By Caitlin O’Neil
By Kathleen Cambor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
258 pages ISBN 0374165378
US $23/ Canada $37
Kathleen
Cambor’s second novel centers around losers—not the uncool variety derided
by modern culture but the unlucky few who cannot seem to hold onto what small
good fortune life might hand them. Its setting is one where much stands to
be lost: Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where a flood on Memorial Day 1889 destroyed
the city and killed 2,209 people. A crumbling earthen dam, poorly maintained
The South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, summer resort dreamed up and frequented
by captains of industry including Henry Frick, Andrew Carnegie and Andrew
Mellon, gave way and local citizens paid the price of the upper class’s folly.
In contrast with their historical betters, the fictional working class of
Johnstown, as well as a Pittsburgh family that teeters between these two worlds,
must face the moment of reckoning when the waters break free. While the upper
class works to erase all trace of its mountain top folly, the people below
are erased themselves, caught up in the waves of water, mud and debris that
wipe the landscape clean. In a tone both lyrical and resigned, assigning blame
without bitterness, Cambor gathers together the disparate lives that intertwine
in this towering, transforming moment.
That
this moment is a flood—a disaster that unites nature’s power with man’s carelessness—enables
her to explore fate and free will in grand style. But the true star of this
spectacular disaster is the late-19th century society that dares
not question authority, keeping emotion and outrage in their place, whether
tied up in a corset or held back by a dam. This pervasive stoicism in the
face of misfortune is underlined by Cambor’s use of quotes from Marcus Auerelis’s
Meditations as chapter epigraphs,
enjoining readers that, “Man must endure whatever wind doth blow/ From God,
and labor still without lament…” and “Withdraw into yourself; the reasonable
governing self is by its nature content….” Underneath this girdle of resignation,
however, are roiling emotions that find expression in stolen moments, diversions
that stem the rising tide but never succeed in averting the inevitable flood.
As
Carnegie and friends mingle at their mountain retreat, complete with the anomaly
of Allegheny sailboats and dories, Frank Fallon and his family struggle through
life below. A treasured piano, saved for with coins in a sock, sits tuned
but unused in the wake of a diphtheria epidemic brought on by son Daniel,
who survives only to remind his mother Julia of the two children she has lost.
The remaining family members circle each other, able to connect only obliquely
through their separate friendships with the town’s new librarian, Grace, herself
on the run from an unhappy Boston Brahmin marriage. Grace offers each Fallon
a different sort of comfort: Julia an easy friendship, where pasts can remain
unexplained; Daniel daily lessons in Greek and the mother’s love he is missing;
and Frank the closeness of a woman he can no longer find at home. What Grace
takes away from this family is a sense of being necessary, a feeling she’d
seldom felt before. Their collective story unfolds in the shadow the impending
flood, which, though dispensed with in a slim ten pages, looms over the story
like fate itself.
From
afar, the flood also colors the life of James Talbot, an up-and-coming Pittsburgh
lawyer who puts through the paperwork for the faulty dam, all the while pledging
to prevent the worst from coming to pass. His summer visit to the club, once
a sign of his new found status, becomes a vigil at the water’s edge as rain
stirs its surface ever higher. Meanwhile his daughter Nora finds her calling,
trekking through the forests surrounding the club while the other children
picnic together, much to the detriment of mother’s social aspirations. Her
journey beyond the bounds of the club leads her not only to nature but to
love. Daniel Fallon has spotted her, along the lakeshore in her white dress,
unlike anything he’s seen before. Through notes secreted under rocks and in
tree hollows, they come to know each other, finally meeting the summer before
the dam breaks.
But
love will never get the best of any of these poor souls. Cambor deftly works
the fabric of this society, showing the tight weave of propriety and convention
that bind both high and low into the life they have made. Julia cannot find
the heart to love her surviving family; Frank cannot find the courage to confront
Grace; Daniel cannot find the strength to unionize the iron works, for which
he left college—and his father’s hopes—behind; and Nora cannot break free
of the club’s social circle. Their revolts don’t reflect their highest hopes;
they are provisional and, in the end, half-hearted.
Fulfilling them would exact too high a cost on the family and society
around them. More than anything else, these people have lost possibility;
in the face of the world’s unspoken rules, they clam up and live as best they
can.
Still
Cambor’s tone is one of kind judgement as she dips in and out of her character’s
lives. We come to sympathize with the removed Mellon, heartbroken at his sweetheart’s
death, and understand the scheming Carnegie and Frick, self-made men so obsessed
with their own empires that they can’t bother with the details. And that is
the trouble, in the end. Everyone thinks someone else is taking care of the
details. Daniel Morrell, head of the Cambria Iron Company and Johnstown benefactor,
knows the dam’s spotty provenance but his protests never reaches the ears
of South Fork’s owners. Instead of a diatribe against the malignant neglect
of the wealthy, Cambor constructs an elegy for their folly, a damning illumination
of their guilty knowledge.
As
the human story unfolds, the dam itself seethes like a monster as water pushes
ever higher against its earthen wall. “When standing close to it, more than
once Nora had thought, Yes, it might be breathing. More creature than artifact.”
No matter how much money or power you have, Cambor seems to be saying, nature
will trump you. The dam belongs as much to the mountains as it does to man,
part of a wilderness where the concerns of society hold little water. No philosophy,
stoic or otherwise, will save you.
Cambor’s
epigraph for the novel, taken from Maeterlinck’s “Pelléas at Mélisande” intones,
“I have been watching you; you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with the
strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in
sunlight, in a beautiful garden.” With the luxury of hindsight, Cambor turns
a modern eye on her characters, mourning the provisional happiness they allow
themselves and marveling at their poise when faced with the inevitable.
Expecting the worst, the residents of Johnston find stolen moments
of grace; expecting the best, members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting
club won’t allow tragedy to tarnish their moment in the sun. What makes this
story so compelling is that the whole business could have been prevented.
While quietly outraged at every missed chance to change the course of history,
Cambor focuses instead on her characters, so that when the flood comes we
feel the true impact of its human cost.
Caitlin
O’Neil (caitoneil@mindspring.com)
writes and reviews fiction in Cambridge, MA and works for WGBH.