Saint Maybe Read online

  “A NOVEL THAT LIVES AS

  VIBRANTLY AS ITS FAMILY.

  As she explores the myriad ways in which dreams get deferred and hopes revised, infusing the prosaic details of domestic life with honor, humor, and deep affection, it is Anne Tyler’s achievement to raise ordinariness to an art form.”

  The Christian Science Monitor

  “With her picture-perfect Baltimore world of scraped knees, lost jobs and even lifelong grief, Tyler has staked out a singular territory; it is not so much nobility or tear-blinking fortitude that keeps her characters moving but more often their goofy, thoroughly human essence.… Her depiction of Ian’s transformation is extraordinary.”

  The Boston Globe

  “The pleasure of reading Anne Tyler lies in listening to disparate people, watching out for the odd impressions that creep into the margins of their tales. Seen this way, the moral message of SAINT MAYBE oddly resembles a medieval tapestry.”

  Time

  “Tyler has the gift of keeping her characters in clear sight as they wax, wane and turn unexpected corners along the passage of time.”

  Los Angeles Times

  “STUNNING … WONDERFUL.”

  The Seattle Times

  “Tyler crafts a warmly beguiling tale that sometimes echoes such previous works as SEARCHING FOR CALEB, DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT and, especially, THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST.… Here again are life’s endearing misfits, occasionally suffering pangs of self-awareness. Here is that special blend of playfulness and poignancy, the oh-so-true dialogue, the specificity of detail and image.… Heart-wrenching.”

  The Orlando Sentinel

  “Engaging … SAINT MAYBE is a first-rate novel, told with quiet but fiercely heart-wrenching authority.… Tyler writes in an earnest, plainspoken prose, underscoring her choice to make story itself, rather than style, the means to fictional magic.”

  New York Newsday

  “A warm and generous novel … Each character in SAINT MAYBE has been fully rendered, fleshed out with a palpable interior life, and each has been fit, like a hand-sawed jigsaw-puzzle piece, into the matrix of family life.”

  The New York Times

  “A MASTERFUL ACCOMPLISHMENT

  by any standard and a worthy addition to Ms. Tyler’s impressive body of work … SAINT MAYBE is a gentle, insightful rendering of a troubled family.… This novel won’t harm Ms. Tyler’s reputation as one of our finest prose stylists. Her special gifts are an unassuming but precise descriptive power, an unerring eye for detail and a graceful, unhurried style that conveys perfectly her generous and humane view of family life.”

  Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “Tyler’s novels are always a pleasure to read, and with the decline of minimalist fiction writers, Tyler’s sympathetic and sentimental attic-of-family-secrets has the American family all to itself.”

  The Detroit News

  “Exquisitely crafted … SAINT MAYBE is classic Tyler: wry, offbeat and engaging, with sentences to die for.”

  The Miami Herald

  “Perfection.”

  The Kirkus Reviews

  “MAY WELL BE HER MOST

  IMPORTANT WORK …

  Finishing a Tyler novel is like waking from a dream-filled sleep.… She has a gift for drawing readers into her world. Her books are hard to put down.… SAINT MAYBE deals movingly with Ian’s self-loathing, his heroic sacrifices and, finally, with his redemption.… SAINT MAYBE is a joy to read.”

  The Denver Post

  “Wondrous … Every few years Anne Tyler brings out a novel and makes originality again something to appreciate. How fiction that is so modest and unself-conscious, so teeming with melancholic characters, can be so absolutely funny and dazzlingly memorable is, of course, a secret locked inside Tyler’s mild-mannered features, which peer out from her dust-jacket photographs.”

  Kansas City Star

  “Tyler does her usual marvelous job of creating odd and slightly crazy but lovable characters peculiarly suited to her blue-collar, Baltimore neighborhoods.… The wisdom behind all of Anne Tyler’s fiction is a loving acceptance of the peculiar but surprisingly predictable habits of individual humans, of all their inherent frailties and eccentricities.… Anne Tyler is a master at discovering these peculiarities and writing about them with clear-eyed affection.”

  St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Wonderful … A novel that is old-fashioned in its moralism. And completely convincing and refreshing.”

  Detroit Free Press

  “ONE OF FICTION’S ABSOLUTE

  MASTERS …

  Compassionately and convincingly drawn … The classic Tyler trademarks appear immediately, the warmth and humor of the narrative voice, as if the novel were being told to us by a friend who creates an engaging character quickly and hooks us to her tale.… If you shelve your contemporary novelists alphabetically, as I do, Anne Tyler stands beside John Updike. There’s a metaphor there too powerful to ignore.”

  St. Petersburg Times

  “Anne Tyler cuts through the monkey business straight to what is true and real in life. To open one of her books is to open an invitation—she leads you right through the front door, plumps you down on the sofa and surrounds you with her characters, ordinary people coping with the kind of extraordinary things that happen every day.… With each new novel she reaches another dimension in her tender exploration of humanity, and reinforces her place among America’s best writers.… With her distinctive blend of unforced philosophy, gentle humor and high farce, Tyler takes us into the life of Ian Bedloe as it is turned inside out.… The maturing of Ian Bedloe is one of Anne Tyler’s most subtle designs.”

  The Buffalo News

  “The reader is emotionally involved and touched as never before.”

  Publishers Weekly

  By Anne Tyler:

  IF MORNING EVER COMES

  THE TIN CAN TREE

  A SLIPPING-DOWN LIFE

  THE CLOCK WINDER

  CELESTIAL NAVIGATION

  SEARCHING FOR CALEB

  EARTHLY POSSESSIONS

  MORGAN’S PASSING

  DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT

  THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST

  THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE

  BREATHING LESSONS

  SAINT MAYBE

  LADDER OF YEARS

  A PATCHWORK PLANET

  BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS

  Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  An Ivy Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1991 by ATM, Inc

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-52704

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78456-8

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1 The Airmail Bowling Ball

  2 The Department of Reality

  3 The Man Who Forgot How to Fly

  4 Famous Rainbows

  5 People Who Don’t Know the Answers

  6 Sample Rains

  7 Organized Marriage

  8 I Should Never Tell You Anything

  9 The Fl
ooded Sewing Box

  10 Recovering from the Hearts-of-Palm Flu

  1

  The Airmail Bowling Ball

  On Waverly Street, everybody knew everybody else. It was only one short block, after all—a narrow strip of patched and repatched pavement, bracketed between a high stone cemetery wall at one end and the commercial clutter of Govans Road at the other. The trees were elderly maples with lumpy, bulbous trunks. The squat clapboard houses seemed mostly front porch.

  And each house had its own particular role to play. Number Nine, for instance, was foreign. A constantly shifting assortment of Middle Eastern graduate students came and went, attending classes at Johns Hopkins, and the scent of exotic spices drifted from their kitchen every evening at suppertime. Number Six was referred to as the newlyweds’, although the Crains had been married two years now and were beginning to look a bit worn around the edges. And Number Eight was the Bedloe family. They were never just the Bedloes, but the Bedloe family, Waverly Street’s version of the ideal, apple-pie household: two amiable parents, three good-looking children, a dog, a cat, a scattering of goldfish.

  In fact, the oldest of those children had long ago married and left—moved out to Baltimore County and started a family of her own—and the second-born was nearing thirty. But somehow the Bedloes were stuck in people’s minds at a stage from a dozen years back, when Claudia was a college girl in bobby socks and Danny was captain of his high-school football team and Ian, the baby (his parents’ big surprise), was still tearing down the sidewalk on his tricycle with a miniature license plate from a cereal box wired to the handlebar.

  Now Ian was seventeen and, like the rest of his family, large-boned and handsome and easygoing, quick to make friends, fond of a good time. He had the Bedloe golden-brown hair, golden skin, and sleepy-looking brown eyes, although his mouth was his mother’s, a pale beige mouth quirking upward at the corners. He liked to wear ragged jeans and plaid shirts—cotton broadcloth in summer, flannel in winter—unbuttoned all the way to expose a stretched-out T-shirt underneath. His shoes were high-top sneakers held together with electrical tape. This was in 1965, when Poe High School still maintained at least a vestige of a dress code, and his teachers were forever sending him home to put on something more presentable. (But his mother was likely to greet him in baggy, lint-covered slacks and one of his own shirts, her fading blond curls pinned scrappily back with a granddaughter’s pink plastic hairbow. She would not have passed the dress code either.) Also, there were complaints about the quality of Ian’s school-work. He was bright, his teachers said, but lazy. Content to slide through with low B’s or even C’s. It was the spring of his junior year and if he didn’t soon mend his ways, no self-respecting college would have him.

  Ian listened to all this with a tolerant, bemused expression. Things would turn out fine, he felt. Hadn’t they always? (None of the Bedloes was a worrier.) Crowds of loyal friends had surrounded him since kindergarten. His sweetheart, Cicely Brown, was the prettiest girl in the junior class. His mother doted on him and his father—Poe’s combination algebra teacher and baseball coach—let him pitch in nearly every game, and not just because they were related, either. His father claimed Ian had talent. In fact sometimes Ian daydreamed about pitching for the Orioles, but he knew he didn’t have that much talent. He was a medium kind of guy, all in all.

  Even so, there were moments when he believed that someday, somehow, he was going to end up famous. Famous for what, he couldn’t quite say; but he’d be walking up the back steps or something and all at once he would imagine a camera zooming in on him, filming his life story. He imagined the level, cultured voice of his biographer saying, “Ian climbed the steps. He opened the door. He entered the kitchen.”

  “Have a good day, hon?” his mother asked, passing through with a laundry basket.

  “Oh,” he said, “the usual run of scholastic triumphs and athletic glories.” And he set his books on the table.

  His biographer said, “He set his books on the table.”

  That was the spring that Ian’s brother fell in love. Up till then Danny had had his share of girlfriends—various decorative Peggies or Debbies to hang upon his arm—but somehow nothing had come of them. He was always getting dumped, it seemed, or sadly disillusioned. His mother had started fretting that he’d passed the point of no return and would wind up a seedy bachelor type. Now here was Lucy, slender and pretty and dressed in red, standing in the Bedloes’ front hall with her back so straight, her purse held so firmly in both hands, that she seemed even smaller than she was. She seemed childlike, in fact, although Danny described her as a “woman” when he introduced her. “Mom, Dad, Ian, I’d like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life.” Then Danny turned to Mrs. Jordan, who had chosen this inopportune moment to step across the street and borrow the pinking shears. “Mrs. Jordan: Lucy Dean.”

  His mother, skipping several stages of acquaintanceship, swept Lucy into a hug. (Clearly more was called for than a handshake.) His father said, “Well, now! What do you know!” The dog gave Lucy’s crotch a friendly sniff, while Mrs. Jordan—an older lady, the soul of tact—hastily murmured something or other and backed out the door. And Ian clamped his palms in his armpits and grinned at no one in particular.

  They moved to the living room, Ian bringing up the rear. Lucy perched in an easy chair and Danny settled on its arm, with one hand resting protectively behind her loose knot of black hair. To Ian, Lucy resembled some brightly feathered bird held captive by his brown plaid family. Her face was very small, a cameo face. Her dress was scoop-necked and slim-waisted and full-skirted. She wore extremely red lipstick that seemed not gaudy, for some reason, but brave. Ian was entranced.

  “Tell us everything,” Bee Bedloe ordered. “Where you met, how you got to know each other—everything.”

  She and Ian’s father had seated themselves on the sofa. (Ian’s father, who had a baseball player’s mild, sloping build, was pulling in his stomach.) Ian himself remained slouched against the door frame.

  “We met at the post office,” Danny said. He beamed down at Lucy, who smiled back at him trustfully.

  Bee said, “Oh? You two work together?”

  “No, no,” Lucy said, in a surprisingly croaky little drawl. “I went in to mail a package and Danny was the one who waited on me.”

  Danny told them, “She was mailing a package to Cheyenne, Wyoming, by air. I told her it would cost twenty dollars and twenty-seven cents. You could see it was more than she’d planned on—”

  “I said, ‘Twenty twenty-seven! Great God Almighty!’ ” Lucy squawked, startling everyone.

  “So I told her, ‘It’s cheaper by parcel post, you know. That would be four sixty-three.’ ‘Let me think,’ she says, and moves on out of the way. Gives up her place at the counter. Stands a few feet down from me, frowning at the wall.”

  “I had to take a minute to decide,” Lucy explained.

  “Frowns at the wall for the longest time. Three customers go ahead of her. Finally I say, ‘Miss? You ready?’ But she just goes on frowning.”

  “I was mailing some odds and ends to my ex-husband and I wanted to be shed of them as fast as possible,” Lucy said.

  A little jolt passed through the room.

  Bee said, “Ex-husband?”

  “Half of me wanted him to get that box tomorrow, even yesterday if it could be arranged, but the other half was counting pennies. ‘That’s fifteen-and-some dollars’ difference,’ this other half was saying. ‘Think of all the groceries fifteen dollars could buy. Or shoes and stuff for the children.’ ”

  “Children?”

  “What got to me,” Danny said, “was how she wouldn’t be hurried. How it didn’t bother her what other people made of her. I mean she just stood there pondering, little bit of a person. Then finally she said, ‘Well,’ and straightened her shoulders and chose to spring for airmail.”

  “It mattered just enough, I decided,” Lucy said. “It was worth it just for the satisfaction.�
��

  “If she had said parcel post I might have let her go,” Danny said. “But airmail! I admired that. I asked if she’d like to have dinner.”

  “He was the best-looking thing I’d seen in ages,” Lucy told the Bedloes. “I said I’d be thrilled to have dinner.”

  Bee and Doug Bedloe sat side by side, smiling extra hard as if someone had just informed them that they were being photographed.

  There was this about the Bedloes: They believed that every part of their lives was absolutely wonderful. It wasn’t just an act, either. They really did believe it. Or at least Ian’s mother did, and she was the one who set the tone. Her marriage was a great joy to her, her house made her happy every time she walked into it, and her children were attractive and kind and universally liked. When bad things happened—the usual accidents, illnesses, jogs in the established pattern—Bee treated them with eye-rolling good humor, as if they were the stuff of situation comedy. They would form new chapters in the lighthearted ongoing saga she entertained the neighbors with: How Claudia Totaled the Car. How Ian Got Suspended from First Grade.

  As for Ian, he believed it too but only after a kind of hitch, a moment of hesitation. For instance, from time to time he had the feeling that his father was something of a joke at Poe High—ineffectual at discipline, and muddled in his explanation of the more complicated algebraic functions. But Bee said he was the most popular teacher Poe had ever employed, and in fact that was true. Yes, certainly it was true. Ian knew she was right.

  Or look at Claudia. The family’s one scholar, she had dropped out of college her senior year to get married, and then the babies started coming so thick and so fast that they had to be named alphabetically: Abbie, Barney, Cindy, Davey … Where would it all end? some cynical voice inquired from the depths of Ian’s mind. Xavier? Zelda? But his mother said she hoped they would progress to double letters—Aaron Abel and Bonnie Belinda—like items on a crowded catalog page. Then Ian saw Claudia’s children as a tumbling hodgepodge heaped in a basket, and he was forced to smile.