Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

Luckily, his door was ajar. No sound gave her away as she entered. But she knew, somehow, that he was awake. After all these years, of course she knew, just from that bated quality to the air. She stepped delicately across cool floorboards, then scratchy rug, then cool floorboards once again-terrain she had traveled since the day she first learned to walk. She sat with no perceptible weight upon the side of the bed that used to be hers. He was lying on his back, she saw. She could begin to sift his white face from the flocked half-dark. She whispered, “Sam?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You know that letter you wrote me in Bay Borough.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what was the line you crossed out?”

He stirred beneath the bedclothes. “Oh,” he said, “I crossed out so many lines. That letter was a mess.”

“I mean the very last line. The one you put so many x’s through I couldn’t possibly read it.”

He didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “I forget.”

Her impulse was to stand up and leave, but she forced herself to stay. She sat motionless, waiting and waiting.

“I think,” he said finally, “that maybe it was… well, something like what Driscoll was wondering earlier. Was there anything that would, you know. Would persuade you to come back.”

She said, “Oh, Sam. All you had to do was ask.”

Then he turned toward her, and Delia slipped under the blankets and he drew her close against him. Although, in fact, he still had not asked. Not in so many words.

Long after they went to sleep, the telephone rang, and Delia resurfaced gradually. This late, it had to be a patient calling. But Sam didn’t even change the rhythm of his breathing; so she inched out from under his arm to reach for the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Mrs. Grinstead?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Joe Bright.”

A voice as bright as his name, wide awake and chipper at the ungodly hour of-she peered at the alarm clock. One twenty-three.

“Um…,” she said.

“The realtor?” he prompted.

“Oh!”

“You called me? You and your daughter? Left a whole bunch of messages?”

“Oh! Yes!” she said, but she was still floundering. “Um…”

“I would never phone so late except you did say it was life and death, Mrs. Grinstead, and I only now got in from out of town. Wife’s mother died, spur of the moment.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. She sat up straighter. “Um, Mr. Bright, why I called was…” She shifted the phone to her other ear. “My daughter has been wanting to know,” she said. “Yes… will she be allowed to pound nails in the walls?”

There was a silence.

“Just in case they need to hang some pictures, say, or a mirror…,” Delia said, trailing off.

“Nails,” Mr. Bright said.

“Right.”

“She wanted to know if she could pound in nails.”

“Right.”

“Well,” Mr. Bright said. “Sure. I reckon. Long as they spackle the holes upon vacating.”

“Oh, they will!” Delia said. “I can promise. Thank you, Mr. Bright. Good night.”

There was another silence, and then, “Good night,” he said.

Delia replaced the receiver and lay down again. She had assumed Sam was still asleep, but then she heard him give a little whisking sound of amusement. She started smiling. Outside, far downtown, a train blew past. In the house, a floorboard creaked, and a moment later a foggy cough broke from the room where Nat slept.

“It’s a time trip,” Nat had said.

She thought of her attempt, that afternoon, to picture Adrian. She had begun with his resemblance to her high-school boyfriend, and only now did she realize that the image she had come up with happened to be Sam’s, not the boyfriend’s. A younger Sam, earnest and hopeful, the day he’d first walked through the door.

It had all been a time trip-all this past year and a half. Unlike Nat’s, though, hers had been a time trip that worked. What else would you call it when she’d ended up back where she’d started, home with Sam for good? When the people she had left behind had actually traveled further, in some ways?

Now she saw that June beach scene differently. Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean’s edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving.

Where they were going without her.

How to say goodbye.

Q: How would you describe this novel to a potential reader?

Anne Tyler: I think Nat says it best: It’s a time trip. If you look at Delia’s journey from one angle, it is nothing but an attempt to travel back through the life she’s already lived, doing it right this time (as in the unnamed movie, Groundhog Day, referred to toward the end of the book). Symbolically speaking, in her new life she acquires new sisters, a new son, a new husband, and a new father, and she tries to make a better job of it the second time around.

Q: Is Delia a reliable narrator?

AT: Not always. The more difficult aspects of her father’s character, for instance, and Adrian ’s continued attachment to his wife are just two of the unwelcome truths she manages to hide from herself.

Q: Your protagonist, Cordelia, is the youngest and favorite of three daughters of a powerful father. How did King Lear influence the writing of this novel?

AT: It really didn’t. I had chosen the name Delia before it occurred to me that it must be “Cordelia,” and while Adrian does refer to the King Lear connection, I wouldn’t make too much of it.

Q: Delia’s deceased father is a central figure in this novel, but he is obscured by Delia’s worshipful memories. How would her sisters and husband describe him?

AT: Her sisters would say he was sexist and domineering; Sam would no doubt bring up Dr. Felson’s post-retirement habit of listening in on patients’ phone calls. I particularly enjoyed writing the scenes where these facts emerged so clearly but remained unremarked upon by Delia.

Q: Why did you choose the profession of medical doctor for Delia’s father and husband?

AT: I was looking for a profession with some power, since Delia’s sheltered life-from father’s hands to husband’s, with no break-seemed to require that.

Q: You capture perfectly teenagers’ cruelty to their parents in this novel. Do you think such behavior is a necessary rite of passage to adulthood?

AT: I wouldn’t call it cruelty, exactly, but I do think that it’s necessary at some point for teenagers to draw back and view their parents with a cooler eye. (Notice what happens when they never go through this stage-as Delia obviously never did with her father.)

Q: What is a reader to make of the parallels between Delia’s handling of and socializing of teenagers and cats?

AT: I was very fond of Delia, and I wanted readers to be fond of her, too. One of the qualities I hoped they would find endearing was her graceful and intuitive touch with both cats and children.

Q: Is her friendship with Nat the most important new relationship Delia has formed and the most important for her to sustain?

AT: Not really. Nat is only one member of the “surrogate family” she constructs for herself on her journey.

Q: Would Delia really have come home sooner if Sam had asked her to?

AT: She was very hurt when he didn’t ask her, but I suspect that if he had, she’d have invented some quibble with his tone, his wording-some flaw that would allow her to say no and go on with her sojourn until the moment she was ready to return.