Patchwork tale
Debut novel stitches together a wealth of characters and family stories
By Jessica Treadway
Keeping the House by Ellen Baker, Random House, 530 pages, $24.95
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in the day, a woman was expected to present to the world the most attractive
version she could muster of herself, her house, her husband and her
children, if she had any. If she knew what was good for her, she also kept
mum about any ambitions she might have harbored beyond these domestic
ideals.When, near the beginning of Ellen Baker's first novel, "Keeping the House," newly married Dolly Magnuson arrives for her first visit to the weekly Ladies Aid quilting circle in Pine Rapids, Wis., she chafes at the societal strictures dictating her demeanor, her diet and her dress. The year is 1950. In the Ladies' Home Journal and other magazines, excerpts from which the author occasionally uses as chapter epigraphs, women are urged, for example, to:
"Take an interest in his appearance. Keeping his clothes in order is your job; encouraging him to look his best, and admiring him when he does, should be your pleasure."
Dolly, who yearns to resume the flying lessons she took before she married Byron, tries hard. She owns 19 aprons -- one to match nearly every one of her dresses -- and she keeps a written log of everything she serves her husband at mealtimes, so as not to repeat a recipe too soon and lead him to find her "predictable."
Yet despite her attempts to duplicate Donna Reed's wifely glory in "It's a Wonderful Life," Dolly is restless. In short order, she becomes enamored of an abandoned house in the neighborhood, the history of which she culls from the other ladies who spend their Tuesday afternoons making a quilt for the church fundraiser. The house belongs to the Mickelson family, none of whose members have been in evidence since four years earlier, when something happened to send them scattering. According to local legend, the house is built on an old Indian burial ground cursed to bring great sorrow to anyone who disturbs the souls reposing there.
Intrigued by what she learns about Wilma Mickelson, who as a young bride was delivered by her husband, John, to her new home in 1896, Dolly approaches the house at the top of the hill on the night of the 4th of July (it is no coincidence that it happens to be Independence Day) and thrills to find the door open. Thereafter she sneaks in regularly to snoop and clean, deluding herself that if she can refurbish it to its once-grand condition -- as Reed's character did in the movie -- she can persuade Byron to buy the house.
Throughout the novel, Baker alternates narratives, primarily between the experiences of Wilma and Dolly, sometimes moving into the perspectives of other characters in the Mickelson saga, which includes infidelities and triumphs, the anxieties and griefs caused by war, the sacrifice of personal dreams and the gradual unraveling of family secrets culminating in a thunderous series of revelations during Thanksgiving 1945. Baker is adept at pacing these events, making effective use of multiple story lines to achieve ultimate suspense for the reader.
For example, just as we are wondering what it is that Harry Mickelson has figured out about the young man his niece is set to marry -- just when we think we must know -- Baker shifts us to the conflict between Dolly and her husband, which has caused her to throw plates of beef stroganoff against the walls of her own kitchen. When we start to feel mired in the description of soldiers in overseas battlefields, we receive a reprieve in the form of the daily routine of a member of the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps at the University of Minnesota. If either the present or the past story superseded the other in terms of reader interest, we would feel impatient to get back to the more compelling tale; but it is credit to Baker's literary instincts that they engage us equally.
One day while Dolly is trespassing in the house, she hears the door open, and the drama takes off as she comes face to face with JJ, one of the Mickelson boys who lost part of his leg at Iwo Jima and has returned to the family homestead for lack of anywhere else to go. A once-promising young man who seems determined to destroy himself -- as well as treat his physical pain -- with liquor, he finds in Dolly a confidante to whom he can confess his indiscretions and report the details of his family's history that remain a mystery to members of the quilting bee.
As she takes to spending more time with JJ than her husband or the ladies of Pine Rapids deem seemly, Dolly confronts her feelings about the decisions she has made in marrying and moving away from her family, giving up the vision of herself as a pilot in order to cook, clean, iron her husband's clothes and -- after she playfully tosses a piece of potatoes au gratin at Byron -- rush at his behest to remove the stain he fears the cheese will leave in his shirt:
"Dolly couldn't seem to stop herself from asking, Is this it? Is this my life?"
Her dismay echoes that suffered by Wilma Mickelson upon her arrival in Pine Rapids at the turn of the 20th Century: "That she had abandoned college, her piano, for this!?
Baker has done her research, down to the dances people enjoyed in 1943 (the jitterbug, the schottische, the waltz); slogans from the war effort ("Our Boys Need Socks. Knit Your Bit"); and, of course, the magazine admonitions to women of the day ("I urge wives to try to stifle their pride," and, "Try to figure out why he needs the other woman. . . . Don't be difficult, no matter how provoked you are. Be more cheerful and attractive than usual.").
Occasionally the narrative stumbles, as when it not only switches abruptly to the perspective of a character we haven't heard from before and didn't expect to inhabit, but does so in the present tense, which perhaps is intended to magnify the immediate drama of the moment (it occurs in the instance of a father learning that his son has been killed at war) but instead jars the reader. There are some clich�s (a mother's influence draws her son back home "like a moth to a flame") and some colloquial anachronisms (a woman observes, in 1946, that her former beau "is just trying to find himself"; in 1950, JJ mulls the "disconnect" between pre- and postwar life).
But for the most part the novel carries us along under the power of vivid prose and complex family history, inviting us to imagine men and women fashioning new lives in the context of war, rigid moral codes and the consequences of their own choices regarding personal relationships. "Keeping the House" is an achievement of plot and character, introducing Ellen Baker as an author who knows how to keep us turning the pages.
Jessica Treadway is the author of the short story collection "Absent Without Leave" and the novel "And Give You Peace."