Two mothers.

Iris, mother of the bride, is pushy, ambitious, Jewish, overpresent, and proud of her Red Hook genealogy, which can be traced back to the Battle of the Bulge. But Iris is not exactly a local. Yes, every summer Iris comes back to the oceanfront Queen Anne house, chats up the Red Hook Ladies, attending “every last bean supper and blueberry breakfast of the season,” where she tries to befriend the wives of lobstermen by feigning enthusiasm for rummage sales. But every Fall, Iris returns to New York, to art and to work, and will never, in the eyes of the locals, be anything but a “from away”.

Iris’ father, Mr Kimmelbroad, is indeed “from away”: a real gentleman,  a refugee violinist from Prague who still smells of polished wood, rosin, violets and 4711 Kolnisch Wasser.   The family are immigrants: bustling, displaced, well educated.

Jane, mother of the groom, is a local: by temperament, by income and by genealogy. Jane is strong from “clomping up and down stairs and hauling laundry and vacuum cleaners.” Jane has been taking care of  houses for the “from aways”  for a long long time, as had her mother before her. One of these houses is Iris’, which she cleans in the summers and tends all year long.

She [would get] the furnace and the propane tank filled, turn on the water,   take down the storm windows and put up the screens, mow the meadow and lawn, replace the water filter, have the piano tuned, and replenish staples like flour, sugar and the fancy teas ….

The story begins in the middle of the wedding, detailing the  profusions of fresh flowers, mismatched vases, white lace tablecloths, blues band,   bar, hanging lanterns, crab-cakes and lobster puffs and champagne of  the  reception at Grange Hall, where the mothers find out that the bride and groom are dead.  What becomes of the mothers and their other children is part of the story of the wedding, because the wedding  joins not only the bride and groom but the mothers; makes them, in Yiddish, Machatainisteh.

Tagged: death, family, Maine, wedding

Categories: Interesting,Original narration

Have a bit of Christie as social chronicler, as drawing room critic of a leisure class which presents itself as a platform of unemployment. It is 1946 and the Angkatells are gathered togethered, after the murder. Lucy, the mistress of cognitive deviations, Henrietta, clever, independent and detached, Midge, dark, square shaped, and poor, David, a spoiled, sour intellectual, and Edward, the reluctant, bony, undeserving heir.

It is quite obvious that the notion of work is odd, uncertain, and turning: the way milk turns. “Is the woman sympathetic and pleasant to work for?,” Edward asks Midge. “If you must have a job you must take one where the surroundings are harmonious and where you like the people you are working with.”

But how does one explain the notion of work to an heir?

How to explain to a person like Edward… What did Edward know of the labour market, of jobs, They were all divided from her by an impassible gulf: the gulf that separates the leisured from the working. They had no conception of the difficulties of getting a job. And once you had got it, of keeping it… She had found a job for herself at 4 pounds a week… Midge had no particular illusions about working. She disliked the shop. She disliked Madame Alfredge. She disliked the eternal subservience to ill tempered and impolite customers. She doubted very much whether she could obtain any other job….

A 17 year old shop girl, circa 1946 or 2010?

Discontent does not stop at the door of the dress shop. Oxford is overgrown with it; circulates it, exports it.

“I must have a talk with you David and learn all about the new ideas. As far as I can see one must hate everybody but at the same time give free medical attention and a lot of extra education… Poor things all those helpless little children herded into schoolhouses everyday….

Tagged: class, English mystery, family, Hercule Poirot, leisure class, social critic

Categories: Clever,Cozy,Editor's pick,Good Mystery,Interesting,Listen up,Original narration

Only Anne Tyler can make an off-license church appear as American as apple pie, and it’s off-beat flock, a fumbling but cuddlesome assemblage. The Church of the Second Chance is both a hovel and haven of forgiveness, a familial supplement to a family no longer familiar, a family askew.
In 1965 Mrs Bedloe was one of those mothers who believed that life, her life, was perfect, and that everything that happened in life, her life, was perfect. “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.” Indeed, in 1965 the Bedloe family had been perfect, or close to it as you got on Waverly Street, in Baltimore. Mr Bedloe was a high school math teacher and the coach of the baseball team, Danni worked in the post office, Ian dated the prettiest girl in his junior class and dressed in high top sneakers held together with electrical tape.
Afterwords, after the Bedloe family had lost Danny and Lucy, whom he had met in the post office, and married, and who had worn red lipstick and stockings with too straight seams, what remains are Lucy’s three children—Agatha, Thomas, and Daphne, and Ian, and his parents, and the house, with its attic converted into bedrooms for the extra children.

Tagged: alternative church, Baltimore, family

Categories: Listen up

Gamash celebrates his marriage at a bed and breakfast with beds so high you need a little step stool to climb into them and bumps into a family murder.

Tagged: B&B, bed and breakfast, Canada, family, Louise Penny, murder

Categories: Cozy,Enchanting,Listen up