Drowning Ruth (43 page)
Authors: Christina Schwarz
And then the ice creaked. Scared, I stopped and stood still. Mat-tie heard it too.
“Put Ruthie down!” I shouted, but the wind blew my words away.
Mattie's voice, on the other hand, sailed right to me, as if she were screaming in my ear. “Mandy, please come back, come back to me!”
I was frightened, then, with the ice creaking under me, too frightened to go on. I decided to go back.
The moment I started, it happened, as it has happened every night since, whenever I close my eyes. The ice cracked and stopped my heart. Mathilda, with Ruth in her arms, lurched left and sank to her waist, then to her shoulders, and then they were gone, both of them, gone.
I ran then. It's hard to run on the ice, harder still with a newborn in your arms. I heard splashing. I heard her calling me, “Mandy, help! Help me, Mandy!”
But my feet would not go fast enough. I slipped. I fell to my knees. I seemed to be getting no closer. I left my baby on the ice and tried again and again, throwing myself forward, screaming Mattie's name.
By the time I reached the hole, Mathilda had already pushed Ruth back onto the ice, but she had disappeared. I lay on my stomach and reached into blackness. The water was so cold. I reached and reached, until my hands were numb, but I could catch nothing.
And then, though I could barely feel it, my fingers tangled in Mattie's hair. I pulled, gently, so as not to lose my grip, but swiftly as I dared.
With a gasp, she broke the surface.
“Mattie!”
I pulled her sodden arms around my neck. For an instant, she hung there, safe in my arms.
But the ice refused to hold us. A piece cracked off under my shoulder and my head splashed into the black water. Down Mattie went again, but I held on, the collar of her nightgown bunched in my fist. Now that I had her, I could never let her go, not even if she dragged me down after her.
And she
was
dragging me down after her. The ice beneath my other shoulder gave way. I tried to work myself backward, to shimmy my hips, to dig my toes and my knees into the ice. I was so strong, and she was so tiny, I couldn't believe that I would not pull us both to safety. And then the ice beneath my chest gave way.
If Mathilda had not surfaced again, if she'd not thrust her frozen, drowning body back once more toward the sweet air, we would all of us be dead, Ruth and Imogene, frozen on the ice, Mat-tie and I beneath it. But she did come back. She opened her mouth for breath, and then she closed her teeth on my hand and bit with all her might.
I would've held on. I would not have let go. I didn't even feel the hurt. But my fingers opened. They just opened. And Mattie slipped through.
I reached and reached again. “Mattie!” I screamed, pushing my head under that black freezing water. But she wasn't there. I reached. I called. But she wouldn't come back.
Finally I saw Ruth, a still, little shadow on the dark ice. So much time had passed. I forced my breath between her frozen lips. I pressed my numb and bloody fingers to her neck to find her pulse. But I was much too late. She was gone too.
I picked her up and carried her to where I'd left the baby, wrapped both of them in my sweater and coat and carried them in one bundle together as fast as I could across the ice.
And here is the miracle. With that warm little body pressed
next to her, Ruth thawed. She came back to life. When I reached the shore I heard her cough.
I knew Mary Louise would be a good mother, so I gave the baby to her. Her arms went out for that child, as though she'd been waiting for it, as though it was meant to be. I hadn't thought what I would say.
“It was terrible,” I managed at last. And out of my mouth came something like the story Mattie had made up about the farm girl. “The baby's name is Imogene,” I said. “Please take her.”
Why is Ruth in her nightgown? I thought they'd ask. Where is Mathilda? Where is Mattie? I wanted to scream it myself. But Imogene had all their attention.
Soon Ruth and I would steal away, but for now I held her close in the Lindgrens' spare bed to warm her. I felt her pulse grow strong, as I pressed her as tight as I dared against my skin.
I will have you, I thought. I will keep you. We will begin again.
In the following letter, Christina Schwarz takes the opportunity to answer some of the many questions readers have asked her in letters and in person since the publication of
Drowning Ruth.
Dear Reader,
Drowning Ruth
began because, as a child, I had a mysterious neighbor. She was a sort of Boo Radley character, reclusive and unknowable. People talked about her, but not directly to her, as far as I knew. My great aunt had been acquainted with her when they were both young. She'd wait in the car, Aunt Margaret said, while her husband went to parties.
To adults, I understand now, this woman was merely eccentric, probably agoraphobic, but to a child, she was fascinating. She had a huge house and lots of property surrounded by a chain-link fence. She kept two white German shepherds, which barked at anyone who passed along the road. She had outbuildings, one of which I was told (or perhaps I'd simply decided) was an aviary. And she was rumored to have shot a BB gun at teenagers who tried to cross her lakefront yard. She also mowed her lawn on a riding mower, her face hidden by a floppy sun-bonnet, but somehow this normal behavior made her even more interesting—she was almost, but not quite, like everyone else.
I first thought I would make up the story of her life, full of tragic betrayals that would cause her to want to have nothing more to do with other people. I would begin with her childhood and follow her until she was eighty, ensconced in that house, reaching for a BB gun whenever she spotted some children sneaking around the perimeter of her lawn.
It didn't work. For one thing, I kept getting stuck when my character, who eventually became partly Ruth and partly Amanda, was in her thirties—my own age. But thinking about her helped me generate the world that
Drowning Ruth's
characters would eventually inhabit. Very early on, I wrote the scene in which Ruth watches Imogene at the dance. And then I wrote another scene with Ruth and Imogene and Arthur, something about a driving lesson; a scene that is now stored in a long file
box, along with lots of other scenes that in the end wouldn't fit into the book. I thought about Ruth as a little girl. What would her childhood be like? Who would take care of her? I remembered a foster child who would wait for the school bus with me when we were children, but then get on a smaller bus that would take her to a different school; she was another fascinating, mysterious person, and thinking about her helped me write the chapter in which Hilda comes to stay with Ruth. I also thought of a story my father had told me about a brother and sister who'd raised two adopted children together on a farm, when he was growing up. From this, in a way, Amanda and Carl emerged—they were brother and sister at the start.
Once Amanda had distinctly arrived, she took over. I could hear her voice quite clearly, always her tone, and often her harsh, sardonic words, and I quickly grew very attached to her. Because her voice was so vivid, I started writing scenes in the first person. I particularly like the idea that a novel can show several interpretations of a single event, and alternating first person with third person helped me do that.
For awhile, I wasn't sure whether Amanda was Ruth grown up or Ruth's guardian. Even though, literally, she turned out to be the latter, in some ways, I suppose she is both. I wanted Ruth to echo Amanda, both because Amanda raises her and because of their genetic connection. In a larger way, too, I wanted to imply repetition in this novel, which is one of the reasons I set the book between the two world wars. Although I don't know enough to be sure it's true, I'm intrigued by the notion of human events moving in cycles, because of the way one generation inevitably influences the next.
I realize now that I used impressions from my childhood for
Drowning Ruth
, because everything seemed so dramatic then, when I didn't understand the mundane underpinnings of events and relationships. This attraction to things I don't thoroughly comprehend is also the main reason I set my story in the past. My father's side of the family has lived in southeastern Wisconsin for generations, and my ancestors have long had an intimate connection to the lake on which I modeled Nagawaukee. I lived
for the first ten years of my life over a boathouse that was originally part of my great-great-grandfather's summer estate, the main house of which was the model for the Owens's house. Stories about the place, from my great aunt, my grandmother, my father, and my uncles, were inescapable. To me, separated from those times by at least a generation and hampered by a child's limited understanding, these stories were vague. They weren't narratives so much as splotches of color and patterns of light and shade, peopled with characters with names like Bub and Hep. The stories gave me a vivid sense of a world I could never quite know; a place that draws me, precisely because it will always elude my grasp. Beyond a detail here and there—the culverts on the school playground, the couple that meet and fall in love at a parade, the double-decker excursion boat—nothing in
Drowning Ruth
is true, but the sense of the place and time, I think, is right.
I wouldn't say
Drowning Ruth
is a historical novel, only that its setting is in the past, and I hope my characters think and behave in a way that's appropriate to their time and not to ours. I needed to set the story in an era in which Amanda could do something that she and her community would find shameful, but that would not make her monstrous. It would be possible to create such a situation now (although unwed motherhood would certainly not suffice), but I think that, in general, people today are more forgiving of others and of themselves, which may or may not be good for their psyches, but which definitely weakens dramatic tension.
I researched facts mostly after I'd worked them into the book, based on my general knowledge and my imagination, and sometimes this caused me a lot of trouble. I knew something about influenza during World War I, for instance, partly because Kather-ine Anne Porter's
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
struck me years ago, but long after I'd conveniently disposed of Mr. and Mrs. Starkey in the epidemic, I checked the dates and had to push the whole story back by half a year to make that plausible. In fact, I almost gave up on the idea, since it meant that Mathilda would have to fall through the ice in the winter, instead of off a boat in the summer, and, for about a month, that just seemed unthinkable to
me. This shows you how little I knew about the plot as I went along.
In general, plot was the most difficult element for me, which is why there's a little too much of it in
Drowning Ruth.
Still, although I love to read books in which not very much happens—Barbara Pym, for instance, is one of my favorite authors—those don't seem to be the kind of books I can write. At least not now. The novel I'm currently writing is very different from
Drowning Ruth
, although the main characters, again, are two women who are best friends. It's about misguided ambition, it's set in two cities in the present, and, surprisingly, so far it's turning out to be sort of a black comedy.
Yours very truly,
Christina Schwarz
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Throughout the story, Amanda seems to be alternately portrayed as either sinister and mentally unbalanced or as a sad woman who is a victim of circumstance. What are your feelings about her? Were you mostly sympathetic to her or turned off by her controlling spirit?
Did you find most of the main players in
Drowning Ruth
to be complicated and not easily categorized? Who intrigued you the most?Do you think the author skillfully built up the suspense of the fateful night on the lake? Did you guess what would happen?
Ruth and Amanda's relationship is one of the most compelling elements of the novel. At times they are presented in a mother/daughter dynamic, but at other moments they seem poised as siblings almost, or even as foils to each other—especially when Amanda speaks to us about her own childhood. How do you think Amanda regarded Ruth? What, in your mind, was the real significance of their relationship? Did Amanda truly love Ruth?
The lake is a striking backdrop throughout the novel, and most of the traumatic or profound moments occur there: Mathilde and Clement die there, Amanda forces Ruth to swim in it, Imogene and Ruth both fall in love upon it. Do you think the author intended for it to be symbolic of something? If so, what?
The complicated and varied relationships between women—friends, sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces—lie at the heart of this novel. Did any of these relationships, in particular, strike a chord with you?
Do you feel that Amanda's jealousy of her sister was abnormal or just common sibling rivalry? Why do you think the author juxtaposed their relationship with Ruth and Imogene's?
Men hover at the edges of the novel. The three main male characters—Carl, Clement, Arthur—though different, are all ultimately ineffectual in some sense. Carl leaves, Clement womanizes, Arthur cannot determine whom he truly loves. Even Amanda's father is barely realized. Why do you think the author created these male characters this way?
The island seems to be a very important metaphor. Both Mathilde and Amanda become pregnant there, and it is where they retreat to during Amanda's term. She, especially, is preoccupied throughout the novel with this locale. What does the island represent?
Did you like the continuously shifting narration? What was the overall effect of this plot device?
Ruth and Imogene's intense friendship commences with the voluntary loss of Ruth's dead, black tooth. Why do you think the author chose such an unusual, visually graphic scene to mark the unfolding of their intertwined lives?
In the end, does Ruth follow her heart, or is she still under Amanda's control? Does Ruth return home truly of her own volition?
Were the book to continue, do you think the author would have chosen for Ruth and Arthur to unite? Why or why not? What type of man do you envision Ruth with?
Drowning Ruth
was an Oprah Book Club selection. Have you read any other Oprah picks? If so, how did this compare?