Vinegar Hill (21 page)

A. M
ANETTE
A
NSAY
was born in Lapeer, Michigan. Her family moved to Port Washington, Wisconsin, when she was four. Among her few remaining memories of Michigan are “the sound of the piggyback trucks going by on the highway” and the looming presence of a Mr. Bert. (“Mr. Bert was our landlord—whenever I did something wrong I thought he somehow knew about it.”)

Her father was a traveling salesman. Her mother was a grade-school teacher. “Eventually,” she says, “they started a real estate company.”

Manette shared Wisconsin with sixty-seven first cousins (and over two hundred second cousins). Port Washington, she says, is “known throughout the Midwest for its annual festival—Fish Day. It's billed as the ‘World's Largest Fish Fry.'”

She especially enjoyed family gatherings on the one-hundred-and-twenty-acre farm of her maternal grandmother. “When the house got full,” she recalls, “the kids were sent to the basement—where we played in
the root cellar and behind the ancient furnace. When the basement got full we were sent out to the barn. Ninety-nine percent of my childhood memories involve subzero weather, but the barn was always warm.”

Summers on the farm were sweet indeed. “My grandmother would send us to the garden with mason jars of sugar to cut rhubarb—we'd climb up into apple trees in the orchard to dip and eat. Sugar, I suppose (as much as snow), figures large in my memories. Someone was always baking something sweet. I suppose it offset the strictness of our religious faith. We were Catholic, and there was a long list of
Thou Shalt Nots
that everybody lived with, but you could always eat a batch of chocolate chip cookies.”

Manette first experienced great literature after sneaking into her mother's hope chest—from which she produced a good many musty paperbacks. “I choked on
Daisy Miller
,” she wrote in her memoir
Limbo
, “but relished
Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre
, and (especially)
An American Tragedy
. I lingered over the word
disrobe
, which I'd had to look up in the dictionary, and then read the scene again and again.”

She studied piano at Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. This pursuit, however, came to an unfortunate end. “At the age of nineteen,” she says, “I developed an MS-like illness that began with pain and weakness in my arms and legs. It became harder and harder to play the piano. Eventually, I realized I'd have to do something else with my life that was less physically demanding.”

So she sought a degree in anthropology at the University of Maine, the only degree she could find that did not require a literature class. “At the time,” she told Oprah's Book Club, “I did not write. I had never liked reading, never kept a diary, and had hated the English classes I'd taken in high school.”

She met her husband in college. “We are still on our first date,” she says. “I remember calling my mother and saying, ‘I met this guy and he doesn't want to go home.'”

Manette started writing (as a New Year's resolution) on January 1, 1988. Owing to her muscle disorder, “I had to find a career I could manage sitting down,” she says. As she told Oprah's Book Club: “My boyfriend (now husband) helped me keep to my writing schedule. At the time I was writing poetry, but he kept encouraging me to write fiction—so I finally did. In the summer of 1988 I won a ‘scholarship' to the Stonecoast Writers' Conference in Portland, Maine. (Later I found out that my tuition had been secretly paid by an older woman in one of my writing classes.) At the conference, I learned about MFA programs—I applied to Cornell and was accepted.”

She was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, from 1992 to 1993. While there, she won a National Endowment for the Arts grant worth twenty thousand dollars. “One day my husband and I were living on a five-hundred-dollar-a-month stipend, plus housing,” she told the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
, “and the next day I found out I got the NEA grant. And the following day Viking took my book!”

That book (
Vinegar Hill
) was published in 1994, followed by the story collection
Read This and Tell Me What it Says
in 1995. Manette has since published three more novels—
Sister
(1996),
River Angel
(1998), and
Midnight Champagne
(1999). The last named was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Limbo
(2001) chronicled her twenty-year struggle with undiagnosed illness, taking its title from the Catholic belief in a place between heaven and hell that is neither, one which Ansay imagines as “a gray room without walls, a gray floor, a gray bench…. You wouldn't know how long you'd been in that room, or how much longer you had to go.” She has won a Pushcart Prize, a Friends of American Writers Prize, and two Great Lakes Book Awards (among others).
Vinegar Hill
was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her November 1999 book club selection.

“My health improved dramatically in my late thirties,” she explains, “largely a result of alternative medicine—which I paid for with my post-Oprah royalty checks.” As she has written on her Web site (www.amanetteansay.com): “I am no longer using a scooter (which I donated to the VA) and I am walking unassisted—using a cane only for long distances.”

Manette has taught creative writing at Warren Wilson College (Ashville, North Carolina), Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee), Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), and the University of the South (Sewanee, Tennessee). She now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, where she is Associate Professor of English.

Asked whether she has had any curious jobs, she replies, “I sold (and fitted) ballet shoes at a dance store in Baltimore.” Odder still, she spent two summers working for the Museum of Natural History “on a research project banding and observing common and roseate terns.”

Does her literary routine include any unusual customs? “No, I don't even need (or have) a room of my own,” she says. “My writing desk is squashed between the bed and the wall. Somehow, no matter how many
rooms we have in the house, my work space gets eaten up and I end up writing in the bedroom.”

Has she any vice? “I really don't,” she says. “I have a two-year-old daughter, and any free time I might have once used to pursue a vice I now use for sleep.”

She does, however, rely upon certain beverages for inspiration: “Morning cup of fair-trade coffee, light cream. Afternoon herbal tea. Sometimes, but not always, an evening glass of red wine—probably something we got for $6.99 at Costco.”

Manette's enthusiasms include birds, plants, travel, cities (especially New York, Paris, and Seoul), and languages. “Someday I'm going to take language classes full time,” she says. “I can limp along in German and Spanish, but I'd like to be really fluent—and I'd love to study French.”

Her latest novel is
Blue Water
(William Morrow, 2006). She lives with her husband and daughter.

Hazy Memories
The Inspiration Behind
Vinegar Hill

 

V
INEGAR
H
ILL
came about as a result of a series of conversations I had with my mother about what it was like to balance the demands of Catholicism, motherhood, and individual freedoms in the 1970s—when I was very young. The plot evolved out of hazy memories of a very brief period in which my family lived in my grandparents' house. It was there, at the age of five, that I became keenly aware that my mother and I were not considered family the way that my father and brother were—my mother because she was an Ansay by marriage and me because I'd lose the name (or so it was assumed) when I married. The fierceness of my grandmother's affection for my father and brother (coupled with her chilly distance toward my mother and her absolute indifference to me) only served to underscore the irony of her own situation—she was not family either. Her identity as an Ansay was every bit as precarious as our own. And to make matters worse my grandfather knew something about her—a secret. Whenever she raised her voice to him he'd threaten to tell.

I never learned what this secret was, but there were several clues. When I was fourteen my grandmother pulled me into the bathroom by my wrist. There, speaking through tears, she told me that sex was for the sole purpose of bearing children—once I passed out of childbearing age I was free to deny a husband anything more. My grandfather had persisted, but she'd known
her rights. She'd gone to the priest—on her mother's advice—and the priest had made my grandfather leave her alone.

And then there was this—she'd been past twenty-five (an old maid by the standards of the day) when she married. Her father had approached my grandfather. The two had negotiated until my grandmother's dowry was sweetened with the promise of good land. My grandfather told me the story several years after my grandmother had died.

“No one else would have her,” he said.

Vinegar Hill
was published in 1994. It was (simultaneously) a meditation on my grandparents' secret and a critique of the Catholicism which had bound them to each other for life. I finished it when I was twenty-five, but I was twenty-eight by the time I found a publisher for it. I had just turned thirty when I finally held the first copy in my hand. After all that waiting I expected to feel something like joy. Yet what I experienced was cold, clichéd dread at the thought of what my Catholic relatives would have to say about it. In fact (as I soon discovered) I was looking in the wrong direction. My relatives' reactions were enthusiastic and proud—though one of my aunts did express a mild concern for the state of my soul. The negative reactions I received came from an audience I hadn't considered: a small but vocal number of citizens living in Port Washington, Wisconsin—population seven thousand. My hometown.

Port Washington is set on a hill overlooking Lake Michigan—a blip on the most detailed of maps. At the top of the hill is St. Mary's, an old Catholic church made of stone. Lodged in its steeple is one of the largest four-faced clocks in the United States. Growing up it seemed to me that no matter where I was, who I was with, or what we happened to be doing, the eye of that clock was fixed upon me—unblinking as the eye of God. Who could resist such a landscape, so ripe for metaphor? I borrowed the hill, the church, and the clock for the fictional town where
Vinegar Hill
is set. I also borrowed my grandparents' house. The house resembled many in Port Washington—furnished with the same hanging Jell-O molds, the same framed biblical portraits, and the same avocado carpeting. I borrowed Lake Michigan (it is, after all, a big lake) and a few other general details—the swimming pool downtown, for instance, and a particular tourist trap restaurant.

Not exactly the town's crown jewels.

To be fair, I was expecting some flack about the church and its clock. I expected to be asked if it was St. Mary's. Yes, I'd planned to say. You figured it out—you've got me there.

That, I thought, would be the end of it.

What I wasn't expecting were the people who would accuse me of setting the novel in their homes—who claimed to recognize in my protagonist (Ellen) their own mothers, their own best friends, even their own selves. I wasn't expecting the people who showed up at the readings I gave in the Milwaukee area to chant the refrain of my childhood—if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In a bookstore during a question-and-answer exchange the mother of a childhood friend stood up with tears in her eyes.

“Nothing like this really happened to you!” she said.

“You're right,” I agreed.

We stared at each other helplessly.

Fortunately, the vast majority of reactions were positive ones.

Vinegar Hill…
what is the significance of that title?

From the start I knew that I wanted to name the book after the street this family lived on, but even after I'd finished the manuscript I wasn't able to come up with a name that set an appropriate tone. I wanted something with a bitter connotation—this is a book about a difficult year in the life of a family—but I wanted to modify that bitterness with a sense of motion or transition as a means of suggesting (even if subtly) the promise of transcendence and hope. I was living in Ithaca, New York, where I was finishing an MFA in fiction at Cornell University. One day while driving to nearby Trumansburg for a conference with my adviser (a wonderful teacher and writer named James McConkey) I happened to glance up and see a street sign that said “Vinegar Hill.” It was perfect. I had never turned down that street before. I made a point never to do so afterward. I wanted it to belong solely to my characters. And it does.

Do any of the scenes in Vinegar Hill emerge from your own life?

The scene in which Ellen is teaching Amy to swim in Autumn Lake draws on a personal memory. Like Amy I was walking in deep water with my mother—who was encouraging me to walk further; like Amy I felt something knobby with my bare toes; like Amy I pulled it to the surface. What I describe Amy seeing in
Vinegar Hill
is exactly what I saw. At the time I was furious with my mother for not warning me that it was there—it
took her a while to convince me that she hadn't known. It was the first time it had occurred to me that my mother didn't know everything, and the thought both fascinated and frightened me. In Amy's case the realization hits at a time when she's particularly vulnerable.

 

Why is Ellen so passive? Why doesn't she stand up for herself sooner? Isn't this the 1970s?

This is indeed the 1970s (the decade in which I grew up) and this is a realistic portrayal of the religious and social barriers facing a woman in rural Catholic Wisconsin who considered leaving an unhappy marriage. Because this is the 1970s—and not the 1950s—such a woman might (perhaps) find some support in the community if she could show evidence of physical abuse. Ellen, however, is not in physical danger. Although she recognizes her own unhappiness, she has never heard of such a thing as emotional abuse—and would dismiss such a phrase if she heard it. She grew up, as I did, worshiping martyrs—women who became saints because of the suffering they endured, and who (like Mary) were idolized for their passivity: “Not my will but Thine be done.”

Ellen relies on her faith (rather than her head and heart) to guide her. She's been taught to believe that things of the body are tainted, sinful, and suspect. In my mind she is kind of a female Job—and the irony of course is that there is no point to her suffering. She believes endurance will lead her to understanding—a resolution in her marriage and her faith. She is brought to a point so low that she identifies with an atrocity committed years earlier by an equally desperate woman. At that moment Ellen sees herself clearly. In a “moment of grace” (a term Flannery O'Connor used when speaking of her own work) she wakes up and takes steps to save herself and her children—despite the painful alienation from her family and community which is bound to result.

 

Were you raised Catholic?

Yes.

 

Are you now a practicing Catholic?

No.

 

The only character from whose point of view you don't write is Fritz. Did you ever consider giving him a voice of his own?

I not only considered it, but tried it—it was dreadful. All I found in him was exhaustion and rage—characteristics which are already clear from the things he says (and does) to members of his family. Fritz was raised at a time when a man was considered a tool for a task. His value rested not on his humanity (and certainly not on the quality of his mind), but on his brute strength and the number of hours he could work in a day. Fritz, like James, went into the fields as a child. By the time he was of age to marry any originality, lightness, or spark had been worked out of him—crushed. To a man like Fritz a wife is just an extension of his livestock—another responsibility. Children represent future workers and the survival of the farm. They are sent to the fields. The cycle repeats itself.

 

Do you consider James a sympathetic character?

When I think of James I think of a dog on one of those very long, thick chains. The dog begins to run, gaining speed, but the chain runs out and yanks the dog off its feet. James feels the chain when he loses his job. He lands back in his parents' house and that brief burst of speed is soon forgotten.

James is a man for whom the past exists as the present. His daily life is filled with old terrors (in the scene in the shower with the rose-scented soap or the scene with Monty on the road). As he tucks his children into bed he is paralyzed by thoughts of their frailty. This leads him into thoughts of his own childhood vulnerability and he's lost again—withdrawn and passive. Even his bursts of anger accomplish nothing useful.

And yet he tries. Look at how he wants to put the children to bed properly. Look at his attempt to buy Ellen a Christmas gift. But his actions are empty because he doesn't feel—doesn't know what to feel. He looks to the men he sees on television to guide him—looks to the stereotype of what a husband and father “should” be. The men in his own family certainly haven't been much of an example. Ironically, by the end of
Vinegar Hill
James has done almost everything Ellen wanted him to do at the beginning of the book. He chooses Ellen over his mother, he offers her physical affection, and he stands up to his parents more actively. But Ellen is not the person she was at the beginning of the book, and it isn't going to be enough.