The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

I'm not sure that this is as "novel" a concept as all the promotion might lead one to believe, but it was still a good read. Kate Summerscale tells the story of what is now a classic mystery setup: a murdered family member inside the locked gates of an English estate, leaving only the occupants of the house as suspects. The case is investigated by Jack Whicher, a member of England's relatively new detective force, and he's left with the unpleasant choice of implicating a person that society does not believe to be capable of murder or allowing a murderer to escape unpunished.

As with so many fictional mysteries, the setup is promising, and doubt is cast on all members of the family while journalists of the day hint at unsavory elements of middle-class life concealed by wealth and privacy, such as sexuality and insanity. Sadly, most of us are so used to being bludgeoned by details of such behavior on a daily basis, so the innuendos and implications seem very understated in the modern era.

Still, in a world so accustomed to police presence, Summerscale reveals interesting details about how police, privacy and the sanctity of the home were viewed in 19th-century England. There are also interesting tidbits about rural village life and the day-to-day operation of a middle-class home. In addition, there are numerous connections drawn between the work of early mystery detectives (Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the case as well as with the authors' depictions of detectives.

Overall, it was well-crafted and interesting reading, although the literary comparisons grow a little thick at times. Perhaps, Summerscale's work almost makes her own point about why we hunger for mysteries, because although the story unfolds, the murderer is brought to justice and the detective recovers his reputation, the story still remains murky. The identity of the killer is doubted, the victim and the motive remain grey shapes in the fog that are only just made out, and Jack Whicher wanders off the pages of history rather uneventfully. We love mysteries, because we love to have them solved; their solutions confirm our sense of order, their motives reduce unthinkable crimes to attitudes we can fathom, and at the end of the day, we know who the "bad" people are. Perhaps it isn't surprising that a real-life mystery with such unsatisfactory resolutions spawned a genre dedicated to defining, illuminating and resolving.

Simple Pleasures

What a nice day it's been. Little of this, little of that, small happinesses abound. A mug of tea to start the day and the little cadre of joys caffeine brings: warmth, sweetness, and optimism. A flurry of editing that achieved neat rows of numbers and a sense of accomplishment at finishing folders of work, plus that safe feeling of earning one's keep and supporting oneself. Leftover pancakes (made from scratch, thank you very much) with homemade jam for lunch made me feel thrifty and brought the realization that I made enough jam to keep us in peanut butter and jam sandwiches for a whole year until strawberry season rolls back around. No small feat in our house, where rarely a day passes with a pbj sandwich for lunch! After lunch, I read a few pages from a new book, which left me feeling self-satisfied the way that only satisfy aimless curiosity can and feeling greatly relieved that I did not live in the filth and squalor of 19th century London. (Or 19th century anywhere, for that matter.) After a light lunch and light reading, I stretched out on the couch under a quilt, grateful for a cool spring day, and listened to the birds, grateful for a house with green space. If contentment has a specific feeling, it's dozing on a spring afternoon under the cool, worn weight of a quilt. And then a yellow cat joined me, curling up by my shoulder and resting his chin on my arm. He seems to be feeling pretty contented himself, judging by the soft sigh he gave after settling in and the whiffling little snores that followed. I felt flattered, honored by the willingness of another species to share a space with me and by the confidence he seems to have in my presence. A pot of vegetable soup is simmering on the stove, a person who thinks I'm fabulous is on the way home, reruns of Monk are in the DVR, the lawn is mowed, the laundry's (mostly) done, and the book window is filled with new books.

Life seems so good sometimes, but like one of those carefully crafted dollhouse miniatures; a painfully beautiful object with frail supports, a tenuous skeleton and piecework upholstery. So tiny and delicate that even breathing in its presence seems reckless, and the whole thing is a study in contrasts: so perfect and so pointless, so stable and so fragile, so gorgeous and so worthless. Sometimes, I feel like every day is a struggle to find my place on those spectra, to see my life as I see others. My inner life has so rarely been perfect, stable, beautiful, and each day I search for evidence, for a path away from worthlessness and pointlessness, even if it is in things that are the cosmic equivalent of grains of sand. Each day, I hope for the belief necessary to gather the good things into a small pile, a box of treasures, and I hope the intricate mathematics of my ratio holds: small grains of joy in relation to the smallness of life.

Entropy

I love my little house full of old things. Our life may have new "skin" - books, television, clothes, appliances, but we have old bones. The most beloved things, the things that make our house a home, are all old, even the cats.

The house is aging too. We living in a one-room brick schoolhouse, and this time of year, as everything is waking up, things start wandering through. Mostly, our tourists are just pillbugs and spiders and ants, with the occasional wayward mouse. (Mice tend not to spend much time here before deciding that it would be best to move on.) Small spaces between the floorboards allow admittance, as do gaps under the doors and holes in the screens, if there are screens. But the airy openness of our little house, for all its draughts and bugs, isn't something I would trade for the impermeable blister-pack construction of a new home.

Our furniture fits here, too. Hand-me-down chairs from our grandparents with faded, paper-thin upholstery. Piesafes with rusting tins and oil stains. Chests and blanket boxes with age cracks and blistered varnish. Ikea furniture off-gases chemicals, but our furniture seems to exhale, breathing a sort of world-weary sturdiness and peacefulness into the house. Somehow, things wouldn't seem as still and calm with laminated wood and particle board.

New things make me anxious anyway, truth be told. White tennis shoes, shiny new cars, fluffy untrampled rugs - a consumer's dream for most, but for me, just a panic attack waiting to happen. I do my best. I'll spend weeks watching my every step, avoiding close parking spaces, waiting for a cat to cough up a hairball, but I'm always relieved when entropy sets in. Truly, if you spill something on my new rug, I'll be a little disappointed, mostly in myself for allowing it to happen, but then relief sets in. Salt causes rust, people cause messes, life causes death. Of course, I have momentary envy when I see people with blindingly white sneakers, but honestly, I just don't want the responsibility.

Entropy is a comforting theory. Things deteriorating, winding down, aging, disassembling: they're just following the natural order. Trying to prevent this from happening is like trying to prevent John Henry from catching mice. (I can prevent him from eating them, but not from catching them, much to his annoyance and delight.) It is not a failure on my part, but rather a reminder that the world is functioning as it should.

Entropy is anathema to some people, though. They hermetically seal everything they own, agonize over bugs and damp and dust, tilting at the universal windmill of decay. My brother, for instance, loathes imperfection, and its presence in his life causes him endless agony. He purchases something new, and within days, all he's able to see is the tiny nick in the finish. I still remember admiring his new car for the first time. He pointed out an infinitesimal scratch on the hood, and I was both sympathetic and irritated. He sees it as caring for his things. That's just how he is. With each downward spiral, he becomes more and more dissatisfied, frustrated by ruin. Me, I see acceptance in deterioration. With each day, my responsibility as vanguard against damage lessens. Mentally, a scratch on something makes it one less thing I have to worry about. You do what you can, and you accept what you can't change. I see it as reality. That's just how I am.

So, I suppose it makes sense that I'm happy with my old furniture. Everything in our home lost its "showroom floor" quality a long time ago, well before I was born or before my grandparents were born, for that matter. There's no way I can be responsible. Our house has the graffiti of children grown, dead and buried, and in comparison, a scuff on a windowsill is merely the world continuing its work. I am absolved.

The Cat's Pajamas

I should start by confessing that we have entirely too many cats in this house. I'm not sure at what point "too many" starts, but five is beyond that point, that much I do know. Four of them are getting to be old codgers, slouching through feline middle age, sleeping extensively, losing teeth, developing paunches. And diabetes. And heart problems. The aggregate amount of energy displayed daily wouldn't trigger a motion sensor.

And along came Charlie Bucket. I'm not sure why we let him in the house, aside from the fact that he's floofy, absolutely adorable, was tiny, and was about to take up living like a groundhog under our deck in the backyard or dying like a groundhog on the major state route in the front. The other cats were not sympathetic. They did not intend to descend into their dotage with a Tasmanian devil in the house. Neither did I, but there you have it.

Mostly, he just engages in "normal" kitten behavior. He feels sudden compulsions to leave and enter rooms. He does laps around the house. He has strange prejudices regarding knit blankets, camera bags and the bathmat. He takes issue with how the carpet "looks" at him.

And then, there is his fascination with pants, or more specifically, with the inside of pants. Dare to go into the bathroom in our house, sit down to conduct your business, and begin perusing a back issue of Entertainment Weekly, and the next thing you know, you'll have a cat in your pajama pants. He just plucks the band back like a harp string, slips over the edge, and he's in!

If you try to get him out, he bites and retreats into the depths of one pant leg. Finally, you realize that even if you could grab him, you'd have a hard time negotiating your underwear and your waistband without having your legs scratched to pieces, so you decide he'll just have to go out another door. You slide one foot back inside the elastic cuff of your pajama pants, and attempt to get him to recognize light at the other end. He begins to crawl down your pant leg, gets halfway, becomes bored or disoriented, and lays down. In your pant leg, on the floor, looking like a plaid sausage.

You decide to extrude him, pick up the leg, and begin shaking. He slides further down and part of his head, including one ear, emerges. Suddenly, he decides he likes this. He's snug, you're close by, and he feels hidden and capable of surveying everything at the same time. You're losing feeling in your legs now, and you start to shake with more purpose. No luck. You reach in the cuff, past the little needle teeth, are thinking that this must be how a veterinarian feels, and draw one paw forward. He sticks the other paw out willingly, but then assumes an attitude reminiscent of Tom Hanks trapped in the rug in The Money Pit: two abbreviated arms, paws stuck under his chin, slight hysteria. You fight the urge to begin singing "The Name Game," because, at this point, frantic shaking starts to have some effect, but he continues to be limp, like a creature being born, as he oozes the rest of the way out of the cuff and flops onto the bathmat, blinking, confused, and generally disoriented.

Yoga pants are no better. He uses the wide legs to curl up in, and if disturbed, he assumes the stance of a small child playing "ghost" under a sheet - arms begin to wave above his head behind the fabric and strange noises start to come out of your pant leg.

The entire thing is both hilarious and frustrating. How do you explain to your non-catloving friends exactly how you sank to this level? Worse yet, the entire production is guaranteed to be a viral video, popping up on CNN, Youtube, and in email forwards everywhere. If, that is, you could bring yourself to go into the bathroom with a camera. I can't. And, Charlie apparently only performs on stage. It is no use to attempt to explain to your husband what he does. If you poke him into a pair of pajama pants fresh from the laundry, he'll crawl promptly down the leg and out the cuff, casting a worried glance at you over his shoulder as he sits down to bathe. As a result, Charlie gets to be a "monkey not seen" of sorts for everyone else, and you have the task of attempting to convey the monkey's charm through words. Words are amazing things, but they can only go so far and they make a poor substitute for actually having a cat in your pajamas.

Delayed Gratification

I'd love for this to be a book blog, but I never get far enough ahead! I have unread copies of celebrated books from recent years: Possession, Three Junes, The Known World. I've not been living under a rock. I know they're good. I know they'll be fabulous and I'll love them. But not just yet.... I have stacks of arc copies from library shows, and my "to be read" shelves are starting to outnumber my "have been read" ones. I keep hoping that I will find a mysterious wealthy benefactor or a patron and be paid to read, but so far no luck. Although, clearly, I need to cut back on the gothic.

Part of my problem is an overdeveloped sense of delayed gratification. A saint, who masquerades as a friend working in a bookstore, sent me an advance copy of Deanna Raybourn's Silent in the Sanctuary. I don't remember exactly when I got it, but it was an advance copy and the book was published in January, so, needless to say, I've had it for several months.

The worst part is that it has not been languishing on a shelf, but on my nightstand the entire time! I knew I was going to love it, I knew it was going to be over too soon, and I knew I was going to have to wait until next January to read her next one. Okay, maybe October, if my saintly connection holds up, but you get the idea.

I started it several times. I'd lie in bed, relishing the first few pages, put it down and begin to gush to my husband about how much I liked it, and just not pick it up again. I'm a horrible coward, I suppose, but I wanted to save it. Then, like a glutton, once I started, I devoured the entire thing this weekend and now it's gone. *sigh* And it's months until January or October.

The thing is, I'm inconsistent. I read a review, became obsessed with Dan Simmons' The Terror, used a treasured gift card to order a copy, tracked the Barnes & Noble order like the federal government tracking a shipment of uranium, and tucked in to it with gusto the minute it arrived, looking up only to rave or recite newfound knowledge about the formation of pancake ice. And instead of feasting on a good book, I have the nasty habit of snacking on less substantial fare. It's like planting a garden and then binging on canned corn, but not because I prefer the canned, but because I'm afraid of the day the real thing will be gone and I'll have to wait a whole year for more.

Anyway, Silent in the Sanctuary is that good. I enjoy a good mystery - not particularly high-minded of me, maybe, but there you have it. I like the puzzle, the sense of purpose in reading, and the fact that all mysteries are really, in some senses, the same story told over and over against a variety of backdrops. Mysteries are the kind of books one reads if one enjoys looking at changing scenery, I suppose, but so many of them have such artificial backdrops, the literary equivalent of bad matte painting or stereotypical casting. I can tolerate a weak plot or a weak structure, but both at once are too much! As a result, those dreaded mysteries referred to as "cozies" are right out. However, Deanna Raybourn has taken scenery that has, at first glance, been done, well, to death: Victorian England, manor houses, house parties, eccentric families, etc., etc., etc. However, with her research and humor, they're just terrific. This may be due to the fact that she has a Victorian-era heroine who is not a squeamish fainter bound too tightly in corsets or in social niceties, but an independently wealthy widow with an outlandish family, a reformed prostitute-turned-maid, and a pet raven. What's not to love?!

I have other books I'm excited about - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, The Likeness, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, The Matchmaker of Perigord. Oh, and I'm waiting on the library to call about my hold on The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher! They all sound delightful, and I have so many prospects that just selecting a book is becoming daunting. I'm beginning to feel like Smaug from The Hobbit, perched atop my book pile, admiring all my beautiful possessions and all their wondrous possibilities, so mesmerized that just staring and admiring eclipses all possibility of real enjoyment. But I may get to them while they're still timely! I may! In fact, just this week, I read the prologue of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was entranced, gushed about it, and put it down. The potential seems so luscious that letting it ripen on the vine just a little bit longer can't hurt, can it?

Dirt

I don't know much about ancestral memory. I think I may not want to. That is one of the great disappointments of having a natural curiosity in all manner of things. I develop subject lust very easily, and sometimes, you seek out knowledge and develop a deeper romance with your subject, because your understanding has moved beyond the crush stage of love. Sometimes, though, you research and you learn and what you get for it is the squelching of the fuzzy, vaguely romantic concept you've always had. Kind of like when you adore someone, then find out that they're a Clay Aiken fan. It just calls everything else into question....

Anyway, if ancestral memory gets explained to me in the language of cellular biology and genetics, I'd probably just go blank and write it all off as a crock of hooey. Meanwhile, however, I am free to think of it in picturesque terms, imagining some blood memory transferred to me by peasants, the kind that you see in Jean-Francois Millet paintings. Sturdy, stoic people with their eyes simultaneously on the dirt and on God.

If generations of farmers don't explain it, I'm not sure how else to account for my sudden urge every spring to go dig in the dirt. I have no idea why this should happen. I never dig in the dirt with much purpose. I garden like some people diet - if I'm going to stick with it, results had better appear pretty quickly. And I'm no green thumb. I manage tomatoes, herbs, pansies if there's enough rain, but mostly, by July, somehow, I seem to have little to show for my efforts besides a few anemic hanging baskets of impatiens, no pun intended. Even if I fuss over little green shoots, it does no good. My sense in plants might be as good as my sense in relationships, because I somehow seem to find myself begging, pleading, worrying and fretting over only the most recalcitrant, ungrateful and unproductive of specimens.

My lack of success may be due to an embarrassment of riches. Maybe I just don't have any real sense of need. If I kill off five dollars worth of tomatoes, I'll go to the farm market. There's no sense that a lack of diligence on my part has any consequence, beyond the straggly brown detritus that is an embarrassing reminder of my inattentiveness. We'll not starve. On cold November nights, I'll not lie awake regretting my neglect of the carrots. And if they thrived? We might be wasteful, picking and eating what we wanted, what was attractive. There'd be no eleventh hour canning of produce, no neat array of 87 quarts of tomato juice, no pickling of excess cucumbers. We'd have little to show for the bounty aside from an obese groundhog. Or guilt would drive me, and there would be a series of frantic preserving efforts, consultations with the local extension office, purchases of a dehydrator, and I'd be stiff and irritated with resentment of lost weekends, unread books and unfinished knitting.

Who knows? If there is ancestral memory, perhaps my ancestral blood just doesn't take such vanity gardening seriously. You can't pay bills with petunias, can't sustain body and soul with a weeping cherry. Or perhaps, like most people of my generation, I'm just looking for a way to blame my failures, botanical or otherwise, on my parents.

Still, on Saturday morning, after lingering over an extra mug of tea, I'll put on grubby jeans and wander out to take stock of the green, growy things. I'll pull away dead grass, loosen up the dirt, assess progress, and wonder about the world's ability to annually renew life, in plants and in people.

Tea

I'd be a lousy revolutionary. I'd have gone right back to England for tea, Continental Congress be damned. (My husband points out that I would have been a lousy poor person, too, but I figure if a revolution isn't worth it, neither is a marriage for love. I'd have married for money. And tea.) I'd give up lace, recycle candle wax, send loved ones off to battle, but without English Breakfast, I'd have just stayed in bed.

I used to think I'd make a lousy addict too. Drugs never held any appeal to me. Honestly, if you cringe at the thought of nose spray, would you ever consider cocaine? I've shown a reliable and, my friends assure me, aggravating ability to smoke, smoke heavily, smoke daily, and then just quit. Coffee, meh. And then I discovered tea.

I wasn't raised to be this way. Tea of any variety other than Lipton in my hometown, if you can find it, implies a sort of frippery. We had brief dalliances with Tetley in 80s in the name of sun tea, and college professors probably accounted for presence of the 3 stale, faded boxes of Celestial Seasonings on the top of the grocery store shelf, but otherwise, it was Lipton. Iced, thank you very much, not hot. If you wanted a hot drink, you'd break out the Folgers Instant. We were not a family that put on airs, and honestly, who washes down a fried bologna sandwich with ginger pu-erh anyway?

I wasn't raised to indulge myself in any way, actually. I wear Levis, despite the fact that I have no ass and apparently everyone at Levis' does. Great Clips sees me and my split ends about every five months. My summer sandals? $2.99 at the Goodwill. Cotton underwear, Suave shampoo, Cheerios. An unpretentious existence. Until you come to the tea box.... Shiny golden cans of tea mailed from Maine, exotic words like "oolong," various black blends, a French press, tea strainers, tea sacs, organic sugar, antique silver spoons - a smorgasbord of paraphernalia to stoke my addiction.

I feel sacrilegious saying so, but truly, the most earnest moment I spend giving thanks to the powers that be every day is when I'm taking my first sip of tea. For that split second, all is right with the world. Within moments that sense of perfection is gone: my tea is cooling too fast, I get distracted, I regret not adding a smidge more sugar, but for just that ONE second, life is without flaw. I can see the appeal of chasing a high - spending 86,399 seconds of every day trying to repeat that perfect one second of warmth. Of course, in lieu of estrangement, foreclosure, and pox marks, I just end up over-caffeinated and slightly unfocused. The nickel slots of addiction, that's what I'm playing. Lightly tendered gamble, lightly tendered payoff.

Into the Void

Monkeys Not Seen seemed to be appropriate. Bailey White has a beautiful essay about a little boy who wishes to see a monkey, but the sheer excitement of the possibility of such a visit makes him so ill that it never happens. He spends his life thrilled by the near miss and imagining an intelligent, gentle creature, never knowing the reality of a caged, lonely, grouchy monkey. So much of life is the perception, not the reality, and the things we don't do somehow become luminous in our minds with some sheen of possibility, while so often we just see the flaws in the experiences we have had.

This feels a little odd, somehow. Like the first page of a new journal, there's the sense that I should say something profound, that I should make some meaningful statement. But it's not a day with much to say - clear sunshine, sleeping cats, faded quilts, dust piling up along the baseboards. Speaking, or writing, seems uncalled for, but otherwise there's just nothing. It's a still day in my little schoolhouse today. I can hear a cat breathing upstairs behind my nightstand, the tick of the crockpot on the kitchen counter, the hum of the dvr recording another Law & Order rerun. This kind of silence, at one time in my life, would have been filled with a burbling, muddy sluice of thoughts, but now, the interior of my mind is as still as the house, thoughts lined up on the floor of a clean internal room, like small, imperfect, nondescript pebbles. As a result, the urge to turn on a blaring soundtrack of 80s pop seems ridiculous - the image of Billy Idol screeching through the same internal room, for no one but a tidy line of stones seems bizarre, to say the least.

Sharing such thoughts seems odd, self-conscious, self-important, ridiculous somehow. Why do we do this, this cyber equivalent of scratching our name on a post, tucking a scrap of paper in a crack? An odd contrast between immortalizing our "monkeys not seen" and an apparent fear of a life passed unseen ourselves?