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And the more I meditated on it, the more the "usurp" word compounded in
personal meanings. Not just kingdoms and crowns got usurped. A person's
unique and untransferable self could, at any time, be diminished,
annexed, or altogether extinguished by alien forces. My soon-to-be
twenty-two years on this earth had been an obstacle course mined with
potential or actual usurpers.
Since day one, it seemed, I had been confronted by them in one form or
another. After my alcoholic father crashed his car fatally into a tree
on the day of my birth, Mother's Alabama cousin, a childless woman
married to a rich man, tried to annex me. The offer included my widowed
mother, but my grandmother Loney was not part of the package—the cousin
thought Loney was "too undemonstrative"—and so Mother had to decline.
Next came a string of suitors who were willing to take on a little girl
to get the attractive, sexy mother, but not willing to take on the
grandmother, so once again I was spared. Next came World War II, four
years during which my mother's job as a reporter on the Mountain City
Citizen sufficiently engaged her libido. She covered the Veterans
Hospital overflowing with wounded soldiers straight from the
battlefront, interviewed visiting celebrities, reviewed books, and even
contributed the occasional seasonal poem. But then the war ended and the
men came home and wanted their jobs back and three of them wanted my
mother. She chose the one my grandmother and I liked least, an
oversensitive bully who brought to the match his overflowing trousseau
of sermons and insecurities. After great storms of tears and reproaches
between the women, my grandmother was left behind in our old apartment
and I found myself part of a new family in a worse apartment on the
other side of town, with new rules to follow and new things to worry
about.
Earl immediately began his campaign to remove me from my "snobbish"
grandmother's influence altogether. It took three years for him to get
us out of Mountain City, but at last he succeeded, which meant plucking
me out of my beloved St. Clothilde's, to which I had won a full high
school scholarship the year before. Thus at the end of ninth grade, when
I was going on fifteen, we packed up and drove out of our mountains, to
begin our strange migrant years of "transferring" up and down the East
Coast, gradually adding more human beings to our family mix, while Earl
discovered, or his bosses discovered for him, that he was
temperamentally unsuited to a career in chain store management. In those
gypsy years of Earl's and Mother's, I felt like someone kidnapped from
my rightful environment and tethered to a caravan of someone else's
descent.
In my last year at St. Clothilde's, when our ninth grade had been
immersed in David Copperfield, Sister Elise, a svelte, scholarly young
nun recently transferred from Boston, read us a letter the adult Dickens
had written to a friend, describing his terrible experience of being
sent to work in a blacking factory at age twelve. It was for less than a
year, while his family was bankrupt and living in debtors' prison, but,
Sister Elise informed us in her Back Bay accent, it left a scar
("skaah") on Dickens forever, even after he had become rich and world
famous and was surrounded by an adoring family of his own. No words
could express, Dickens had written to his friend, the secret agony of
his young soul as he sank into this low life, pasting labels onto
blacking bottles for six shillings a month in a rat-infested warehouse
with urchin boys who mockingly called him "the little gentleman."
Snatched from his studies with an Oxford tutor, obliged to pawn all his
books (The Arabian Nights, his favorite eighteenth-century novels), the
young Dickens felt his early hopes of growing up to be a distinguished
and learned person crushed in his breast. All that he had learned and
thought and delighted in was passing away from him day by day. His whole
nature, he wrote to the friend who, Sister Elise told us, was to become
his first biographer, had been so penetrated with grief and
humiliation that even now he often forgot in his dreams that he had
escaped it all and was famous, caressed, and happy.
Excerpted from Queen of the Underworld by Gail Godwin Copyright © 2006 by Gail Godwin. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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