A death in the family and its many echoes
Sacred Time
By Ursula Hegi
Touchstone, 244 pp., $25
At its best, family can provide a sense of security for us as we go out into the world. We like to think of a loving family as a kind of guarantee, a talisman against life's worst dangers. But the hard truth is that tragedy often happens to people leading good lives and that life is frequently lived in murky waters.
In her sixth novel, Ursula Hegi, best known for her Oprah pick, ''Stones From the River," examines the possible guilt one child bears in the death of another, not in the eyes of the law, but, perhaps more powerfully, within a family over half a century. Seven-year-old Anthony Amedeo's world is changed when his uncle Malcolm goes to jail and, as a result, his father's sister Floria moves in with her twin daughters, Bianca and Belinda. Anthony's comfortable life with his parents, Leonora and Victor, vanishes overnight, and he now must share his room with his cousins and watch as his mother adjusts to his aunt's presence: ''It occurred to me that [my mother] and I -- so alike in the narrow shapes of our bodies -- were hiding out from the people with sturdy bodies: Aunt Floria, the twins, even my father." However, it is the moment when Bianca jumps to her death from a window with Anthony as the only witness that irrevocably alters all their lives.
Though the novel begins and ends with Anthony's words, the story is also told in the voices of Leonora, Floria, and Belinda. Moving from the 1950s to the '70s to 2002, it chronicles the effects of Bianca's death over time and how the family comes to terms with Anthony's mysterious role in it.
What is noteworthy about the novel is how immediate family is defined. After the tragedy, Anthony and Belinda are more siblings than cousins, bound both by loss and by blood. The parents' separations, rapprochements, and, in Floria and Malcolm's case, eventual divorce are shared experiences. The relationship between Leonora and Floria as sisters-in-law is also uniquely drawn. And they are not just mothers and wives, fulfilled only in relation to their children, but women with sexual desires.
The novel begins a bit slowly -- Hegi is clearly intent on setting a scene, evoking the Bronx in the '50s -- but it takes off after Bianca's death and the stories of the family unfold. ''Sacred Time" is a skillful switch for Hegi from writing about Germans to detailing the lives of an Italian-American family, with a refreshing dearth of stereotypes. Food is an integral part of the family's life and is richly detailed, but the descriptions do not feel like a caricature of the Italian-American experience; there are no echoes of ''The Godfather" or ''The Sopranos" here. Catholicism, even given Belinda's eventual marriage to a former priest, is peripheral, and retribution and redemption lie within the family and not the church.
At the beginning of the book, Anthony describes his family's storytelling: ''I felt the presence of untold stories -- there already, beyond all of us in the future -- shaping themselves within the body of my family, waiting for us to live these stories. And to tell them." It is an eerie beginning to a life that has been marred by his own inability to communicate.
Hegi is exploring questions of guilt and responsibility over half a century, but also the effects of silence. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is aware of what Anthony's role is in Bianca's death, but his family members are not. Before Bianca dies, Anthony says, ''I knew it was up to me to restore my family. Otherwise my father would let the twins and Aunt Floria live with us forever, and my mother would get thinner and whiter till she'd vanish in the white bedding." As the book draws to a close and Anthony is in his 50s, he continues to be haunted by his role in his cousin's death. And this time it is his mother who saves him.
Indeed, it is the mother-son relationship that is the book's center. It is ultimately Leonora's coming clean about violence in her childhood that causes Anthony to fall himself, not to his death like Bianca, but into life. In pushing Anthony, forcing him to confront his own past as she confronts hers, Leonora makes him '' dare to want [his family's] lost stories" and provides his with a long-lost sense of hope. As a mother, lover, grandmother, and fighter, Leonora provides the novel's heart -- redemption is found in her ferocity of spirit. And while the book's end is a bit melodramatic and Anthony's salvation, even after nearly 50 years, a bit too easily won, it is to Hegi's credit that she has created characters whose intensity and love for one another ring true.
Caledonia Kearns is the editor of two anthologies of Irish-American women's writing, ''Cabbage and Bones" and ''Motherland."
