An accidental family takes shape in 'Happiness'
Accidental Happiness
By Jean Reynolds Page
Ballantine, 326 pp., $22.95
In the company of women, the topic du jour seems to be the more-than-adequate mother -- or so it is, at least, among the predominantly female population of ''Accidental Happiness." Maternity good and bad, instincts sound and unreliable, responsibilities shouldered and shrugged off, form the fabric of a tale heavy on female guilt, self-doubt, and mutual suspicion.
The story begins with a bang when Reese Melrose and her 7-year-old daughter, Angel, step aboard River Rose, a sailboat moored in a South Carolina marina, in search of somewhere to sleep. Reese, long divorced from Ben Melrose, knows the boat from her married days. What she does not know is that Ben died in an accident some three months previously, that his newly widowed second wife, Gina, now sleeps aboard, and that she keeps a pistol in her nightstand. By shooting and wounding Angel, Gina is established -- inadvertently but with considerable emphasis -- as a woman short on maternal feeling.
Henceforward, after Angel has been patched up, the two wives circle each other like gladiators. Reese admires Gina's elegance and Gina notes Reese's beauty, but good manners and undeclared competitive jealousy cannot forestall the inevitable questions. Why has the woman who deserted Ben time after time reappeared? Were Reese and Ben still in love? And who is Angel's father? Gina, previously grieving an uncomplicated loss, must now refine and reassess her assumptions about her husband, who, despite a compact that they would never have children, had begun to urge her to reconsider.
For all their dissimilarities -- Gina is practical, Reese is flaky; Gina is clear and direct, Reese is guarded and vague -- both women are marked by abiding fears and childhood phobias. Gina has carried a lifetime's burden of shame about the death of her sister Elise, who drowned when in 12-year-old Gina's care. Gina's failure even to warm to Elise, never mind protect her, has given rise to her skepticism that ''there is anything maternal inside me." Poor Gina was also deprived of much to go on in the way of role models. Her own mother, ''a Stepford wife at cocktail hour," has cool water if not ice running in her veins.
Gina may latterly have been adopted by her mother-in-law, Maxine, as the daughter she never had -- the good spouse compared with Reese's bad -- and she may sardonically refer to herself as ''Braveheart with breasts," but at her core Gina is unsure of herself. Angel's instinctive and not unreasonably cagey attitude toward her does not help.
Reese, on the other hand, is phobic about churches. Motherless too after her parents split up, she was sacrificed by her father, at age 14, to an evangelical preacher who claimed she had ''the gift" and then raped her. Memories of that instant of paralysis and helplessness return to her in the present in the form of illness, for Reese has multiple sclerosis and her reason for coming back is to find a legal guardian for Angel. With Ben gone, will it be Lane, Gina's neighbor, another widow but one with unfathomable reserves of mothering, or Gina herself?
Jean Reynolds Page teases out the answer to this question at length, in a strongly visual novel but one with scarcely more dramatic action than a one-act play. Its 300-plus pages are largely devoted to the peeling away of Reese's veils and Gina's assumptions. A handful of male characters have secondary roles, usually in the comfort department, but it is the reformulation of responsibilities between the two wives -- played out before a chorus of commentary by the grandmother generation of Lane and Maxine -- that is the book's key.
The author's first novel, ''A Blessed Event," examined the web of emotions surrounding a surrogate pregnancy, and Page's imagination has once again been fired by issues related to kinship. This new book seems to argue that the route from infancy to adulthood also serves as the qualifying path to proper nurturing. Emotionally scarred Reese has given birth to Angel but denied her a childhood. Inhibited Gina is too doubtful about the obligations of neediness to take the risk. In the end, she does accept a role in Angel's life, although not the one the reader expects. Best of all, she is permitted to live a fulfilled existence despite her acknowledged inability to develop ''the parent muscle," for which enlightened conclusion the author is to be congratulated.
In a novel of relatively simple polarities, angels slay demons and psychological disorders are exchanged for redemption and expiation. The gift of maternalism is not bestowed on everyone, and yet the children survive and eventually thrive. So far, so encouraging, but readers should probably also bear in mind what Freud might have said -- that there is no such thing as accidental happiness.
Elsbeth Lindner is a writer and publisher who lives near New York City.
