The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 29: August 3

Today I went to a neighboring town to see the gallery opening of the woman inundated by motherhood and to hear another woman read. This town is as close to fancy as Maine can muster. It is also very literary. The poet Robert Lowell used to live in this town, ergo his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, lived in this town, and so did Jean Stafford, his first. Jean Stafford wrote a short story published in 1978 called “An Influx of Poets,” about the inundation of poet guests to her summerhouse, and the subsequent ruin of her marriage.

Cora’s marriage to the poet Theron Maybank dissolved after five years in an awful Maine summer, right after the war. Every poet in America, it seemed, came to visit. They sat around reading their own works aloud, not listening to each other.

I will never write a story called “An Influx of Fiction Writers,” even though there are many fiction writers in my town. More come every year, but we don’t sit around reading aloud our stories to each other. Mostly we talk about old barns and how to keep them from falling down. Maybe this is our coded way of discussing how to prevent, given our dangerous summer numbers, the future dissolution of our marriages.

This fancy town is also a famed warfare site, and not only of the domestic variety. I’ve been told the history of this town. A Revolutionary War — era something happened there. The battle of something. During the war, people floated their houses here on boats from (or maybe to) Quebec. Or from (or maybe to) Massachusetts. They were either too sentimental to leave their houses where they’d built them, or they were too cheap to build new ones. When I think of this town, the image that comes to mind is a harbor clogged by floating houses, and people in tri-corner hats yelling at each other, “Watch your front porch, asshole!”

Subsequently, or not, the town consists of mainly colonial-era houses, and all of these houses are white because of a town ordinance. There is no town ordinance, however, governing public drunkenness or bad art. Most galleries sell the art of the vacation spot. Postcard-equivalent landscape paintings. Sculptures so figurative they appear Duchampian. A “Tea Cup” or a tea cup?

The art was not bad at the gallery we visited. My friend’s art is there, and she is a really good artist. She makes bleak and lonely paintings that I can’t help but unimaginatively view as representations of her maternal experience.

The energy on Main Street was scatty. There had been “feeder races” that day. Sailors had been fed into a boat on the other side of the bay and ended up here. Not much feeding occurred on board, but lots of drinking had. Some of these sailors landed at the gallery where there was more wine, and also chalk for the children. The drunkest sailors drew on the sidewalk with the children’s chalk.

But I was also in town for the fiction reading. The reading was held in the white Parish House on the town green. The writer was Jewish. Her stories were about Jews in New York. She said the word “Shabbat” a lot. Behind her podium hung a portrait of a man from the 1700s. The parson, maybe? He stared disapprovingly at the woman throughout her reading. Who on earth was this New York Jew reading her fiction aloud in the parsonage? Wasn’t there a town ordinance governing this?

Afterward, a handful of us went to dinner at a Victorian inn. We were greeted by a woman who resembled a governess. More portraits stared at us throughout dinner. I did not know most of the people at the table, and so I found myself explaining myself a lot. One woman asked me where I spent my summers. I told her the name of my town. “Ah,” she said. “And is yours a heritage family?” I had no idea, I told her — I had never heard this term before — but I guessed not. If she’d known my last name she’d never have asked me. Julavits is not heritage for anything you’d want to boast a historical connection to in these WASPy parts. Though maybe she did know my last name, and this was her indirect way of asking: Are you Jewish? I was indirectly asked this question a lot as a kid. After the Christmas vacation, kids would ask me, “How was your holiday?” In middle school, a Jewish family moved into the house next door. They noticed our lack of a Christmas tree (we’d gone out of town to visit my grandparents who’d retired to Florida). We were understood to be Jewish by these neighbors, and my mother never had the heart to correct them, not even when they invited us to Jewish holiday dinners. There seemed no way to set them straight without lots of awkwardness or risking offense. (You? I look nothing like you.) At a certain point, it seems more polite to just become the person people assume you to be.