In Clara's Hands: A Novel

By Joseph Olshan

In this follow-up to Olshan’s acclaimed debut novel, the unforgettable Clara, a tough and deeply caring Jamaican housekeeper, returns to help a troubled friend solve a mystery and deal with tragic loss
Ever since childhood, Will Kaplan has trusted one person—his family’s Jamaican housekeeper, Clara—to help him get through the pain and tragedy that have all too frequently invaded his life. When his brother, Danny, died suddenly, Clara was there to offer strength and comfort. When Will was confined to a mental hospital, she gave him hope and purpose. Now he needs her wisdom and counsel as never before in the wake of a horrific plane crash that may have taken the life of Will’s dear friend Marie, the mother of his former lover, Peter.   When he learns that Marie may not actually have been aboard the doomed flight, Will is suddenly faced with an altogether different dilemma: how to find Marie, who apparently vanished while on her way to see him. It will mean an uneasy reunion with Peter, who’s embroiled in his own family crisis. But if he places his damaged heart and troubled soul in Clara’s loving and capable hands once again, Will might just weather the emotional storm that is brewing all around him and emerge a stronger person because of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jul 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480421561

Joseph Olshan

Joseph Olshan is an award-winning American novelist whose works include Cloudland, The Conversion, Nightswimmer, and The Sound of Heaven.His critically acclaimed first novel, Clara's Heart, was the winner of the Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers’ Competition and subsequently the basis for a motion picture starring Academy Award–winner Whoopi Goldberg. A former book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, Olshan has written extensively for numerous publications including the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Times (London), the Washington Post,Harper’s Bazaar, People magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. Once a professor of creative writing at New York University, Olshan currently lives in Vermont. His work has been translated into sixteen languages.

Book preview

PART ONE:

A MAP OF THE WORLD

ONE

CLARA MAYFIELD HAD ALWAYS thought: I don’t care how many other beauty parlors open up in Flatbush, they could never run Blanche out of business. But here it was four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon and the salon deserted as if the customers had evacuated a stink. Now it was just Blanche and Clara sitting on the gashed vinyl chairs next to a washing stand. Clara stared at the pink cone heads of the hair-driers, none of which was operating, half of which were broken. A dozen pairs of hair shears lay gleaming next to each empty hair-dressing station. Only a few years ago you’d have to call days ahead to get a Wednesday-afternoon appointment. Hard to believe, but once upon a time Blanche’s Beauty seemed like the center of Brooklyn.

But now, despite the All Beauty Half Price sign in the window, Blanche had been unable to get back her former customers who had been lured to other establishments where younger beauticians spent hours weaving strands of artificial hair into fine long braids and dreadlocks. ‘I can’t conceive of it,’ Clara was saying. ‘Nobody wants hot comb again. And you the best hot comb in Brooklyn.’

‘Me fingers just can’t plait hair like some o’ dem,’ Blanche replied, glancing wearily at the peeling orange-and-red-tulip wallpaper that matched her beautician’s smock. Part East Indian, Blanche’s gentle but care-worn face always reminded Clara of the spirit faces you’d see at the Muslim shrines in Kingston. Could the reason why Blanche’s Beauty was failing also have to do with some of the ‘quick and fast’ old girls retiring? Seemed that they’d all returned to their home towns in Jamaica: Lydia to her sea cottage in Aracabessa; Felicia to her children in Port Maria; and Doris Williams to a cliff house in Spanish Town. Nobody to labrish and run jokes robbed the fun of getting hair done. Clara certainly understood the pull of the island and sometimes dreamed of skylarking to sweet Jamaica herself. But now she was collecting social security and qualified for Medicare and could afford to live simply in retirement.

Noticing that Clara was carrying her red suitcase, Blanche said, ‘So where you gone to now?’

‘To Vermont. To see me boi.’

‘Finally! Just so you know it cold up dere. All year long.’ Blanche was shaking her head. ‘Not like here. Vermont cold like Toronto. Prepare.’ She flashed a gold-tooth smile.

‘Is awright, me have his muddar’s coat,’ Clara said, patting the mink that lay on the gashed vinyl chair next to her.

The coat had seen better years and was now a bit bedraggled, coming apart at the seams. Blanche looked at it askance and scoffed, ‘Cha Clara. Must be twenty years ole, dat. Soon will look like a muskrat.’

Clara shrugged and said, ‘Got me trew a whole heap a winters.’

‘And you mean to say dem fanatics don’t ’cost you in de street?’

‘No, man. Dem wouldn’t cus out a black. One white lady say something to me once. I tell her I happy to give up me mink coat if she well want to buy me a new one. Since I don’t have no money. That kept her shutters shut.’

Blanche clapped her hands. ‘Lawd God, ya mouth certainly do…’ She left her sentence unfinished. There was a moment of jittery silence and then, ‘So, Clara, what happen him dis time?’

Clara shook her head, feeling the shadow of concern crossing the conversation like a boat driven by a dark wind. She fought back a surge of bitterness. ‘Sounds depressed when I talk to him.’

‘Again? For shame. At least him have plenty money.’

This annoyed Clara, who scoffed, ‘What a way…money? Money don’t matter. I don’t want him in de hospital again. No sir, every time him gone into hospital, him comes out worst.’

Blanche had a baffled look on her face. ‘Clara,’ she said. ‘You na find it strange…ya whole life intertwined wid dese Jewish boys?’

‘So what I must do? Clear off because they not family? You love people, don’t care. After all, I don’t see my own.’

‘Me na judge,’ Blanche said, sweeping up a pile of several-year-old fashion magazines and throwing them in a nearby trash bin. She dusted her hands together.

Clara glanced at her watch. ‘Well, sweet darling, me must high tail.’ The train was leaving from Penn Station in less than two hours. You could never rely on subways. She stood up.

The two women hugged and Blanche said, ‘Come straight to me when you get back. I well want to hear how everything turn out.’

‘Yes sir. Me will come straight.’

As Clara passed out of the shop, she took one last backward glance around the Beauty. Truthfully, it was looking shopworn and sad. If Blanche could only nice it up, Clara thought, she might find business improved. Oh, to think how things turn out. If Blanche finally closed down, Clara resolved not to patronize any of the new salons. ‘Do me own wigs,’ she muttered to herself as she walked out into the wide boulevard.

It was early October, and along the windy streets the golden leaves of locust trees gathered wind and shimmered. As she walked to the subway, Clara remembered how she used to meet Will Kaplan at the station and escort him back to her apartment. People would always stare. In her neighborhood, the only time black and white ever seemed to mix was as couples. An elderly black woman and a young white man didn’t add up. No sir.

She was seventy-five years old but many people took her for sixty. Her face betrayed no lines, although of late it was looking a bit drawn. She had lost some weight in the last few years and her stomach had grown smaller and harder like a lump. Strangely she’d begun losing weight after retiring from taking care of the last elderly woman, who ended up being only eight years older than she was. Now that Clara was staying at home she wasn’t active and yet she found herself dropping pounds. Blanche had urged her to check this out ‘wid de doctor’, but Clara had no use for such an idea. ‘Clear off dem doctors from me,’ she muttered to herself as she walked down the cement stairs into the train station. ‘You leave dem to go straight to hospital. Then come out hospital sicker than when you first gone in. Cha, me ne have no use fe doctors!’

Her subway train finally arrived and she stepped aboard, finding it stifling and crowded. Two young men sitting side by side, listening to headphones, nodded their heads to what Clara imagined was probably tinny rap music. She glowered at them until one stood up and offered his seat. She sat down, resting her bottom on the boundary between both seats, turned to the standing boy and remarked, ‘Dese new trains dem make for Japanese, that’s why only small people can fit them.’ But he was unable to hear her over the din of his Walkman, and she ended up shaking her head at this inadvertent rudeness.

She hated traveling and dreaded the long journey that remained. But she had to do it, because nobody else would. Will Kaplan hardly ever saw his parents, and time had proven that he was unable to rely upon them so easily in a pinch. ‘God spare, at least it’s not AIDS or anything like dat,’ Clara consoled herself. In her residential nursing practice, she’d taken care of several dying men and had grown fond of them. Each death had been difficult to witness, like watching a clock fast-forward. Whereas the old ladies—their lives had at least reached a point where every extra day was icing on the cake.

When he called her a few days ago, Will had told her he was supposed to have been on the jumbo-jet that crashed off Long Island but had changed his plans at the last minute.

‘Masse me God!’ Clara had cried out when he told her.

She wouldn’t divulge, but the night before the crash Clara had dreamed that a stray dog had come into her apartment, begging for food. She rummaged her kitchen for a tin of meat, but couldn’t find any, and each time she opened one of the cupboards to look, water came sluicing out. Her apartment filled up with water, and Clara, who couldn’t swim, began to drown. The dog swam away and left her there. When she’d woken up the next morning and heard about the crash into the sea, she wondered if her dream had something to do with it. But she didn’t say anything to Will who had always distrusted her claim to dreams that signified.

After he told her about the plane she didn’t hear from him for three days; he usually phoned her at least once a day.

When she finally reached him, he had sounded strange and distracted and said he hadn’t left his apartment since they’d last spoken. This mood alarmed Clara, who easily remembered an earlier time of his life after his older brother died in an accident when Will had trouble leaving the house.

‘And all this start with the plane crashing?’

‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘What you mean, complicated? Explain. Me not a stupid kind of person, ya know.’

He agreed with her and then went quiet. ‘Why don’t you come and visit me,’ he suggested finally. ‘And we’ll talk about it.’

The winds began inside her head, the seas angry and waves pitching like the devil. Clara didn’t want to go anywhere near to where his brother, Danny, died. She steadied herself before saying, ‘You know I don’t want to come up there.’

‘I just invited you in the past. Now, I’m asking you.’

‘But what is it, child? Tell me, na. Cha man, I don’t like it when you keep me a stranger,’ Clara complained.

‘We’ll have plenty of time to discuss it.’

Memories of the death came howling back like Furies and Clara was peeved at them. She bore their lament for a few moments and then forced herself to say, ‘Alright. But once I there, me don’t want you dragging me anywhere I don’t want to go.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ He sounded unconvinced.

‘You heard what I said? Since you not deaf!’

‘By the way, bring warm clothes. The temperature can dip this time of year. I don’t want you to complain that I didn’t warn you beforehand.’

‘I’ll carry come bring ya muddar’s coat.’

Will managed to laugh and remark that she still had ‘that old war horse’.

‘Don’t want to hear nothing about dat coat,’ she told him. The coat came in handy, especially in winter when the boiler broke down in her building and there was no heat for several days. ‘If it vex you, have a new one—better be mink—waiting on me for when I get there.’

It took her longer than she calculated to get to Penn Station, and when Clara finally found the Amtrak terminal and scanned the departures monitor she discovered with a start that the train bound for Montreal was already boarding. ‘Jesus love a…how this could be?’ She addressed the monitor and then scurried toward the gate indicated, trotting down the moving escalator, waving her ticket at the conductor. ‘Custom class, where it is?’ she asked breathlessly. She’d accepted Will’s offer to buy her a ‘first-class’ train ticket when he told her that in ‘first class’ she would be able to plug in her mini-television. As the conductor motioned her to the front of the train, she called back, ‘I was told it have electric.’

‘When the sockets work,’ the man said.

‘They better,’ Clara said as she bustled. ‘Not gwan miss me stories.’

‘Don’t worry, Clara, I have a satellite dish.’ Will had calmed her fears that her stories might not be broadcast in the sticks of Vermont.

She found the proper car, chose an empty row of seats and plopped down, placing her red suitcase next to her. She fished a bag of mint jellybeans out of the torn pocket of the mink coat, unzipped her red suitcase and brought out her TV. Resting the TV on the suitcase, which in turn she balanced on her knees, she plugged it into the socket that was provided and then plugged in the earphones. ‘My, my, de trains gettin’ fancy so till,’ she remarked to herself when she gleefully noted the television’s power light switching on. But then, greeted by snow on the tiny screen, she tssked. Glancing at her watch, Clara figured that if the train left on time and cleared the Manhattan underground she might just be able to catch Search for Tomorrow from the beginning.

TWO

BEFORE WE’D EVER MET, I had only known part of Marie Claire Arcenaux’s story, but what I’d heard was enough to make me realize we would have something in common: that she was a mother estranged from her children, and I was a child estranged from my parents.

We were all set to fly over to Italy together and travel in Europe for three weeks when I heard from a friend of mine, also a rare map-dealer, who told me that a seventeenth-century map of the world with beautiful marginalia was being sold at auction. Coincidentally, the auction was being held in Venice just a few days before Marie and I were due to arrive. And when I called to ask if I might change my flight and meet her there, an appalled silence fell on the other end of the line, while she no doubt imagined herself crossing the Atlantic for the first time alone. Marie was petrified of flying.

‘I guess, at least I’ll have Max with me,’ she said finally with false cheer. Max was a Cairn terrier, small enough to be held on her lap. I heard her silver bracelets softly clattering on the other end of the line; Marie often fidgeted while she spoke on the phone. ‘It’s only, what…seven hours to cross the Atlantic?’

I reminded her that it was a night flight and she’d probably be able to sleep a lot of the way.

‘If Max lets me. Knowing him, he’ll be vying for everybody’s attention. I have a window seat, don’t I?’ she asked. ‘I must have.’

I told her I’d have to look but thought that I had an aisle.

‘Well, I’m sure we’re sitting next to each other,’ she said in a tremor.

Before this I had never understood the depth of her fear—it was now clear to me that she was afraid of flying alone. I asked if she wanted to change her ticket and fly over with me a few days earlier.

‘It’ll cost a fortune to change it so late in the game.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it, Marie.’

‘I don’t want you to do that. Besides, you’ve got your business to attend to, Will,’ she said a bit stiffly. ‘I’m sure I’ll be in the way.’

‘I can manage my business. I didn’t realize how much you hated flying.’

‘I try not to talk about it…and probably should just go as we planned. Sweat it out on my own.’

I offered her a few of my tranquilizers and she laughed and said it was going to take more than a few. ‘I tell you, Will,’ she confided. ‘Moments like these make me want to start smoking again. Sometimes, I think: Why not? We all have to die of something.’

I’d hired a motoscafo to meet her at Marco Polo Airport in Venice. The boat driver was one of those god-like Venetians with black wavy hair and light-green eyes. He wore a yellow rain slicker and drove with cocky confidence through the early morning silence of the city. We motored around the walls of the Aresenal, the boat stopping every so often to navigate the canals at low tide. Something about the boatman, his lustrous hair worn a bit long, reminded me of Peter Arcenaux. Five years in the past, and the hurt sometimes felt newly minted. Pushing aside these rheumy thoughts, I wondered if Marie would also notice the driver’s resemblance to her son.

And then waiting at arrivals, craning my neck to spy the familiar dark hooded eyes and bluntly cut mane of her hair swinging forward as she rambled out of customs, towing her luggage, little Max tucked under her arm. But she never appeared, and after the last passenger had staggered into the terminal, I inquired at the ticket desk.

A middle-aged bleached-blonde woman decked out in gaudy gold chains looked Marie’s name up on the screen. Her eyes, darting through scrolling lines of computer text, froze on something. When the agent once again fixed her attention on me, her painted features suddenly looked mask-like. She scribbled a number down on a piece of green paper.

‘I have no information,’ she said in precise English. ‘You will have to call this number.’

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Why do I have to call that number?’

Silent, the ticket agent gaped at me. And just then, a family of Americans brushed past and an adolescent girl said exuberantly, ‘Mommie, that man said Flight 609 from New York crashed in the ocean.’

I turned back to the agent, who was still gazing at me, but now her eyes were tearing. And I was hit with a familiar dread, a blip of twenty years past when my brother died.

A wall of fire, a blast of the unreal and my overloaded brain spewed up a newspaper picture I’d seen once of an airplane about to crash in San Diego. Caught in an amateur photographer’s lens, the fuselage was angled too steeply for anything but a disaster. And then, even before I could imagine Marie and Max lying in wreckage on the bottom of the ocean floor, I thought of Peter, lying asleep in my arms, long before everything had gone wrong, long before I’d given up on him.

Dazed, I walked outside the terminal into the silvery glare of sunlight on water, into the throng of exuberant tourists. I reached into a pocket for the Klonipen I kept in a metal cylinder. I gobbled down two pills and began frantically to scan the crowd until I spotted the boatman, standing among a group of his Venetian comrades, laughing and backslapping, his dazzling smile.

But he ceased clowning around when he saw me walking toward him alone, he stopped chattering in the soft consonants of Venetian dialect and said, ‘Ma che è successo, where is the lady?’ When I told him, he looked afraid and raised his eyes to heaven and said, ‘This isn’t possible, God protect!’ Something he kept murmuring all throughout the journey back to the Grand Canal, respectfully slowing down when we passed the island of San Michele, where the Venetians once buried their dead. A short while later we passed the island of San Giorgio, where the cartographer who scaled my newly acquired map of the world had spent his entire life in a monastery. The boatman hugged me when he dropped me off at the landing in front of my hotel and said, ‘Coraggio.’ And then, not knowing what I should do next, I watched him departing, his hair feathering in the stiff wind, the yellow rain slicker billowing behind him.

Now I was alone with tragic news in an ancient, majestic city. Afraid to go anywhere, afraid to go back to my room, to the physical details of my own life, which I knew would only reinforce the terrible news. By now the tranquilizers had kicked in, a soft furry blanket thrown over the torn edges of the day, and I dimly decided to try and walk into some kind of acceptance of what had just happened.

Winding my way through a gallery of quiet streets, passing the pair of thousand-year-old lions stolen from the Greeks, I came out at Via Garibaldi, the boulevard built originally for Napoleon. The street was wide and thronged with Venetians doing the last of their marketing before the afternoon siesta. Sunlight was prisming off the water, paving the street in silver lures, reality and displacement clashing together, and I proceeded as though I had nothing at all to do with any of it.

And then in the midst of the crowd I saw a small, dark-haired woman all in black. She was grotesquely crippled, her hands gnarled and her back twisted as she hobbled along using two canes, her feet planted in thick black shoes pointed away from her body at ninety-degree angles. She was a lame Venetian struggling to navigate a city of people constantly walking up and down thousands of steps and little bridges. And when I passed by, she gave me the most radiant smile. Neither a maniac’s grin—for I certainly knew those—nor a forced felicity of somebody determined to override their handicap, but an expression at once soulful and even peaceful. Her happiness, for some reason, filled me with shame. With no idea whether or not she was real or imagined, I watched her hobbling along until she reached the lip of the Grand Canal. She turned back to peer at me once more, and then mysteriously disappeared into the light’s watery refraction.

Two days later I was back in America, calling directory assistance in California, trying to find Peter Arcenaux. There was no listing for him anywhere in the state. I would have called Marie’s sister, Lena, in Lafayette, Louisiana but didn’t even know Lena’s married name. And so, assuming her children had no idea she was traveling abroad, I popped two more tranquilizers and drove from Vermont down to Long Island.

Navy crews were combing the ocean floor for bodies and wreckage, journalists were encamped around a podium, clamoring for the FAA to feed them information about the search and rescue, police barricading roads, establishing checkpoints. In order to get anywhere near the site of the crash, I had to lie and say that I was the son of Marie Claire Arcenaux. In a parking lot next to the ocean, all kinds of trucks were unloading complicated equipment: mechanical arms, and waterproof computers, spools of glistening cable and what looked like an enormous glass eye attached to a bendable pole. A hard rain was pelting down, a mantle of mist kissing the water, and the whole undersea excavation seemed other-worldly, as though it were going on in purgatory, the dead souls being shifted and divided into groups by worker drones in yellow rain slickers, just like the one worn by the boatman in Venice.

And in the near distance, metal salvage boats were departing and returning, some bearing black body bags slimy with brine. It occurred to me through the haze of tranquilizers that she might be in one of them, but then I thought: No, not yet. A crane was unloading a frayed piece of metal fuselage painted with the letter ‘W’, and then a stainless-steel serving cart, spouting water from all sides, and then a flapping black coat that looked like a drenched opera cloak. Marie had one just like it, but she only wore it in the winter, so I knew it couldn’t be hers. I thought of the plane splintering as it fell, I thought of its contents slung over miles of ocean, and how as they were recovered the most everyday objects—house keys, powder compacts, portable CD players—were assuming the importance of possible clues.

The recovery vessels had already located some of the pet carriers that had gone down. Despite the impact of the crash, most of the battered, sludge-stained crates remained intact, the animals still inside. My eyes filled when I saw them. I couldn’t understand why the idea of dogs trapped in their cages could penetrate my sympathies so quickly when it was so much more difficult to take in the concept of human tragedy. I just couldn’t imagine Marie clutching Max, strapped into the airplane that fell out of the sky at such a severe and fatal angle. I couldn’t imagine what happened to her on impact, the last few seconds of her life immersed in a blind swell of sea water.

There was a final checkpoint that remained between the parking lot and the beach where the families of the victims were encamped. Here I was asked to submit proof that I was the son of Marie Claire Arcenaux. When I tried to explain, a tall policeman with a pencil-thin salt-and-pepper moustache said in heavy Long Islandese, ‘Only family are allowed.’ Glowering at his clipboard he informed me, ‘It says heah that a sistah has arrived to claim Marie Arcenaux.’

‘Her children?’ I asked. ‘What about her children?’

‘Sistah is all I have. So she’s spoken for,’ he said with chilling finality.

How can a body somewhere in the Atlantic be spoken for? Beyond this, I knew that Marie had not spoken to her sister in years.

Shunned from the scene, I drove to Manhattan to the apartment of my friend who had originally told me that the map of the world was coming up for auction, the man who, in effect, had saved my life. But I had known about this particular map for a long time. Fra Mauro had executed a switch of continents, portraying Africa and Australia where Europe and North America should conventionally be. Fra Mauro did this after a world traveler had described to him the land of Apocalypse, a place peopled by Antipodeans, a race that had no links with humans. And why not, I thought, when I’d first found the map in a catalogue, remembering that I’d seen a modern-day version in Australia. Who was to say that Australia wasn’t on the top of the world rather than on the bottom? And weren’t the physical coordinates of north and south merely the result of some kind of cultural hegemony? As my friend and I sat there looking out over the East River, at the barges and the pleasure boats, he reminded me that the idea of the inversion of the world had saved my life, kept me from being one of the fallen bodies they were trolling for at the bottom of the ocean.

That was when I thought about going back to Long Island, about driving out there at night and swimming the way I once did in the Pacific. I’d go to the beach next to the one at Moriches, tramp through the sand among the couples making out and the people perched around late-summer campfires and let myself out into the Atlantic. It was late September, so the water should still be fairly warm. It’d be so easy to swim a mile down the coastline, easy enough to gain the beach where only families of the victims were allowed to watch at close hand the search for fragments and debris in the dark universe of the water. But my friend grew alarmed and reminded me the waters around Moriches would be busy with lots of nocturnal boat traffic, and I was likely to be maimed in my lonely flight along the shoreline. And so, despite his entreaties to spend the night, I drove back to Burlington.

I arrived in the city late at night. Drove past Marie’s bookstore, The Traveler, where I could see the bold-lettered sign in her handwriting, CLOSED FOR VACATION SEPTEMBER 25TH UNTIL OCTOBER 15TH. I continued my downtown pass along a string of outdoor cafés, where, even at such a late hour, tables of scantily clad, jubilant people were spilling out into the Indian summer evening. I looked at these revelers and thought of winter and how it always delivered calm, a sense of purpose, especially when snow was falling in great luminary masses. In winter at this time of night these streets, these cafés would be deserted.

I stopped my car near Battery Park, changed into my swimming trunks and walked out to Perkins Pier and dove into Lake Champlain. The water had chilled quite a bit during the last ten days of September, probably much cooler here than out on Long Island. I gasped at first and windmilled my arms in order to stay warm, and then swam another 50 yards out to contemplate.

I first came here to Burlington in 1980, the year after

Reviews for In Clara's Hands

[bembo_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Clara Mayfield of the title was some twenty years ago the Jamaican housekeeper to the Kaplan family: self absorbed Mr and Mrs Kaplan, the headstrong elder son teenage Danny, and Will, a fit and healthy swimmer who idolised his older brother. Clara is a forthright woman with a strong personality and an open mind, and she quickly brings Danny into line, and soon establishes a close loving and trusting relationship with both boys, but tragedy strikes when Danny is killed in a skiing accident at the age of eighteen.Five years ago Will enjoyed a relationship lasting for one year with Peter Arcenaux, but his lover walked out on him when he could no longer take the worry of Will’s propensity for late night swimming in stormy seas. However the story starts in the present, with Will a now successful dealer in antique maps. Having since lost contact with Peter, Will befriends his mother Marie Arcenaux in the hopes of regaining his lover. As the story opens Will is in Europe awaiting the arrival of Marie on a flight from the States, but while he is waiting he learns that the plane went down off Long Island. On his return there is considerable uncertainty as to whether Marie was on the flight on not. Peter’s sister Grace, who’s suffering with cancer, is also trying to locate her mother Marie.The story unfolds, told in the third person from Clara’s and from Grace’s perspective, and in the first person by both Will and by Marie, as much in reflection on the past as in the present. We learn much of the different families’ backgrounds and troubled relationships, and how they cope with their present problems: Grace’s recurrence of cancer and Marie’s continued disappearance, and of course Will and Peter and their longing to get back together but each uncertain how the other feels. Clara remains a steadfast support throughout.This is a very warm and involving story; the lively infusion from Clara’s aspect provides much needed relief from the sometimes oppressive worries of the others. Olshan captures beautifully her Jamaican dialogue, and her freeness of expression lends a touch of humour.As the story reaches its end we are left to draw our own conclusions on the outcome of some problems, but we are also faced with a sudden and shocking realisation, while yet another problem is resolved most satisfyingly.(It is a pity that the writing was spoilt by the repeated incorrect use of the second person personal pronoun)

[pattymclpn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that I received from NetGalley to read on my Kindle. It was originally published in 1985. It has been re-released as an e-book by Open Road Integrated Media 0n July 9th, 2013. This was made into a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg back in 1988. Whoopi played Clara and Neil Patrick Harris played the part of David. I am not a big movie watcher. I’ve never seen this movie. It wasn’t a box office smash. Olshan has written other novels and articles for magazines and newspapers. Clara’s Heart was his first novel and it won the Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers’ Competition.David is a young boy who is growing up in a family that is experiencing difficulties. David’s parents go to Jamaica after his baby sister’s death to try to salvage their relationship. His mother, Leona, strikes up a friendship with Clara a Jamaican woman. Leona knows that Clara has some secrets. She has heard some rumors. Leona brings Clara back to the states with her to help take care of the house and David.David is unsure how to react to Clara’s sudden appearance in his life, but they quickly form a strong bond. David is your typical ornery boy and Clara doesn’t put up with his shenanigans. David is also very curious about Clara’s past after hearing things from her friends.The novel comes to a climax at the end. David must decide whether to live with his mother or father when his parents decide to divorce. What will happen to Clara? What happened in her mysterious past? Will her secrets be exposed?I really liked this book. I thought that it was well written. It is packed full of emotion and drama. I thought that the characters were realistic. This was a quick read for me. It only took a couple days. It’s too bad the movie didn’t do better. It is a really good story. I give this one 4 out of 5 stars.