Rejoice

By Mildred M. Jeffrey

A sometimes hilarious three-generational clash, of values plays out in REJOICE, a novel about a conventional mother, an uncompromising hippie daughter, and a devil-may-care granddaughter raised in an idealistic commune. The mother finally details her struggle in a memoir which she pays her granddaughter to tout on a do-it-yourself book tour.

The granddaughter is less interested in the book than she is in her gypsy hippie encounters with the pony-tailed know-it-all who is pursuing her. Soon her casual attitude toward life is put to the test when she falls in love with the dutiful son of a straight-laced Mexican widow. Do we hear wedding bells or fire sirens in the distance?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 12, 2008
• ISBN: 9781467861007

Mildred M. Jeffrey

Mildred M. Jeffrey, a retired professor of literature and creative writing at Hofstra University, began as a junior high school teacher in New York City at a time when schools were segregated largely according to neighborhoods. Since political correctness had not yet been invented, ethnic and racial tensions often surfaced. A teacher’s day was also complicated by the reach of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt into the schools. Before becoming a teacher, Ms. Jeffrey was a by-line reporter for a daily metropolitan newspaper. WALKING THE CLIFFS is her second published novel.

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© 2008 Mildred M. Jeffrey. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 6/2/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4343-4840-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4343-4841-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-6100-7 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

To Kathy, the sine qua non of this book

and

Chuck, who makes good things happen

Contents

PART ONE

— NOW

PART TWO

— THEN

PART THREE

— NOW

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PART ONE

—

NOW

The modest stir in the little bookshop—one storefront wide—quieted as two women came out of a door marked Office and made their way to the front of the room. Brainfood was about to welcome a first-time author in line with its policy of featuring books put out by small presses. It was one of a series of stores in small towns up and down the California coast that were dedicated to offbeat books.

The author, a pretty girl of about twenty with a nimbus of carrot-colored hair, immediately zinged up the energy level of the room. She wore a yellow knit top, ankle-length floral skirt and red backpack. Gold-colored rings in her earlobes matched a smaller ring in her left nostril, and a ceramic oval with the zodiac sign for Aquarius hung on a leather thong around her neck. Delighted to be the center of attention, she smiled and wriggled her fingers at the small audience—a sprinkling of young women from the nearby junior college, a handful of gray-haired ladies who in an earlier generation would have been founding members of a Wednesday Afternoon Reading Circle, an old man who had already lapsed into a doze, and a pony-tailed young man sprawled on his chair, his feet in work boots reaching out into the aisle. He wore a copper ring in one earlobe and a metallic stud just south of his lower lip.

Good evening and good reading to everybody. Let’s welcome our guest, Fern Miller, author of ‘Rejoice,’ said the store owner, who then began a description of her literary plans for the coming fall season.

Fern broke in. Hi, she said. Welcome to my book tour. You’re, like, my first stop. She grinned. I still can’t, y’know, believe it. Me reading in a bookstore. It’s not like I’m literary or anything. Even if I write poems sometimes. This whole thing’s an accident, right?

She pulled off her backpack, almost knocking over the glass of water on the table in front of her, then dug out a book and a bottle of water. Never go anywhere without my own water bottle, right?

She waved toward the display of a dozen books stacked behind several more standing on end to show the jacket illustration—a crowd of young people in a meadow, their arms upflung, heads back, mouths open. How was this audience to know the shout was OM? The title, Rejoice, splashed its letters slantwise across the picture.

The book just happened, she said. "I went east, y’know, to visit my grandma when I finished college last May. San Ramon Junior College. I’m, like, a nutritionist, a holistic nutritionist, or I will be when I get a job. Anyhow, my grandma, like, started telling me stories about when my mom was my age, and she showed me a lot of things she wrote down, y’know, sort of like a journal, and she wanted me to connect it all up, right? My mom and dad lived with a whole bunch of people on this farm out in Arkansas.

My grandma’s a nice lady and she was good to us—me and my brother, Sky—when we were, y’know, growing up, and besides I loved doing it so I started writing it up and with the stuff my grandma had, pretty soon I had a lot of pages, right?

Fern paused to take a swig from her water bottle.

Now here’s the crazy part. She used to pay for us to go east and spend every Christmas with her and Grandpa. I loved working with her. She started telling me stories about when my mom was my age and Gran, like, couldn’t handle that my mom was in a commune. My brother thinks the whole book idea sucks. He’s in the book but I’m not. He was, like, born then but I wasn’t. But my mom said go ahead, why not. So.

Fern paused to nod and smile.

The commune’s still there. It’s called Bent Creek. In Arkansas. I sure hope you like it. The book, I mean. I thought I’d read you some of the beginning, so—

Wait! Pony Tail pulled his feet in from the aisle and stood up. I was there, he said. In Bent Creek. Where were you? Like, my whole life, I was there. So why don’t I know you?

Fern laughed. Well, you do now.

I was there, he repeated. All the time. If you were too, why don’t I know you?

Easy, she answered. My mom and dad, like, split up. Mom and I went up to Mendicino. Sky too.

You never went back? he asked.

No reason to. Look, I can talk to you after the q-and-a, said Fern. Anyhow the story’s not about me. It’s mostly about how my gran had a hard time, y’know, with my mom. Now here’s, like, the crazy part. My best friend from school got a job answering mail at this publishing company, Willow Winds, down in Santa Cruz, and when I, like, told her what I was doing, she said send her the stuff. So. I did and she loved it and she showed it to her boss, and the next thing they had me and my grandma, y’know, trying to tell the whole story. So. Actually my grandma wrote most of it, but I helped a lot. She’s pretty old and not feeling too good. So. Anyhow it got published. Me with a book! And I’m, like, not even in it.

She picked up the nearest book and pointed to her name on the cover. My name, right? She waved the book trophy, then opened to the first page and began to read.

PART TWO

—

THEN

Betsy, shrilled the voice on the phone, That bus in front of your house. It’s on fire. There’s smoke coming out of the roof!

True. Wisps of smoke from the bus were clearly visible in the light of the street lamp in front of the Allenby house. Just as visible was the stovepipe thrusting up from the bus roof.

Betsy Allenby smiled at the ravenous curiosity of her neighbor, who had found such a lame excuse for her phone call. Oh that, Betsy said airily, it’s only the stovepipe.

"Stove? Stove?"

I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, Bea. Right now I have a roomful of guests. Bye.

There. That would give Bea something to report up and down the block. Something but not too much. Betsy was giving her friend back some of her own treatment; Bea often withheld a juicy tidbit of gossip. For the moment they were even.

This was to be Betsy’s last purr of satisfaction as her suburban shelter began to develop cracks, letting in the chill of reality. A crazy kind of reality, based as it was on illusion. Or delusion. The revolution of the Sixties had finally arrived at Merrymeeting Lane, where hitherto no one had taken much notice of the hippy-dippy flower children shown from time to time on the TV news.

After tennis and sailing and driving their own cars, the boys and girls of Merrymeeting Lane et al. had gone off to good colleges whose stickers were flaunted on the rear windows of parents’ cars. Betsy and her husband, F. Crawford Allenby, had been extremely pleased to paste up University of Michigan. Midgie was an ideal daughter. She’d breezed through high school with distinction while dating a boy on the tennis team, life-guarding summers at Harborlawn’s town beach and assisting one night a week at an English as a Second Language class for a small group of Haitians at the South Harborlawn library.

With three sterling college acceptances, she’d chosen her dad’s alma mater in Ann Arbor as far enough from Long Island to give her the real college experience. She’d graduated cum laude, but must have made some strange friends along the way, for she told her parents flatly, Nobody I know would be seen dead at commencement. So much for the Allenbys’ long-anticipated day. No dad-daughter snapshots on the library steps. No candids of mom wiping away a sentimental tear. No chance for dad to rejoice at the distance he’d come since his own Ann Arbor commencement.

No, I’m not coming home right now. I have a job.

The declaration had set off another argument that the parents lost. They were hurt and puzzled by Midge’s determination to work at a low-level social service job and hang around Ann Arbor. Why not get a job in Harborlawn? She’d always had wonderful summers–why should this one be different? Besides, they’d been looking forward to having her home. Just like old times.

That’s just it, declared Midge on the phone. I don’t want it like old times. I’m a full-fledged grownup. Out of the nest. Can’t you understand that?

Of course they could understand. But how about coming home just for a visit? They could talk everything over.

Midge was adamant, and they ended up telling themselves that she deserved some idle time before getting down to the nitty-gritty of graduate school.

Now, after months of telephone silence, a significant call broke into a typical Allenby evening–Crawford upstairs at his desk balancing beautifully complex columns of figures and Betsy in the kitchen filing recipes.

Betsy picked up the phone to be doused by a torrent of words that ended with a click before she could ask a single question. She took the long breath that Midge must have needed.

Her husband was leaning over the upstairs banister. That was Midge, right?

Betsy, puzzled and distressed, was frowning at the telephone.

I said, ‘It’s Midge, right?’ Crawford bellowed.

His wife jumped. Hm?

Another bellow. I said–

Yes. Yes, it’s Midgie. They’ll be here tonight. From Franklin’s in the Bronx. Whoever he is. On the way to Stony Brook to hear Peter. Whoever he is. For a gig. Whatever that is. She stopped and grimaced as if in pain. What did she mean, ‘meet my new family’?

Crawford hurried down the stairs, grabbed his wife’s arms, and spoke directly into her face. She said ‘meet my new family’?

Yes.

Her exact words–‘my new family’?

Betsy sagged against her husband’s chest. Does that mean she’s married? she wailed. Without telling us?

Crawford hugged his wife. No. She wouldn’t do that. Not my Midget. He was talking to himself.

"Skipped commencement. Wouldn’t come home last summer. Went out to Berkeley for Thanksgiving. Then never a phone call. Never a letter. Just a postcard from San Francisco–Lots of good vibes here. Love you. Another from Wyoming–peace and love. Can you believe it–peace and love! What kind of message is that?" demanded Betsy.

These had been the spreading cracks in her shelter, cracks steadfastly ignored except for 3 A.M. wakings. But a sleeping pill always took care of that. Tonight no sleeping pill would be able to help. Betsy–her husband too–would have needed daytime tranquilizers as well as sleeping pills long since, had they known what their model daughter was up to. Clued in at Yoga sessions with her New Age housemates–Midge had moved out of her dorm room in her junior year–she had joined a Zen group dedicated to vegetarianism and anti-materialism, even though the latter necessitated selling one’s possessions and donating the money to the group. She disposed of everything, including her blonde suede coat, the fisherman’s sweater her parents had brought her from Ireland, her high-school-graduation-present watch, the gold signet ring Crawford had given her at her twelfth-birthday dinner, her trusty white Plymouth, and the little ivory Buddha, a long-cherished gift from her grandfather. She learned to sit zazen without too much muscle pain and discovered she had nothing to say to her parents anymore. She let her regular phone calls home slide into oblivion and took care not to divulge her move to a big shabby house inhabited by followers of an obscure talker in San Francisco, a former ranch hand who had read too many books. He called himself Peter–fully aware of the religious significance of the name.

Peter had developed a following of restless college students, idealistic graduate school dropouts, and dissatisfied post-doctoral teaching assistants, who flocked to his public lectures on the necessity for becoming a voluntary peasant in order to save America from its follies and the third world from its hardships. His words traveled to almost every college campus in the country via grapevine, and before long he seized upon the notion of sharing his message with folks all over America. Young folks, that is. Thus was born the caravan, financed by the participants, plus gifts from a few soft-hearted parents.

In practically no time, three psychedelic buses left San Francisco on the first lap of a cross-country tour, Peter in a luxury cruiser driven by an inner circle of volunteers and the others in seatless old school buses lined with carpet remnants, loaded with backpacks and sleeping bags, equipped with candles and pot-bellied stoves. What the sanitary arrangements were no outsider ever learned.

The Zeitgeist being what it was, Peter recruited a busload or two at every college where he spoke. When funds for gas and groceries ran out, the buses halted long enough in small cities for the girls to fan out and find housework and the boys to find carpentry and handyman jobs. In farming areas they all searched for jobs in the fields. Everyone was happy to serve the cause with whatever skills he or she had, and Peter rewarded them by letting first-comers crowd into his bus every evening for another of his rambling talks. By the time Peter and his entourage reached Ann Arbor, the caravan was eight buses long. It left town a week later with Midge and her friends aboard number nine.

From time to time a bus would drop out of the caravan to visit parents, for the twin purposes of spreading the word and picking up a cash donation. Practically every stop proved fruitless. Midge, however, was sure her parents would be so glad to see her that they would be generous. She couldn’t remember a time when they had denied her anything.

Betsy was ashamed to realize she was actually moaning. What had gotten into her? She was a disgrace to her upbringing. Action, not reaction, had always been the motto of her late mother, born a New England Yankee, who for many years had been the head of a nursery school. Betsy had admired her mother almost as much as she admired her father, a specialist in Oriental art and chair of the art department at Oak Hill College, a private coed institution that had grown from what was first a seminary for young ladies and then a normal school for young women who hoped to grace the teaching profession. As a female seminary it had been the alma mater–if one can call it that–of Betsy’s grandmother, Hannah Jane, daughter of the Rev. Davis Carter Jordan, rector of St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church of Oak Hill. Immediately upon completion of her genteel studies, Hannah Jane had married the seminary’s staff physician, Dr. Robert Wilson Wright, a widower ten years her senior. Rumors of the match had caused a tidal wave of gossip which receded when the rector himself officiated at the wedding ceremony, to which everyone of sufficiently high social standing had been invited. The college buildings crowned the modest hill for which the little town had been named and still managed to emit an aroma–shall we say (Midge’s fellow hippies would have said vibes)–of old-fashioned gentility that Betsy had grown up with. Worse, Mrs. Grundy was still a living presence in Oak Hill.

Though the works of art that perforce decorated their home testified to an interest in Oriental art, Betsy’s parents had never found any inspiration in the customs and religions of the East. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism–these were simply words that appeared in books and on labels. The decisions and behavior of the Wrights were based on commonsense and the demands of their place in the academic community, and there was no doubt that their household benefited by the belief that things should always be kept running smoothly. As a practical man, their son-in-law agreed, though there were times–more and more of them lately–when he needed a little support from Johnnie Walker.

We have to do something! Betsy stood in the living room looking around. A forefinger running back and forth across her upper lip told her husband she was thinking hard.

He waited.

I’ve got it! The most wonderful idea!

He tried not to cringe. When his wife was powered by one of her wonderful ideas, all a sensible man could do was get out of the way.

We’ll put up the Christmas tree, decorations and all. I’ll do all the usual things. It’ll make her homesick. She’ll want to stay.

It’ll never work, Crawford said. Anyhow it’s too early. It’s only December tenth.

He started pacing the hall.

Betsy was bustling around the room. In a flash, a book of carols, opened to Silent Night, rested on the music rack of the grand piano. From the Christmas records she’d arranged casually on the floor beside the hi-fi, Betsy selected one and put it on the turntable. Mixed voices filled the room–We wish you a Merry Christmas, We wish you a Merry Christmas, We wish you–"

Will you turn that thing off! Crawford exploded.

Betsy complied but left the record in place.

The whole idea is ridiculous, he said.

It is not.

Ridiculous. Too early. And too obvious.

We’ve got to try it. It might just work. That was Betsy.

She’ll see right through it. She knows how you operate. That was Dad.

Betsy, paging through the carols on the piano rack, played a few chords. Midgie used to love helping with Christmas, she said softly.

Crawford had resumed his pacing. Something funny, he said to himself. Something funny’s going on.

Betsy turned toward him, her fingers clenched. With Midge?

Something funny, Crawford repeated. His accountant’s mind couldn’t bring itself to put this new entry under Debits when the urge to put it under Assets was so strong. He set his teeth. Inconclusive situations always made him irritable.

When he wasn’t working at–or thinking about–the accounting business, F. Crawford Allenby considered himself an easy-going man. He enjoyed being with people who shared his assumptions. Ambitious as a young man, he had worked his way through U. Michigan. Now he savored the middleclass pleasures he had earned–the wide overfed lawn that measured up to all the others on the block, the new Cadillac every second year, the two January weeks in Sarasota, the weekly golf game with neighborhood cronies, all of whom found the drinks and jokes at the nineteenth hole as important as the strokes of the preceding eighteen.

Along with these necessary signs of success, Crawford harbored the conviction that he was a cut above his neighbors, thanks to his marriage to Betsy and the acquisition of a distinguished (though deceased) father-in-law. The Allenby residence displayed evidence of this important cultural connection–the rose-blue-and-ivory Chinese rug on the floor of the living room; the ink brushwork of mountains, gnarled pine trees, fishermen in simple frames on the walls; the 14th-century porcelain bowl with its blue warriors on leaping horses set on the gleaming top of the Steinway; the remains of an academic library on the mahogany bookshelves. Crawford never failed to stand a little taller whenever he