Vinegar Hill, A. Manette Ansay
Toolan, David
FAMILY VINAIGRETTE VINEGAR HILL A. Manette Ansay Viking, $21.95, 236 pp. David Toolan elcotne to the less charming side of Garrison Keillor country, 512 Vinegar Hill, home of Fritz and...
...But where, since she cannot go it alone, will she acquire the strength to break free...
...There is too much of Ellen in Ellen for God...
...the parish priest, Father Bork, spouts platitudes ("If the fire in the hearth burns out, the family dies...
...512, as Psalm 69 puts it, are "sunk in the abysmal swamp where there is no foothold"—and Ellen must take long walks after dinner just to breathe...
...The inhabitants at No...
...So Ellen must turn elsewhere for support, and as she makes the rounds in quest of it like some modern-day Job, the air is filled with the false pieties of Bildad, Zophar, and Eliphaz, showing just how far Catholic doctrine, in the right hands, can reinforce a sentence of death...
...She goes about setting the table, folding the pink napkins to look like tall, peaked hats, just the way her mother did when she wanted to dress up a meal...
...30...
...Rather, it seems her fierce God is expelling her from the "abysmal swamp" nearly everyone else sees as a woman's lot in this vale of tears...
...Only Ellen's divorced friend Barbara gives her pain a real hearing...
...If Ellen doesn't make a decisive break with this malign legacy, she will be condemning her daughter Amy to become another Mary-Margaret or Salome, her timid son Bert to become another James...
...I'm not sure how the omniscient narrator intends such lines...
...David Toolan elcotne to the less charming side of Garrison Keillor country, 512 Vinegar Hill, home of Fritz and Mary-Margaret Grier...
...What is going on here is a tradition of master-slave relations whose machinery spits out executioner-victims with each succeeding generation—thin-skinned daughters who suppress their rage, hate their own femininity, and devour their sons (Mary-Margaret), smart daughters who escape into isolation (Salome), macho sons who turn into the brutes their fathers were (Mitch), sensitive sons who cannot be touched, who turn into zombies (James...
...As the novel opens, shortly after Thanksgiving in 1972, daughter-in-law Ellen Grier finds herself hoping for the kind of Christmas she knew in the noisy farmhouse of her childhood...
...29 She wants to be lost in him, but he vomits her out again and again, and each time he asks more from her before he permits her return...
...You will be surprised, I think...
...The rooms are 28 filled with knickknacks—china angels, statues of saints, small glass animals with beady eyes (a place for everything, everything in its place—and a taxing dusting job for Ellen, who is chief cook, cleaning lady, and her mother-in-law's unpaid nurse...
...From the outside there is nothing to single out this peaceful, palebrick ranch from its almost identical neighbors on the block...
...The only reason Fritz escapes this fate is that Mary-Margaret fears the pains of Hell—where she is sure her beloved Mama has gone for an unpardonable sin of which no one in this household will speak...
...No one except Ellen's two children, ten-year-old Amy and six-year-old Bert, appreciates the gesture...
...The still vigorously violent and miserly Fritz is retired from the hard life of a fanner and wants "some peace"—something he is not likely to get now that his unlucky son James, in a fugue state since he lost his job and home in Illinois, has moved in with his wife and children...
...Vinegar Hill is a gothic mystery story, and the sleuth here is Ellen, who is trying to find her adult self while doing her duty as a good Catholic to be all things to the people around her: breadwinner, good mother, and loyal wife to the damaged, by now nearly mute James—who grew up in the shadow of his smart, athletic brother Mitch—now dead—and fears that Ellen "looks at him now as if he were an appliance she doesn't think can be fixed...
...A faith that denies nature does not serve Ellen well...
...Seeing Amy, she looks right through her...
...Fritz stands a better chance of getting more peace than he bargains on from his wife, MaryMargaret, who lies awake at night thinking of cutting his throat or cooking up a panful of poisonous iris leaves to pour into his coffee...
...The meal proceeds in stony silence...
...But the house is haunted by a crime worthy of Medea...
...An unmarked grave out at the old farm testifies to the truth that Mary-Margaret has already had her revenge...
...What she wants, however—"a real conversation, one adult to another"—he cannot give...
...The site is a small, German-American Wisconsin town, dominated by the steeple of Saint Michael's Catholic Church, on the shores of Lake Michigan...
...Like the good Catholic she thinks she is not, her resource lies in communing with the powerful dead—even lost souls in Hell...
...she sticks in his throat like a bone...
...Don't say what you feel...
...Ellen's own mother tells her to "lose weight," and her five older sisters advise that the key to a happy marriage and strong faith in God is: "Disguise yourself...
...this is warfare in which mothers resort to terrorist attack—at which precocious little Amy is already honing her skills...
...It is not to be...
...She must unravel the catechism she learned as a child...
...But the more she has tried to claim God, the more he has rejected her...
...He isn't wrong about Ellen's alienation from him—or his children's...
...She tries," we are told, "to feel the smugness of faith, to know that she is important and that life has great if hidden meaning...
...Thirteen years ago, Ellen thought marriage meant love...
...Now she believes that marriage means need, and when the need isn't there, what comes next...
...her husband James is only embarrassed...
...MaryMargaret's devout older, spinster sister, Salome, bolts the door...
...Ansay is too perceptive a writer to single out benighted Fritz as the sole villain in this family feud...
...When MaryMargaret looks at Ellen she sees only "James's mistake...
...Vinegar Hill, a first novel, has all the makings for a thinly disguised feminist polemic...
...The senior Griers' interior color scheme is the loudest sign that something is amiss: overwhelmingly pink, even the china and the stretch pants and polyester blouses that Mary-Margaret wears...
...This is a stunning debut by a writer to watch...
...A "smug" faith (according to Flannery O'Connor the besetting sin of Catholics) that aspires to be "lost in God" is what nearly all in this tightknit, patriarchal town seems to have at the tip of their tongues, which leads this reader to the conclusion that when Ellen's God "vomits" her forth into the world he does her a distinct favor...
...That it is nothing of the sort is due to Ansay's ability to draw us deeply inside her characters and set them at odds, in one compelling, grotesquely comic scene after another...
...Neither Fritz (at sixty) nor Mary-Margaret (at sixty-four) is old, but to Ellen the place "smells of old age, of pale gray skin and Ben Gay and many dry roasts and silent suppers...
...he has grown up in a looney bin and is slowly disintegrating, withdrawing into himself...
...These are not happy campers...
...It only gradually creeps up on you that the prettifying pink, the doodads and the silence represent denial...
...Too much Ellen in Ellen for God...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 19
