61. the HOUSE at RIVERTON

Kate Morton 2006

In this brilliant historical fiction, alternating between 1914 through 1924 and 1999, Grace Bradley recounts her life at the House at Riverton during her privileged service to the Hartfords: Hannah, Emmeline, David and Mr. Frederick. A film maker, Ursula has decided to recreate the tragic death of Robbie, an artist and Hannah's lover. This novel ought to be slowly and patiently savored, each foreshadowing meticulously remembered, for in the end, they all are subtle little clues to the final secret revealed. Warning: do NOT read the last page of the book.

'Last November I had a nightmare. It was 1923 and I was at Riverton again.'(3)

'But although I had been met with such memories before, Ursula's letter was different. It was the first time in over seventy years that anyone had associated me with the events, had remembered that a young woman named Grace Reeves had been at Riverton that summer. It made me feel vulnerable somehow, singled out. Guilty.'

'A rising star of the English poetry scene kills himself by a dark lake on the eve of a huge society party. His only witness are two beautiful sisters who never speak to each other again. One his fiancee, the other rumored to be his lover. It's terribly romantic.'(14)

'...there was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn't leave me. For years after, the smell of Stubbins & Co. beeswax, the crackle of tires after a long day's work, sipping cocoa by the servants' hall fire while Mr. Hamilton orated select passages from the Times (those deemed fit for other impressionable ears), Nancy frowned at some irreverent comment of Alfred's, and Mrs Townsend snored gently in the rocker, her knitting resting on her generous lap...'(15)

'I have been thinking about the day I started Riverton. I can see it clearly. The intervening years concertina and it is June 1914. I am fourteen again: naive, gauche, terrified, following Nancy up flight after flight of scrubbed elm stairs.'(17)

'Never forget... you are fortunate indeed to be invited to serve in a great house such as this. And with good fortune comes responsibility... Your conduct in all matters reflects directly on the family and you must do them justice: keep their secrets and deserve their trust. Remember that the Master always knows best... Serve them silently... eagerly... gracefully. You will know your job is done well when it goes unnoticed, that you have succeeded when you are unnoticed.' (24)

'The Game was old. They'd been playing it for years. No, not playing. That is the wrong verb. Living: they had been living The Game for years. For The Game was more than its name suggested. It was a complex fantasy, an alternate world into which they escaped.'(46)

'Just a children's game and yet... What happened in the end would surely not have come about without it?' (49)

'He will return one day, of that I've little doubt, for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.'(80)

'There's nothing dynamic about a room full of old books. It works well this way, the lake being where he killed himself and all. Kind of like the end of the story is in the beginning. It's romantic.'(139)

'I wan unsure how to answer, how to explain. How does one begin to confess that mothering didn't come naturally? That from the first Ruth had seemed a stranger? That the fond feeling of inevitable connectedness of which books are written and myths are fashioned was never mine?'(182)

'He turned to me, but did not speak, and I glimpsed for a moment how I must appear to him. The yawning gulf between his experience and mine. And I knew then that there would be no telling me what he saw. I understood somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.'(229)

'Teddy shrugged away a birch leaf that had fallen onto his shoulder...I seek a wealth of a different sort. A wealth of new experiences. The century is young and so am I. There are too many things to see and do to become bogged down in business.'(246)

'I have been trying to fix the turning points in Hannah and Teddy's story; all thoughts, these days, lead to Hannah. Looking back, it seems clear: there were certain events in the first year of their marriage that laid the foundation of what was to come. I couldn't see them at the time. In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.'(271)

'It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future:moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past: should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.'(301)

'There is only one person whom I wish to hear my story. One person for whom I set it down on tape. I only hope it will be worth it. That Ursula is right: that Marcus will listen and understand. That my own guilt and the story of its acquisition will somehow set him free.'(303)

'And I kept my word. For better or for worse.'(326)

'And then he spoke to her. Poem after poem. About knowing and unknowing, truth and suffering, love and lust. She closed her eyes and with every word she felt the darkness disappearing.'(388)

'Testing. One. Two. Three. Tape for Marcus. Number four. This is the last tape I will make. I am almost at the end and there is no going beyond.'(451)

First Atria Books hardcover edition April 2008
468 pages
Book borrowed from the library