Summer is the best time for reading short stories. All you need is a clear day and a shade tree and, if you’re fortunate, Roberta Silman’s Heart-work, a collection of beautiful and smart short stores.
Silman is daring and subtle when exploring the varieties of friendship, love and affection that drive us through life, and is especially insightful when writing about the awkward or beautiful dynamics of family life. The people she writes about read books, appreciate the arts and have complicated inner lives and, like them, her stories have a lot going on beneath the surface.
Sometimes the mystery of love remains simply that: a mystery. That seems to be true – or almost true – in the tale of a well married woman with four children who lives on a farm in Virginia and visits her former college professor in Manhattan almost every year. He never married and has no family, and when he phones to say his life is ending, as they had agreed he would, she leaves her home to bathe, feed and care for him on his passage to death. The professor had never been romantically involved with his student, though he had once confirmed her belief in herself as a poet.
In another of Silman’s enjoyably complex fictions we meet Linc Edelman, a womanizing cad. Linc has a rapid zigzag life of diminishing success as a theatre director and an increasing number of women he has abandoned. The meaningful constant in his world isn’t his longtime secretary Lorraine, it’s Rembrandt, the painter whose life and works he admires and obsesses over. Linc communes with Rembrandt and Rembrandt speaks to him, causes Linc to see his own life clearly, after which Linc recognizes he’s truly in love with Margery, the woman he’s hired to edit a poetry magazine as part of a tax-loss scheme. Edelman isn’t an admirable guy, but Silman’s story is a fascinating sequence of events, narrated in a voice unlike anything she’s written anywhere else, a wonder of scenic cuts and shifting tenses.
Silman’s mastery as a writer is illustrated best in the brilliantly conceived and accomplished story that gives this collection its name. In “Heart-work,” Laura’s father is dying of brain cancer, but the chief action that unfolds throughout the tale is her father’s ongoing encouragement of her mother’s endeavor to learn how to swim.
The characters in this story aren’t attemp
ting to avoid the obvious by their focus on swimming, and neither is Roberta Silman. Laura notes the changes in her father that mark his progress toward death: “He’s at home now, and they’ve engaged a nurse for the nights. ‘The pain is getting worse, and Dr Poporov says it’s time for some pain killers. First by mouth, and then shots.’” In life, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop the dying or the loss coming to Laura’s mother, so mother and father do what is left for them to do, and Silman articulates this in the swimming lessons, in learning how to survive.
The opening scene in this story takes place in a hospital room where her father says, “Tell me, Laura, how do you feel about euthanasia?” A few moments later Laura’s mother arrives with another woman, a passing acquaintance who has a smudge of soot on her forehead. The woman greets Laura and her father, murmurs a few words of encouragement and leaves. “Isn’t that amazing?” Laura’s mother says. “I could have sworn she was a typical Jewish woman.”
Laura’s family is Jewish, but they recognize that the woman had gone to Mass on Ash Wednesday and is Catholic. It’s a slightly comic moment, but also a deeply meaningful. For it doesn’t matter whether or not they know Ash Wednesday begins a period of fasting and self-reflection that leads to Easter, they know the smudge is from ashes that remind us of our mortality. Later, the radiologist will mark her father’s head with small Xes
As the story unwinds and his strength ebbs, Laura’s father speculates on life, wonders about the nature of an after-life and asks what happens to his “power” after he dies. The rabbi in the hospital was awful, he says, but the young Catholic priest was a mensch with whom he had interesting discussions. In this beautiful and moving story, Silman’s characters find a way to transcend the final tragedy of life.
Readers will have different favorites in Heart-work; you might choose the fine magical story that concludes this collection, and somebody else will favor the absolutely original, zany comic piece, “The Alphabet of Joy.” By the way, the same fictional character is at the heart of a generous handful of these tales; her name slips by so casually you may not notice, and that would be a loss. Roberta Silman has written five novels, but her first published book was a collection of short stories that announced the arrival of a bright fresh talent in American fiction. These in Heart-work were selected from the decades when she was primarily writing novels and show a mature insight enriched with wisdom. Enjoy this gift to readers this summer.
