An American Tune Read online

  “An American Tune is about the ’60s, but it’s about now, too. It’s about a mother finding herself in her daughter, for better and for worse, and it’s about generations of women forever realizing that even though we try our best to prevent them, our children were born to make their own mistakes. Nora will become your honest-to-God best friend because she reminds us of where we’ve been, what we’re doing, and what we are looking for.”

  MARGARET MCMULLAN, author of In My Mother’s House and When Warhol Was Still Alive

  “Barbara Shoup has written a rich and timely story about one generation’s outrage and the long reverberations of secrets. Her plot has much to say about the tangle of responsibility and how an ill-advised war disrupts an intricate network of ordinary American lives. A striking and memorable novel warm, sage, and beautifully written.”

  JOAN SILBER, National Book Award finalist for Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories and author of four other books of fiction

  “I love An American Tune, by Barbara Shoup! She’s a wonderful writer with an amazing story to tell to those of us who have been fumbling along trying to gain perspective on a signal moment in our own history. Hers is the first account, in my opinion, that understands the combination of the extraordinary and the banal that characterized the antiwar movement, and yet she’s never didactic. The extraordinary and the banal coexist in the seminal moments of any generation, of course, but to those of us who became adults during the Vietnam War years it is still surprising to remember over and over again how self-absorbed, how trivial we were while also making profound decisions.”

  ROBB FORMAN DEW, author of the novels Dale Loves Sophie to Death, The Time of Her Life, and Fortunate Lives, and a memoir, The Family Heart

  “Barbara Shoup’s An American Tune is an elegant, moving, finely written page-turner that reaffirms and makes fresh again Faulkner’s assertion that the past is never dead; it’s not even past.”

  WILL ALLISON, author of Long Drive Home

  “It’s an ordinary day until a man calls your name, a man from the life you’ve tried your best to leave behind. Suddenly, anything can happen. Such is the case in Barbara Shoup’s engaging new novel, An American Tune. A story that comes from the heartland and from the heart. I cared about these characters as if they were my own family members. What a moving story of what it is to long for the person you once were, set against the backdrop of political unrest both then and now.”

  LEE MARTIN, author of Break the Skin and The Bright Forever

  “An American Tune kept me on the edge of my seat while at the same time wanting me to savor the evocative, memorable and true sentences along with way. Barbara Shoup’s exasperating yet loveable characters felt so real that I longed to lure them into my kitchen for a cup of coffee so I could spend more time with them. Shoup brings the sixties back to life with wry humor and sympathy, reminding us all the while that we have never left its shadow. A haunting, powerful book. I loved it.”

  ELIZABETH STUCKEY-FRENCH, author of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady

  “The story of Jane and Nora – and what happens when these two lives converge – held me in great suspense. This highly readable novel isn’t afraid to talk liberal politics during wartime, nor is it afraid to tell an epic love story. I loved everything about Barb Shoup’s An American Tune.”

  CATHY DAY, author of The Circus in Winter

  “Barb Shoup’s new novel An American Tune brings to life an important time in our history that young people don’t know and older people would rather forget – the idealism and protests of sixties’ youth against the war in Vietnam, and the shadow it casts in today’s world.

  DAN WAKEFIELD, author of Going All the Way

  an american Tune

  an american Tune

  A NOVEL

  BARBARA SHOUP

  This book is a publication of

  INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  601 North Morton Street

  Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA

  iupress.indiana.edu

  Telephone orders 800-842-6796

  Fax orders 812-855-7931

  © 2012 by Barbara Shoup

  All rights reserved

  “An American Tune” by Paul Simon. Copyright © 1973 Paul Simon. Used by permission of the Publisher: Paul Simon Music. “Positively Fourth Street” by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1965 Warner Bros., Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. Excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from Collected Poems, 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1964 by T.S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  Manufactured in the

  United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shoup, Barbara.

  An American tune : a novel / Barbara Shoup.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-253-00742-1 (pb : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-253-00754-4 (eb) 1. Middle-aged women – Fiction 2. Family secrets – Fiction I. Title.

  PS3569.H618A83 2012

  813’.54 – dc23

  2012027221

  1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12

  FOR STEVE

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1965

  . . . we come on the ship they call Mayflower

  We come on the ship that sailed the moon

  We come in the age’s most uncertain hour

  And sing an American tune.

  Paul Simon

  PROLOGUE

  “Deja Vu”

  JULY, 2002

  Nora Quillen sat on a bench in People’s Park, considering what was lost. The Book Nook was gone and, with it, long, rainy afternoons browsing the cluttered shelves, breathing in the smell of paper and ink. The Oxford Shop, Redwood and Ross, the Peddler were gone, and all the beautiful blue and yellow oxford shirts, the matching Villager skirts and sweaters. Knee socks, the warmth of them on bitter winter mornings.

  The SAE house was gone, its big lawn, where you could always count on seeing at least a few cute guys throwing a football, was now a parking lot; the old stadium, the spinning silver spokes of Little 500 bicycle wheels on its cinder track had vanished into green space. There was a Burger King in the Commons, and the Gables, where a young Hoagy Carmichael once sat in a back booth dreaming music, had been gutted and transformed into a Roly Poly Sandwich Shop.

  People’s Park itself was nothing like it had been in 1970, when students claimed the site after the storefront buildings that once stood there were razed in a fire. In the spirit of Berkeley’s People’s Park, they brought shovels, lumber, paint, flats of vegetables and flowers, and set out to shape the half-block of mud. Anyone could plant anything, they said. There’d be benches and tables, a playground for children, kiosks announcing every kind of happening. It would be a friendly place, where you could listen to music, fly kites, blow bubbles. Get high. That same spring, Nora remembered – the night Nixon announced he was sending troops into Cambodia – some of the protestors marching from Dunn Meadow toward the courthouse downtown had picked up rocks unearthed from the digging and thrown them, breaking windows in some of the shops on Kirkwood Street.

  The warm spring night c
ame back to her, the smell of newly turned earth mingling with sweat and patchouli and marijuana. Chanting overlaid by shouts and laughter, the sound of glass shattering – Tom grabbing a drunk fraternity boy and wrestling a rock from his hand.

  But she wasn’t going to think about Tom. There was no use in it – and, besides, it was Claire’s turn now. Soon her daughter would step into a whole new life here, as she herself had done so many years before.

  The park was so tastefully landscaped now, she observed, with neat brick paths dividing the grassy areas into triangles whose points met at the abstract sculpture in its center – a smooth scoop of limestone reminiscent of an open hand. There was a drinking fountain with a brass bowl. Green benches lined the paths, and tables surrounded colorful mosaics that had been set into concrete near the front of the park: fingers on piano keys, cyclists, an eye. There were trees, with commemorative plaques set into the soil beneath them – one dedicated to former chancellor Herman B. Wells: “A Friend of Bloomington’s Urban Forest.”

  Had the chancellor been a friend of People’s Park? Nora didn’t remember, but she was pretty sure that, at the time, he was as much against the students’ occupation of university property as most everyone else. When had it become the Urban Forest, anyway? A stupid name, she thought. If people were bound and determined to rewrite history, they ought to be able to do a better job than that.

  That other time simmered inside her, unsettling her, as it had done all too often since the towers came down in New York and the President’s intention to hijack the horrific event to further his own political agenda became more and more obvious. Just this morning, there had been another news story about weapons of mass destruction, citing the testimony of a former Iraqi nuclear engineer who claimed that Saddam Hussein would have enough weapons-grade uranium for three nuclear bombs by 2005. God. Couldn’t people see through the “Chutes and Ladders” maneuver that had so neatly made Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein the same person in their minds and how Bush was using it to justify the buildup toward a war in Iraq that was only vaguely connected to what had happened in New York? One that was likely to be as disastrous, as unwinnable and costly of innocent lives as the war in Vietnam had been?

  She could not talk about it, even with her own husband, Charlie, who’d put all that had happened to him in Vietnam, whatever it had been, in a closed-off place and would not even allow himself to consider that anything like it might ever happen again. Nor with Claire, so devastated by the television images: the towers falling in on themselves, the black smoke, people running, screaming. Frantic, grieving loved ones holding up photographs. “Have you seen . . . ?”

  “How could this happen here?” Claire asked again and again. Nora had heard her, sobbing, on the phone with her boyfriend, Dylan. “How could people hate us so much?”

  “Why not here?” Nora would have had to say, if she had said anything. “Why wouldn’t they hate us?” But once started, she might not have been able to stop. She might have told them everything, and she was in no way prepared to do that.

  Near the sculpture, where the paths converged, a bunch of boys dressed in baggy shorts and Birkenstocks were playing Hacky Sack, rap music blaring from a boom box they’d set on the grass. Rowdy, full of themselves, they hopped and wheeled and backpedaled, ducking and reaching to bounce the little rainbow-colored bean bag off their tattooed ankles, their knees, elbows, wrists, shoulders, foreheads. They scattered a group of chattering girls making their way through the park, careened into trash cans, came perilously close to upsetting a table where a serious-looking young man was drinking a cup of coffee, a book propped before him. When the Hackey Sack landed on the bench where Nora sat, one of the boys darted over, bent and twisted within inches of her face as he scooped it up, and sent it flying again – as if she were invisible.

  “Motherfuck,” another yelled, stretching to bonk it with his forehead. He wore a purple tee shirt with a grinning stick figure on it holding up two fingers in a peace sign.

  It should have made her angry to be ignored by them. Or sad. But she was glad to be a middle-aged woman, not even on their radar. She would never want to be young again. The past few days in this place, memories catching her short everywhere she turned, she’d been her young self all too often.

  Yesterday afternoon, checking into the dorm where parents who had accompanied their children for orientation were staying, she’d been, momentarily, a college freshman again, saying goodbye to her own parents and her little sisters on the day they dropped her off for college, more than thirty-five years before. She could almost hear the stereos cranked up along the corridor, as they had been on that long-ago day. The Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds. The Rolling Stones, inciting them to rebellion. When all her belongings had been unloaded, she’d stood with her family, watching the elevator light blink each floor on its way up, feeling like a can of Coke shaken up hard. Finally, the door opened. Did they hug? Speak? They must have. But all she could remember now was how, suddenly, they were gone. And then flying back to her room, her arms wheeling, her soul rising, wild and joyous. Thinking, anything can happen to me now. Absolutely anything.

  The memory had stayed with her all day. And Bridget appearing in her doorway moments later, grinning. Walking across the little bridge onto the winding path she’d walked each day to and from class; the sound of scales drifting from the music building in the humid air; Jordan Hall with its overgrown plants pressing against the steamy greenhouse glass; it was impossible to stay in the present moment. She’d felt Charlie watching her, interpreting her distraction as continuing disapproval of the choice their daughter had made and willing her not to express it. He didn’t know she’d gone to IU herself, she’d never told him, so he’d been baffled by her visceral response to Claire’s interest in the school last fall. It was a beautiful campus, not terribly far away. It had a better music program than Oberlin, where Claire had originally planned to go. What was the problem?

  Claire only wanted to go to IU because Dylan was there, Nora argued – a ridiculous reason to choose a college. She had let him believe her resistance was really about her reluctance to accept that Claire had a serious boyfriend, endured his attempts to persuade her to trust their daughter’s judgment. Finally, realizing nothing would sway her, he asked, “Why are you so dead-set against this when it’s what Claire wants?”

  And she had said, bitterly, surprising even herself, “What she wants. In case you haven’t noticed, Charlie, you don’t get every single thing you want in this world. Or think you want. Nobody does. Now’s as good a time as any for Claire to figure that out.”

  To Claire, she’d said, “Indiana just feels wrong to me. If that’s irrational, so be it. I’m sorry. But I’m your mother, after all, and – as you’ll probably find out yourself some day – you raise kids based on how you feel. It’s all you know to do.”

  It was a stupid-cop-out thing to say. And a flat-out lie. Claire knew it, too. Nora could see it in her face. Eventually, she’d given up. Given in. She’d done her best to be supportive as Claire moved on through her senior year toward graduation, but she could not pretend enthusiasm and so, in the end, had hurt her daughter, the person she loved most in the world, and caused the first real rift between them.

  She’d slept poorly in the dorm room last night, tangled in dreams of Tom, waking again and again, her heart racing, half-sick with some terrible combination of joy and grief. She lay on her back, palms up, in the relaxation pose she’d learned on the yoga tape she’d bought, a New Year’s resolution mostly abandoned, and concentrated on pushing her breath through her heart, down through the middle of her body, to her toes – and back again. But it didn’t help. At five, she got up, put on her clothes, and went down to the dorm lounge, where she sat in a dark corner, trying – and failing – not to think about the past, until dawn broke and other parents began to make their way down to the coffee and pastries that had been set out for them.

  She poured a cup for Charlie and took it up
to him. “I’m afraid I’ve got a migraine coming on,” she lied. “You take Claire to register for her classes, okay? I’ll feel better if I take a walk before the long drive home.”

  But she hadn’t walked far, just the few blocks down Kirkwood Avenue to this place where she’d sat most of the morning, bereft in a way she had hoped she would never have to feel again. She would not indulge in memories of the past, she told herself. Nor would she think about the Minneapolis soccer mom, a doctor’s wife, recently wrenched from her suburban life and charged with crimes she’d committed nearly thirty years ago. But when she turned her mind away from these things, all she could remember was arguing and arguing against Claire’s coming here, spoiling so much of Claire’s last year at home, spoiling something between them.

  The clock on the bell tower of the old library struck eleven, and Nora rose to head back to the Union, where Charlie and Claire would be waiting for her after Claire’s registration session. The three of them had pored over the class catalogue the evening before, marveling at all the possibilities, making lists and alternate lists so Claire would be prepared to make the best of her scheduled time on the computer. She felt guilty again, thinking that Claire must have been disappointed this morning when Charlie appeared without her.

  She walked up Kirkwood Avenue, past a low wall where a scruffy man with a graying ponytail sat strumming a guitar, a battered baseball cap with a scattering of coins in it at his feet. She paused at the Von Lee Theater, its red door padlocked, its marquee blank, its ticket window a makeshift kiosk layered with tattered, rain-spotted flyers. She and Tom had seen “The Graduate” there in the spring of 1968, and she remembered how the audience had stood as one, cheering, when Dustin Hoffman burst into the church, wild-eyed, crazy with love, and Katharine Ross turned, her face luminous at the sight of him.