Synopsis, Ondine Lived Here
With her pleasant but unremarkable features, Nova is used to being confused with other people. The consequences have included a new given name; a sizeable fortune; and a husband-- as well as the queasy sense that life’s twists and turns are beyond her control. Crowned with blond curls as a child, she was renamed as a favor to a wealthy uncle fascinated by her resemblance to a young British actress, Nova Pilbeam. She later was written in his will. And now she has reason to believe that her marriage goes back to Eliot mistaking her for another woman.
Eliot has just discovered a stack of old photos he’d taken in Lithia Sprints, a gritty Pennsylvania coal town. Looking over his shoulder at various moldering buildings, Nova notices a young redhead with whom she shares a resemblance. Eliot can’t see it, and recalls that the woman had hair like burnished copper. She reminds him that when they first met, on a Connecticut beach, her day-old henna job had been set aglow by the sunset. And that as he came closer, he’d seemed flustered. And in his embarrassment, asked her out.
Eliot says he barely knew the woman, a Dean something or other. He’d gone to a bar where the band was advertising for a pianist, and danced with her as a way of getting closer to the stage. As they walked back to her apartment, she described having grown up on a failed dairy farm. But Nova scoffs when Eliot says that her bare rooms suggested a certain disenchantment with material things. His audition the following week didn’t go well, evidently because the bass player had seen him with his girl. Eliot ends the story there. But he has begun working on a haunting piano piece that catches Nova’s ear, and when she asks him for a simplified transcription, he says the melody hints at how he felt in that isolated part of the world.
The photos are drawing Eliot out of their Connecticut home, back to that time and place. He creates an exacting scale model of Lithia Springs and its surroundings, a hobby that becomes an obsession after he resigns as an elementary school music teacher. He’d been rebuked by the superintendent for giving lessons to a precocious fifth-grader in her home, a violation of school policy. And he admitted to Nova that he’d begun thinking of Isabel as the child they lost when she fell from a ladder in her third trimester and learned she could no longer conceive. Eliot slips into a depression, and Nova turns to cocktails as a way of making her solitary evenings feel convivial.
Eliot has been looking at an Internet real estate listing for an abandoned Pennsylvania farmhouse near Lithia Springs. When he says nothing about the property to Nova, she suspects Dean had grown up there. And she does not mention the way in which the run-down property appeals to her, like a three-legged cat an animal shelter wondering if you’ll give it a home.
Eliot and Nova are primed for an event that will test their relationship. One evening after Nova has had a few drinks, Eliot accidently elbows her breast. She blurts, “I feel I’ve been violated,” and gets out her suitcases. But it is Eliot who leaves the next day. To look for Dean in Lithia Springs, Nova supposes. Then, remembering he mentioned a bottling plant in town that was for sale, she calls there, intending to hang up if he picks up the phone. A woman named Mindy answers. When Nova pretends to have spoken to an Eliot about an order, Mindy guesses by the out-of-state area code that she is after information about someone named Eliot. She says she moonlights as a skip tracer and can confidentially email reports on him. When Nova mentions Eliot might be seeing a woman named Dean, Mindy confirms that he is dating an Ondine Ireland.
Nova soon adapts to living alone, but she becomes ravenously curious about Eliot’s relationship with Ondine. And when Mindy’s emails become vague and unsatisfying, Nova visits the old farmhouse on the chance the couple might be there. It is vacant, and she spontaneously decides to fix it up. Only after moving in does she learn that the ruined mill on the adjacent property once belonged to Ondine’s grandparents, explaining Eliot’s interest in the real estate listing. Again, it’s as if the woman has deflected Nova’s life’s course like a pinball flipper.
When Nova stops getting reports from Mindy, she drives past the soda plant. It has been out of business a good while: clearly she has been paying all along for a cleverly constructed soap opera. Asking around about Ondine, Nova learns she long ago had escaped from her bassist boyfriend, Hub Vogel, described as an angry drunk. She left town in a Porsche convertible with Maine plates, and he has been trying to hunt down the driver ever since.
Hub hangs out with Nova and evidently enjoys being seen in public with someone resembling the woman who had rejected him. She, on the other hand, feels like a stand-in for his old girlfriend. Hub happens to see Eliot’s handwritten sheet music on Nova’s piano, and after playing a few bars of the unnamed piece he declares it is his own work. He’d recorded “Ondine Lived Here” after she disappeared and mailed a cassette to her Philadelphia box number. Hub concludes Eliot must have been there with her—and that as a wealthy Penn student from Maine, he likely was the driver of the Porsche that took her away. He gloats that after all these years, the son of a bitch likely will someday drive down Nova’s lane. She breaks off with him.
Nova gets to know Jane Ireland, a flaming redhead resembling her cousin Ondine. Jane met Eliot the night he danced with Ondine, he happening to mistake her for Ondine in the crowd. She told him she grew vegetables for market, and after failing his audition he drove out to visit. She describes their days together as blissful, if not romantic, working side by side in her fields. The experience had an effect on him, and he applied to the Peace Corps rather than medical school, as he parents wished.
After Eliot returned to Philadelphia, Ondine called Jane to say that Hub found out she was pregnant by another man and had become violent. Jane phoned Eliot on the chance he would take Ondine away, put her up in his Philadelphia apartment, and arrange for doctor appointments. Jane visited after Ondine gave birth to a girl, named Thalia, and she was struck by how remote Ondine seemed from the child, with Eliot doing most of the work of raising her. He and Thalia became attached over the next year as he waited for a Peace Corps assignment. When Ondine announced plans to leave the country with a French boyfriend, Eliot attempted to adopt Thalia even though as a young, single male without current employment he was not the strongest candidate. He wrote Jane to say that they knew each other as friends, not lovers, but he wondered if they might wed and raise the child. She, just twenty-one and never having had a serious relationship, did not write back.
Nova now can better appreciate how devastating it was for Eliot to stop seeing Isabel. Learning that the girl’s mother has been arrested for dealing narcotics, Nova contacts the social worker in charge to say she is interested in becoming Isabel’s foster parent. And with Jane, she talks openly about what Eliot might do if he returned. Jane is still young enough to give him a child. And Nova imagines him walking into her house and hearing Isabel practicing the violin. How curious, they agree, that their respective dramas—and possible fates-- can be traced back to Eliot having danced a set with Ondine.
Experiencing her first winter in the old house, Nova dips beeswax candles to place on windowsills. She walks up to the road one snowy night to look at their welcoming glow. And she realizes the candles are more for herself than people driving by, Eliot included. Her face is stiff from the cold but she can feel a smile forming. And she considers that a smile with no one else around is a benediction of sorts. One that goes both ways, inward and out into the world.
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98,000 words
Portions of the plotline and setting appeared as “Anthracite” in Crab Orchard Review, published by Southern Illinois University.