Seventh Heaven
By Alice Hoffman
Putnam, 256 pages, $18.95
It is a pleasure, pure tonic, to read Alice Hoffman`s eighth novel,
”Seventh Heaven.” The setting of this deft blend of magical realism and sociological truth is a suburb of New York City in the summer of 1959, a subdivision in which ”to have peace with your neighbors you needed to adhere to two unspoken rules: mind your own business and keep up your lawn.” The author renders this long ago place with brushstroke perfection:
”On summer evenings like these, when the children were tucked into bed, safety hung over the neighborhood like a net. No one locked windows, no one locked doors. The G.E. refrigerators hummed and the stars were a brilliant white. In the morning, the traffic on the Southern State would be loud enough to wake sleepers from their beds, but at night the parkway was no more than a whisper. The later it grew, the more the hands of the kitchen clocks lingered on each hour. A summer night might last longer here than it did in other places. The chirp of the crickets was slower, and when children fell out of their beds they never woke, but instead rolled gently under their beds, still clutching onto stuffed bears.
”In the moonlight you could see that, even after six years, everything still seemed new.”
When Nora Silk arrives in this idyll of place in her beat-up Volkswagen filled with a cat, an infant and an 8-year-old named Billy who won`t stop playing with the cigarette lighter and who wears at times an ”awful taunting look” that makes complete strangers have to fight the urge to smack him, she is an immediate object of suspicion. She takes occupancy of the one house on Hemlock Street that has suffered neglect and near abandonment. It might or might not be haunted by spirits that may be evil or may be kind.
At first Nora is shunned by her neighbors. Schoolchildren call her a witch, and Billy is picked on by the other children. He is one of those super- tuned-in kids; he has grown up in an unsettled house where the rules are always changing, and he has an amazing telepathy for what the grownups around him are really thinking. In his family`s new neighborhood, most of them are thinking negative thoughts, for in the delicate ecology of little houses all in a row, Nora Silk`s presence introduces an overpowering disturbing element. She is tumult, she is change, she is revolution itself-she is, in short, a woman without a man. Her husband, Roger, is a magician in Las Vegas. They split up when she discovered that his best performances were with other women, and now Nora is divorced: ”No one had to say it, but the word was there, it had entered their vocabularies, and now it hung above them, a cloud over their coffee cups.”
Despite the censure, Nora is glad to be out of the city, glad to stick to her dream of living in a place where the stars are brighter. She has spunk. In a community where everyone is consoled by the notion that they all share the same floor plan, Nora creates her own designs. When money gets tight, she finds work-as a manicurist at a beauty parlor, as a salesperson of Tupperware. But what she is really selling is herself, her quirky contagious goodwill. To the customers at Armand`s she is a treasure trove of dead-on advice. To the washed-out client she advises: ”No gray for you.” ”Purple,” she whispers to a housewife splurging on a manicure.
Much later in the novel, when Detective Hennessy`s wife Ellen schemes about engaging in the radical act of taking a job outside the house she confides in Nora that she doesn`t know what to tell her husband. ”It doesn`t matter what you tell him,” says Nora. ”What matters is where.” Where`s that, asks Ellen. Why, in the bedroom naturally.
Something about Nora`s cheerful immunity from public opinion frees her to live her life in the way she wants to. And the very sight in 1959 of a woman alone, making it, stirs in everyone who comes within her radius a similar urge for freedom.
In this world almost everyone is redeemed by fantasy, but there are exceptions. A teenage boy who is systematically beaten by his father lives his dream and shoots the old man to death, only to find himself shuttled off to the oblivion of a mental hospital. And a young girl, the school slut, sweet-faced, innocent despite too much experience, is killed in a car accident after she has been cruelly used by Jackie McCarthy and a couple of his pals. Yet after this horrendous event, Jackie McCarthy at least realizes his dream of reconciliation, even a partnership, with the father whose garage he helps out at but from whom, in the days before Nora, he was stealing cars in an insurance scam. He is freed from the need to be bad.
And his brother Ace, a high school senior who falls in love with Nora, is freed from the need to stay so small-town. And on and on it goes. Danny Shapiro takes a chance at trying out in Florida at spring training. Little Billy makes it to the Little League and finally wins the admiration of Stevie Hennessy, the kid next door who engineered the initial rock-throwing abuse that greeted Billy at school each day. Detective Hennessy, Stevie`s father, wants the love of a good woman, and in the end it is there for him, in the arms of his wife.
One of the underlying metaphors of the book is supplied, ironically, by Nora`s absent ex-husband, Roger, and that is the magician`s bedrock trick of what it means to pull a rabbit from a hat or a scarf from a sleeve: the constant interchange of the seen and the unseen.
Not too long after Nora`s arrival, Donna Durgin, the housewife with the cleanest house, commences a stringent diet. In shedding her obesity she sheds something else as well, and one day she simply vanishes, taking a walk from which she fails to return. Through Billy`s clairvoyance and Hennessy`s doggedness, the detective manages to catch up with her in her life at her new job, selling lingerie at Lord and Taylor`s. What happened, he wants to know;
was she forced?
”`You won`t understand,` she answers. `I was dead.`
`What about your kids. You haven`t even asked about them.`
`What good was I to them?` Donna asked. `I was disappearing more each day. Is that what life is supposed to be?`
Hennessy looked at her blankly.
`Is it?` Donna said.
`I guess it is,` Hennessy said. `That`s the way life is.`
`Not for me,` Donna said. `Not now.`
”Hennessey`s coffee came, and when the waitress had left he leaned forward. `How would it be if everyone walked away. How would it be if I just upped and left Ellen and the kids and the mortgage and just took off?`
`I don`t know, How would it be?`
`God,` Hennessy said, `I wish I knew.”`
What would happen if everyone did what they wanted to do? That is the central question of this wonderful work. And the answer has Nora Silk`s benevolence: for the most part life would be better.
There is a special brilliance in choosing as the locale of this book a world that has in fact disappeared, though it comes alive thanks to Hoffman`s skills as an illusionist, particularly her fine ear. In evoking the Atlantis of subdivisions in America in the late `50s, she quietly sets forth the smaller icons from the now lost place to recreate what it was like: her characters guzzle Sanka, control their weight with Metracal, watch
”Bonanza.”
But in the end, at least in ”Seventh Heaven,” physical reality is the dream: the garage with its heavy door, the ear-blasting drone of an electric saw, all those hopeful casseroles, even the hula hoops and the strollers and the red Belairs, these are figment, hallucination, mirage. In the world according to Alice Hoffman, the place we really live, our true human address, is deep inside and invisible-the place where wish intersects with will, at the corner of Courage and Desire.
