Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
around the house, goes through the baby’s wardrobe, makes shopping lists for practical things like a rubber sheet. “Over the next few weeks, she showed [Claire] how to crochet . . . how to know when to flip a pancake, how to really change a baby” (15). As Aunt C takes charge of the girls and the house, Diana seems to rally, but her upswing is a Band-Aid that covers a festering wound. Ultimately, Diana’s explosive anger forces Cecilia to return to her home in Washington, DC, after which Diana is committed to an institution in Raleigh that Sidney describes as a “place for people not right in the head” (58). In the peace that follows Diana’s departure, Claire takes hold of Sweetie, and her life starts over. The reader hopes that Connor would come alive in Diana’s absence, be an attentive father, but if anything he retreats even further, showing pleasure only on the days he’s going to visit his wife. Throughout most of the novel, he is a cypher for a man whose wife is mentally ill: she gets worse, he retreats; she has a good day, he
is foolish in his belief that all is well again. When Diana returns home, the family collectively holds its breath as Connor asserts that she’s better, he can tell. Claire is frustrated when Diana pulls her hair out, bangs on things, yells, and curses the town – but never in front of Connor. At fifteen months of age, “Sweetie knew too. She tensed every time my mother walked into a room” (111). When Diana, in a rage, fires Sidney, Claire is left with no dependable adult in her life. Nature weaves in and out of the novel, underpinning the plot, especially during winter scenes when the cold is persuasive, brilliantly woven into the story. As I read the book on a hot July night, I shivered and sought warmth from the scene of “[a]n entire field of ice under a river of stars, and beyond it all, at the horizon, broken trees like brushstrokes” (194). The weather becomes an enemy as Diana continues to spiral downward and those around her are helpless to stop her descent into madness. Crone weaves Claire’s
Daphne Athas received the 2015 R. Hunt Memorial Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association for her contribution to North Carolina Literature. Athas published her first novel, Weather of the Heart in 1947, when she was twenty-two. She published several more novels, two of which received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Athas also published a collection of poetry, a whimsical book on grammar and stylistics, a play, and a travel memoir about Greece, the birthplace of her father and a frequent summer destination for herself. Her most recent book is Chapel Hill in Plain Sight: Notes from the Other Side of the Tracks (Eno Publishers, 2010). It is a collection of essays about the people and institutions of Depression-era and post-World War II Chapel Hill and Carrboro – a time and place of Athas’s youth. Her work has appeared in numerious journals and periodicals, including the Hudson Review and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Athas taught at a school for the blind, worked for the Office of War Information, and, from 1968 into the 1980s, was an instructor in the creative writing program at UNC Chapel Hill. n RIGHT Daphne Athas with her Parker award, presented by John Blythe, Raleigh, NC, 13 Nov. 2015
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awareness of the outer world into a story that takes place in the inner world of the McKenzie home. Even as her mother is teetering, Claire notes, “ice brought all the beauty out . . . [a]s if the world were getting polished” (145). The reader will wish that Diana could see things that way. Moira Crone has a gift for the perfect detail to create a picture in a reader’s mind, as when Sidney and Claire dress Sweetie to attend a funeral: “a baby in a black dress was the saddest thing there could be” (209). And, in an impeccable description of older women in small Southern towns: “All those widows and old maids . . . knew how to get the florist to work, how to find musicians in a federal disaster area” (210). The Ice Garden compels a fast first reading for the story, then a second slow one for enjoyment of the phrasing, the language, the author’s style. The complexity of the characters, the myriad themes, and nature as metaphor make this a book that will stay in my personal library. n
PHOTOGRAPH BY LINDA FOX; COURTESY OF THE NC OFFICE OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
DAPHNE ATHAS RECEIVES THE 2015 R. HUNT PARKER AWARD
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