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Come, Old Ghost
| Article
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18756 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
3,215 Words |
| Author
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Joan Frederick
Joan Frederick is professor of English at James Madison
University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. |
THE BOOKMARKER'S DAUGHTER: A MEMORY UNBOUND
Shirley Abbott
New York: Haper Collins, 1991
290 pp., $19.95
Bookmaker Alfred "Hat" Abbott first appeared in Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South, author Shirley Abbott's highly praised 1983 memoir of the formidable women of Abnott's native Arkansas. In that work, Abbott introduced her father as "a one-man pari-mutuel machine [who] could tell you the payoff on a three-horse parlay without ever putting pencil to paper. ... Lawbreaker that he was, he set off every morning in a fedora and three-piece suit and tie, just like everybody else's daddy." Thus, the sartorially splendid "bookmaker" of Shirley Abbott's Bookmaker's Daughter: A Memory Unbound was not the binder of printed pages, the literal maker of books, as Velma, Abbott's naïve mother, first assumed. He was instead a charming but totally domineering figure who bequeathed his only child much more than the unbearable migraine headaches that plagued both father and daughter. Relationship between child and parents are always complex, complicated and convoluted mixtures of emotions and genes. In this generally moving, often humorous but occasionally cynical portrait of her father, Shirley Abbott attempts to come to terms with one of the strongest, most ambiguous, and least understood of human relationships--that between daughter and father. With a few probably unavoidable exceptions, Abbott succeeds in her quest.
Dangers of love
In her prologue, "A House Revisited," the keystone to the rest of her book, Abbott recounts a recurrent dream of her childhood house and its "king"--her father, of course. While the details and incidents of the dream change, one dominant impression emerges: "How dangerous it is to love!" In teaching his child to love words, to love romance and a world of ideas that reached far beyond the confines of Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1930s and 1940s, and, concurrently of course, to love him, Hat Abbott wove a web that entangled his daughter in emotional cords difficult, if not impossible, to break. Shirley Abbott writes: "Fathers are supposed to teach their daughters how to be women, that is, how to love men and serve them and use them, coexist with them, how to desire them in a seemly manner. A good father domesticates his daughter, so that when she is twenty or so he can hand her over, polished to a high gloss, to another man. But my father refused to do that."
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