Just Jennifer

Up from the Blue by Susan Henderson (Harper, October 2010)

Tillie Harris and her husband have just moved into a new home in Washington, D.C. where Tillie lived as a child.  Nothing is unpacked, not even their telephone, Simon is away on business and Tillie is in labor.  Not knowing anyone in the city, nor having made any medical arrangements, Tillie goes to a neighbor’s house and calls the only person she knows in the city, the father from whom she has been estranged for years.  As Tillie goes into labor, the story of her childhood begins to unfold.

As a eight-year-old living in an army community in New Mexico, everything in Tillie’s life is covered in a thin film of red dust.  Tillie’s father is regular army and often away on business trips, leaving Tillie and her twelve-year old brother in the care of their mother.  Mara is different than most mothers Tillie knows:  she is exuberant, unorganized and often sick in bed for days.  Tillie doesn’t know her mother is plagued by depression, but is fiercely protective of her when other mothers try to meddle in the Harrises’ lives.  General Harris is reassigned to Washington, D.C. and while he moves his family across country, Tillie stays with his assistant Ann and joins her family two weeks later.  When Tillie arrives in Washington, her mother has vanished and no one will talk about her.  Tillie is desperate to find out what has happened to her mother and is frustrated by her brother’s lack of interest and anger toward their mother and her father’s unwillingness to discuss anything to do with her mother.  Tillie is a scrappy fighter and fights against her natural instincts to be free and do things the way she thinks they should be, often without boundaries, as her mother did.  As adult Tillie’s labor progresses, an uneasy truce is forged with her father, and the story of one year in her life that affected everything after unfolds.  There is a Gothic quality to Tillie’s life with its terribly painful emotions, though there is such a goodness and innocence in Tillie that will endear her to you.

The story of Tillie’s eighth year is neatly woven in between the progression of her labor.  The tone of each part of her childhood story matches the phase she is in during labor until the baby is born and the story of that year is fully revealed.  Tillie is a heart-wrenching character who just wants her mother and wants to understand.  She has been compared to Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.  Her love for her mother, with all her eccentricities is so pure and uninhibited.  Over twenty years of Tillie’s life are unaccounted for, but at the end it is easy to see she will be able to transcend her childhood tragedies and make tentative steps to create a relationship with her husband, new baby, and perhaps even the father she had grown away from.  This is an elegantly told and haunting first novel.