A Book of Common Prayer
An engrossing novel about political and personal life in Central America, from the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking.Set in the ruined Central American nation of Boca Grande, A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women and their conflicting experiences of wealth, politics and personal history. We follow the intriguing life of Grace Strasser-Mendana – an American expatriate and member of one of Boca Grande’s most influential families – alongside the story of Charlotte Douglas, whose daughter Medin has run off with a group of Marxist radicals. What follows is an exploration of the women’s ability to make sense of the behaviour that surrounds them, as their worlds are made hazy by the atmosphere of evil and innocence that envelops their strained and entangled lives.
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A Book of Common Prayer
Joan Didion
Dedication
This book is for Brenda Berger Garner, for James Jerrett Didion, and also for Allene Talmey and Henry Robbins.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
ONE
1 I will be her witness…
2 Call my own letter from Boca Grande…
3 According to her passport, entry visa, and International…
4 When Charlotte first came to boca grande she was referred…
5 Until I lost a filling and had occasion to see…
6 The State Department list on which Charlotte Douglas’s…
7 La norteamericana told a story…
8 “Charlotte Douglas is ill,” I said after Christmas lunch…
9 “It’s depressing to be sick in a hotel”…
10 The next time I saw Charlotte Douglas she grabbed up…
11 A gold cigarette lighter engraved “D.N.C. ATLANTIC CITY ’64.”
TWO
1 The wind is up tonight…
2 The morning the FBI men first came to the house…
3 One imagines a sweet indolent girl, soft with baby fat…
4 “I see,” Leonard kept saying from wherever he was on…
5 You no doubt heard the tape…
6 The night Charlotte first heard the tape…
7 When I married Edgar Strasser-Mendana…
8 “Those were four truly wonderful specimens…
9 I know why Charlotte liked talking to the FBI…
10 “Boo hoo,” Warren said…
11 In the second week after the release of Marin’s tape…
12 “I’ve never been afraid of the dark.”
13 Charlotte did not get out of bed the day after…
14 Charlotte did not get out of bed the day after…
15 “I have a lousy trip to Philadelphia, lousy flight back,…
16 Who can say why I crave the light in Boca…
17 Photographs of the last evening Charlotte spent with Leonard…
18 “It’s Charlotte,” she said to her brother’s wife…
19 When Warren came that day to the door of the…
THREE
1 She had been going to one airport…
2 Look at the visas…
3 Leonard had not wanted her to see the baby…
FOUR
1 Fevers relapse here…
2 I said before he had the look of a man…
3 Here among the three or four solvent families in Boca…
4 When I consider the pattern of their days and nights…
5 Sometimes she would leave the motel during the day…
6 The last thing Charlotte remembered before the Mountain Brook Country…
FIVE
1 Oil wells about to come in have a sound the…
2 I think now that in the beginning she stayed on…
3 “You smell American,” was the first thing Gerado ever said…
4 Sexual current…
5 As a matter of fact Leonard Douglas did not come…
6 When Marin Bogart asked me without much interest what her…
7 What had Charlotte Douglas “done” In Boca Grande…
8 We could have been doing this all our lives…
9 “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said to Victor the…
10 I recall it now as a year when we actually…
11 Land of contrasts.
12 “Who was there,” Charlotte had said when Leonard told her…
13 “And what about this fucking bomb,” Leonard Douglas said to…
14 A few days after Leonard Douglas left Boca Grande…
15 On the afternoon I went to the Caribe…
16 In fact she had…
17 I don’t have to see Marin because I have Marin…
SIX
1 In the end there was not much to tell Marin…
2 Gerado had counted on a smooth transition…
3 Day eight…
4 All I can tell you directly about Charlotte Douglas’s death…
5 In summary…
About the Author
Praise
Other books by the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
I WILL BE HER WITNESS.
That would translate seré su testigo, and will not appear in your travelers’ phrasebook because it is not a useful phrase for the prudent traveler.
Here is what happened: she left one man, she left a second man, she traveled again with the first; she let him die alone. She lost one child to “history” and another to “complications” (I offer in each instance the evaluation of others), she imagined herself capable of shedding that baggage and came to Boca Grande, a tourist. Una turista. So she said. In fact she came here less a tourist than a sojourner but she did not make that distinction.
She made not enough distinctions.
She dreamed her life.
She died, hopeful. In summary. So you know the story. Of course the story had extenuating circumstances, weather, cracked sidewalks and paregorina, but only for the living.
Charlotte would call her story one of passion. I believe I would call it one of delusion. My name is Grace Strasser-Mendana, née Tabor, and I have been for fifty of my sixty years a student of delusion, a prudent traveler from Denver, Colorado. My mother died of influenza one morning when I was eight. My father died of gunshot wounds, not self-inflicted, one afternoon when I was ten. From that afternoon until my sixteenth birthday I lived alone in our suite at the Brown Palace Hotel. I have lived in equatorial America since 1935 and only twice had fever. I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos. I studied under Kroeber at California and worked with Lévi-Strauss at São Paulo, classified several societies, catalogued their rites and attitudes on occasions of birth, copulation, initiation and death; did extensive and well-regarded studies on the rearing of female children in the Mato Grosso and along certain tributaries of the Rio Xingu, and still I did not know why any one of these female children did or did not do anything at all.
