THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607150186
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY NAN EDGERTON
LENGTH: 68 lines
FOOTPRINTS
SHELBY HEARON
Alfred A. Knopf. 191 pp. $21.
Footprints, Shelby Hearon's 15th novel, is about ``the paleontology of grief,'' or in this case, how a grown child's sudden death affects the marriage of Nan and Douglas Mayhall.
We first meet the couple at a party held in honor of organ donors and recipient families. The Mayhalls have traveled from their home in upstate New York to Texas to attend the picnic.
Bethany, their 22-year-old daughter, was killed by a drunk driver while en route to visit Douglas' widowed stepmother, who runs the family ranch in Texas. Nan and Douglas agreed to let Bethany's heart, liver and kidneys be used for transplants. Now Douglas, attempting to know ``that part of our Bethany still lives and breathes,'' is determined to find the beneficiary of her heart.
Nan cannot understand why Douglas feels such a deep emotional connection to the recipient, the Rev. Calin C. Clayton, a 50-year-old Texas preacher. When the reverend's wife tells Nan, ``You did a good thing,'' Nan replies, ``She was already gone.''
``I know,'' Mrs. Clayton says, ``but everyone doesn't see that.''
Douglas, a successful neurobiologist, ``refuses to see'' because his older brother died in the Vietnam War and he has never resolved his anger at being the one surviving child. He corresponds with the Rev. Clayton, ignoring his wife and their surviving son, Bert. In a self-centered attempt to replace his lost daughter with a new baby, Douglas has an affair with Bethany's 30-year-old English teacher.
The Mayhalls met while attending graduate school in Chicago, two displaced Texans. But Nan, a paleontologist, left ``ABD'' - all but dissertation - to marry Douglas at the start of his career. Now she, ``at 49 and counting,'' determines to retrace her ``footprints'' and decide what to do with the remainder of her life. The novel is told from her point of view.
On a fossil-hunting trip after Bethany's accident, Nan exclaims: ``All I wanted was one specimen. . . . So that when I awoke, when I returned to my old life, I would have it there.''
Unlike Douglas, Nan has started to accept that Bethany, her first-born, is gone, and that Bert is grown and living on his own. Hoping to repair her marriage eventually and to see her son Bert, now a marine physiologist in Florida, Nan retreats to a family home on Sanibel Island, Fla. She needs the detachment.
The story moves among the Mayhall homes in Florida and New York and the ranch in Texas, and Hearon creates a vivid sense of place for each locale. The Sanibel cottage is ``handed-down and safe,'' the college town in upstate New York is a ``17th-century faux British countryside'' and the Texas ranch is ``on the south side of nothing.''
Hearon shifts between the present and Nan and Douglas' past as easily as she changes settings, constructing a complex exploration of the many compromises required in a long-term marriage. She also explores the need for women to have pursuits beyond their families, the ethical implications of organ transplants, the effects of adultery on marriage and the concessions women make when their husbands' careers are deemed more important than their own.
But Hearon's main concern is how a parent comes to terms with losing a child, whether by accident or through the normal course of growing up. Footprints is a moving and evocative picture of one family's attempt to grapple with such loss. MEMO: Nan Edgerton is a free-lance writer who lives in Virginia Beach. by CNB