THE VAGABONDS
By Nicholas Delbanco. Warner. 294 pp. $23.95
Anovelist who sets his story in the past is sometimes accused of turning his back on contemporary times. If the historical world is fully realized, however, and the characters expertly constructed, the novel brings to light universal truths that not only dramatize the give-and-take of a past era but also illuminate the here and now. The writer invites us to know our own time better by recognizing the chain of historical events that has in some part helped create our culture and the lives we live.
Such is the case in Nicholas Delbanco's elegant new novel, The Vagabonds. Here, history and present meet in a seamless joining, and the construction enables the characters involved to stand with one foot in today and one in yesterday, to cast an eye around them and behind them, to know more fully the consequences of inheritance, to understand, as one character says toward the end of the novel, that "what matters is the way we deal with what's been left behind."
The novel begins in 2003 with the death of Alice Saperstone in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Her lawyer, Joseph Beakes, summons her three adult children from their scattered locations -- Joanna from Cape Cod, Mass., Claire from Ann Arbor, Mich., and David from Berkeley, Calif. Alice has stipulated, Beakes explains, that the three of them be present when he reads the will. Furthermore, he says, there's the matter of a trust, the details of which he'll be happy to reveal at the appropriate time.
The characters introduced and the narrative hook provided, Delbanco gracefully shifts the focus in the second section of the novel to 1916 and the historical figures from which the book takes its title. Thomas Edison, John Burroughs and Harvey Firestone are touring the country via automobile, a practice the group continued into the 1920s. This time, "the Vagabonds," as they like to call themselves, are camping near Saratoga Springs, looking forward to their fellow traveler, Henry Ford, joining them once they reach Plattsburgh. On this night, the event that will cast its significance well into the future occurs. A local family, the Danceys, comes to the Vagabonds' campsite, and in the course of the evening, the 16-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, finds herself alone with Firestone's aide, Peter Barclay. Before the night is done, the two of them slip away to Elizabeth's grandmother's unoccupied cottage, where they're unable to contain their passionate desire for each other. Months later, Mr. Dancey writes to Firestone requesting the name of his aide, explaining that Elizabeth is with child. Henry Ford, upon hearing of the scandal, demands that the reputations of the Vagabonds remain unsullied so the public won't begin to regard their tramping about as opportunities for immoral behavior. Ford and Firestone come up with the idea of providing money -- not for Elizabeth, but for the care of "her child and that child's children." Edison completes the plan by proposing that each of the Vagabonds provide five shares of General Electric stock and transfer them to the Adirondacks Savings Bank "for the benefit and use of Miss Elizabeth Dancey's heirs in trust." Elizabeth is not to know of the trust until two years have passed, and it must be stipulated that only her child and her child's children be the beneficiaries.
"Vagabondage is a tangled skein," Delbanco writes late in the novel. With consummate skill, he connects the web of intrigue and inheritance. The child born to Elizabeth Dancey is Alice Saperstone, and, as Joseph Beakes eventually tells her children when he reads her will, those 15 shares of General Electric stock have split over the years and have become 69,120 shares, which, if liquidated, would be worth close to $2 million, netting Joanna and Claire and David nearly half a million dollars each.
The Vagabonds not only immerses us in a prior era but also illuminates the state of our current culture, in which adults like Joanna and Claire and David can feel themselves unmoored in the midst of ruined marriages, unfulfilled dreams, and the terrors and anxieties we've come to know only too well. Late in the novel, David talks about Marconi and how his dream of crossing the ocean with wireless calls has opened the door to nightmare and disaster: "Back before the world became a village, there was no chance that some millionaire ex-playboy Muslim with a kidney problem and a penchant for apocalypse could bring down buildings made of glass and steel ten thousand miles away." In controlled, sensual prose, Delbanco expertly weaves this story of inheritance, responsibility and longing for the security of home. The Vagabonds is a highly enjoyable and provocative story, told with the sure hand and clear eye of an expert novelist. •
Lee Martin is the author of the novel "Quakertown." His new novel, "The Bright Forever," will appear in May 2005.
