I explore wartime domestic tensions with Lucia Holley

The Blank Wall
by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

It is a dark and stormy night, and Lucia Holley is writing about the weather to her naval officer husband at war somewhere in the Pacific. She catches her teenaged daughter, Beatrice, trying to sneak off to meet a man in the boathouse. Lucia sends her daughter back to bed while her elderly father goes out to see about the man, a would-be blackmailer. When Lucia goes for her swim the next morning, she finds the man dead, the point of an anchor sticking through his throat. Assuming the death was accidental and hoping to spare her father any unpleasantness, she does what any good wife, mother, and daughter would do: She pulls the anchor hook out of the corpse, hauls it into a boat, takes it to a nearby uninhabited island, covers its face with a bandana, and hides it in a swamp where few people go. Sadly, she forgets that sometimes people like to picnic on the island with their dogs. It's barely two days before a local canine finds the body and the place is swarming with cops and a parade of unsavory characters.

From there, the 1947 novel is less a police procedural--in fact, the cops don't make much more than perfunctory appearances--and more an exploration of how the unfolding crime and Lucia's increasing involvement with various criminals--the blackmailer has buddies--brings domestic tensions roiling within Lucia to a head.

Lucia's children, the brash 15-year-old David, and Bee, a self-willed 19-year-old, are disappointments to her, though she internalizes that disappointment.

She had always been faintly disappointed in herself, disappointed in school because she had not been remarkable, disappointed when she married because she had not become the perfect housekeeper, in herself as a mother. Whenever she visited her children's school she felt singularly inept among the other mothers. Simply not real, she thought.

Lucia's self-disappointment is intensified when Bee blows up at her: "I want to know all kinds of people; I want to live out in the world. I'd just as soon be dead, as have a life like you." Lucia's pat response that she has everything worth having--presumably a husband, home and children--falls flat even to herself. There are many more speeches like this that underscore the generational tension and rifts between mother and children, and between Lucia's inner doubts about her life and the rather placid and conventional woman she seems.

Gradually Lucia's disappointments turn into resentments. A knock on her bedroom door pulling her away from a chance to lie down and think about the blackmailers precipitates a rebellious line of thought:

Someone would come and see her. Someone always came. There was always a knock on the door. Everyone had a right to come to her; that was what she was for, that was her function, her reason for being. There was never an hour that belonged to her.... People are idiots to talk about getting married and being your own mistress, so much more free than women with jobs.

While Lucia struggles with her doubts about her role as wife and mother, and Lucia is drawn ever deeper into efforts to keep the blackmailers at bay, forced to act and sometimes to lash out at the family she is trying to protect. She breaks a social engagement to take the train to New York to meet one of the crooks. Her children protest. She ignores them, thinking:

I'm not a child, or an idiot, I'm not a slave, either. I can go to New York whenever I think best, and I don't intend to be cross-examined by my own children. they ought to have confidence in me, and so should Father. Complete confidence. 

She is less confident than she seems. She still answers her daughter's announcements that she wants a career with conventional platitudes, but her answers are motivated more by her sense that no matter what women do, the are trapped by domesticity. Her frustrations at her role as a mother mount:

That word [mother] was like a wave, like a tide beating against her. Mother! Where have you been? What were you doing? Open your door when I knock. Answer when I ask. Be there, always, every moment, when I want you. It's inhuman.... They [her family] would give her love, protection, even a sort of homage, but in return for that she must be what they wanted and needed her to be.

As another body presents itself for disposal, and Lucia finds herself drawn to one of the blackmailers who seems to have feelings for her, her resentments at the family she is trying to protect reach a pitch. She remembers her son David's dog as it lay dying, and David constantly petting it, trying to derive reassurance from the fact that the dog would still wag its tail. As the criminal activity reaches its climax, Lucia begins to feel like the dog, that her family demands her reassuring presence even as she is experiencing the most excruciating tensions.

I don't think it will spoil the ending of the crime story to note that Lucia does not emerge from it a self-directed personality: "... all that had happened to her would be, must be, pushed down, out of sight, the details of daily living would come like falling leaves to cover it." Lucia, at nearly 40, has lived too long and her habits are too ingrained to change the way she lives. It is a devastating ending ... and a rather devastating indictment of conventional domesticity. There are even references to her living a doll's existence, recalling Henrik Ibsen's unhappy Nora.

Holding's plot, overall, isn't quite cogent; it seems to wander. But she is a great scene writer and keenly delineates Lucia's inner turmoil and outer appearance. The vignettes between Lucia and her family, Lucia and the neighbors, and, particularly, Lucia and the household's African American maid, Sybil, with whom she shares a strong bond that conventionality never allows to blossom into real friendship, are extremely well done.

***

Holding also wrote a shorter, more conventional thriller about a May-December marriage gone bad, "Lady Killer." One of the fun things about that read was the attention to fashion that help convey character and move plot points along.