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A hole where their hearts once were

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Special to The Times

Thomas and Margaret Talcott are paragons of American childhood: the 12-year-old boy, tough, resourceful and protective; his younger sister, open-hearted, pretty and just strong-willed enough to take the edge off her sweetness, like a squeeze of lemon. It is the depth of the Great Depression, in one of the small Vermont towns Mary McGarry Morris likes to write about. The siblings have spent weeks camping with their father near Black Pond, an idyllic summer holiday under other circumstances. But Henry Talcott has lost his house and land to the bank, and he has to drive all day looking for scarce butchering jobs on nearby farms. He shelters himself and his children in a tent in some woods owned by friends. His wife, the town beauty, Irene, has left them.

Although Thomas and Margaret are the main characters in “The Lost Mother,” Morris’ sixth book, the absent, mourned-for figure of Irene Talcott is central -- a hole burned in the heart of the novel. We never learn exactly why she left, only that Henry softens the blow for the children and himself by telling them that she has gone to Massachusetts for a factory job and that she’ll be back. Alternately angry and remote, he can hardly handle his own grief, let alone theirs. Lying to the children means he doesn’t need to comfort them, since ostensibly nothing terrible has happened.

Oh, but it has. A mother has gone. The children think of little else, clutching at fantasies of reunion whenever they’re in pain. Maybe sorrow over the loss of a baby a year earlier drove her away; maybe Thomas and Margaret did something wrong. When Thomas feels especially hopeless after the reality of the situation is made clear to him by reading one of his mother’s letters to her father, he strikes out at Margaret, savagely blaming her for their mother’s defection while holding a secret, corrosive fear that it is his fault.

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Any novel about children and loss risks sentimentality. Morris’ placement of these events in a small farming community and in a more “innocent” time, when little is heard of divorce or abandonment, exacerbates this risk. And Morris cuts ever closer to the kind of easy emotion that sinks good books. (For example, Thomas and Margaret allow themselves to believe their mother will come home for Thomas’ birthday. The candles are lighted, the song warbled, the cake cut. No mother.)

What saves “The Lost Mother” is Morris’ adroit characterization. No character is unshaded: not Henry or the poor children or the various women who rush in to take Irene’s place. And because of the characters’ complexity, seemingly trifling events become nuanced and portentous. When Margaret is given a kitten, this isn’t a Hallmark moment for the reader, but a Chekhovian one. The cherished kitten is like the gun that, having once appeared onstage, must be fired by the last act.

If this is a novel about irretrievable loss, it is also a meditation on motherhood. Substitute mothers abound. There is Henry’s cast-off fiancee, Gladys (on whose land they stay through the summer), a kind, sensible woman who has none of Irene’s feminine graces; Mrs. Farley, the well-to-do dairy farmer’s wife who offers Margaret a poisonous, smothering love; and Aunt Lena, Irene’s alcoholic sister, who provides the one moment of comedy when she chases Mrs. Farley drunkenly around her living room with a pair of haircutting shears, intent on providing service in exchange for the handouts she’s received. When Margaret and Thomas go north in search of their mother, we find more maternal stand-ins: Sister Mary Marion, the harsh nun of Catholic nightmares, and Sister Mary Christopher, an invalid (nearly blinded in an episode of child abuse) who is the first to confront Thomas, gently but meaningfully, about his growing violence.

None, of course, can match the watery, weak, selfish Irene, “the object of all yearning.” “In a loved one’s beauty,” Morris writes, “there is solace, comfort in its presence, and the hope -- no, the belief -- the certainty that possession of so fine an ornament might be sustenance enough.” Thomas and Margaret both find and do not find their lost mother, they both cling to and surrender their illusions. Later, in maturity, when they accompany Irene’s coffin down the church aisle, they still seek the love that was unfairly stripped from them: “Irony or not,” Thomas recalls, “we would take, as once before, the little we could of her presence, her body if not her soul.”

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Regina Marler is the editor of “Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex.”

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