Old times there are not forgotten

Author: By Jessica Treadway

Date: SUNDAY, May 31, 1998

Page: N3

Section: Books

We meet Emma Garnet Tate in the kitchen of her family's Virginia plantation on ``slaughter day,'' 1842. The day is named for the autumn butchering, but in this year it takes on an added significance when Emma's father stabs to death a black field hand with his hog-killing knife. Though her father insists he did not mean to do it, Emma -- like everyone else aquainted with the cruel and cold-blooded Samuel Tate -- believes she knows better. ``Even then, at 12,'' she tells us, ``I knew that my father was a liar.''

Not to mention a raging brute who tyrannizes his household and makes sure his young sons have a front-row view when a crowd gathers in the town square to witness a public hanging. The execution is prelude to the traveling circus, which promises to feature a Negro frying pancakes in a hat. ``This yoking of death and life,'' Emma observes, ``the hanging followed by pancakes fried in a hat, was my first lesson in the absurd. If we could not sometimes escape from horror into the realm of the bizarre, we would drown.''

Emma escapes the horror of her father by marrying Dr. Quincy Lowell, a member of the Boston Lowell family (poet Amy is a cousin) and moving to Raleigh, N.C., taking along her family's most faithful and long-term servant, Clarice. Emma gives birth to three daughters in three years and settles into ``a joyful life'' until word comes of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, and Quincy takes charge of the local military hospital. By the time the casualties arrive from Bethel and Manassas, Emma has joined Quincy on the wards, where by necessity she becomes almost as skilled as her husband in supplying the inadequate medical care of the time.

Eventually, of course, the war takes its toll, on the living as well as the dead. Driven from his plantation by Union soldiers, Emma's father comes to live with her, and all the animosity of their earlier relationship is magnified by the bitterness accumulated over time. He scares her children, who know him as ``the bastard,'' and smacks Quincy with his cane. When Emma insists that he address the servants by their proper names rather than with racial epithets, he laughs in her face.

The 70-year-old Emma has a few confessions to make in her reminiscence, and the one involving the circumstances of her father's death seems to warrant more dramatic attention than Gibbons gives it. But it comes near the end of the novel, when the narrative feels slightly rushed, more summary than scene. It would be one thing if this feature were built into the voice -- if Emma, intuiting the approach of her own death, had to hurry in order to finish the telling in time. Instead, it feels more like the author trying to tie things up quickly, without giving the story as much space as it needs.

The character of Emma is an intriguing and admirable one, and Gibbons gives her full weight in depicting the daughter, mother, sister, wife, and nurse whose soul we inhabit on what is perhaps her ``last afternoon.'' We see her in her glory (the years spent raising her children before the war) and her guilt (an examination of her conscience's qualms about letting her servants work ``under the delusion of bondage,'' when they were actually free.)

To the novel's detriment, however, the other main characters are not presented in the same complexity. There is little to temper, let alone redeem, the depiction of Emma's father as a consistently heartless man. Even when Clarice tells Emma a story about ``why your father was who he was,'' it's too little, too late for us to feel any sympathy. At the other end of humanity's spectrum is Emma's husband. Saint, martyr, and ideal soulmate, Quincy is as perfect a man as any woman ever imagined -- which only reinforces the suspicion that only in the imagination does such a person exist.

Of course, it could be argued that because we see these characters through Emma's descriptions of them, our impressions suffer her biases. (This may be particularly true in the case of Emma's beautiful, perpetually angelic daughters, who -- the attentive reader of acknowledgments will notice -- bear the names of the author's own children.) But readers like to judge a character for themselves, and this novel would be more powerful if we felt even the slightest conflict in our own hearts about the men's virtues and vices, their talents and flaws.

These observations aside, there are good reasons to read ``On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon'' -- among them, the way Gibbons manages to capture the disturbing but vivid sensory images of wartime away from the front (the sound of coffins being nailed hastily together, or the taste of stray blood -- ``like an overripe port.'') And of course, there is Emma Garnet Tate Lowell herself. As she finishes her story, quoting her husband's encouragement to ``Face it all dry-eyed. Say it,'' she is another gift from Kaye Gibbons to the literature celebrating strong women of every age and era.