Cover

NET OF JEWELS

BY ELLEN GILCHRIST

In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

The Annunciation

Victory Over Japan

Drunk With Love

Falling Through Space

The Anna Papers

Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle

I Cannot Get You Close Enough

Net of Jewels

NET OF JEWELS

A Novel by

ELLEN GILCHRIST

Dedication

For Hoyt Hughes Purvis

“Like a war between magicians it can last a long time, and even then the outcome may not be what it appears to be.”

Tom Robbins

NET OF JEWELS

Preface

My name is Rhoda Manning and I am a writer. I’m not a great writer like my cousin Anna Hand, but I’m not bad either. I make a living at it and that’s more than I can say for most writers. I want to get this straight at the outset, before we set up camp for three hundred and fifty-nine pages.

I meant this as a book of short stories and I started writing it that way. Then the stories started to bleed into each other and I decided to go on and let them bleed. I should have known when I decided to call a book Net of Jewels I was going to be in trouble. Well, I’m the one who did it, so let’s start with me.

I was cathected by a narcissist. That’s how shrinks put it and it means, my daddy is a vain and beautiful man who thinks of his children as extensions of his personality. Our entire lives were supposed to be lights to shine upon his stage. We were supposed to make him look good. We were supposed to be better than his brother’s children, smarter, faster, more accomplished. Then his mother would like us more than she liked them. And so on and so forth. You have to know that to understand this story, which is about my setting forth to break the bonds he tied me with. It took a very long time and almost destroyed a lot of innocent people along the way. In the end I got free, so it sort of has a happy ending. That’s what this country is about, isn’t it? Getting free. Freeing people from their pasts. Creating our own crazy dazzling lives.

This story is also about Charles William Waters, who was along for part of that journey and sparked or inspired me into telling about it. Charles William spent his whole life making things beautiful and building houses for people to live in that made them view the world in different ways. He liked cathedral ceilings and lots of glass and creeks running into living rooms and people playing Ravel on the record player and girls wearing handmade cotton underwear trimmed with lace. He lived and died for beauty and was scarce adjusted to the tomb when one who died for truth was lain in an adjoining room. That will be me.