Brookland: A Novel - Softcover

Barton, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312425805 ISBN 13: 9780312425807

Publisher: Picador, 2007

Synopsis

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
A Los Angeles Times Book Review Favorite Book of the Year

Since her girlhood, Prudence Winship has gazed across the tidal straits from her home in Brooklyn to the city of Manhattan and yearned to bridge the distance. Now, firmly established as the owner of an enormously successful gin distillery she inherited from her father, she can begin to realize her dream.

Set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn, this is the beautifully written story of a woman with a vision: a gargantuan construction of timber and masonry to span the East River. With the help of her sisters--high-spirited Tem and silent, uncanny Pearl--Prue fires the imaginations of the people of Brooklyn and New York by promising them easy passage between their two worlds.

Brookland confirms Emily Barton's reputation as one of the finest writers of her generation, whose work is "blessedly post-ironic, engaging and heartfelt" (Thomas Pynchon).

About this title

About the Author:

Emily Barton's fiction has appeared in Story, American Short Fiction, and Conjunctions. Her first novel, The Testament of Yves Gundron, called "blessedly post-ironic, engaging, and heartfelt" by Thomas Pynchon, won the Bard Fiction Prize and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the recipient of a 2006 artist's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

One
IHPETONGAAt the close of the workday on Thursday the twenty-fourth of January, 1822, Prue Winship sat down at the large desk in the countinghouse of Winship Daughters Gin to write a letter to her daughter, Recompense. The power train had been sprung free of the windmill for the night, and the machines of the distillery sat quiet, the embers of its great fires still smoldering. Prue could hear the low horn of the steam ferry as it approached the Brooklyn landing. Her sister, Tem, with whom she ran the distillery, had retired an hour since to the Liberty Tavern, and had said she’d be home for supper; their overseer, Isaiah Horsfield, had gone home to his family. He’d left a stack of papers on his section of the desk, and would no doubt see to them first thing in the morning.
Prue’s husband and fourteen-year-old son awaited her return, but she did not wish to put off writing the letter another day. In honor of Prue’s fiftieth birthday, her daughter had sent her a lavish gift: a magnificent paisley shawl Recompense’s father-in-law had brought back from a journey to Kashmir. Prue had opened the packet the evening before, and had delighted in the shawl’s softness and its jewel-like shades of blue and green. When she’d wrapped it around herself in the kitchen, her son, Matty, had clapped in admiration and proclaimed her “the very queen of the Gypsies.” Tem had shaken her head.
Prue might have dispatched her thanks in a quick note, had Recompense not enclosed a letter with the parcel. After wishing her mother a happy birthday, she had written the good news that she was with child. Should no ill befall her, she expected to deliver in the autumn. In light of this disclosure, and of the obvious adulthood it bestowed on its bestower, Recompense asked her mother to tell her about the bridgeworks, which she knew had caused her parents both happiness and misfortune, but about whose history she knew little. Recompense had never, until that moment, gathered herself to ask either of her parents about that chapter in their lives. The distillery had consumed most of her mother’s time and energy, and Recompense had always feared importuning her with questions that might spoil her for business. As for Recompense’s father, he was too good-natured and self-effacing to be much of a storyteller, and she found it difficult to cast him in her imagination as an actor in any sort of drama. Yet she wished to know the story of the bridge, if her mother had the time and inclination to entrust it to her.
Prue was discomfited by the request. She had always loved her daughter, but had given most of her adult life to keeping Winship Daughters Gin solvent enough to repay the high cost of insurance and her own significant debts. The distillery was the legacy her father had bequeathed her, and she had slaved to make it profitable enough to pass on to her own son and daughter. The children themselves had been, she admitted now, of secondary importance. And after placid Recompense had declined a third time to be trained in the family business, Prue had felt herself powerfully betrayed, and had wondered, with a flash of a coldheartedness she had not experienced in some time, if she would ever again have use for such a daughter. Jonas Sutler, the son of a man in the whaling trade at Hudson, had come soon after to ask for Recompense’s hand; and as her husband had given his warm consent, Prue had sat wondering why anyone would want such an unadventurous creature and why she herself was too hard-hearted to feel any of the emotions appropriate to the occasion. Yet when the August wedding day had arrived, Prue had felt a terrible, wrenching ache at the thought of her daughter leaving. She’d wished she could say she had never known such an ache before, but its pain had been so poignant because of its familiarity. It had reminded her in an instant of every loss she had ever suffered; and as Mr. and Mrs. Jonas Sutler had departed for their wedding tour of the Upper Hudson, Prue had stood on the landing of the New Ferry and wept into her husband’s coat.
Prue had struck up the correspondence to ease the intolerable pain of having a little-valued daughter vanish from sight. She herself had once passed the town of Hudson by boat, but not knowing she would ever wish to envision the particulars of its streets, she had committed nothing but its vaguest outline to memory. Now she peppered her daughter with questions, and learned the Sutlers had a tall house bounded by a fence, with a garden that continued to produce cabbage and chrysanthemums well into October. The household employed three Irish servants. Jonas had grown up in educated society, and the wives and sisters of his cousins and childhood friends were lively conversationalists, zealots for good books, the manumission of the few remaining local slaves, and politics. Yet for all this, Recompense confessed to missing Brooklyn, with its old Dutch houses scattered across the landscape despite a newly laid grid of regular streets. She was homesick; in addition to which she was spending the longest evenings of the year propped up on a sofa and trying to keep down salt biscuits and tea. Prue realized it was only natural her daughter should seek out the missing pieces of her family history. And though she herself had taken pains to conceal the story of the bridgeworks all this time—one evasion leading to the next until at last she had lost sight of the original reason for her reticence—her love for her far-off daughter, and her compunction at having ignored her before she’d moved away, made Prue believe she could change her course. It was thus that on the first full day of the sixth decade of her life, Prue Winship thanked her daughter for the beautiful shawl, expressed her delight at the prospect of a grandchild, and commenced in a roundabout way telling the story Recompense wished to hear. The correspondence would hold them both in its thrall the remainder of that winter and spring.
“There is much to tell you,” she wrote,
though of course if you were here I would brush off your questions and return to my gin as ever I have done. But distance changes much;—I have missed you with a pain very like that of yearning for the dead since you’ve been gone. And you were a decade since old enough to hear the whole of it. I would like to think only my busyness in the distillery has kept me from relating it, but this is not so. My silence on this matter has been partly due to bad character; which I hope at this late date I can emend.
You ask for the story of the bridgeworks, but if I am to give you not only the history of that matter but its justifications, I must begin by relating a metaphysickal crime I long ago committed against my sister Pearl. I laid a curse upon her when I was still a child. Perhaps you will think it peculiar of me to recall such a fancy now; but that tale itself unfolds from my twin obsessions, with Mannahata & with Death; and all three must stand in some wise as the founders of the bridge. To relate the story properly, dear one, I shall begin there.
I was born in January of 1772 and Pearl in July of 1778, which gave me six and one half years to grow accustomed to being my parents’ only child. This was more time than you had before Matty came along, but you must surely know what a long span it seemed. My parents, Matthias and Roxana Winship, were an odd lot. As I may not have hitherto told you, my father had escaped the seminary at Cambridge to jump on the Eliza Dymphna in Boston Harbour, and he set sail for the West Indies, slaves, and rum. To the chagrin of his father, a dissenting minister, Matty Winship,—your grandfather, that is,—realized what the colonies lacked was good, native-brewed strong drink, produced on a large scale; so he took his next passage to England & there apprenticed himself to a rectifier of distilled spirits. Eight years later he returned with a receipt for an excellent and most alcoholick geneva, and with my sharp-tongued mother, Roxana Parker (also a refugee from dissenting parents), in tow. They settled here in Brookland, where stood a derelict windmill, as old Mr. Joralemon had tried his inexpert hand at distilling once before, only to burn his operation to the ground. Here on the East River, Father reason’d, would also be easy shipping for the forthcoming gin. Father had no license to distill liquor,—none was granted at that era, as the Crown’s policy was to keep the colonies dependent on the mother country for finished goods,—but he resolved from the start to pay the inspectors handsomely; & there was no man among them so loyal he could not be tempted by a small gift of money and a monthly allotment of good gin. This, of course, until the colonies engaged in open rebellion, at which time the manufacture of goods in defiance of royal decree became an act both lucrative and patriotickal.
Because he’d not been born to the business of distilling, in those first years my father often asked my mother’s advice on the savour of the finished product (this though she knew little about gin, though she did have her fair measure of sense); as a result of which, in my early childhood I was largely left to do as I pleased, so long as I kept within the bounds of our stone fence. I was forbidden to wander the distillery lest my hand be smashed in the herb press, and forbidden to run out in the road lest, Mother told me, some officer with wrist frills try to offer me a pear. I had only a hazy notion what the war meant beyond the movement of troops, the building & toppling of forts, and the occasional fusillade of artillery fire, which sent the slaves & housewives running to gather the children indoors and left me quaking with fear for my Daddy, who would not leave the distillery to come up the hill and check on us until the gunfire had subsided. I saw men both in uniform and ordinary cloaths limping about town with bandages on & leaning on crutches; and there was a sad autumnal funeral in which the children of the Sands f...

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0312425805
• ISBN 13: 9780312425807
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496