Word: isabell
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have any doubt that Townley is a small piece of the puzzle," said Letelier's widow Isabel. He is a piece to which many other pieces may yet be fitted...
Things are a little out of the ordinary at 50-12 Dover Road, Queens. For eleven years, Isabel Moore has been nursing her widowed father through a series of debilitating strokes. The first occurred when she was 19, and she has done the dirty, exhausting job all by herself. She is aware that almost no one of her generation would make the choice that she did, but she likes the "balletic routine" of caring for an invalid. There had been an ugly, whining housekeeper named Margaret Casey, but Isabel loathed her and summoned the force to throw...
...Isabel skips eagerly out of her eleven-year retirement. Helped by two old Dover Road pals who have since quit the neighborhood, she soon has smart clothes and a social service job in upstate New York. She sells the house, moves, and falls lyrically in love with a married...
Then everything turns inside out. She realizes that what interests people most about her is her bizarre and medieval past. The do-gooder work helps no one. Her lover's wife confronts her, screaming, "You're a good person." Isabel flees her whole new world. There will be another job and another man for her, but before that she must go back to Margaret Casey. It was not the old woman's spiteful tongue, her sloth, her mawkish novenas or her copies of the Sacred Heart Messenger that Isabel hated. It was that her father loved Margaret...
...Final Payments is a lower-class Death of the Heart, in its controlled structure and in the daring with which both writers force collisions of conscience and will. But perhaps the most heartening aspect of the new book is one that is almost incidental to it, the passages about Isabel and the two women friends who help her. The moments of warmth and the strains that gradually heal are written with openness and unselfconsciousness. It is as if the painfully aggressive voices of the past decade had finally been heard, understood and absorbed...