Word: stan
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...fills out into a husky, milkmaidenly beauty. After the day's chores are done, neither Amy nor Stan have much time for romantic frills, but they love each other with an honest animal urgency...
...Stan is a handsome stripling and Amy Victoria Fibbens a skinny teen-ager when they get married at the turn of the century in the rickety church at Yuruga, a town where "a person could be dead an only the flies would cotton on." Stan takes his bride to a shack deep in untracked wilderness, where the awesome stillness has not been violated since the last glacier crunched to a halt. Stan fells the giant trees, pries grudging boulders out of the earth, builds up his own herd of cattle...
Against the fledgling civilization and piddling defenses of the pioneering settlers, Nature mounts her devastating counteroffensives. Droughts, fires and floods rage across the land. Stan knows what he is struggling against, but wonders at times what he is struggling for, and if there is a God, and if He cares-and hopes to find the answers in the son and daughter that his wife bears...
...grows up to be a spiv and live with a prostitute. Thelma grows up to marry an aging lawyer and develop arty airs at musicales. Stan's bitter cup is not full, however, until Amy. in a climacteric crisis, commits adultery with a red-haired traveling salesman. A tongue-tied Lear, Stan buries his sorrow in a drunken, big-city binge, winds up lying among empty crates in a side-street lot and spits at the "paper sky, quite flat, and white, and Godless...
With Marked Cards. Stan goes back to Amy, and they measure out their old age in rocking chairs and the stale tea of memory. Author White's notion that destiny plays with marked cards is scarcely fresh, but Stan and even Amy play the losing game with stubborn dignity, unlike their children. Author White is overfond of the eye-stopping metaphor ("She was brushed in sad gusts by the branches of the music"), but at his best, he makes long-suffering Stan at least as poignant as Markham's Man with the Hoe. Stan's mute wisdom...