Tillerman books, part 3 (Voigt, reread)

[cahn]

...why yes, I'm still working on posting stuff I started back in August. So. The rest of the Tillerman Cycle (I'm not reading Homecoming), and these form a set for vaguely-spoilery reasons (see Seventeen Against the Dealer).

The Runner (4/5): The book about the "older generation" (mostly the Tillermans' dead uncle, Bullet, as a high school kid). Here we actually get to meet Francis/Frankie Verricker, the Tillermans' father, who's pretty much absent in the rest of the cycle. In terms of the overarching family theme of the cycle, this is the book where we see a family that fails (but because Voigt is so good at drawing characters and families as realistically complicated, this family also succeeds in some small and surprising ways), as opposed to all the other books, where we see families that are struggling to make things work in different kinds of ways, and by-and-large succeeding. It's also clearly the big setup for Come a Stranger, and the big emotional payoff of that one.

Sons From Afar (4/5): I really like this one. James and Sammy decide they need to find out about their dad. And they find — and I love this — that there are no easy answers and no good answers, in the end, there's just you and the people you love and what you choose to make of that. I think I like it because I like James, a lot; I love how he's smart and conflicted and tries to fit in and sacrifices his integrity for that and then finds that there's an integrity of the mind that he can't sacrifice. I love how he's cowardly and courageous at the same time. I'd love to find out what happened to him as a grownup.

I like the idea of Sammy and James both as different sides of Grandfather Tillerman — that between them they have all the sides that caused him to fail, and to fail his family, and to be unhappy, but because their family works, those same traits help them instead of hurting them.

Seventeen Against the Dealer (3+/5): Ummmmm. Yeah. It's a depressing book (though ultimately uplifting) and the one where Dicey loses her way before finding it again. The interesting thing about this one is Cisco Kidd.

I'm afraid I'm a very unironic reader of books that I love (though hand me some obnoxious YA dystopia, and we'll talk), and it was completely lost on me until I was reading a review on the interwebs that Cisco Kidd is totally supposed to be Dicey's and her siblings' father. Francis -> Cisco, duhhhhh.

Whether he actually is their father is, I think, not at all clear (there is never anything that can be taken as proof, and in fact Voigt is very careful never to have the man meet James or Sammy, either of whom would have tried to figure it out), and I think that's part of the point — it doesn't matter, in some sense, whether he is, although the book is more poignant if you assume he is. But whether he is or not, he's a stand-in for this man.

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, I am so bad at syllable stress. But also vowels. Here's a recent example (of why phonics only gets you so far): pasty, the Cornish food. Is it pronounced like pastry, past, or pasta? I recently learned that my lifelong pronunciation with the vowel of pastry, which might I add is the correct vowel for "pasty-faced", was wrong, and it is, in American English at least, the vowel of "past". The OED tells me the British pronunciation is with the vowel of "pasta".

English abounds with examples like this. That's why starting with memorizing whole words works for so many kids.

The piano sticker experiment has been tried, funnily enough. That's exactly what one of my friends came up with, after I failed to make any progress any other way. It got me to the point where I could press the keys in the right order, but even after quite a bit of practicing, it was still very slow, and sounded nothing like music. Muscle memory would presumably speed it up, but I still don't think it would sound like music until you flashed lights at me (which is exactly what I was thinking when I wrote "you'd have to signal me visually").

At this point, yeah, it becomes indistinguishable from a form of gratuitous torture, and the experiment will probably not be tried in real life unless it's in the name of actual science that will benefit people who are not me. I have often thought how grateful I am that I live in a society where I'm not required to go through the convolutions necessary to connect things that don't naturally connect for me, the kind my dyslexic mother had to go through to write an impromptu essay (and she wasn't able to complete even a 2-year degree in community college). Music is optional, for which I am glad.

Oh. OH. I had totally missed that (same societal expectations blinding me here). WHOA. Does he ever say anything about fathers?
Not that I caught, but this passage, when they're exchanging names, is interesting.

“How’d you get a name like that?” he asked, without looking up from his work.

Dicey shrugged. She wasn’t about to say I got it from my father, or so I think, but I’m not sure because he took off years ago, so I never asked him.

She thinks she got it from her father, and it is the sort of name you'd expect from him (dice, gambling, etc.), but but Cisco, like other characters, seems to think it's an odd name in the above passage. And in Runner, he says, "She [Liza] even gave the kid her name, because I wasn’t at the hospital to stop her." He's referring to Tillerman, but it sounds to me like Liza picked the name Dicey. And then never explained it.

In Homecoming, Eunice's priest friend says,

"That’s an odd name, Dicey. What is your real name?”

“Dicey’s my name,” she said. “I don’t have another one.”

“You just don’t know it,” the priest assured her. Dicey didn’t argue. After all, maybe he was right.

What do you think?

Here's another thing Cisco says that's not precisely about fathers, but is about him and Liza, when he's quizzing Dicey about Jeff:

“Maybe I don’t want to get married,” Dicey suggested.

“I have trouble believing that. It’s always seemed to me, there has to be an awfully good reason for a man to do it, but a woman, I mean, she’s got everything to gain. Someone to support her, and be responsible, and owe her fidelity, take her out, keep her happy. She can have children.”

“You don’t need to be married to have children,” Dicey pointed out. She could have added, My parents weren’t, but she didn’t.

“I know that,” Cisco answered.

If you read this in the light of his relationship with Liza, we know Liza didn't want to get married (we have Ab's word on this), and we have Francis telling Bullet (in an account that is a pack of lies) that he did propose to Liza, who refused him.

“She won’t marry me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t much mind not being married. I told her I’d marry her, when she was pregnant. But not Liza. She even gave the kid her name, because I wasn’t at the hospital to stop her. Tillerman, like I had nothing to do with it. She wouldn’t have done that if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have let her, you can believe me. It’s not my fault— I told her I was willing. But not Liza. Just like her, too, stupid. If we were married they’d send her half my wages, more than half with a kid or two.”

I don't know how much of that to believe, but I do believe he wanted Dicey to have his last name. I doubt he'd have settled down (like he said, he doesn't much mind not being married, and I doubt a wedding ring would keep him from running off). But Ab seemed to think marriage might settle him down:

“Your momma stuck around here a long time just because she felt sorry for me. I was glad when she began seeing Francis. He was handsome and cheerful. I thought, maybe she’ll be happy, maybe she’ll steady him down. But do you know what I said to her, just before she left this house? She was twenty-one then and her father couldn’t stop her. I said—‘ We don’t want to hear anything from you until we hear that you’ve been married.’...She said, ‘I’ll never get married.’

And then there's this, a little further on in the discussion between Cisco and Dicey about marriage:

“Yeah, well, you’re old enough to be my grandfather,” Dicey reminded him.

For a minute, it looked as if Cisco was going to say something angry. Then he decided he would take it as a joke. “You’re telling me it’s none of my business,” Cisco said.

“Something like that.”

“I still say you ought to marry this boy. You’re not going to have all that many offers,” he warned her. One thing you could say about Cisco. He wasn’t exactly sweet-talking her.

“Have you ever been married?” she asked. He wasn’t the only one who could be nosy.

“No,” he said. But there was something in his voice, some difference, as if he might be lying, or as if he might wish he were married, or as if there were some sad story behind that simple no. She stared at his back, and wondered.

Maybe he did want to get married, maybe he'd still have run out...I don't think we can know. But it is interesting to think about.

Speaking of old enough to be her grandfather, apparently he almost is, judging by the chronology in Sons:

“He was years older than she was,” James announced. “Our father. Because I’ve been thinking, Mrs. Rottman said he was in third grade in 1938, which means he was about eight, which means he was born around 1930. He could have been nine, you see,” he explained at Sammy’s confused look. “It’s only a rough date, but Momma wasn’t born until 1942, so he was more than ten years older than she was.” “So what?” “It’s not normal, it’s— she’d have been awfully young for him, if you—”

Oh, ha, I was hunting for that passage, and I found this a couple pages before:

“Now I can see why Momma didn’t name me [James] after him [Francis].”

“She named me after her brother.”

“I don’t even know why my name is James,” James said.

Yep, Liza picking the names and not explaining them. I mean, we know she didn't talk about the name Samuel, and we know why, but wow, yeah. Do we know of any other James's? I can't think of any. Maybeth shares the "beth" with her mother Elizabeth, but that's all I've got for the other kids.

[cahn]

Agh, vowels! Yes, those too! Wait, that's not how you pronounce pasty? I've always pronounced it that way too. And my toddler has just started being interested in how letters sound and oh man, I feel so bad every time I try explaining to him that "T makes a t sound but A makes an aaaah or an ahhhh or an ae sound…" It would totally make sense for him to start with memorizing a bunch of words.

The piano sticker experiment has been tried, funnily enough. That's exactly what one of my friends came up with, after I failed to make any progress any other way. It got me to the point where I could press the keys in the right order, but even after quite a bit of practicing, it was still very slow, and sounded nothing like music.

Wait, ok, I'm glad this experiment was tried (although maybe you're not :) ) because this is really interesting to me that this didn't work. I would have thought that pressing a sequence of numbers would be quick, not slow, for someone who has technical skill — it might still not sound much like music, but I would have thought the failure mode would be more along the lines of doing it too quickly. So — at work I have to badge in by pressing a sequence of five numbers; these five numbers are the same every time, but they come up on the keypad in random order. Would this be difficult/slow for you? Would 10-15 numbers be difficult/slow for you? That is, I assume the problem is not remembering the sequence, given your excellent working memory, and given the stickers (or a keypad) the problem shouldn't be translating from one modality to another. Therefore, it seems to me the problem must either be the actual mapping (in which case I'd expect you to have trouble with both a piano and a randomized keypad) or the addition of sound confusing your brain (in which case I'd expect you to have trouble with the piano, but not the keypad).

…um, if you ever get tired of my performing thought experiments on you, feel *totally free* to ignore me :) (I expect that is fairly clear, but thought I'd verbalize it just in case.) I think you have just engaged my "I really want to understand how this works" buttons :)

He's referring to Tillerman, but it sounds to me like Liza picked the name Dicey. And then never explained it.

That… sounds rather plausible, and I have this whole story in my head now as to Liza knowing that Frank gambles, and naming Dicey after dice as some sort of, I don't know, talisman against it? But that's all in my head, I have no textual evidence besides what you've just presented (which I like).

“I know that,” Cisco answered.

Agh! Of course he knows, the jerk.

“She won’t marry me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t much mind not being married. I told her I’d marry her, when she was pregnant. But not Liza. She even gave the kid her name, because I wasn’t at the hospital to stop her. Tillerman, like I had nothing to do with it. She wouldn’t have done that if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have let her, you can believe me. It’s not my fault— I told her I was willing. But not Liza. Just like her, too, stupid. If we were married they’d send her half my wages, more than half with a kid or two.”

“Have you ever been married?” she asked. He wasn’t the only one who could be nosy. “No,” he said. But there was something in his voice, some difference, as if he might be lying, or as if he might wish he were married, or as if there were some sad story behind that simple no. She stared at his back, and wondered.

Yeah, right there the "No" is actually the truth, but he should have been married, so to speak. I agree, I don't think it would have stopped him from running off (though if his wages were garnished maybe it would have been easier for Liza), and maybe I'm being too nice to Frank to believe what he says to Bullet, but I actually am inclined to believe that he would have married her if she'd pushed the issue, given that he does in fact go back to her four times and gets them a house… his statements to Bullet that we can check, I think, mostly are lies in terms of degree (although I'm mostly thinking of the house here), not wholesale falsification like his lies to Honey — so I'd believe, for example, that he never actually told her he'd marry her (as he told Bullet) but that he would have been willing to if she'd pushed it.

I don't know of any other James in the books. I wonder where that name came from too.