Terms of Endearment Read online

  Praise for Larry McMurtry

  “Larry McMurtry is the most entertaining novelist in America.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “He is precise and lyrical, ironic and sad…. There aren’t many writers around who are as much fun to read as Larry McMurtry.”

  —The Boston Globe

  ‘What an imagination he has! When it comes to spinning a good yarn, few do it better.”

  —The Houston Post

  “McMurtry is an alchemist who converts the basest materials to gold.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “McMurtry displays [a] large-souled empathy and Dickensian gift for bringing people to vibrant life as quickly as anyone writing today.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Larry McMurtry grabs his readers in the first paragraph of narrative and continues his hold on them to even beyond the last one.”

  —Newport News Daily Press

  By Larry McMurtry

  Oh What a Slaughter

  The Colonel and Little Missie

  Loop Group

  Folly and Glory

  By Sorrow’s River

  The Wandering Hill

  Sin Killer

  Sacajawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West

  Paradise

  Boone’s Lick

  Roads

  Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories

  Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

  Duane’s Depressed

  Crazy Horse

  Comanche Moon

  Dead Man’s Walk

  The Late Child

  Streets of Laredo

  The Evening Star

  Buffalo Girls

  Some Can Whistle

  Anything for Billy

  Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

  Texasville

  Lonesome Dove

  The Desert Rose

  Cadillac Jack

  Somebody’s Darling

  Terms of Endearment

  All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

  Moving On

  The Last Picture Show

  In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

  Leaving Cheyenne

  Horseman, Pass By

  By Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  Zeke and Ned

  A NOVEL BY

  Larry McMurtry

  TERMS OF ENDEARMENT

  With a New Preface

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1975, 1989 by Larry McMurtry

  Copyright © 1983 by Paramount Pictures Corporation.

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales:

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  Designed by Irving Perkins Associates

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Simon & Schuster/Touchstone edition as follows:

  McMurtry, Larry.

  Terms of endearment / by Larry McMurtry; with a new preface.

  —1st Touchstone ed.

  p. cm.—(A Touchstone book)

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A319T4 1989

  813’.54—dcl9 88-36755

  CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85390-1 (Pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-684-85390-6 (Pbk)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-439-12846-6

  A portion of this book has appeared in Playboy magazine.

  FOR

  CECILIA DEGOLYER MCGHEE,

  MARCIA MCGHEE CARTER,

  AND

  CECILIA DEGOLYER CARTER

  Thou art thy mothers glass, and she in thee

  Calls back the lovely Aprill of her prime;

  So thou through windowes of thine age shalt see,

  Dispight of wrinkles, this thy goulden time….

  —SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet III

  PREFACE

  I think of Terms of Endearment as my most European novel, perhaps for no better reason than that I was in Europe when I wrote it. Writing it was a mechanical, rather than a creative, struggle: the first half of the book was written on an Italian typewriter, the second half on a Swiss; on neither machine were the letters where my fingers were accustomed to finding them.

  The Italian keyboard seemed particularly perverse, the z being where I was used to finding an a (or was it another major vowel?). I imagine the first draft manuscript of Terms probably has more zs to the page than any manuscript of comparable length in the English language.

  Adding to my conviction that Terms of Endearment must be somehow European is the fact that I had just spent a couple of years rereading several nineteenth-century novelists—Balzac, Tolstoy, and George Eliot, in particular. All three, of course, had taken a very searching look at the fibers and textures of life; I doubt that I aspired to such profound achievement, but I did hope to search at least a little less superficially among the flea market of details which constitute human existence.

  It was in this book that I first indulged my penchant—since, perhaps overindulged, some think—for lifting a minor character from one book and giving him or her (usually her) a book of his (or her) own.

  In this case the person thus lifted was Aurora Greenway, a widow of a certain age, lively, imperious, demanding, unwilling to give up. Aurora—she’s Emma Horton’s mother—appears twice in Moving On, but the trait which called her back to me was her habit of parking her Cadillac two yards from the curb, so as to avoid scraping her tires.

  I suppose at the time I was hoping that Aurora, nothing if not impetuous, would plunge into a moral dilemma worthy of Anna Karenina or Dorothea Brooke, but no such dilemma arose. Aurora was, after all, operating in Houston, a town where anything goes. I tried to give her access to a New England conscience by having her born in New Haven, but the New England conscience didn’t really function as a New England conscience should, and no great moral crisis presented itself. Aurora merely had to choose between a number of grossly inadequate suitors, which, eventually, she did.

  A dilemma does turn up in the book, but it belongs to Emma, the plain, rather unprepossessing daughter, rather than to the vivid mother. And then its merely the dilemma common to thousands of domesticities: a sensitive but not greatly gifted young woman finds herself stuck with a boring, mainly inadequate husband who is nonetheless a pretty good father to their children. Emma might with luck find a better husband than Flap, but can she realistically expect to better him as a father? Is anyone apt to love the kids as much as he does?

  Aurora, not to her credit, is neither surprised nor sorry that her daughter has such a problem: she had predicted it to begin with, and is never sorry to be proven right.

  Mother and daughter make their choices, Aurora to take a cranky old general as a lover, Emma to keep her family intact. In the end the selfish mother outlives the unselfish daughter, but not because she is either more, or less, moral: she just had the good fortune not to get cancer.

  I enjoyed the social comedy of Aurora and her sui
tors and I fell in love myself with her wonderful maid, Rosie, not merely because Rosie is an admirable human being but because having her allowed me to set a few chapters in Houston’s Fifth Ward. I also liked balancing my upstairs-downstairs elements, and had some fun with Vernon, the lonely, virginal oil millionaire.

  And yet as I inched through the story, in Rome and Vevey, creating a blizzard of typos, I felt an impatience. I wanted to get Aurora’s story behind me, so I could conclude my decade-long involvement with Emma Horton.

  Through three very different books (Moving On, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, Terms of Endearment) Emma kept growing on me. If she was Danny Deck’s vision of the normal and the good, so was she mine. Though often praised for my insights into women, I’m still far from sure that I know what women are like; but if my hunches are anywhere near accurate, and if I’m not idealizing her, then Emma is what women are at their best.

  As Terms of Endearment, and with it my Houston trilogy, moved toward its end, I began to sense the emptiness that would seize me when it did end, when Emma and her circle were gone from my life. They had, after all, been my companions for more than a decade.

  Then she died, and the emptiness did seize me, and with it came a cool distaste for my own writing that didn’t subside for ten years, not until the morning when Harmony went driving home at sunrise in The Desert Rose.

  Delighted as I was to meet Harmony—she had a fine buoyant spirit and did much to reconcile me to my own writing again—I don’t believe she is Emma’s equal. Emma saw life clearly, Harmony rarely had that problem. Harmony survived a muddle, even a degrading muddle, but Emma survived her own clear knowledge, and that’s a harder thing.

  —Larry McMurtry 1989

  BOOK I

  Emma’s Mother

  1962

  CHAPTER I

  1.

  “THE SUCCESS of a marriage invariably depends on the woman,” Mrs. Greenway said.

  “It does not,” Emma said, not looking up. She was sitting in the middle of her living-room floor sorting a large pile of laundry.

  “It most certainly does,” Mrs. Greenway said, assuming a stern expression. She tightened her lips and narrowed her brows. Emma was letting herself go again—a breach of standards—and she had always endeavored to meet any breach of standards with a stern expression, if only briefly.

  Sternness, she knew, did not become her—at least it didn’t entirely become her—and Aurora Greenway, as she herself knew quite well, was not one to do the unbecoming—not unless it was a matter of strictest duty. Yet strange as it sometimes seemed—to both of them—Emma was her daughter, and her behavior was a matter of strictest duty.

  Aurora’s face was more plump than not, and despite forty-nine years that seemed to her to have consisted largely of irritations and disappointments, she still almost always managed to look pleased with herself. The facial muscles necessary to a display of true sternness were called into play so seldom that they were somewhat reluctant to stir, but nonetheless, when the need arose, she could be for short periods extremely stern. Her forehead was high, her cheekbones strong, and her blue eyes—usually so dreamy and, Emma would have thought, vacantly complacent—were capable of sudden angry fires.

  In this case, she felt that only a little narrowing of the brows would be necessary.

  “I don’t believe there’s a decent garment in that whole pile of laundry,” she said, with her own light and slightly arrogant contempt.

  “You’re right, there isn’t,” Emma said. “It’s a crappy bunch of clothes. However, they do cover our nakedness.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t mention nakedness to me, I’m not concerned with it right now,” Aurora said. Her brows were getting tired of being wrinkled, and her mouth of being tight, so she relaxed, conscious of having done a mother’s duty. It was unfortunate that her daughter had been too stubborn to look up and notice, but then that was Emma. She had never been duly attentive.

  “Why can’t I mention nakedness?” Emma asked, looking up. Her mother dipped two fingers into what was left of a glass of iced tea, extracted what was left of an ice cube, and sucked on it while she watched her daughter work. Making Emma feel guilty had never been easy, but it was the one maternal task left to her, and Aurora attacked it with relish.

  “You have a fine vocabulary, dear,” she said, once the ice cube was gone. “I personally have seen to that. There are certainly better ways to use it than the discussion of naked bodies. Also, as you know, I’ve been a widow for three years and I don’t wish certain things called to my attention.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Emma said. Her mother calmly extracted another ice cube. She was, as she would have put it, recumbent, lying at ease on Emma’s ancient blue couch. She was dressed in a loose elegant pink lounging robe that she had picked up on a recent trip to Italy, and she looked, as usual, faintly bemused and smugly happy—happier, Emma thought, than either she or anyone else had a right to be.

  “Emma, you really should diet,” Aurora said. “You’re such an unyielding person, dear. I want you to know that I’m raather vexed.”

  “Why?” Emma said, poking in the clothes pile. As usual, several socks had failed to mate.

  “Raather vexed,” Aurora repeated, on the chance that there was something wrong with her daughter’s ears. She had put the full weight of Boston behind her “raather,” and was not disposed to have it ignored. Emma, who possessed—among other unladylike qualities—an annoying interest in precision, would have insisted that it was only the full weight of New Haven, but quibbles of that sort cut no ice with Aurora. Boston was hers to employ, and the full weight of it was meant to strike thunder. Had they been in Boston, or perhaps even New Haven—any place where life could be kept in hand—no doubt it would have; but the two of them, mother and daughter, were in Emma’s hot, muggy oversmall living room in Houston, Texas, where the full weight of Boston seemed to strike nothing at all. Emma went on distractedly counting socks.

  “You’re letting yourself go again,” Aurora said. “You’re not taking pains with your appearance. Why won’t you diet?”

  “Eating makes me less frustrated,” Emma said. “Why won’t you stop buying clothes? You’re the only person I know who has seventy-five of everything.”

  “The women of our family have always prided themselves on their dress,” Aurora said. “All except you, at least. I am not a seamstress. I do not propose to sew.”

  “I know you don’t,” Emma said. She herself was wearing jeans and one of her husband’s T-shirts.

  “That garment you have on top of you is so disgusting I scarcely know how to refer to it,” Aurora said. “It belongs on a pickaninny, not on a daughter of mine. Of course I buy clothes. The selection of a tasteful wardrobe is a duty, not a pastime.”

  With that, Aurora lifted her chin. When justifying herself to her daughter she often liked to assume a touch of majesty. Emma was seldom impressed, and the look on her face at that moment smacked of defiance.

  “Seventy-five tasteful wardrobes is a pastime,” Emma said. “I reserve judgment about the tasteful part too. Anyway, what happened about your female problem?”

  “Stop it! Don’t talk about it!” Aurora said. In her indignation she not only sat up but attempted an outraged flounce, causing the old couch to creak loudly. It was not merely the moral weight of Boston that she embodied.

  “All right!” Emma said. “Good God! You told me you were going to the doctor. I just asked. You don’t have to break the couch.”

  “You needn’t have mentioned it,” Aurora said, genuinely upset. Her lower lip was trembling. She was not ordinarily a prudish woman, but lately all mention of sex upset her; it made her feel that her whole life was wrong, and she didn’t like to feel that way.

  “You’re absolutely ridiculous,” Emma said. “Why do you have to be so touchy? Shall we correspond about it?”

  “I am not ill, if you must know,” Aurora said. “Not ill in the least.” She held out her
glass. “However, I should like some more iced tea.”

  Emma sighed, took the glass, got up, and left the room. Aurora lay back down, almost depressed. She had her strong days and her weak days, and she had begun to feel a weak day coming on. Emma had not anticipated her wants in any way—why were children so incapable of keeping their minds on parents? She was in the mood for a fit of despond, but her daughter, determined to thwart her at every turn, came back immediately with a glass of iced tea. She had stuck a sprig of mint in the glass and, perhaps as a gesture of contrition, had brought a little dish of sassafras candy—one of the several candies that her mother particularly enjoyed.

  “That’s sweet,” Aurora said, taking a piece.

  Emma smiled. Her mother, she knew, had been about to go into a fit—a lonely-widow, unappreciated-mother fit. The candy had been a brilliant stroke. The week before she had squandered a whole dollar and sixty-eight cents on a variety of it, all of which she had hidden and about half of which she had already eaten herself. Flap, her husband, would not have looked kindly on such an expenditure. He professed strict ideas about tooth decay but would undoubtedly just have spent the money on his own vices, which were beer and paperbacks. Emma was devil-may-care when it came to teeth, and liked to have candy around to stave off fits—her mother’s or her own.

  Aurora, her little sinking spell conquered, had already drifted back into happy indolence and was gazing around the living room, hoping to find something new to criticize.

  “The reason I brought up the doctor was because I went yesterday myself,” Emma said, settling herself on the floor again. “Maybe I’ve got some good news.”

  “I hope he’s persuaded you to diet,” Aurora said. “No one should be so intractable as to reject the advice of their physician. Dr. Ratchford has had long years of experience and except where I am concerned it’s been my observation that his advice is invariably good. The sooner you start to diet the happier person you’ll be.”

  “Why do you always make an exception of yourself?” Emma asked.

  “Because I know myself best,” Aurora said serenely. “I certainly wouldn’t allow a physician to know me this well.”