"August Saturday"

Pregnant pauses

By my reckoning there are two notable things about this story. First, the number of named characters is startling and a bit intimidating. I read this story over the course of two nights in the fashion I often do, i.e. after a couple of drinks, lying in bed—and I had to start over twice to make sure I had the dramatis personae correct. Besides Grania, the protagonist, there are her husband Desmond, their friends Mavis and Martin Duddy, and other couples and friends from the tennis club, among them: Francie, Helen, Trish, Billy MacGuinness and Una Carty-Carroll and Mary Ann Haddon, and the Quiltys, and so on. The setup of the story is at the bar of the Tara Hotel where the tennis club meets for dinner, and Grania runs into an unnamed man she met 16 years ago. We remain sufficiently stranded in Grania’s defensive POV to not entirely learn who the nameless man is: instead we simply feel her fear and insecurity as she goes through the motions with the huge cast of characters that constitute her social environment. Over the course of 15 pages, we learn that Grania had sex with this unnamed man 16 years ago, siring her daughter Judith, an arguable necessity from Grania’s perspective given Desmond’s sterility. The nameless man has returned for the funeral of an elderly relative, whose house he may inherit and inhabit—a prospect that understandably makes Grania uneasy and makes for the story’s tension.

Reading this story, my mind went back to another former professor of mine, an otherwise fairly bad teacher who offered one golden dictum that has remained with me for two decades: think of your stories as independent films in which you have to pay the named actors union scale. If someone warrants named status in a story, they should have to perform in some way in the story, in order to earn their money. Most of the named characters here are passive or even effectively off-screen—they appear in Grania’s perception of the room, but do not speak or impinge upon the proceedings. The only real actors in this drama are Grania, her husband Desmond, Martin Duddy and Mavis, and the nameless man—everyone else is essentially a walk-on.

On the other hand, the profligacy of names has a perhaps strategic effect in the story, especially paired with the nameless man’s namelessness. The overpopulation of Grania’s social life underscores her vulnerability to this man’s sudden presence. And his lack of a name ironically underscores his importance to Grania’s life as the true father of her child, a piece of information somewhat ploddingly revealed over the course of the story.

Here is the second notable thing about this story: I find pregnancy to be an almost uniquely irritating dramatic device in fiction, an aversion I only fully realized as I read “August Saturday.” Why does this bother me? Pregnancy is, of course, one of the most dramatic events in real life, and perhaps that’s part of the issue for me. It is always at hand for authors to use as a foolproof means of creating stakes and tension—or for that matter, creating a deus ex machina that resolves the tension/situation. The Age of Innocence—one of, say, eight perfect novels ever written—is one of the few examples of pregnancy-as-plot-point that I will give a pass to, simply because the rest of the novel is so perfect, and there’s really nowhere else for it to go. In fairness, “August Saturday” probably also deserves a pass since the story is, from the get-go, is really only about the fact of Grania’s daughter’s conception—it is not a plot point tacked on halfway through for lack of other dramatic options. Nonetheless, I generally am not a fan of pregnancy stories, though this is certainly a me problem and not a William Trevor problem.

At any rate, as seems true for these later Trevor tales, despite the inherent drama of the setup, the story ends as mutely as possible. Over a cup of tea in her kitchen following the dinner, Grania remembers the night of her daughter’s conception, and the narrative summarily tells us “she was incapable of regret.” I think the ending works well, at once summarily answering the story’s dramatic question while creating ample ironic space for interpretation. Is she really incapable of regret? That incapacity will be tested, one imagines, if the nameless man moves to her small town, and if she is reminded on a regular basis of her life’s fundamental deceit.