Review: But Now Am Found by Patricia Horvath

But Now Am Found by Patricia Horvath
Black Lawrence Press, 2023; 163 pp., $21.95

At sunrise, a single mother awakens to find that her daughter never came home the night before. She busies herself with a crossword, replaying arguments about curfew alternating with moments of grace. But when two men in trench coats pull up in her driveway, she knows it can only be “grief on the other side of the door, banging, insistent, and what was another word for that?”

This opening salvo sends forth the twin tendrils of hazard and bereavement that wind through the collection. Many of the girls and young women in these stories are endangered by men: their own absent and neglectful fathers, their mothers’ new boyfriends, their predatory teachers, or strangers. In “Never Let Go,” a girl visits Radio City Music Hall on a “date” with her future stepfather; the unease of this situation creeps closer in “Bonita,” where a male teacher drops inappropriate notes on a girl’s lunch tray. “In My Solitude” features a teenage girl shuttled back and forth on the train between divorced parents. “All week long,” she says, “I looked forward to that magic hour when I was suspended between worlds, no one to claim me.” But the father, after an impromptu (and cruel) success at the microphone in the hotel bar, interrupts his date just long enough to deposit his daughter alone at Grand Central Station at night, just as her train is departing.

The title story cuts across this dynamic. In “But Now Am Found,” a brilliant young girl wears a back brace composed of “two bars attached to a molded corset, like a pair of metal suspenders.” This story, told in the voice of her perceptive boyfriend, features one of the few intact families in the collection: a father with “meaty hands” and a gumball-sized high school ring, and a mother whose face is “a crumpled bag, [her] blonde hair gone to rust.” These parents undercut their daughter’s burgeoning romance when they send her away for the summer to a rural grandmother and a backward bible camp. While she is there, the girl stops wearing her brace. “Here they do not believe in deformity,” she writes, “it being a mark of sin.” The boy visits his eye doctor while she is gone, and when his vision is blurred, he achieves true insight and empathy: no one in the picture she sent him from camp is wearing glasses, so presumably, he too is “deformed.” When the girl returns, she still isn’t wearing her brace, though without it, “her spine would twist, ribs shifting, pressing the life from her heart.” It seems that even these careful parents have allowed their daughter to be lost.

Like Miriam Toews, whose novel Women Talking concerns the mistreatment of women in an extreme sect, Horvath is clearly wary of indoctrination; like Toews, she also treats unsparingly of bereavement. There is a deep vein of grief in these stories, and it is here that we often discover the operation of grace. In “To the Stranger Who Brings Flowers,” which first appeared in Dappled Things, the recently widowed Olive undergoes chemotherapy. Olive prefers to avoid the more “malignant” of the two nurses at the clinic—until she observes her leaving a homemade birthday cake at her son’s grave. Only then can Olive see: “The nurse looked bad. Bone snap thin, scarecrow haired, some blueprint of a self.” In response, Olive starts leaving anonymous gifts at the boy’s grave. At the end of her treatment, she is rewarded with an unwonted act of kindness.

Horvath’s voice can be terse, almost clipped—it sometimes took me a few sentences to gain a foothold on point of view—but the writing, while spare, is intensely evocative. Take these lines, from “Bonita:”

After class girls huddle by the lockers. Giggling, gossiping, filing their nails, passing out gum to the circle. Girls in platforms, crepe-soled mules, rhinestone jeans, frosted eye shadow, clogs. Nice shoes, someone says. They all look at my brown Oxfords.

Elsewhere, Horvath draws us effortlessly into an urban scene. In “Luck Was a Taxi,” an interior designer walks home with her date after a dinner out. When a cat darts out in the dark, “he [puts] his arm around her, shielding her from her own imagination.” They reach her apartment, and she rebuffs his offer to come up, preferring to settle into her own eyrie. But she misidentifies the tree whose branches scratch her window, and he chides her for not being more observant.

She brought her tea to the living room, settled into the cushioned window seat. A small commotion below as the rain began, people scurrying for cover, arms above their heads, a quick unfurling of umbrellas, a man sheltering a woman, rain sweeping the sidewalk.

Something was clawing at her, some feeling she could not name. … She could fashion a space in which people saw not themselves but an ideal of themselves, an ideal crafted from texture and hue, the weave of a carpet, the glow of a lamp…details he’d failed to note. Her job depended on this, on seeing, no less than his.

Such perspicuity subtly critiques the man’s “faith in his own good fortune, a thing that, despite the show complaints, he could depend upon, believing he’d forged it himself.”

The difficulty with a collection of very fine stories like these is that each one is a concocted whole with its own defining moment; when they are piled one on top of the other, the effect can be quite intense. While most of the stories are somber, “Value Added: A More Fabulous You!” offers much-needed comic relief. Still, Horvath ends the collection as it begins, with a sleepless mother awaiting the safe arrival of her child.

Grief is at the door; there is no other word for it.