"Ugly to Start With" a handsome suite of stories by John Michael Cummings

Ugly to Start With By John Michael Cummings Vandalia Press. 168 pp. $16.99

Reviewed by Frank Wilson

Only about 65 miles separate Harpers Ferry, W.Va., from Washington, D.C., but for young Jason Stevens, that might as well be the distance between the Earth and the moon. And that is only one of Jason's problems concerning distance. There's also the distance separating him from the rest of his family, and that separating Jason's family from most of the other people in Harpers Ferry.

To call John Michael Cummings' Ugly From the Start a collection of short stories would be imprecise. It is really a suite of short stories adding up to a novel. The operative word is suite. The baroque suite is a collection of dances in the same key; variety is achieved because the dances themselves are different. A slow, stately sarabande, for instance, will be contrasted with a lively jig.

The baker's dozen of stories gathered here have in common a tone that is wistful, even elegiac. The variety comes from the different characters and experiences.

The first story, "The World Around Us," establishes the themes, like a good overture. Jason and his mother pick up a hitchhiker. His name is Ernesto, and Jason knows him. He's one of the artists Jason follows around in Harpers Ferry. In fact, he is among a group of teachers from Washington's Corcoran School of Art visiting the town.

Jason's mom tells Ernesto that "Jason has always had an interest in drawing," adding that "he gets it from his father." Jason, who is the narrator of all of the stories, wishes she hadn't said that: "I thought of my father, not so young anymore, working this afternoon and every afternoon, doing nothing with his life."

During the ride, Jason learns that his mother once visited the Corcoran, and that gets them talking about the distance from Harpers Ferry to Washington.

Jason's father "may have painted some years ago, when he was younger," as Jason's mother tells Ernesto, but this doesn't make father and son close. Bill Stevens, the local postman, is a hard, bitter man who detests the tourists and the cutesy-pie shops they visit in Harpers Ferry. Whatever aesthetic sense he may have left is focused on a well-tended collection of vintage firearms. He uses that collection as an excuse for keeping people out of their house. But that's not the real reason:

… the real reason was he was ashamed of the house, of how small it was and especially of the condition of the kitchen, with its rotted plasterboard walls and wet-stained ceiling from around the commode upstairs — problems he could have fixed if he had just put his mind to it, Mom said.

The distance between the Stevenses and their neighbors becomes embarrassingly plain to Jason during a dress rehearsal of a play about John Brown. When guests at the house where the rehearsal is taking place learn who Jason is and where he lives, one asks, "Is that the little house across from the wax museum? … The one with that noisy black dog in front? Someone lives there?" Then, "everyone started speaking as if I weren't there, asking one another how long the house had been in our family, why we had not sold it when everyone else around us had, and what it must be like to be the only native family left so far down the hill."

When one looks back over one's life, it seems less a continuous narrative than a sequence of disparate episodes, with some things in common and many other things not. So a novel in the form of stories has its own peculiar verisimilitude deriving in no small measure from the ambiguity resulting from all that is left out.

This is especially the case with a story called simply "Carter," about an old man who lives in an A-frame house in the middle of the woods on the side of a mountain. "For me," Jason says, "houses were alive. They watched me. All houses did." When Jason first comes upon Carter's house, no one is home. But on a subsequent visit, owner and visitor meet, and both are wary of each other.

Jason keeps visiting. "I looked at him for a while. Always the looking. That was our way. Eye contact."

Jason is pining over a girl named Lisa that he had a crush on and who has moved away. Carter senses this. "I'll tell you why I like this area, Jason.?… It's lonelier than me, and I feel safe here in that way."

Carter is gay, and he and Jason will have what is perhaps best described as a bit of passing intimacy. Nothing really bad happens, but this is risky territory, and Cummings brings it off with touching delicacy.

All of these stories are characterized by sharp observation and surpassing grace. Filled with sentiment, they are devoid of sentimentality. Eventually, there is even a kind of rapprochement between father and son, when Jason learns that he will be traveling along one of those defining distances toward its — and his own — destination.