Meet the Hennarts: Samantha Hennart, a poet with writer's block; her husband, Bernard, obsessed with the life of a nineteenth-century Belgian mystic with stigmata; their son, Ryan, a mediocre rock musician; and their eighteen-year-old daughter, Marguerite, who is quietly losing her mind. A meditation on family, faith, and mental illness, Genealogy is an operatic story of one family's unraveling and ultimate redemption.

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Genealogy
A Novel

Chapter One

Humble, Then, Your Wisdom

For forty-three years, the one-and-a-half centimeter berrylike sac has been nestled in Samantha Hennart's brain, like an exclamation point curled into a comma waiting for the end of the sentence.

Everyone is gone: her husband, her son, and since yesterday afternoon, without any warning, her daughter has disappeared too. As Sam waits for Marguerite to return -- because she will return, because, really, there is no other option -- her eyelid flutters. Flutter, flutter. It's been fluttering all morning. From nerves, she assumes. To calm herself, she looks out the window to what she calls the lifesaving view, the stubbly Rhode Island fields and fields and fields that lead to the distant sliver that is the ocean. The farmer's son and another boy are out in one of the fields baling hay and they look up to where Sam leans out of the window. In adulthood, she has emerged from a mousy girl shell to be the kind of woman who stops the wandering gaze of men and with her hair pulled back what her husband once called her revelatory forehead is revealed. A revelation of beauty, he said, placing his palm there delicately, deliberately, as if her forehead was a holy relic and Bernard was divining something, but that was years and years ago.

Sam appreciates that the farmer's son, upon seeing her, raises a hand in hello as if she were a normal woman.

Sam's daughter, Marguerite Hennart, will not be back today. She is searching for her heart in Queens. She believes her eighteen-year-old heart, strong enough, tough enough, is in a jar somewhere -- she can hear it thump-thumping -- against thick jelly jar glass. Up and down, up and down the up and down hall she shuffles, searching for her thump-thump heart, pressing her ear into door after door though the mourning women have told her not to. The mourning women whom Marguerite first met in the morning but then there they were in the afternoon and the evening too and so she knew they were not women who came in the morning but mourning women.

The mourning women tell Marguerite not to lean her ear against the doors because there are germs. According to the shorter mourning woman there are germs everywhere, which is kind of funny. Germs in a hospital.

"Germs on the doors, germs on the floor, germs on the walls," the shorter mourning woman says. "Germs everywhere."

"And in this kind of hospital," Marguerite's roommate, Regina, says, skating by on legs bruised from kicking herself, "there are germs on the mind."

But if finding her heart means getting ear germs then Marguerite will get germs in her ears because above all, at the very top of the musty pile of musts, she must find her heart and have it ready for her brother when he comes to carry it to its final resting place. Suddenly, in the overhead sky of the indoor world: paging Dr. Goodman (florid mania, Dr. Goodman says, is like a flower bursting), paging Dr. Good Man, and Marguerite is hopeful. Up and down, up and down, an ear pressed to every door.

Marguerite's brother, Ryan Hennart, isn't on his way to find her heart because he doesn't know it's missing. He doesn't even know Marguerite is missing because he has been gone three weeks, longer than anyone. He is in San Francisco, sitting at a wobbly thrift store table, one of its legs propped up by the Yellow Pages. He is in an apartment not his own in the Mission, across from a woman elaborate with tattoos -- lines and squiggles that were indecipherable when he was having sex with her in the dark last night. With his second cup of coffee, the tattoos become more legible: thorns with drops of blood, an anchor, Jesus on a cross wearing a dress.

"Where did you say you were from?" the woman asks. The woman's pointed question threatens to turn a perfectly enjoyable one-night stand into an interrogation and Ryan is late for his job as a long-term temp.

"Are you going to answer me?" The woman puts her toes in the cuff of Ryan's pants and jiggles her foot. "What are you, mute?" She kicks him.

"Something like that." People should be tattooed by love, Ryan thinks as this woman waits for an answer, although Ryan suspects that no answer will satisfy her. Love should leave a mark on the body, carve itself into different shapes, but he isn't thinking of this woman, he is thinking of Marguerite whose love has tattooed his heart with something that Ryan imagines looks like the snake that winds its way up this woman's arm. The snake that is right now reaching out across the worn, scratched surface of the wobbling table for a carton of milk whose expiration date is a week ago.

"Whatever," the woman says finally, standing to readjust her robe, opening it briefly to reveal a tattooed flower over her left breast. And then, shit, Ryan remembers that all of this love tattoo bullshit is something his mother once said to him and, Jesus, was he so pathetic that he was recycling thoughts of his mother's? A woman who the last time he spoke to her was touting the benefits of some freaky Quaker medicinal treatment that involved taking baths all day long? A woman who was using this freaky antiquated quack treatment to cure whatever it was she thought ailed his sister? If she had asked Ryan, and no one ever did, the longterm effects of parents like she and Bernard weren't going to be washed away by any bath, no matter how long you soaked.

Ryan pulls the woman's calf rough with razor stubble up onto his leg and traces the anchor. He lets his relief at being states and states and states away from his parents run through his finger to this calf in front of him. He can see in this woman's eyes the way relief is being interpreted as something deeper.

Excerpted from Genealogy by Maud Casey
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