ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part One, Chapter 28: A Prayer and a Plea
Ernie and I are so naive about publishing that we both think getting an agent to handle a manuscript is tantamount to selling it, but Ann Elmo doesn’t sell The Thoroughbreds or the Gothic romance Ernie writes just because Gothics are hot on the market just now. He queries The New Yorker himself with a short story, Brooks Brothers Blues, and gets the magazine’s standard rejection note, only with Sorry added at the bottom in heavy black ink.
“I guess that means something, to get a sorry out of The New Yorker,” Ernie says. He keeps the note and files away the story.
His Big Novel is the one he wants to sell. “I’ve spent too much time and energy on it to give up on it.” Just now he’s reading a Robert Penn Warren biography, which gives him an idea. “I’m going to send The Thoroughbreds to Penn Warren. He’s a fellow Kentuckian. Maybe he’ll help me out.”
Robert Penn Warren answers Ernie. Drop the opening chapters. Always remember the importance of dramatic issue — conflict.
“Maybe the old man’s right,” Ernie says, so he drops the barn-fire scene and the fox-hunting scene and begins the novel with Bryan at eighteen, searching this rainy spring night for Frank, his drunken father. They’re already late for Colonel Taylor’s annual pre-Keeneland dinner.
“The colonel’s angry at Frank and thinking about firing him,” Ernie says, “and Arabella’s anxious about Bryan. She loves Bryan despite her father’s disapproval of a match between his daughter and his trainer’s son. That’s opening the novel with conflict, all right.”
Ernie sends out another round of query letters, and Ben Camardi, with the Harold Matson literary agency, agrees to look at it. Ernie places the manuscript in a white box, seals the box with tape, then takes off the silver cross he wears around his neck and blesses the box with it. We mail the package at the downtown post office.
Headed back home, we near the parochial school Joshua attends. He’s in its second-grade classroom right now, in a uniform of white shirt, green criss-cross tie, and gray trousers. Ernie stops the car. Next to the school is a church. We open its heavy wooden door and step into a darkened interior.
A tier of votive candles glows red against a side wall.
“I know you’re not religious, Ernestina. You don’t believe in a God. I don’t go to church, either, but I believe in a God. Do me this favor. Say a prayer for Bryan and Arabella.”
We approach the votive candles. Ernie lights one in its ruby glass. The flame flickers next to the other lit candles, each flame representing a prayer and a plea.
I look over at Ernie. His eyes are closed. I close mine, too, and I send my plea . . . to Ben Camardi.
