Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

Winter Garden

By Kristin Hannah

Published February 2, 2010 (Hardcover) St Martin’s Press

Two grown sisters – one who tensely fills her life by tackling every chore, the other who escapes to international cesspools of warfare to photograph anguished faces – struggle with their family legacy.  A story that is teased out in Kristin Hannah’s masterful epic Winter Garden.

When Meredith and Nina lose their father to a massive heart attack, leaving them to the icy mother they believe never loved them, it is then, perhaps that I first begin to grieve my father’s death.  Their loss becomes mine.  I hadn’t seen my biological dad since I was six – when my stepfather beat him bloody and told him to never return.  He didn’t, though I watched for him through the school classroom windows and at the school swings.

Decades later, I hired a detective to find him.  I knew only his name, Jimmy Jordan.  Middle name I thought was Frederick; my brother says it’s Frances.  We don’t know his birthday, but maybe he is a December Capricorn.  We never met his parents, don’t know if he had siblings. Only two photographs of him remain – one hidden in my grandmother’s closet, which we found after her death; the other sent to me as a slide by my godmother, my mother’s cousin, whom my mother had characteristically disowned, like she’d disowned her brother, her best friend, and me.

The stories we tell ourselves in the absence of truth!  Before his death, Meredith’s and Nina’s father make their mother promise to tell them her Russian fairy tales – to the very end this time.  And, Winter Garden becomes a tapestry of despair, and death, war and love.  A brilliantly told tale, with stories within stories.  I read the nearly 400 pages in one gulp. I had to.

What secrets does a family have?  How well do we really know each other? I learned from my mother’s former best friend only a few years ago that the father of my maternal grandmother – who was born in Peru – was a Russian Jew. And I had wondered why Fiddler on the Roof tore me up no matter how many times I saw the musical.  Are these odd things sewn into our DNA, clues to unravel later?

Years ago, when I was in my thirties, the detective found my dad.  She said to me, “I cannot charge you.”

I asked why not.  She said, “He died last year.  He was 54.  Heart attack.”

But she said, “I have found the children of the police chief, who was his best friend.  The older, a woman, is about your age.  She’s a police dispatcher now, and she says she will talk to you.”

I called the woman, and got the only story I have ever received about my real dad.

She was about five at the time, as I had been.  And, she also had a brother, younger by two years.  She told me that my dad would bring them toys, and play with her and her brother, and laugh, and they’d have the best time!

Her words made me smile.  My dad was a good man. But, there was no way to know if he ever learned that my stepfather was raping me, and beating my brother. And I wondered if he had ever tried to rescue us, as I had always hoped.

The detective mailed me legal documents from those years the end of the 1950′s, early 1960′s.  My dad had fought for our custody, and lost.  And, he charged my mother with adultery.  He contested the divorce, and my mother remarried my stepfather.  And, he was given visitation.  He came that once, with Silly Putty, the Sunday comics, and laughter and love.  You already know how that visit ended.

These stories, these struggles, change us, make us who we are.  I am tough, like Meredith and her mother, always pushing through, always busy, always trying to make things right.

Sometimes, you just have to hear the whole story.  You get a glorious epic in Winter Garden.