Tommy Hays’ fifth novel, The Marriage Bed, marks an exciting return to adult fiction for the Asheville-based novelist. Hays is the founder and former executive director of the Great Smokies Writing Program, recipient of numerous literary awards, and a former book reviewer for Smoky Mountain Living.
With this most recent novel, he has crafted a moving study of a family in the throes of grief.
The tale begins as Asa Flowers, a poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, North Carolina, comes home from work one evening to find his wife of 25 years, Betsy, in a strange mood. She confesses to him that she has feelings for someone else.
Distraught and bogged down by student papers, Asa stomps off to work and sleep in their garage apartment. Overhead, a storm is brewing. When he wakes in the morning, he finds Betsy dead in their bed, pierced through the heart by the branch of a fallen tree. His world is altered irrevocably.
In the wake of Betsy’s death, Asa is forced to confront the dysfunction at the core of many of his relationships. His marriage had been off-kilter for a while, and of his two adult children, he has a functional relationship with only one. When these children, Sarah and Mitchell, arrive in Asheville to prepare for their mother’s memorial, the intensity of the shared family grief threatens to push them even further apart.
With The Marriage Bed, Tommy Hays gives us an intimate and complex portrait of a family in the aftermath of tragedy, but he also asks us to consider the more mundane frictions and failures that precede it. In a flashback scene, Asa and Betsy go to a cabin in Bryson City for the weekend, and arrive to find it dusty and littered with mouse droppings. Asa refuses to stay, despite Betsy’s plea that they make the best of it. Although they ultimately find somewhere nicer, she tells him over dinner: “Your negativity wears me out … rejecting things outright before we’ve even had a chance to discuss them.”
For Asa, frictions that existed before Betsy’s death are intensified by her passing. For example, their son Mitchell has a girlfriend, Wendy, who is, as Sarah describes to her father, a “pro-life, pro-NRA, card-carrying member of That Party Which Must Not Be Named.” Asa is already frustrated by her presence at the home in the week leading up to the memorial, but this revelation crosses a line for him. At one point, he declares that “no son of mine is marrying a fundamentalist nut.” As they get closer and closer to the day of the service, Asa has to decide what’s more important to him: that his son conform to his own ideas about what to value in a relationship, or that his son have someone in his life who supports him unconditionally.
Part of what makes this novel so successful is its form. Told from many perspectives—most often those of Asa, Sarah, Mitchell, and Wendy—it is able to interrogate the multiplicity of experiences that emerge out of a tragedy. Readers are asked to empathize and understand the perspectives of each family member in turn, and also to question them. Although Asa offers us entry into the novel and is most frequently our narrator, we are often given glimpses of him from the outside. His children reflect on his coldness and his temper, offering insight into his character that he himself does not reveal. The effect is humanizing, allowing the reader to understand how he fails as a father, but also to see how he tries.
The one Flowers family member we do not hear from is Betsy, who is arguably the central figure of the novel. After all, it is her death that begins the narrative. Instead, we see her through the eyes of those who loved her. In Asa’s flashbacks, we see the night they met—Asa has driven to Charleston to interview for a teaching job he was never going to get, and Betsy is a student who meets him for dinner. As Asa retraces their lives together, he is forced to reckon with what she said to him the night she died: that neither of them are the people they were when they married. In the context of her confession and death, Asa’s recollections of her read like an attempt at dissecting the essence of their partnership.
At Betsy’s funeral in one of the novel’s final chapters, Sarah, Mitchell, and Asa each read a poem that Betsy had requested. Sarah reads from Emily Dickinson and Mitchell reads from Billy Collins, but Asa has been handed one of his own poems, one he wrote in the early days of his and Betsy’s relationship, called “All Our Belonging.” In the poem, a raccoon raids the Flowers home, leaving behind scattered books and jewelry and paw prints. They’ve seen him in the backyard before, and have called him Rocky. Asa reads from the poem:
“In bed that night
you said Rocky’s visit was a blessing, a reminder of our belonging.
‘You mean belongings,’ I said, and you answered ‘Belongings, singular
but plural. Apart but together. What we have. In each other.’”
This is a novel about relationships—romantic, platonic, and familial—and the effort and humility it takes to maintain them. It is about what people have and find in one another. In The Marriage Bed, loss brings the members of the Flowers family together, but it is through reflection and care that they heal.