She Was a Visitor.

Stone, Martha E.

Light, Coming Back

by Ann Wadsworth

Alyson Books. 332 pages, $24.95

Set in Boston in the early 1990's, this is the story of a triangle. Mercedes Medina is a 59-year-old part-time academician married to an almost-famous cellist. Mercedes has placed herself out of touch with much of contemporary life, as well as with most of her feelings--other than a free-floating discontentment.

Her husband said he had "saved her from a life of self-indulgent loneliness." Patrick Medina, 25 years her senior, suffers from physical ailments and a dementia that comes and goes, but he's never an object of pity. Nor is he so irascible as to cause the reader to lose patience with him. In his lucid moments--sometimes hours--he is a sophisticated, erudite man who enjoys holding forth in a discussion. In a pitch-perfect vignette, the Medinas read Robert W. Service's poem, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" to each other, something they've apparently done a fair number of times during their two decades of marriage. Their stops and starts and tangential comments are a pleasure to read, and the jolt comes when Patrick starts talking about his memorial service--not for the first time--only to find that Mercedes' mind had wandered off to an upcoming beauty salon appointment.

Into their financially comfortable, Back Bay lives enters the striking (and strikingly named) Lennie Visitor, a lesbian in her twenties. Actually, it was Mercedes who had first entered the Harvard Square flower shop where Lennie works. An unexplored sense of desire overtakes the older woman, and she pursues the not uneager but eminently unsuitable younger woman through coffee and dinner invitations. Mrs. Medina is unaware that Lennie is a lesbian; she is only aware of the awakening of feelings that have long gone unrecognized. Lennie's gaydar, however, has no difficulty homing in on Mrs. Medina.

Patrick Medina is fairly supportive of his wife's interest in Lennie, due in part to his own guilt over past dalliances, but also due, one suspects, to his prurient fascination with the affair. And Mrs. Medina is not quite honest with her husband about what her interest really is, because she can't explain it even to herself.

Over the course of a few months, Lennie abruptly leaves Mrs. Medina's life without a trace, and Patrick dies. Light, Coming Back, which is not told in a perfectly linear fashion, actually begins at the psychiatric hospital where the anguished and grief-stricken Mrs. Medina has gone to recover from her losses. After the flashback that tells her story, the book ends with Mrs. Medina in the British Virgin Islands, where she's gone to vacation and where she meets a woman whose life story has parallels to her own. This is the only part of the novel that feels slightly rushed, as if the author has tried to crowd in as many social issues as possible. Here, Mrs. Medina makes slow, halting progress toward understanding her same-sex proclivities, discovering her lesbian identity, and figuring how all this fits into her life (if at all). Light, Coming Back ends on an upbeat note, albeit with some loose ends left untied.

In the author's constant and quite lovely descriptions of flowers and dinner parties, as well as the consistent use of the honorific "missus" for Mercedes Medina, there is something of Mrs. Dalloway. And what of Mrs. Medina's recollection of the beautiful woman whom she met in passing on her honeymoon in San Francisco? The remembrance of her presence permeates Mrs. Medina's life. That vision is personified by an exquisite jacket photograph by Philip Pirolo, in a style reminiscent of John Singer Sargent.

Light, Coming Back is a beautifully written first novel. Wadsworth is editor of publications at the venerable Boston Athenaeum, and stated at a recent reading that she had another handful of unpublished novels in her desk drawer. She said she loves to tinker, to edit her work over time. Perhaps it's safe to conclude that more will follow now that this first effort has seen the light of day.