Now the author of ten novels, Christina Baker Kline is a smooth, talented storyteller with a real gift for finding intriguing subjects. Her latest, “The Foursome,” is the story of the marriage of two North Carolina sisters to the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, joined by a band of cartilage at the ribs.
The Bunker twins, as they now called themselves, had become famous and rich, traveling the world as a spectacle, and decided to settle down near Mt. Airy. They bought a 150-acre farm, built a grand house, and set about finding two wives. The Yates sisters, Sarah and Adelaide, actual distant cousins of the author, marry them. Sarah, writing in old age, is the reluctant but determined narrator of this complicated, singular story.
How exactly did they do it? Yes, reader, there were problems to solve, logistical and psychological. Kline handles this in a straightforward but never lascivious manner. Part of the answer, Chang explains, is “alternate mastery.” The men have been attached every moment of their lives and have learned, when necessary, to “detach mentally,” to “go elsewhere in our minds.” The wives learn that too. Sarah writes: “What had once been unimaginable became ordinary. What had been taboo became routine.”
The couples have an astonishing total of 21 children. The 25 of them together constitute a kind of “village,” all the more important because many of the neighbors, good Christians all, will never accept what they see as depravity, an abomination. The bulk of the book is, in fact, the domestic story of these growing families, their labors, joys and hardships. They farm the land and raise their children, some of whom, in this medically primitive time, died.
The twins, joined though they are, are separate, distinct personalities. Both are healthy, agile, intelligent and cultured and, of course, well-travelled. Chang is tougher, more rigid, and prone to anger and drink. Eng, Sarah’s husband, is gentler, more sensitive, a horse-whisperer, but not entirely trustworthy.
The novel is set just before the Civil War and, to many people’s surprise, the twins are happy to own slaves. Thinking themselves superior, ignoring the way in which many of their neighbors view them, they believe in the “institution” even though they had as children been sold, and for years put on display. Their pain has not produced empathy. Sarah comes to understand that “pain can calcify into cruelty. . . . Those who have suffered might go on to inflict suffering themselves.”
The twins send sons to the Southern cause, invest heavily in slaves and Confederate money, all with the consequences we know must come. They then must deal with that catastrophe and loss, just like the O’Haras at Tara, and everyone else.
You will never read another story like this one because I don’t think there IS another story like this one.
