PEARL K. BELL
95
structure. How were they supposed to do that?"
A resourceful woman, this uneasy wife and reluctant mother climbs
out of such sloughs of despond through heart-to-hearts with Edie, her
dearest friend since college. The blessings of friendship - its compensa–
tions for the failures of family, its reassuring mortar of acceptance in a
heartless world - play a vital role in Colwin's work. Like happiness,
friendship is a fragile gift of life that few novelists bother to write about
these days. When the two women give birth only weeks apart, Jane
Louise, world-class worrier, asks Edie, "Do you suppose [the babies] will
someday not be able to stand us?" Edie has the perfect answer: "Oh,
doubtless. But they'll have each other."
The big storm of the title is a real tornado, but it is also Colwin's
metaphor for the disruptive, unsettling changes enacted by marriage and
parenthood. After the storm, the story ends in graceful tranquility on a
country hilltop, as the two couples and their sleeping babies wait for the
Fourth of July fireworks to begin - "that unexpected, magnificent,
beautiful release, like the unexpected joy that swept you away, like life
itself" We tremble, knowing what followed.
Soon after she wrote those closing words of her last novel, Laurie
Colwin died of a heart attack. She was forty-eight years old. The loss is
incalculable.
