Mary Allen - The Rooms of Heaven

Powerful. Full of humor and sharp observations.

The Baltimore Sun

Remarkably lucid and dream-like, The Rooms of Heaven will probably fill your imagination for a long time after you have left its pages.

Detroit Free Press

A memoir unlike any Ive reada page turner told in spare, elegant prose. It is the story of a gifted man falling backward out of his mortal life, and the woman who tries to catch him. A profoundly moving story about the mortality of man and the immortality of love.

Jo Ann Beard, author of The Boys of My Youth

An alternately intense and funny memoir. Engrossing but never self-indulgent or sensationalist. Allens demons make for a compelling tale.

Kirkus Reviews

Allen has a shrewd eye for detail and a talent for making the reader care.

Newsday

Not just an ordinary love story, this book powerfully captures a wide range of emotions, from passion and tenderness to longing, grief, and despair. The Rooms of Heaven shows the unexpected ways in which our lives can be transformed.

Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face

Allen writes with genuine feeling, and, by honestly offering her personal story, she illuminates codependency and the process of grieving.

Gadfly

Allens hypnotic memoir is sad, mysterious and beautiful. A remarkable chronicle of the intense and baffling states of mind love and grief engender.

Booklist

I know of no other writer with the gifts to take trappings of contemporary tragedy and spin from them such a bewitching and convincing tale of the redemptive magic of everyday love. Mary Allen writes like the music of a waltz, and with the vulnerable irony of a balladpitch-perfect, singular, and bittersweet.

Honor Moore, Author of The White Blackbird:
A Life of the Painter Margaret Sargent

A beautifully written tale, thoughtful and arresting.

Library Journal

This book may haunt your imagination. Mary Allen raises many questionsabout the nature of love, the meaning of death, the possibility of a world beyond this oneand tries to answer them in remarkably lucid, sometimes shimmering prose. I was seduced into reading it by the opening, one of the most evocative passages about the Midwest Ive ever read. Then I kept reading, and couldnt stop until I was done.

Susan Allen Toth, author of Blooming:
A Small Town Girlhood

MARY ALLEN
The Rooms of Heaven

Mary Allen received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she was awarded a 1994 Paul Engle/James Michener Fellowship. She has worked in publishing in Boston and lives in Iowa City.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2000

Copyright 1999 by Mary Allen

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Some of the names and details in this narrative have been changed.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Allen, Mary, [date]
The rooms of heaven: a story of love, death, grief, and the afterlife /
Mary Allen.1st American ed.
p. cm.
1. Allen, Mary, [date] 2. Beaman, Jim. 3. Spiritualism. 4. IowaBiography. I. Title
BF1277.A55A3 1999
133.9092dc21
98-43129

eISBN: 978-0-307-76678-6

Author photograph Dan Coffey

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

I always think of Iowa as a place where strange and magical things happen. Not sleight of hand, card tricks, pull-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat kind of magicnothing as literal and obvious as that. What Im thinking of is vaguer, subtler, harder to pin down and yet more genuine. Its an ambiance, a spirit, an intimation of things unseen, a sense that there could be a little bit of slippage, just the tiniest room for negotiation, in the ordinary order of things.

Most people I know think of Iowa as anything but magical. They think of itof the whole Midwestas flat, dull, conventional, a place where mostly boring and mundane things happen. And maybe it is, regarded in a certain way. Maybe life is like a hologram: Hold it up to the light at one angle and it all looks ordinary; tilt it another way and everything shifts, glows, turns strange.

I have a friend who says you always fall in love with the place you fall in love in, and Im sure shes right, Im sure thats partly why I think of Iowa this way. And Im sure it also has to do with who I fell in love withwith Jim Beaman, his particular way of seeing things, his demons and angels. It even, unexpectedly, has to do with what became of himwith death, that mystifying disappearing act which has its own brand of terrible magic, which in the end may be the most magical thing of all.

But even the first time I saw it, entering Iowa from Illinois, I was struck by something unusual in the Iowa countryside. I was driving a small U-Haul truck, moving here from Massachusetts. Earlier Id passed through a massive thunderstorm. You could actually see it comingthe black clouds towering up ahead in the distance, the rain spattering on the windshield, then turning torrential, thunder rumbling then booming then crrracking, as if the very fabric of the world were splitting, flashes of lightning streaking down again and again in the fields beside the highway. Then suddenly I was beyond it; the sun was back out and the sky was once more an innocent placid blue.

Half an hour into Iowa I noticed a change in the landscape. Whereas Illinois is largely flat, full of marshes and lowlands and small industrial cities, giving it a kind of dull suburban atmosphere, Iowa has a safe, kindly, fresh-scrubbed feeling. The landscape consists of miles and miles of rolling, undulating green, a verdant patchwork of corn and soybeans, the horizon only broken every once in a while by a clump of farm buildingsa large white house, a sagging red barn, a windmill, a silo, a couple of shedsand sometimes, out in the cornfields, by a pickup truck barreling along a narrow road in the distance, kicking up a cloud of white dust. Often on the horizon the air fades to a pale, hazy, bluish shade of pink, and above it the vault of the mild blue sky curves and rises. The view seems endlessly wide; it makes something expand inside your eyes or your mind.

Gradually, as I was entering Iowa for the first time, I began to notice a large number of monarch butterflies fluttering around in the air. They were everywhere, pottering along at the edge of the road, scissoring across the fields, sailing on updrafts above the highway, blundering into the path of the truck.

My neighbor across the street has a dog named Bob.

Bob is a short, old, black dog with an energetic disposition and an alert, foxlike face. His parts are all out of proportion to each other; he looks more like a picture of a dog a kid would draw than a real dog: large oval body, ears like sails on a small bullet head, upside-down Vs for legs.