The Macloud Gulf

THE LONG WING (246 pp.)--Elizabeth Fenwick--Rlnehart ($2.75).

Old Mrs. Macloud was impatient, but at 80, having bossed the Macloud household for 50-odd years, she knew a trick or two. That evening in St. Louis, while waiting for her eldest, son to call, she wore her grey silk dress and looked as calm as Whistler's mother. The lamp over her chair was lit, but her eyes were closed and her head was tilted back, "as if some beneficent rays were reaching her from the 60-watt bulb."

At last the door chimes echoed through the house. "Well, child," she said to Edwina, "what are you waiting for?" Poor, flustered Edwina, whose childhood dated back to the days of the St. Louis World's Fair (and whose corset hurt her, besides), stammered, "But, mother, aren't you . . .?" Edwina sprang nervously, dropped her needlework, began fussing with her dress and her hair. By the time she reached the front hall, the colored maid had opened the door. There was Mal, her brother. And there, standing with him, was Nora, his grown daughter, whom none of the family had ever seen.

The Long Wing is a story of the impact of the Maclouds on 18-year-old Nora. Quietly written, with even less "plot" and hardly more fictional fireworks than might be found in an Elizabeth Bowen story, it is perceptive, skillful, and now & then witty. Emerson once shrewdly observed: "Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf." This is an account of the Macloud gulf, told mostly in terms of young Nora's reactions and those of her father, who at points finds himself quite as baffled as she.

A modest, sometimes wan little book, The Long Wing is unlikely to cause much ruckus in the lending libraries, but it is as able a first novel as the season has shown thus far. Author Elizabeth Fenwick, a slim, soft-spoken girl of 26, was born in St. Louis; her marriage in 1941 to a French instructor at Cornell barely outlasted the war. She now lives alone in a basement apartment near the Cornell campus, writing a second novel of family life. Says she: "Families fascinate me, probably because I've never had any real family life myself."

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