The Fifth Year

About the Book

This story celebrates the struggle of an older woman, Celia, who after many years had a lover, David, a warm and capable friend, whom she had long known. Even before her husband had died and her three daughters had married with children of their own, David, a professor, long divorced himself, had been stopping at her country bakery not far from his Blue Hill summer home on the Maine coast.

For four years this love affair was a very happy one until her three daughters became concerned that their inheritance was in jeopardy. Despite good legal advice which should have reassured them that this was not a realistic concern, separating their mother from David became an obsession based on fugitive evidence from some nasty but recent family history. This history, they thought, was now repeating itself in the person of David. They were able to prevail on their mother to use the excuse of  David’s overseas lecture tour to separate herself from him. Only learning of Celia’s decision when he phoned her from abroad, David was very puzzled and deeply distraught and felt helpless to understand what had happened. In the midst of this trickery and conniving, and with David’s absence, Celia not only realized how much she was going to miss him, but also discovered that she had a very severe and fast growing form of cancer. From the daughters’ perspectives this made it even more important to keep David away rather than allow him back in their mother’s life.

Because Celia’s cancer was so deadly the minister of her church made a special announcement from the pulpit to inform everyone that Celia was now in Boston’s Mass General hospital. David, too, had many close friends in the village one of whom wrote to him in Europe to let him know of this distressing news. He also learned that Celia had received radiation treatments, oncological surgery, and finally, as a last hope, heroic surgery resulting in the amputation of her right leg to the hip. However, remission was very short; she remained with intensive unremitting pain that left her feeling helpless and constantly exhausted from drugs.

David immediately rushed back to the States, only stopping over night at his Manhattan apartment before flying to Celia’s home. At Celia’s urging they immediately had a reunion. They were both overwhelmed with what had been and what was now. It was then she told him the whole story of lies and trickery including her culpability, but also of her love for him, and finally of her inability to turn to her unreliable daughters for the truly important help she now desperately wanted from him.

The help was for her suicide. It required moving her secretly at the appropriate moment close to where her parents were buried in Massachusetts.  Her death was very unusual, one that Chagall might have painted.

About the Author

James van Luik travels in many worlds. As professor of philosophy he has taught at major universities. As a classical concert pianist he has toured in America and abroad, and recently released a CD, “Occhiali Rosa.” He is the author of two books of poetry, two volumes of reflections on physics, political philosophy, and cultural history, and several novels. The changing world of rural New England, reflected in “The Fifth Year” and several of his other novels, revealed itself to him during his years as a summer resident of a small Maine community.