At some point in the past decade, the plot of a future novel put down roots in Stuart O’Brien’s mind, and it is loath to give up its place, indulged for all these years.
“It took over our lives,” says O’Brien, 91, whose first novel, “Wildwood: A Love Story, a War Story” is scheduled for release this month.
Even with the novel in print and boxfuls headed to the Vero Beach Book Center for his signing next Thursday, the plot still pesters O’Brien, to say nothing of his wife Susan, who serves as his long-suffering typist.
“We have a love-hate relationship with this book. Mostly hatred, for Susan. She typed that manuscript ten times.”
“We don’t do computers, and he was forever changing his mind,” says Susan, rolling her eyes. Also 91, she uses an electric typewriter; he doesn’t know how to type, though Susan tosses out a rhetorical “Thank you!” when he is asked if he’s considered learning.
“I want you to know he handed me something this morning that he wanted me to type. Enough is enough, holy Moses,” she says with a laugh.
And so it goes – good-naturedly, mind you – at the O’Brien household, a sunny second-floor condo smack on the ocean. They have lived here since 1985, one of the first to buy in the complex, having moved up from Stuart.
The two have been married 67 years; they met in college. “I took one look at her and I said, she’s the one,” says Stuart O’Brien.
Susan O’Brien rolls her eyes again. “Then why didn’t you call me for a date?” she asks pointedly. It seems Stuart waited to ask her out until the Ford convertible he had ordered finally arrived, and even then, he had a friend make the call.
The couple ended up with five children, four sons and a daughter.
What brought O’Brien to Florida was the Palm Beach County school system. In the late 1970s it needed school furniture, a lot of it. O’Brien’s employer got the contract to supply it, which kept O’Brien busy until he retired in 1989.
Rather than relax, that set off a panic: “I thought, ‘What was I going to do down here?’” he asks dramatically as if he’d been handed a prison sentence. “I’m retired. Sit on the beach? Take a walk? Go out to dinner? Sleep? I needed a project.”
So he sketched out a new life for himself: as a violin maker. He applied to the violin-making department of the North Bennet Street School, a renowned private school for fine craftsmanship in Boston’s historic North End. After a rigorous interview process, at 65, he was accepted, one of a class of five students, all of them decades younger than he. “It was very hard work,” says O’Brien, who had built furniture all his life and imagined himself prepared.
Three years later, he graduated, having amassed a closetful of cellos, violas and violins, all of which he kept.
Violin-building wasn’t his first project, nor was it his last. This was a man who once gutted that Vermont farmhouse down to the brick exterior – while his family squeezed into one tiny clapboard portion. There was a phase, his wife says, when there were only two walls. “Neighbors could look in and see us eating dinner,” she recalls. “My daughter was so embarrassed. Animals could run straight through.”
Eventually project fever infected their son Daniel, who worked with the conservation service in Vermont. Never particularly handy, his mother says, he suddenly got it in his head to build a stone wall.
“It took him two years,” says Stuart, who was charged with searching the fields for stones. “Every minute of daylight hours we worked on that wall. When he was done, it was beautiful. But he never made another.”
It was another kind of stone, a gravestone, that got O’Brien on track with his next project. In 2003, he had volunteered for his 60th high school reunion to find out all he could about a GI lost in World War II, one of seven who died from his senior class.
“They were all to be memorialized at this reunion, since we didn’t know how many more reunions there would be. I chose him because I knew him. I was always over at Wildwood Avenue where he and all my buddies lived.”
As he began to ask around, he discovered his friend, a Marine, had had a girlfriend before he left for the war. As they wrote to one another, they fell in love.
When he was killed in the invasion of Saipan, his body was brought back to Montclair and buried in a small Catholic cemetery. O’Brien heard of his death while in Italy in the Army Air Forces, a radio operator on C-47 aircraft ferrying parachutists behind enemy lines. While he himself never saw death, he heard about it constantly.
“We felt for these guys. We’ll never forget them.”
Visiting Montclair for the reunion, they stopped to see his friend’s gravesite. There, they saw that his modest military headstone had been nearly engulfed by the roots of a giant tree. When they spoke to the attendant about the marker, she looked surprised. “That’s odd,” she said. “Nobody’s inquired about that name for years and yet you’re the second to mention it this year.”
That’s when they learned that the long-grieving girlfriend still visited the site, planting a flag and a rose when she came. She too had complained about the diminishing headstone.
O’Brien decided to find her. Turned out, she had never married – had even entered the Marines herself at one point. At last he got her number and called her. They spoke at length. When she refused to go to the reunion, O’Brien told her story instead.
Then in the decade that followed, he wove it into a 550-page narrative, coached at first by David Hagberg, a novelist who taught writing in Vero Beach before moving to Sarasota. O’Brien then joined a local writers’ group called the Lagoon League of Writers. Members include Billie Atamer, Mary Maguire, Rosemary Dronchi, Dick Kropp and Barbara McDonnell. “Everyone’s working on a book,” says O’Brien.
He sent an early draft of “Wildwood” to best-selling author Reeve Lindbergh, the daughter of Anne and Charles and the O’Briens’ friend for 50 years – she was their youngest child’s nursery school teacher and later played in a musical group with O’Brien, a violinist.
Lindbergh gave her advice, and after reading the final version contributed a quote for the cover jacket: “A thoroughly compelling and often enchanting novel … this is a book to savor.”
In the book, O’Brien changed his Marine friend’s name to Bodie at the request of his family. Then he gave Bodie a double, another Marine who looked just like him, and put him in the same firefight that killed one and badly injured the other. Dog tags switched, fatality became survivor, and the novel was born. “I was talking about my friend but I twisted it so he didn’t die,” O’Brien says.
Nearly a decade later, in 2012, the root-strangled tombstone was finally replaced. A doctor from Montclair whose father was a Marine buried near Stuart’s friend, started fretting about the disappearing marker. “Doggone it, that stone drove her insane, and she wasn’t a chicken about going after the cemetery,” says Susan O’Brien.
The doctor called the Montclair newspaper which ran a story about the forgotten Marine. A stone carver made a new headstone for free. The O’Briens were promised transportation from their farmhouse to Montclair, but were shocked when they saw the doctor had sent a black stretch limousine.
“You should have seen it trying to pull into the driveway,” she says. “Backing out and pulling in. Backing out again. It nearly knocked down the stone wall.”
Stuart O’Brien will present his book at the Vero Beach Book Center next Thursday, Feb. 19 at 4 p.m.