Mrs. Kimble
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| Mrs. Kimble | |
 First edition cover |
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| Author | Jennifer Haigh |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | William Morrow |
| Publication date | February 1, 2003 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 400 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0060509392 |
Mrs. Kimble (2003) is Jennifer Haigh's debut novel. Covering several decades from the 1960s to the late 1990s, it is about a man who marries three women and in turn ruins each of their lives. Accordingly, the book is about three rather than just one "Mrs. Kimble." Mrs. Kimble won the PEN/Hemingway Award 2003 for outstanding first fiction.
[edit] Plot summary
Born in 1929, Ken Kimble is raised the son of a pastor in Missouri and becomes a minister like his father. While working as a chaplain in a Bible college in Richmond, Virginia he feels attracted to Birdie Bell, one of his female students who has been sent to the college by her father after he realized that she may be having an affair with their African American neighbour. Kimble, who is 32, marries her on the spot. The year is 1961; Birdie, who romanticizes his paternal attentions towards her, is not yet 19.
Kimble fathers two children, Charlie and Jody. As far as Birdie is concerned, disillusionment about her marriage soon sets in, especially when her husband decides that the whole family have to move to his small Missourian home town where he is to fill in for his father, who has had a stroke. All day Birdie has to care for the old man and her children while Ken Kimble is out at work. After an alleged affair with a married woman he is forced to resign, and the family move back to Virginia. Soon afterwards, in early 1969, Ken Kimble disappears with Moira Snell, one of his students, who during their only encounter blandly tells Birdie that she and Ken are lovers.
It takes Birdie Kimble many years to get over her husband's desertion. With no money and no proper job, and without ever suing him for alimony, Birdie starts drinking and neglecting her children. When her father and stepmother die in quick succession she moves with Charlie and Jody into the house in the country where she grew up. Only at the end of the novel, when she is 51, does Birdie find some solace with Curtis Mabry, her teenage sweetheart, recently widowed and still her neighbour.
In the summer of 1969, at the age of 40, Ken Kimble turns hippie and takes Moira Snell on a tour through California. He grows a beard and, although his hair is thinning, wears it long. After several months the ill-matched couple arrive at the Snells' home in Florida. Moira's parents are shocked at their prospective son-in-law, whom they hold responsible for their daughter dropping out of college and who now, after renting an apartment nearby for himself and Moira, finds work as a gardener.
Through the Snells, Ken Kimble meets Joan Cohen, a rich professional woman of Jewish descent about his own age who has recently moved from New York to Florida to settle the affairs of her recently deceased father. When Kimble and Moira break up after a few months, Joan offers him a room in her father's large house, and Kimble readily accepts.
After a few months of living together under the same roof Kimble and Joan Cohen become lovers. Regretting never getting married and having no children of her own, Joan sees in Kimble her last chance at happiness, especially now that one of her breasts has been removed due to breast cancer. She introduces Kimble to her uncle, a Floridian real estate broker whose principle is "never to do business outside the tribe". Before meeting him, Kimble shaves off his beard and has a haircut. Also, he pretends that his mother was Jewish and that he was raised areligiously. In 1970, Ken Kimble and Joan Cohen are married under Jewish law, and Kimble starts working as a real estate broker. Ben Cohen, Joan's brother, senses that Kimble might be nothing but an opportunist and a schemer but cannot convince his sister to stay away from that man.
In seventh heaven at first, Joan considers finally having a baby although her doctors warn her that a pregnancy is likely to trigger a new outbreak of breast cancer. She does get pregnant but after a miscarriage has to give up any hope of ever having a child of her own. She realizes that she knows nothing whatsoever about her husband's past when she finds an old photograph of his two children. Enthusiastic about the possibility of having a family after all, Joan persuades Kimble to fetch his children so that they can be raised in Florida, especially after learning that they are being brought up by an unfit mother. In the summer of 1972, three years after leaving Birdie, Kimble approaches his first wife again and asks her if he may take Charlie and Jody on a vacation to Florida. Birdie, naïve, still hopeful and in need of a break herself, consents without realizing that her children are being kidnapped. On arrival in Florida, Charlie and Jody take Joan for a nanny especially hired by their father to give them a good time. However, when ten year-old Charlie overhears a conversation between his father and Joan and realizes the awful truth, he steals some money from Joan and escapes with his little sister while the grown-ups are fast asleep. Their father never tries to get in touch with them or Birdie again.
Soon afterwards Joan Kimble dies of breast cancer, and Ken Kimble inherits all her money. Immediately after her death he moves to Washington, D.C. and sets up a new real estate business there. In the late 1970s, he has a chance meeting with Dinah Whitacre, who used to babysit for the Kimbles when Charlie and Jody were little and who now works as a cook in a restaurant in Washington. Dinah is charmed by Kimble's mature demeanour and by his helpfulness, and although she is more than 25 years his junior they get married in 1979. Shortly afterwards, their son Brendan is born. Immediately after Brendan's birth, Ken Kimble has a vasectomy without telling his wife about it and although he knows that she wants to have another child.
A prosperous businessman who regularly works long hours and does not spend any quality time with his family, Kimble one day sells his company and starts a government-funded project providing renovated yet affordable accommodation for those in need, which gains him a lot of recognition both in business and political circles. However, bored with life in a big and beautiful but empty house in suburbia, Dinah starts an affair with Wayne Day, a single lawyer who has been her tennis partner for some time.
Despite his lifelong strict diet and his regular exercise, in 1994, at the age of 65, Ken Kimble has a heart attack. Now Dinah fully accepts her role as wife, ends her secret affair with Wayne Day and lovingly waits on Kimble. On a whim, she invites Charlie and Jody for Thanksgiving, secretly hoping that it might cheer him up, but the moment his children arrive she realizes that her attempt at a family reunion is not successful. If anything, the Thanksgiving dinner serves as an eye-opener to each of the people present including Dinah herself as to Ken Kimble's despicable character.
After recovering from his illness, Kimble soon spends all day at his office again. A few days before Christmas 1994 he phones Dinah from the airport and tells her that he has to attend to some urgent business in Florida and that he will be away for some days. When she notices that all his summer clothes are missing from his cupboard she senses that she will not see her husband again. At the same time she learns that Kimble has been embezzling large sums of money from his non-profit organisation and that a small child has died in one of the houses he is responsible for because he refused to have a faulty furnace repaired.
Kimble lives a solitary life in Florida, with half a million dollars in the bank. One day, while his victims—Charlie, Jody, Dinah, Brendan—and Dinah's boyfriend Wayne Day are having a barbecue in the Kimbles' garden, Dinah gets a phone call from the Florida state police informing her that her husband has died of a heart attack.
