by Tracy
Kiely
My parents were
huge fans of Bob Newhart, especially his early work as a stand up comedian.
They’d play his bits at parties, and pretty soon I was a fan too. I can
remember coming home from school and perching on the backside of the couch
facing my dad’s stereo system. (As befitting the 80s, the entire

system was
roughly the size of a small car. I believe at some point there was even a
discussion about splurging on a “diamond stylus.”) From my perch, I’d flip
through their collection of Newhart LPs (look it up all you youngsters), plop
the chosen record on turntable, and then slip on the enormous gray and white

cushioned headphones that resembled the headsets worn by helicopter pilots in
Vietnam.
Oh, yeah. Add a pair of bright
pink leg warmers to the mix, and you have a pretty clear idea why I was never
nominated to the Homecoming Court.
and b.) a lot of
it revolved around imagined telephone conversations. He’d set up the premise,
and then say “I think it might go something like this...”
Some of his best
bits include an imagined conversation from Sir Walter Raleigh trying to explain
tobacco to the head of the West
Indies Company in England (“Let me get this straight, Walt,
you've bought eighty tons of leaves? Ah…this may come as a kind of a surprise
to you, Walt, but come fall in England, we're kinda up to our...,”) and a call between a slick press agent and a
reluctant President Lincoln (“Abe, do the speech the way Charlie wrote
it. The Inaugural Speech swung, didn’t it?”)
Anyway, the point of this rather long introduction is
to explain that when I started writing my first book, Murder at
Longbourn, I wanted to reveal my
protagonist’s situation quickly, without the reader feeling as if they were receiving
a tutorial. Elizabeth was a young woman who had just broken up with her
two-timing boyfriend. This decision,
while good for her self-esteem, has left her without a date for New Year’s. I
needed to give Elizabeth a reason to visit her Aunt Winnie’s new Inn, where, of course, romance and murder awaited. I also had a writing teacher who once advised me to give my main character a headache (not literally, of course; she just meant to add tension). To
achieve both Elizabeth's need to leave town and her so-called headache, I created the character, Katherine, Elizabeth’s forever smug and condescending older sister. Katherine is married and the mother of a "perfect child." She is constantly telling Elizabeth what is wrong with her life and how to fix it. She is the reason Advil comes in those large bottles. No
doubt due to my admiration of Newhart, I decided to introduce both Katherine
and Elizabeth’s reason to visit Aunt through an awkward telephone
call:
“Seeing
the caller ID, my mood went from bad to worse.
It was my sister, Katherine.
I knew what was coming. One of her goals in life is to see me married – and
while I’m in no way opposed to the idea, it’s not my driving force in
life. As I expected, no sooner did she
hear my voice than she launched into rapid-fire speech. She had heard the news
of my breakup from our mother and was clearly dumbfounded. How could I let a “catch” like Mark “slip
away?” Didn’t I understand that with
each passing year my chances of getting married diminished? (I’m all of 26). Didn’t I know that I had to
“reel them in” while I was still young? (The way Katherine tossed around the
fishing jargon you’d think she was a seasoned angler. Which was odd, given that the closest she
ever got to fish was in her grocer’s frozen section.)
I
didn’t want to tell her the real reason for the breakup – that Mark had been seeing
at least two other women behind my back. But knowing she’d interrogate me until
she got all the lurid details, I resigned myself to the inevitable. Candidly I
volunteered, “He cheated on me, Katherine, okay?”
Silence
answered.
“Katherine, are you there?”
Finally,
all in one breath I got, “Oh, you poor, poor thing. Are you alone right
now? You shouldn’t be alone. Where’s Bridget? Oh, that’s right, Colin’s
proposing this weekend, isn’t he? Well, don’t let that get you down. I know
what you’re probably thinking. You’re thinking that you’re going to end up some
lonely, old woman who lives with cats, but that’s not true!”
“Actually,
Katherine, I wasn’t thinking that...”
“Good,
that’s the spirit! Ok, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll come down. No,
that won’t work. Tom and I are having a huge party this weekend for some
clients. You’ll just have to come here.”
My
brother-in-law sells hot tubs. It wasn’t hard to imagine where the night would
end with a party composed of fellow enthusiasts in a house with the deluxe
model.
She continued on. “You come
here and we’ll forget all about Mark. We won’t even mention him. Do you
know who he was seeing? Is she pretty? You poor, poor thing.”
The thing about my sister is
that she does mean well. However, her idea of well and my idea of well
are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Thanking her for her concern and
promising that I would call if I needed to talk, I hung up on another, “Oh, you
poor, poor thing.”
I
looked at the bag of Oreos. After my third one, I realized I needed something
stronger. I needed a large glass of chardonnay and a larger dose of Cary
Grant. Pulling my wooly cardigan around me, I went in search of Bridget’s
DVD collection. Passing the hall table, I reread Aunt Winnie’s invitation
and decided her affair was just what I needed. Right after North by
Northwest.”
Katherine pretty much disappears after that scene, as
she had played her role and was free to disappear into the Well of Lost
Characters. However, Katherine really struck a chord with a lot of readers. It
seemed that most people have a Katherine in their lives (God help them) and
therefore could commiserate with Elizabeth’s perpetual frustration in dealing with her. So, I
brought Katherine back for a larger role in the third book in the series, Murder
Most Persuasive, and again, readers
seemed to enjoy the sisters’ “Love/Annoy the Crap Out of Each Other”
relationship. I will keep Katherine around as she is (unintentionally)
entertaining, but I can’t see her taking on a major permanent role. As Jane
Austen herself said, “Of some entertainments, a little goes a long way.”
Katherine is one of those entertainments.
Happily, Bob Newhart is not.