Fiction.

As promised, here's a short story of mine. Enjoy.

A YEAR WITH MARY FLETCHER

Two years ago, my girlfriend’s family commissioned me to write a biography of Mary Fletcher, my girlfriend’s grandmother. It was, as they readily admitted, a strange and extravagant request.
I was to complete the project at least a month before Mary’s 85th birthday, which gave me a window of roughly a year to compile interviews, old newspaper articles, ancient sepia photos, valuable legal documents. The book, and it was to be a 150 or so page book, would run in a highly limited edition; only 100 copies or so would be made. I was promised one or two to keep.
Mary’s children, and her youngest, Valerie, in particular, decided I was qualified based on a number of circumstantial advantages. I had an MFA, which just about anyone can have, I was a proofreader for an academic press, which just about anyone could do, and I was (still, somehow) sleeping with Stephanie, Mary’s granddaughter and Valerie’s daughter, and this gave me the special distinction of quasi-family, which the Fletchers valued highly. Then again, I had done well in my MFA and had been published once; I had proofread a few biographies and historical texts, which I suppose gave me some expertise; and being with Stephanie had allowed me to witness, untainted by biographical interest, several family scenes before the idea of the book was even conceived.
“We trust you, Eddie,” Valerie had said. “This is a moment for you.”
We were sitting in a German-themed restaurant on an early September afternoon. Valerie had come up from Chicago with her new husband. Frank, Valerie’s second, was slathering a knockwurst with mustard and eating it noisily. I knew he was vaguely involved in the paper business; I assumed later that had something to do with the limited run they were able to acquire.
“I’m flattered, really, but things are in flux right now,” I said.
“Are they? Your magazine? Eddie, I want you to do this, the family wants you to do this.”
“Does Steph?”
“She’s a stubborn girl.”
“Which means no.”
“Which means she doesn’t understand. Listen, before Stephanie gets here, and before it becomes anything more than a nice lunch, I’d like to make you an offer. It’ll be a year of work, off and on, but we’re willing to pay you 12,000 dollars. A thousand a month. And, depending on the final product, perhaps something more. ” Valerie looked at me meaningfully. I curled up the edges of the napkin in my lap. I could hear the insidious strains of a polka thumping from somewhere in the restaurant.
At the time, I had been dating Stephanie for four years. I was 25 years old, vaguely unemployed and desperate. It was a good time to get a biography started.

“This is my Ga,” Stephanie told me one day while we were at work at the magazine.
“I know.”
“Don’t fuck it up.”
“I’ve been reading some old newspapers, the big yellow ones up in the Special Reserves.”
“For what?”
“Just to get the feel of the time, I guess. I’m going to see her this winter, for my first set of interviews.”
“I’m worried about you,” she said, leafing through a stack of loose documents.
“I’m excited about this.”
“I’m worried that this is too much.”
We sat in our apartment, with various music reviews piled on the coffee table. Stephanie was at the computer, double-checking the lay out of pages 9-16.
“I don’t think you can’t handle it,” she said, relenting. “But what about the magazine? That’s almost too much work. This is my Ga.”
“I can handle it. It’s an important thing. It’s energizing.”
“You said that about the magazine.”
“But this, I don’t know. There’s so much to work with.”
“My grandmother has a history of being left.”
“Are you worried about my sensitivity?”
“There’s enough bad stuff. God, I sound like such a whiner.”
“I can handle the bad stuff. If you don’t want me to, then you can just say.”
“It’s like I’m always complaining. I hate when I do that.”
“I can handle the bad stuff.”
“I believe you.”
“It’ll be good. It could go somewhere.”
“I want it to.”
She got up and pushed her arms back and up, making herself into a sort of frazzled ‘Y.’ She turned her hips rapidly and then half-yelped, half-yawned.
“You should talk to my aunt Sarah. One of the twins. She knew my Ga the best.”
“What about Addy?”
“I’m never sure what to think about Addy.”
“I’ve always liked him.”
“So have I.”
“Maybe he’ll take me fishing.” We both were silent for a little while. I could hear the hum of traffic outside our window. “Steph, are we using the Schlemmer review or are we cutting it for the feature?”
“The feature’s stronger.”
“Should I call him to tell him its cut? I hate calling people.”
“I can call him.”
“No, you called the last one.” I leaned back into the couch and sighed.
“You pussy.”
“Shut up.“

In the beginning, I separated my research into two categories: personal and concrete. The concrete entailed pictures, legal documents, newspapers. The personal, at least initially, entailed drinking with various family members. The first of these was Addy, Mary’s first son.
Addy, so named after his father Adrian, was a tall bastard with dark leathery skin. He ran a fishing and tour service in the Florida Keys and told me that in the low tourist season, he played a full round of golf every other day. One of his front teeth was brown against the rest of his very white teeth, and this made his mouth look like a set of bowling pins with a single one unpainted.
I had thought sitting and drinking with Addy would be good background information. He was up for Thanksgiving in Chicago, where Valerie lived now, and so a few days after Thanksgiving we went out to the bars. I figured that some colorful stories might humanize the whole production, and that maybe I would feel a little more comfortable with the subject matter.
“My mother nearly left us, did you know that?” he said to me the first night we had gone out together. Most of the bars were empty; it must have been a Monday.
“She did. I know my Dad did, but she did also. She had an offer. From some guy she knew back in high school. He was some big timer in Oregon, had struck it up in the logging business. This was when we lived on that farmhouse in Ohio.”
This was what I considered research at this point.
“But he wouldn’t have the rugrats. I was, I don’t know, probably fourteen. This was about a year before Dad came back, so I was fourteen. I listened to them on the phone.” He looked at me over a tilted glass.
“He said it, ‘I can’t live with the rugrats.’ He wanted us at our Uncles, who was older, and knew what he was doing a little bit better.”
“And she considered?” I said.
“And she considered. Not for long. It felt like I waited for two weeks. It was probably only five seconds, but for a kid, hell, for a mother, that’s days at a stretch. At that point, I was beginning to hate her, you know, at that age. But I still couldn’t think about that whole arrangement at the time. I know I didn’t move an inch.”
“Until she said no.”
“Right. I barely remember that day except for that conversation. I mean I was in a total fog.”
“Understandably.”
“The thing I do remember, is that she made raspberry chicken for dinner. With that cream sauce, the sort of sweet kind, served over brown rice? Christ, I bet you Steph’s even made it for you.”
“She has.”
“My mother, she made that, with steamed broccoli on the side. We used red napkins that night.”
“You remember all that?”
“Red napkins.”

Stephanie and I worked at an independent magazine that ran lifestyle and music articles. She was the lead design-person, and we jointly headed the music section. They seemed like venerable positions, but on a single-digit staff, they weren’t really anything. We spent a lot of mornings reading crappy music reviews and struggling with text justification.
“There’s a job in Seattle,” Stephanie said one day.
“There is?” I was reading an account by a man, about Mary’s age, who had grown up in the South Bronx.
“It’s for a book designer. They do art books and some science stuff.”
This was troubling. Specificity implied interest.
“Plane tickets back home will be expensive.”
“Who says I’m going?”
“No one.”

I buried myself in interviews. I spoke with Mrs. Vincent, Mary’s friend from Toledo, Ohio, for three hours one day, her cheeriness driving screws into my brain. Oh yes, Mary was a delightful neighbor and Oh yes, Adrian, I never quite liked him all that much and Oh yes they had the nicest yard right down the street from ours, with a white clapboard fence and a u-shaped driveway. But it truly was scary when that old place burned down, she said. Oh yes, I was a lot younger than Mary at that point, I think her age let her stand it. Yes, I would have been terrified, but she was as calm as ever.
The next day, I called Mary’s second husband’s only daughter, but she didn’t have much to say regarding Mary. I understood. I panicked briefly. Three months had gone by, three precious months, and I had collected only irrelevant testimony and memorized ancient news listings. But New Years was coming, which meant I would get to sit down with Mary, and this calmed me down a little.
Stephanie and I began to intersect less and less. We still worked when we could in the mornings, but Stephanie had picked up a job as a layout consultant for the school’s Academic Quarterly, and they were nearing deadline. She would come home late, mumbling about inDesign and color-alignment.
To compensate, I found myself speaking in apostrophe. I spent all day in 1929, Stephanie, I would say to the empty kitchen. Today I researched Black Monday, when your Ga was seven. I would make coffee for myself at four thirty in the afternoon, my face feeling like concrete. Did you know, Stephanie, that during the Depression, men would bring butter to their dates as courting gifts?
By mid-December, though, the Quarterly was done and so was Stephanie’s employment there. We threw together an issue of the magazine before our holiday break. I began saying her name out loud when anything went wrong. One afternoon, I slit my finger on a can of tuna I was opening.
“Stephanie,” I muttered to myself.
“Eddie?” She said from the other room.
“What?”
“Did you just say my name?”
“No. I just cut myself on this can.”
“I heard my name.”
“I didn’t say anything.”

Christmas came and I spent Christmas day with Stephanie and Valerie in Chicago, and then boarded a plane back to Maryland to spend a few days with my parents. After that, I would drive up to see Mary in New Jersey. Stephanie bought me an old brown pea-coat that I had pointed out to her, and a limited edition Roberto Bolano book. I sent her a picture frame that had belonged to my grandparents and a blouse that my sister had picked out for her. I had to send all these from home, because I had forgotten to get them sent to me before Chicago. It had made the Chicago Christmas tense.
I didn’t hear from Stephanie until the morning I was about to leave for Jersey.
“I got the picture frame.”
“I’m sorry again, Steph.”
“There’s a picture of Truman in it.” Truman was Stephanie’s arthritic cat that now lived with Valerie and Frank. I had a sneaking suspicion Frank was trying to poison it. Silently, I applauded his effort.
“There’s supposed to be a picture of us in it.”
“There will be. Truman’s keeping it warm.”
“It’s a picture frame.”
“You’re so goddamned literal,” she said, her voice crackling a little bit through the static.
“I wish I was.”
“Take it easy on my Ga for me.”
“I’m not there to extract a confession from her.”
“She’s a sweet old woman.”
“Into the interrogation room, Mary.”
“Stop.”
“I’ve brought my travel water-boarding kit. It’s got magnets.”
Silence on the other end of the phone. Our silences were beginning to span time zones.
“They’ve offered me a salary in Seattle.”
“Is it good?”
“Is it good? It’s a salary, it’s better than what I have.”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you have to know?” she said. She always talked on the phone with one hand in her pocket, and I imagined her doing that now, perhaps leaning up against the wall in the kitchen that was covered in black and white pictures from her youth.
“You hate coffee. You like rain, but you hate coffee.”
“I haven’t said yes or no.”
“If I don’t leave now, I’ll get crushed in traffic.”
“I want to talk about this.”
“I’m going to miss my interrogation.”

The first day, we talked creation stories. It seemed a logical place to begin. Mary was born in a storm, or so she claimed. I have a tendency to think that at that point in history, in the relative gloom of the 1920s, before the glow of irradiating television sets and the catch-all of electronic recordings, things happened in legendary fashion. Children are born to thunderclaps and men settle their differences in the streets with knives and brass knuckles. Bowler caps are worn, gangsters hop onto moving cars to make their escape.
This, probably, makes me a poor biographer.
Mary was a blue little old woman, who lived in a New Jersey retirement home, which abutted a convent called the Sisters of Mercy. The home was called the Sisters’ Retreat, or simply the Retreat. Mary talked for a long time in a squeaky, old-lady voice. Her hand, riddled with lumpy violet veins, lay still on the windowsill as we spoke. She talked about her parents, her brothers and sisters, her children. She knew where each of them was born. Finally, after about an hour of talking she stopped.
“I suppose this is a bit boring.” She smiled at me.
“No, no. It’s great, all of this is great.”
“I love biographies, did you know that?”
“Is that why they got you this gift?”
“No. And I wouldn’t have asked for it either.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t be. It just seems so absurd.”
“Your daughter.” I paused, thumbed the buttons on my tiny tape recorder. “Valerie seems very excited.”
“Of course she is. I love her, but she’s zealous. Do you know that word?”
“Yes.”
The door was open, and a group of nuns and a nurse walked past. They waved, one of them canted her head towards us.
“I hate the biographical part of biographies,” Mary said at last.
I remained silent. The tape recorder was still rolling.
“All the names and dates and places. It’s all so mathematical. Do me a favor.”
“Anything. It is your book.”
“I don’t want too many facts in there.” She looked at me levelly.
“I’m a little confused.”
“I’ll give you all the information, but I don’t want too many facts. I don’t know if I remember them anyway.”
“Alright, well what should we talk about then?” She sat quiet for a long time. I pictured Stephanie in a rain slick, picking out fish laid out on packs of white ice. Their dead eyes staring. Diamond beads of water caught in the tips of her hair.
“My house burned down,” she said finally.

It was March, dismal. Snow fell gray against a gray sky, and we walked occasionally from our apartment to buy little things at the little market: toothbrushes, tampons, microwavable popcorn. We cursed the dampness and the wind that carried it into every seam of our clothes and our home. Pervasive! we called it. Unstoppable!
“I’m thinking about it, though.”
“I’ve figured out what it is.”
“What what is?”
“What the dampness is.”
“I want to talk about Seattle.”
“The dampness is metastasizing,” I said, feeling proud.
“What?”
“Like a cancerous polyp. It just spreads and spreads and spreads.”
“This is a big opportunity.” She looked disdainfully at one of our old magazines, which was sitting on a kitchen stool. She started to speak but then stopped, saying only, “This magazine.”
“The damp consumes, Stephanie.”
“How is my Grandmother?” By which she meant my book.
“I’ve set up an appointment with one of her old neighbors.”
“From Ohio?”
“From Toledo, Ohio. Mrs. Vincent.”
“That old woman again?”
“She was your grandmother’s friend.”
“What do you need to talk to her about?”
“I want to find out what it was like when Adrian came back.”
“So you know that already then.”
“Addy told me.”
“I don’t know that I would have picked you to dig up all of this.”
“That’s an interesting way of putting it.”
The radiator buzzed. There was no work for the magazine right now, so I had a stack of interview transcriptions and some early drafts on the table, just little scenes I had been dreaming up.
“I slept with Mrs. Vincent’s son once.”
“What?”
“She’s much younger than Ga, like 15 years younger.”
“How old was he?”
“He was. 25. He was 25, I was 19.”
“What?”
“He was the baby of the family. She must have had him when she was forty, can you imagine that?” She began cutting carrots in the kitchen. The percussion from the knife on the cutting board filled the dead air.
“Did I know you then?”
“Did you?”

I started working strange hours. One of the libraries was open twenty-four hours a day, and I began to wake up very early to go to it, sometimes at four in the morning. There was something about the propulsion of research that invigorated me. The cold didn’t bother me. I sublimated the dampness. Everything had drive and purpose. Sometimes I would spend a whole day figuring out what happened in a particular year, major events, political movements. 1922, Mary born, Irish Civil War, Proust dies, Ulysses. 1981, MTV, Reagan, Mary’s second husband dies. Chronological paraphernalia.
“I have the layout for the next issue,” Stephanie said.
“The library was a graveyard.”
“When you’re there in the middle of the night.”
“I think I’ve forgotten how to sleep.”
“This caption will be aligned to the left bumper.”
Because of my schedule, I saw Stephanie primarily in the mornings. I would wake at four, go to the library, and then come back at nine or so, at which point we would go over any things we had to do for the magazine. This usually took a few hours, and we would eat lunch as a break in between editing or layout sessions. Then Stephanie would leave for work, and I would continue with my research, or, more and more often, simply collapse. We would reconvene at night in our full-size bed.
“Much of the Northwest is considered a rain forest,” I said one night while we were lying together.
“Are you talking about Seattle?”
“Yes and no.”
“I’ve looked at apartments.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“Have you found anything?”
“Yes. “
“Hmmm.” I breathed into her ponytail.
“It’s gray there, it’s gray here,” she said.
“April is coming, and then May.”
“It won’t be green though.” That almost-whining tone.
“Picky, picky.”
“Why did you bring up the Northwest?”
“I wanted to see what you would say.”
“And what did I say?” she said, turning towards me.
“That you’ve found an apartment.”
“But I haven’t.”
“But you have.”
I wrapped around her. She turned back away from me, and I felt her dig into the bedsheets. A train whistle moaned somewhere in the flat Midwestern distance.
“You can be such a bastard,” she said. “Bastard.”
“Seattlan. “
“What?”
“One from Seattle.”
She said nothing for a while. The alarm clock glowed red on the bedstand. I would be up and at the library in less than three hours.
“They’re called Seattleites.”

The writing and researching became only slightly easier after I moved home. In our small apartment, I could not escape the clutter of drafts or the increasingly large voids between Stephanie and I. By the end of March, she had put a down payment on an apartment in Seattle. The gray Midwestern town held little enticement to either of us at that point. She left for the Northwestern coast, to a city with neighborhoods with different names and large, active seafood markets. There was public transportation and there were department stores. I visited for two weeks, slept little, worked less. Our magazine fell apart in her permanent removal and my temporary one. I returned to the Midwest, waterlogged and fatigued from such high proximity to gloom. There were sponsors, authors, calling at all hours of the day.
But all this, like everything, is history. In short, things collapsed. I was fortunate to find a job at the Georgetown University Press, which allowed me to move back home and work flexible, mindless hours. My eyes became accustomed to the latticework of manuscript text as I plied it for errata, inconsistencies.
I drove to see Mary sometimes on the weekends. After we talked places and dates, truth and legend. She told me about her apartment, the one she shared with her sister in the Bronx. Her older sister, Maureen, now Sister Jerome, lived and taught in the Bronx for 27 years. Mary moved in with her in the fall of 1988 and lived there for twelve years, before relocating first to her daughters and then to the Retreat.
“The old apartment, that brown thing,” she said.
“Tell me more, please.”
“We had a rotary phone. It’s not odd for me, but it probably is for you. It had a crank wheel and everything.”
Inside her room there were pictures of Stephanie’s family. Along the windowsill, a faded bouquet. Next to it, a small porcelain figurine of a saint, and a wicker chicken, filled with potpourri. An adolescent Steph watched me as I consulted her grandmother.
“The neighborhood changed, as I’m sure you know. But we were fine there, we were safe. There weren’t any micks left, but we were well known enough that it didn’t matter. There was one young man, a Puerto Rican boy named Emmanuel, that used to hold the door for me every day when I came back from visiting my sister at the church.”
“Tell me more, please.”
“Jerry worked at that school, and then at that church, and now at that convent. I don’t know how she does it. Habits and all, daily prayers. I believe in God, perhaps more than ever, but I can’t match her, I’m afraid.”
“Did you ever consider the church?”
“God no, not after Adrian. I met him at church, believe it or not.”
“He was an altar boy?”
She laughed. “He gave me a cigarette when I snuck out of church during the communion lineup. He was leaning against a mailbox outside the convenience store, which was across the street from out church.”
We would sit across from each other in the lounge, at a wooden table that doubled as a chessboard, although I never saw anyone playing. Tell me more, please.
“I’m about out of stories, Eddie. They sure have you working hard.”
“I guess. It’s good work.”
“You mean they’re paying you well? I hope they are, for all this trouble, all this grave-digging you’re doing.” She smiled, ran her hand along the windowsill, looking at New Jersey in the early summer.
“The pay is good, yes. But its good work. To get to know people. You.”
“You’re a sweetheart. And you’re almost done, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I think I’m nearly done.”
“Eighty-five.” She sighed. “It’s been a long time. I look forward to having it all down, in writing.”
“So do I.”

I knew things about Mary Fletcher. About her family. I suppose this made Stephanie uncomfortable, but then again, we didn’t talk very often anymore. I would hear from her perhaps once a month. I knew the summer was beautiful in the Northwest, and I hoped that she had escaped the gloom of early spring with her some part of her sanity intact. I was nearing deadline—August 27th, around two and half months to go. She called me one morning when I was off at work and left me a message, asking how it was coming. I wrote her an email in response, cribbed from my latest draft.
You were right when you said your grandmother had a history of being left. Two husbands left her three times. Her first husband, Adrian Wallace, was a firefighter and a bit of a drunk, and would probably have been a full-time street tough if not for his fascination with fire. In one of his few existing journal entries from before 1960, he writes: “Blaze today. Two men dead. Sat on the side of the truck and watched it eat the whole building.”
I knew Stephanie did not know this.
Her grandfather was an angry man; he had once beaten a neighbor half to death in the middle of the street, allegedly for disciplining Addy without Adrian’s permission. This is what Mary said, but other interviews revealed that Adrian was employed briefly, before his stint in the NYFD, as a low-level street enforcer. He had problems with drinking and gambling. In pictures, he appeared frozen in mid-sentence, mouth slightly ajar and eyes alight with some sudden insight. Mary gave me a picture of him that she took in Ohio, the sun at his back, his eyes staring towards the top right corner of the frame, as though watching the dusk come on.

After one of my later trips to the Retreat, Mary gave me directions to her old house in Monmouth, on the Jersey Shore. It was there, after Adrian left, that Mary took her family, to live in the nuns’ summer home. In the summer months, Mary, Addy, Sarah, her twin brother Michael, and Valerie shared the weathered-gray beach house with a dozen or so nuns.
As I approached the address—a different house stood there now—I could see summer in the late ‘50s, a tiny beach town painted with reds and blues faded from the wind off the sea, the whole thing shot through grainy, 8 mm footage. In the fall, perhaps, the nuns would watch from the porch as the Fletcher children, adorned in sweaters, ran through the dunes that sprawled in front of the ancient house.
In many ways, the town was the same as I imagined it must have been, and so it felt right to walk the streets where she walked, to inhabit the same spaces. Even the illusion of constancy was comforting. It was July, and the whole town seemed exhausted after the Fourth, as though it were taking a week to catch its breath. I saw cardboard firework wrappers tucked under the shells and stones that comprised most people’s front lawns. Brown cacti squirmed out from beneath beds of salted rock and from the cracks in the aging sidewalks.
I knew before parking that I would hit the boardwalk. Mary told me that the nuns used to walk up and down the boardwalk for exercise, because walking the beach in the sand was too exhausting. Her and the children called it nun-running, and whispered it to each other like children in the back of a class. And so I nun-ran. I heard the surf and the gulls and saw the sunburned bellies of vacationers. After about a half mile on the boardwalk, I approached an elderly couple that was sitting on the boardwalk, underneath a large red and white umbrella.
“Excuse me, have you lived here for a long time?”
“I’m sorry, do I know you?” the old man said.
“No, I’m doing some research, actually.”
“On?”
“It’s on. Well, it’s on someone who lived here, in the nuns house.”
“The nun’s house?”
“On Seaview Lane, near Beech road?” The wind changed directions and brought the sound of children and sea spray off the water and towards the boardwalk, and I had to raise my voice.
“You mean that old convent?”
“It was a vacation home, but yes.”
“I haven’t lived here for a while,” the old man said. “But I remember when I was a young man, the nuns would hold services on Saturday nights, for anyone who wanted to go.”
“Was there a family there with them?”
“A family?”
“Four kids. A single mother?” I took the tape recorder out of my pocket.
“What is this? Am I on trial?”
“No, it’s just— I’m sorry, would you mind if I interviewed you? It’s only a few short questions.”
“I’m enjoying myself, and then I’m on trial.”
“Harold!” His wife, up to that point silent and smiling, shoved him slightly.
“I just want to get a feel for Monmouth. Back then, that is.” I clicked the record button.
“Fine. What? No, I don’t remember a family. What else do you want to know? In the summer, you didn’t know anybody until late June, because you always had new neighbors moving in. And then they left after Labor Day.”
“Is that why you left?”
“Yes. It became familiar and, what’s the word, constricting.”
“Could you raise a family here?”
“I couldn’t raise one anywhere.”
“Harold.” She looked at him. “He’s joking. We have six grandchildren.”
I nodded my approval.
“Well, hypothetically, could you raise one here?” I said.
“Maybe. I grew up alright.”
“What do you think it was like as a parent here?”
“Lonely.”
“How so?”
“Because you never know anyone here. But there’s the beach. At least you can let the kids out onto the beach.”
“What about in the winter.”
“You ever been to the beach in winter? Good luck. You think the curly fry stand is open? No. You think they sell two for one hot dogs on Thursdays?” He leaned back into the bench. His sleeves shifted up and uncovered a series of age spots on his upper arm.
“What about school?”
“We had two. An elementary, and a seven through twelve.”
“Thank you. That should be enough.” I decided not to press further about the family.
“You’re not very thorough, are you?”
“I guess not.” I left them sitting in the sun and walked further up the salt-faded boardwalk.

I spent hours in the tiny cubicles of the Georgetown undergraduate library. They offered to give me a pass to the law library, but everything was painted warmly there, with wood underlay and comfortable, modern furniture. It felt like working in a Crate and Barrel. Instead, I spent hours, sometimes six at a time, hunched over my laptop, or scribbling notes on looseleaf paper. I listened and re-listened to interviews constantly, noting at times the facts, but more often than not, the intonation of Mary’s voice, her pauses and elderly hiccups. I heard the wavering of her upper register when she became agitated. I heard the sullen monotony of my own voice.
In my room back home, I had set up a bulletin board, upon which I had tacked both old and new photographs. There were grainy sepia portraits of family members long dead, and new, glossy pictures I had taken of Mary’s old building in the Bronx, or the boardwalk in New Jersey. My father, an admitted wiseass, said it looked like I was tracking a serial killer.
This was what happened: Adrian, having beaten a man in the street, packed his bags and left. Not a word of explanation. Mary and her family moved to Monmouth, into the nuns’ summer home. An inexorable summer of four years passed. Mary and the children then moved to Toledo, Ohio, to Mary’s brother Joe’s farm. They lived in a five-room farmhouse on the outskirts of Joe’s expansive property. Three years later, with no warning, Adrian came back, having traveled extensively up and down the eastern seaboard. Six months later, he left again, and the next time he turned up was in prison, in Jackson, Missouri, where he served a six-year sentence for armed robbery. He disappeared after that.
I recovered his journals through contact with the Missouri prison system, which put me in contact with his brother, who had kept it in a small wooden box in an attic. It was a tiny leather bound thing, well faded when I found it. It wasn’t all that helpful, but it certainly felt like it legitimated my enterprise. On occasion, I would flip through the pages; most of the writing, done in pencil, was faded by this point, but occasionally a sketch or a fragment of a sentence would be legible.
I approached a lot of my writing with the same masturbatory self-referencing. It wouldn’t take me long to write a section, but I would pore over it constantly. At first I told myself it was to check for errors, to revise. But after a few revisions, I would still return to the same sections, enjoying the appearance of my own words on the page. I would smile at the way I had shaped a certain scene, completely unaware of it was well done or not, only caring that it was done, and that I had done it.
August came and brought the heat. I stayed in my room, writing and reading. I was probably fifty pages from completion by August 15th, and Valerie started calling me, reminding me. It felt like I was crushing my whole head to get those last pages done. I stopped drinking, and then started again. I called in sick to work for a week. I finished the last scene, some innocuous little thing about Mary’s second husband, who was almost an afterthought in the whole thing. It was August 30th. I emailed it, as instructed, to Valerie. She sent me a curt reply, something about punctuality. I figured I would not be receiving my bonus.

On September 19th, I drove up from Maryland into Jersey for Mary’s party. The Fletchers had rented a nice hotel in Avalon for the party. When I walked in, they had several copies of the book, bound in dark blue with simple silver embossed letters. My name appeared on the inside cover. The Fletcher’s had agreed to rent a number of hotel rooms for the out-of-towners, so the whole thing felt vaguely like a wedding reception. I had a single on the 6th floor.
I showed up early, around four-thirty. The drive had been unexpectedly brief, and I had too much time on my hands. I wandered absentmindedly through the hotel’s ballroom, trailing my fingers across the gold ribbons that were wrapped around the edges of the chairs. There were probably 150, 160 chairs set up around 16 tables. There was a podium, a small stage. It was all too much.
Valerie walked in as I was wandering through the room.
“Eddie!” she called out, walking towards me. “Did you check in?”
“Yes. My bag is up there.”
“Do you think it’s too much, Eddie?”
“No.”
“I’m worried. My mother has always been a simple woman.”
“Sometimes you have to have something nice.”
“You were a bit late getting it in, weren’t you?” she said, eyeing me a little more severely now.
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, Frank pulled some strings. All is forgiven. My mother seems pleased with it. Has she heard the whole thing?”
“Of course, I figured I should confirm it with her.” Valerie was standing by a podium that faced out towards numerous round tables, all of which were draped in white tablecloths with cream-colored napkins. In the center of each table was a picture from a different era of Mary’s life, surrounded by some flowers. I was to sit in front of the room, next to Mary, her sister and two other people who I hadn’t met. I learned later that one of them was the head priest at the Retreat, and the other was Mary’s second husband’s brother. I hadn’t met him, which said something about my research, but then again Mary had told me that after Ohio things had just sort of happened. She wouldn’t elaborate much further on it.
I had three hours to kill before the ceremony and the party, so I went to sit in the lobby and read day-old newspapers. Eventually, I got bored, and then depressed, and so I went up to my room. I had snared a copy of the book, and I read the first few pages before putting it down. I fell into the same problem I had when writing the thing, only the opposite. Everything I had written felt pompous and absurd. It was overly poeticized garbage. I put the book down on top of the mini-fridge, and helped myself to a refrigerated Snickers bar. The menu said it was three dollars. I thanked Valerie quietly.

I went down the ballroom at seven thirty, and watched from my seat at the front as the guests slowly found their tables. Valerie, Frank and Stephanie, along with Stephanie’s younger siblings and a few cousins, were sitting at the table to my right. Addy, sitting with a few people I barely recognized was to the left, near the bar. The conversations began to fade, Valerie approached the podium and made a little speech thanking everyone for coming and wishing her mother a happy birthday. She looked at her mother, tilted her head, and said she loved her. I sat listlessly in my chair.
Valerie then introduced me to the crowd of family and friends. I stood up from my chair and walked over to Mary, who gave me a kiss on the cheek. She smelled mildly of baby-powder and expensive bourbon, and I noticed that my whole body was shaking—not shaking, more like the nervous twitters one experiences upon drinking too much coffee too fast. I couldn’t have held my hand steady had I tried. I approached the podium slowly.
“Good evening,” I said. “It’s been my pleasure over the past year to research this fine woman, Mary Gibson Fletcher, for her biography.” I had a series of remarks, prepared by Valerie, that I had to get through.
“In that time, I’ve come to know a woman who we all must acknowledge is highly remarkable.” And on and on it went. I could hear myself talking, but it wasn’t my voice, and so the whole speech seemed to slip away into nothing. I couldn’t remember a single word I said immediately after saying it. After the prepared remarks, I was supposed to give a brief reading from the book.
“Mary, is there any section you’d like?” I said, turning to her.
“The beginning, Eddie.” The crowd looked at me bemusedly. I could see Addy at one of the close tables, a gin and tonic in his hand, smiling at me. Stephanie, in a purple dress with her hair tied back, initially avoided eye contact and then looked at me with something like that looked grief.
“Summer, 1960,” I began. “As the day fades over Joe Gibson’s farm in Toledo Ohio, a chill comes into the air. The oncoming fall is evident in the wind that comes whistling from the north. Mary Fletcher”—a slight murmur in the crowd—“and her four children are walking back from the main farmhouse to their tiny one, towards the eastern edge of the property. Addy runs ahead, chasing Sarah up the road that bisects the farm. Valerie, the youngest, walks at the hem of her mother’s dress. Michael, Sarah’s twin brother, not long for the world, strolls absentmindedly, a hand running over the grass on the side of the road. Adrian Fletcher, Mary’s husband, has been gone from the farm for six months, and it feels as though, on this waning summer day, that some semblance of normalcy has returned to her life.”
I knew they could see this moment. Addy, the oldest, would certainly know what I was talking about. Valerie, however, looked unperturbed. For her, this day in August, this burning building, had become little more than the tapestry of long-forgotten childhood, a type of family legend.
“As they round the bend in the road, Addy chases Sarah past the house, and Mary lets them run. She turns into the gate, a listless Michael lingers behind slightly, and Valerie has her face buried into her blue cotton dress. On the porch, however, Mary notices a chair overturned.”
I paused here, searching for Stephanie’s face. She kept it locked on her napkin ring, which she was rolling back and forth on the tabletop with her palm. Valerie, sitting next to her, was staring intently at me.
“The front door is ajar. Addy and Sarah run up the path from the gate, but Mary tells them to stay. They stop, frightened by the sudden edge in the mother’s voice. Mary tells them that she has forgotten they are going to sleep at their uncle’s tonight. Mary tells Addy to take his siblings back to Joe’s. He complies slowly. Mary approaches the house as the air turns blue with the night. She walks towards the kitchen window, which faces out towards the road and the fields beyond it. Her children, huddled at the gate, look out at her, but cannot make out anything inside the house. Then, as Mary comes closer, a face, pale and unspecific, comes into view in the kitchen window. Long shadows fall from its eyebrows. It makes no movement, speaks no words. Mary turns, slowly, silently, and walks towards the road.”
At this point, both Valerie and Stephanie were staring through my face into the back of my head. I turned to look at Mary, who sat smiling at me, almost winking. Addy, whose drink was now empty, was looking alternately between me and the bar. I looked again to Mary, who nodded.
“As Mary rounds the bend in the road, so that the house is invisible behind a copse of trees, a single plume of smoke, deep blue against the cerulean of early evening, is visible. By the time the fire department arrives, flames have consumed the old farmhouse and so the Fletcher family stands beside it, watching. The house is reduced to a charred crater. There is no trace of a body, and Mary never tells her children about the face in the window.”
Valerie was staring at her mother, but Stephanie was still staring at me. I couldn’t tell if I liked it. Speaking the work felt right, a confirmation of certain things. A completion. But Stephanie was looking at me as though she never had in her life. Who was this strange man, exhuming her family history? History she didn’t know? I felt at once vindicated and humiliated. I stepped back from the podium, touched Mary’s hand as I walked past her. Most of the people in the party, save the children, who hadn’t been listening anyway, were exchanging confused or angry looks. I sat back in my seat, where my neighbor, Sister Jerry, was staring at me.
“Great party,” I said.

Mary spoke very briefly, thanking everyone for coming and for their generosity. Then she demanded that the festivities begin, and people awkwardly complied, still, I hoped, slightly terrified by the picture Mary and I had painted them. Valerie pulled Mary aside and began speaking with a fierce face. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I probably could’ve guessed.
Eventually, the booze and tinsel kicked in and people started having a good time. Stephanie maintained a ballroom’s distance from me. I saw her dancing with one of her cousins, a few years younger than her. I hung mostly by the bar. Addy, also orbiting the bar, tried to bait me into conversation, but I mostly deflected it. “Nice ghost story,” he slurred. I thanked him and moved to the snack table.
The party began to peter out around midnight. Mary had gone to bed two hours earlier, but her children kept the festivities going as best they could; Valerie with practiced cheeriness and Addy by the sheer force of his drunkenness. I was also pretty well drunk by this point, and somehow, despite the fact that I’d been stealing glances at her all night, Stephanie snuck up on me as I toyed with one of the cream-colored napkins left rumpled on a banquet table.
“Is it all true?” she said, taking a seat next to me.
“She wanted me to do it,” I said.
“My mother?”
“Mary. Your Ga.”
“You don’t have to make fun of me.” She put both her hands in her lap. I shifted in my seat so that I was facing her, and then shifted back.
“It’s not a biography, it’s a story.”
“So is it a true story?”
“Sure.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Sure.”
“Are you gonna really answer me?”
“How’s Seattle, Steph?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“How is it? How was the summer?”
“Why are you angry? All of a sudden, why are you angry?”
“It’s a true story.”
“Are you getting back at me?”
“Sure.”
“Is that what this is? You’re getting back at me?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a true story.”
She sighed and leaned back into her chair. I was staring blurrily at the back of the picture frame at the center of our table. On the front was Mary’s face, in some stage of decay, and to my left was Stephanie, her face beautiful, if out of focus. I closed my eyes and it was all there.