I told her. There was no good in hiding anything. “I gave it up. I got lost in it. I think I didn’t understand the father. I think he was just too European for me. That, and my high school German failed me.”
She took one of those long deep breaths meant to let you know she was thinking all kinds of serious thoughts. But then, she probably was.
She said, “At least you’re writing again.”
That was the string. I could see it there between us.
“Yeah. You told me I should. And you told me a couple of other things. Do you remember that too?”
“No. I don’t. What did I tell you?”
“You told me not to write fiction. ‘No novels.’ That was your advice. If I was going to have any standing as a historian, I should stay away from the fiction. But that’s what I’m up to now, Becky. I’m writing stories again.”
She nodded, but the smile faded a bit more. Her voice lost a little color. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Does it? You aren’t looking for a career at a university anymore, are you, John?”
It was my turn to smile and say something to soften the truth. But I said, “Never was. That was all you. Not me. I remember you wanted me to go that direction, but it was never the way for me.”
She sat back and looked every bit the professor I had first seen from the door earlier.
“History is so much more interesting than fiction, John. You have to admit. Look at this woman. Look what we’ve found. That’s history!”
I gave the pause an extra half-second. I didn’t want to be arguing with her now.
“What you have here is just the bones, Becky. All you found were the bones. But the story you told me is fiction. Good, isn’t it? It’s the story that makes those old bones talk.”
She smiled as if there were something humorous to it all.
“Well then. Here we are again. Back at the old argument we were always having in college. Back in what? 1987, or thereabouts?” She looked at me as if I was supposed to say something, but I knew it was better to keep my mouth shut. Then she says, “But I guess that’s history too, isn’t it?”
I could have accepted that without comment. But I didn’t.
“Yeah. Guess it is.” I held up the sheet of paper she had given me with the reference to the archive at the Historical Society. “But this is a story! This might be something to work with. And I like what you’ve imagined, Becky—what might have happened to Mary Andrews. Would you let me use that? I’ll even put in a footnote for you if you’ll let me use some of that.”
She inhaled loudly on the thought. It wasn’t a hesitation. More of a confirmation of something.
“Sure. It’s yours to use. But forget the footnote. My life has too many footnotes as it is.”
2. False starts
The story ended up being a bit shorter than I anticipated. About 60,000 words. The first draft was done in less than two months.
The insurance office where I shuffled papers to pay the bills was in the Pru and I was taking late lunches and running the two blocks over to the Historical Society for an hour and a half or so, every day. My boss didn’t like it, but I was working late as well, and they needed that too, so I got away with it.
I was writing in the mornings, five to eight. Maybe twelve hundred words a day. I didn’t have a social life anyway, so I just went to bed a little earlier. I cleaned up the first draft by the end of April and then looked around for someone to read it. I needed some feedback.
My oldest daughter got first crack. Susie is a hardnosed critic. She doesn’t let me get by with much. But I was wondering if she’d recognize the character I had fashioned around poor Mary Andrews. People never see themselves the way others do. I was betting that she wouldn’t notice a thing.
She called me a couple of days after she got the file.
“You didn’t have to kill me off, did you? Couldn’t you let me enjoy a little love affair without paying the ultimate price?”
So, that was that. The important thing was that she liked it. Her sister Sarah read it next and wanted to know right off if I had chosen the name ‘Mary’ for the victim as a psychological replacement for their mother. I had to convince her that I had used the real name to give the story a little verisimilitude. Sarah is a detail person. She always suspects me of the worst when I start using long words to explain myself. She’s usually right.
At least I had a story. It wasn’t the first one I had written since the divorce, even though I was pretty sure it was the best. But I wanted to be sure I had the details right to a knowledgeable eye. I worked out a few kinks that Sarah had noticed and corrected some eighteenth-century grammar. Then I sent the manuscript to Rebecca Sawyer. That was around May Day.
Of course, I understood that it was the end of the semester and that she might be busy. I waited. Around June first, I called her office. Rebecca was gone. She was on an archeological dig in the Mohawk River Valley near Utica. She would be gone for a least a month.
On July 3rd she called me.
No, ‘Hello. Howarya? Howse the kids?’ Her first words were, “Did you do more research on this before you went into your reverie of speculation?”
I said, “A little bit.”
“How sure are you that the family were Loyalists?”
“Positive. It’s even in those letters you found, but it’s only subtext.”
She let a moment of silence pass as an expression of doubt. I imagined her as a professor in front of a class, letting a student’s reply hang in the air.
Then she said, “It reads well. I like it.”
“Good.”
“Can we talk about it over dinner?”
I might have hesitated an extra beat. “When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow's the Fourth.”
“So it is. Do you have to play with firecrackers? Your kids are grown up, aren’t they?
I tell her, “Yeah. Tomorrow’s fine.”
She says, “Where would you like to go?”
I say, “How about Memorial Drive?” I say that because that’s where I was planning to go anyway.
She says, “Where’s that?” I suppose she thinks it’s the name of some kind of restaurant.
“It’s the street, on the Charles River.”
“You want to eat on the street?”
“Sure. There’ll be some great food along there. All the lunch wagons will be out for the crowds. And we can watch the fireworks.”
She thought about that a moment.
“Can we talk? Will it be noisy?”
“It’ll be very noisy. But we can talk anyway. Come on. I haven’t gone to see the fireworks since before Sarah went away to college. You’ll like it. It’s great.” I didn't add that it would fit my budget.
I wrote the entire conversation down here five minutes after I hung up the phone because I thought it was a little odd. This was a woman I had spoken to only once in the past nine years and that was many months before, and now she’s talking to me on the phone like we see each other every day. It worried me.
Rebecca lives in a time-warp. She always has. It’s disconcerting. During the school year I suppose she has her benchmarks to keep track of things, but other times she seems to forget about the cycles of the sun. She’s not absent minded. She just has too much going on upstairs.
We only went out for a few months when we were in college. There were not many places to go in Amherst during the winter. Not in 1978. I remember we hung out at the bookstore a lot. She studied compulsively. I was trying to write my first version of the great American novel while getting credits for my degree in History. It didn’t make for a creative relationship and, by the end of the last semester, she was gone as a volunteer on a dig in Virginia. We never made it as far as the dormitory.
When I bumped into her years later at the Natural History Museum at Harvard and she told me her life story up to that moment in under five minutes, I had some sympathy for her husband. A marriage shouldn't be summed up in un
der five minutes with “He likes soft beds,” or “He was afraid of heights.” Then again, I've been known to talk about Mary Ellen until I fell off my stool. But I guess it's different if you're the one who got dropped.
That day years ago when I bumped into Becky at the museum, we went over to Bartley’s for lunch and talked at one of the long center tables, sandwiched between a couple of Goth women with healthy appetites on one side and two French tourists who kept asking us odd questions I couldn’t quite understand on the other.
I don’t really remember the conversation with Becky that day. I wasn’t keeping the journal up then. Too many sour grapes. And so much for my vaunted memory. I do know I told her about that short history of the Blaschkas, father and son, that I was working on at that time, because she reminded me of that now. And I probably avoided telling her then that my little history of a scientific endeavor transformed to art had actually started with an idea for a mystery story centered on the Parkman-Webster murder of 1850. That fiction I had never finished because someone else wrote one based on the same crime at just about the same moment, so I had retreated by more than half a century to lick my wounds and put some extra research into those men that intrigued me there. But the work of the Bohemian artisans deserved better than my waning enthusiasm. In any case, I probably talked too much about the glass flowers that day at Bartley’s. I know we were both unhappy with our marriages, but I don’t think the subject of my own disintegrating personal circumstance really came up. It was a hot day and I do remember her décolletage.
This July 4th was hot as well. The humidity would have made clothing optional if there were not so many cops along the way.
The sun hadn’t completely set when we started walking down the river from the Harvard Bridge. I figured that would give her time to rip my little story to historical shreds. Instead, she seemed more interested in nostalgia.
She said, “I feel like I’ve been doing this for too long. Another summer. More fieldwork. August up at my parent’s old place on Isle Au Haut in Maine. Then another school year. Time passes very quickly when you aren’t paying attention.”
Those were the facts. Even I had noticed.
I told her, “Sometimes I think my kids grew up all in one summer.”
She laughed at that. “It’s true. That’s it. When I look back on my childhood, it feels like one long summer with barely any interruptions.”
I said, “Sounds like a good childhood.”
She stared out over the Charles River with her thought. “It was. I like the ocean. Maine always seems more real to me, even now.”
Then she reached out and took my hand. Caught me by surprise.
Almost immediately she said, “So why haven’t you gotten married again?”
I watched the small boats each making their way down to get a good spot to see the show and wondered how I was going to move the conversation over to poor Mary Andrews before I lost the chance.
I shook my head but didn’t find words for what I thought was obvious.
Rebecca said, “You don’t have to talk about it. I just wondered. I think I wanted to know if it was an opposite reasoning to what made me marry Leonard. My second husband.”
I mustered a voice. “What was that?”
She shrugged. “Loneliness. That’s all. A kind of compulsive loneliness. Like the feeling after you’ve eaten all the chocolates in the box. I can’t stand the loneliness. And now I feel it even with him in the room.”
Well, that was that. I couldn’t argue. Mary Ellen and I spent the last years of our marriage that way. Of course, it meant the kids got a lot more attention, but it was a common enough thought at the time. Now, I had most of those thoughts pretty well buried. You keep busy. You write a story and make up something better. Read a book. Call one of the kids. Fix something. And here was Becky wanting to do a little archeology.
I told her my first thought on the matter. “Odd thing. I feel sick when I feel lonely. That’s how I know, I don’t like it. But I’ve been in that room myself—with someone only a few feet away. That was worse. So, I just keep busy.”
She squeezed my hand.
“What’s the answer for it? After a few hundred thousand years of human struggle you’d think we’d have an answer for that.”
Too quickly I spoke the thought, “We do.”
“What’s that?”
Then I had to say it. “Love.”
That stopped her in her tracks. She didn’t look up at me. She looked out at the water again. She said, “Sex is so ephemeral,” and seemed ready to say something more but didn’t.
I had to correct the course of the conversation a little, “I didn’t say sex. I said love.”
She repeated the word, “Love,” but with a dubious tone.
So, I told her a thought I had once.
“A few years ago, I read the autobiography of a nun, St. Teresa of Avila. She—.”
Becky suddenly let go of my hand and turned at me. In the twilight, her frown seemed fierce, though I knew it was only mocking.
“I didn’t know you had become religious.”
Another correction. “I wish I was. But I’m not. Not that way. In fact, I was reading about her to understand the nature of religious devotion. For something I was writing.” I stopped short on the explanation, trying to get the thought straight. “But I mention her because St. Teresa said quite a bit about love. When she spoke about love, it had nothing to do with sex. And in that strange way, when you’re reading something totally at odds with your own experience, it makes you take a different angle, it helped me understand something I only understood vaguely. Only as a father. And sometimes as a writer. . . . I think maybe it was what Bernini was trying to capture in stone—”
My clarification had made things worse. She interrupted, “You mean in Rome? That statue of her? I saw that once. Is that what you mean?”
I tried to explain it better. “The setting’s rather too grand, framed by those marble pillars and crowned with that ornate pediment. But I had a little postcard I picked up in the shop there. Just of the statue with the angel. That was really what Bernini did that was unique, not the rest. The very idea of love and ecstasy, all on a postcard. It had me examining my own life looking for some moments of that. And I found them. But it had nothing to do with sex.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She took my hand again. The muscles in her own hand felt harder now. There was a little sweat there. She said, “Love. . . Is that what ecstasy is?”
I suddenly realized how far I’d gone. I said, “I think so. It’s not by way of explanation or definition but more by comparison.” I hesitated then before I made my move. I just didn’t hesitate long enough. I said, “I was trying to capture a little of that in my characterization of Mary Andrews.”
Becky let go of my hand again like she was dropping a rope.
“Ha! You just want to talk about your damned manuscript. That’s all this is. Ecstasy, my foot! You’re trying to avoid the subject of the moment. That’s all you’re doing.”
“I was just trying to connect the two.”
“Sure you were. You were just scared to death I was going to go all stupid with you. That was it. Wasn’t it?”
She’s too smart to con for long.
I said, “No. Maybe a little. I’m not sure that would be so bad.” Like a coward I fled my position on the battlefield and ran toward the rear lines. In self-defense, I took her hand back. “Didn’t you ever feel that when you were a kid on Isle Au Haut? Islands do that. They can bring everything to a focus. No place to run. You’re all at once lonely and in heaven.”
The muscles in her hand relaxed just a little. And she said, “Yes. That’s right.”
I had pulled the island imagery out of the hat. I’d only spent a few days of my life on an island and this was not a memory as much as a daydream now.
For the next couple of hours, I got her to talk about her childhood. She seemed to enjoy that more than Be
rnini, and by the time we got on the subway at Kendall Square, she was pretty much at ease again. And she was giving me the eye. It had come up that her husband was permanently away at his own family home in New Orleans. She had not seen him for months. Now she had her own ideas for this evening. And there I was taking her home.
I didn’t get her to talk about the manuscript until we were having coffee the next morning. She launched into it all on her own.
“Let’s talk about your little reverie then.” She sniffed. She took a sip of coffee loud enough to be some sort of punctuation. That was on purpose. She had my attention. She said, “I liked it. It makes sense. I think you’re right about the British Regulars. They wouldn’t have tarried to rape a girl with a running battle going on. I don’t know why I let that idea even come into my thinking. Maybe just a modern prejudice about war. I like your idea of Mary coming back to an empty house, with her parents temporarily fled to Boston for their Loyalist sympathies and her alone with no place else to go. She was the oldest. She must have had a boyfriend. It makes sense. The neighbor’s son is an obvious choice. He might well have come by to check on her.” Her fingernail ticked on the small table between us as she tapped one finger in emphasis. “And I’m sorry I missed the fact that her father had been married before and this was his second wife, with Mary the child of his first. Izaak Andrews is an interesting character. A tavern keeper, especially a royalist in those times, would have such substance. And taverns were the center of Colonial life outside the home, and that works well.”
She sat back then in her chair. Maybe she wanted me to comment. For my part I was ecstatic with her appreciation. A little appreciation goes a long way with any writer, I suppose. I kept my mouth shut to hide my fluster.
Becky held her cup close to her lips, nursing the warmth of it when she spoke again, reconsidering the circumstance. “Mary was the oldest child by quite a bit, wasn’t she? The other five children weren’t even in their teens. Being the child of the first wife would make her role doubly difficult in a small house.” Becky stopped and sipped again and squinted at me conspiratorially. “But I’m not sure I understand the stepmother yet. I’d like to know more about HER. They would want Mary gone and married. Sure. But then, if Mary were fond of a boy who did not share their Loyalist sympathies, that would make matters even more difficult. I agree with all that. But I am not sure of the indentured servant. Your young Paul, the indentured worker. Remember, this isn’t a casteless society. Not even the way it would be just a generation later. If the fellow who was killed and thrown in the well with her was an indenture, then he had to have some value to his master. True? And the boy had no hope of supporting a family on his own. He would have had guarded feelings for an older woman, at best. Even if they were only four or five years apart.”
John Finn Page 2