NOVELLA

ESTRANGEMENT

– 1 –

I’m cutting across Copley Plaza with Cotton Mather when I see her for the first time. She’s seated at this little table in the middle of the square with a white tablecloth across it, hands clasped primly, dressed like a nurse. There’s an easel beside her, one of those boardroom presentation things, and a poster on it that says Free Casts. But Cotton Mather is fretting about being, you know, Cotton Mather, and I’m trying to reassure him, tell him to just memorize the fact sheet I worked up for him, throw in a few thees and thous, a few Biblical quotes, let the waistcoat and the periwig we just filched from the Boston University costume shop do their job, he’ll be fine.
        I steer him toward the Green Line, tell him I’ll see him in the morning, tell him for the next couple of days I’ll do Increase Mather as his sidekick, a kind of Puritan Tonto I say, pushing him down the subway steps. And then I go into the BPL because I’m a failed Harvard graduate student and sometimes I go into libraries just to feel the books hating on me. When I come out she’s still there, sitting at her table, hands still clasped in front of her.
        I stop, give her a look. She’s sitting right where all the memorials were back in 2013. All the flowers and notes and photographs. For the Marathon bombing, I mean. This may or may not be significant.
        The nurse’s outfit she’s got on, it’s some sort of World War I English job – the starched white dress, the darling little cape about the shoulders, every button done up, cap pinned to hair. Cute. Sexy, if you go in for that sort of thing and who doesn’t? She’s just sitting there. She’s got surgical scissors and plaster of Paris and a tub of water. Free casts. But there’re no takers. No one’s even giving her a hard time though the square is littered with the usual derelicts. Taped to the front of her table there’s this Red Cross sign, but you can see it’s just construction paper.
        “So, like, what’s this?” I say.
“Free casts, sir,” she says in this spot-on British accent.
        So I’m thinking, okay, this is like performance art or something. I look around for a camera. Then I cross the space between us, right up to her table, and I smile at her because my smile is the only thing about me you might be inclined to call handsome.
        “Would you like a free cast, sir?”
        Really, the accent’s a killer. And she’s looking straight up at me but you can tell it’s an act. She’s a shy girl, she is. But it’s the Great War and she’s a nurse, and that requires the brave front, the stiff upper lip, direct if polite address, etc.
        There’s a business card on her table, so I pick it up, read it. You know what it says? It says Incunabula de la Luz (not her real name). For real. I mean (not her real name) is right there on the business card. And then there’s her phone number with, you guessed it, (not her real phone number) after it.
        “Incunabula,” I say.
        “Yes, sir?”
        “I’m a vocabulary freak, Incunabula,” I say, mock- scolding her with my forefi nger, “so I know what this means.”
        “Gracious, sir!”
        She doesn’t look at all English. Her skin isn’t pale or peachy, and her hair is dark. She looks more Mexican or Mediterranean. Maybe in the Sephardic direction. Maybe not. To tell you the truth she looks like an Incunabula is what she looks like. Which, in case you’re not a vocabulary freak, is a term used to designate books published in the fi rst half- century after the invention of the printing press. Potent potables for four- hundred, Alex.
        “Which arm is it, sir?”
        So I sit down in the chair alongside the table and, because I’m a lefty, give her my right arm. She unbuttons the shirt cuff, rolls up the sleeve, and starts touching me. She probes my forearm, gently, professionally, looking for the break. I have to say it feels good. Her hands know how to touch, if you know what I mean.
        “How did you hurt yourself, sir?”
        I don’t answer, watch instead as she readies the plaster- soaked squares. She does it with skill and care. Or the simulacrum of skill and care.
        “Did you take a tumble?”
        I’m trying to catch her eye. But she’s intent upon her work, bent over my arm so all I can see is the top of her head. And her temples where there’re these little wisps of hair that aren’t obeying the hairstyle. And her eyebrows drizzling off into nowhere. These are the sort of details of face and fi gure which, were one going to fall in love with Incunabula de la Luz, one would fi nd inexplicably charming.
        “My arm’s not actually broken,” I say to see if I can maybe throw her off her game. “I don’t need a cast.”
        “Everybody needs a cast,” she says.
        “I don’t.”
        “Sir?” she says and lifts her eyes to me in inquiry. She’s got the Virginal thing going, but I’m thinking she’s probably thirty, thirtytwo. “No injuries? No hurts?”
        So okay, now I get it. She wants to move us into the hall of mirrors. Metaphor, metonymy, malleable signifiers. But I don’t bite. No way am I going to be drawn out on how Nina/Beth/Denise serially broke my heart. Not part of the situation here.
        “Nice try,” I say.
        But she doesn’t pick up the challenge, goes back to work instead, and I don’t press the advantage. If that’s what it is.
        “Don’t be alarmed if it begins to feel warm,” she says when she’s done. “That will just be the plaster curing.” She busies herself cleaning up, washes her hands. “You will need to keep the cast on for two weeks.”
        “Two weeks,” I repeat.
        “May I have your address?” she asks, pen poised over the flip side of one of her business cards. I consider the request a moment, then tell her my address. I throw in my name as a freebie. Which is Martin, by the way. Marty.
        “Only two weeks?” I say.
        She regards me from under those brows. “Two weeks will be sufficient, sir. It will begin the healing.” Then she’s looking past me, all nurse-efficient, ignoring the palpable metaphor. She calls “Next!” with perfect aplomb. Though there’s no next waiting in line.
        So okay, I think on the way home. I’m a trouper. I can appreciate the absurd, the amphigoric. I can keep the cast on for a couple of weeks, no sweat. I figure it’s fifty-fifty I’m never going to see her again. It’s a joke, a bit of Dadaist clowning, Burning Man, right? But like I say, I’ve got an appreciation for the absurd even if I am a failed Harvard PhD student, and completion, carrying through on my part has its rewards even if I’m the only one watching. And besides, I figure if there’s going to be any chance of there being any, you know, favors bestowed on me by Incunabula de la Luz (not her real name), the cast has definitely got to be on my arm if and when she actually shows up at my apartment. We understand one another on this point, yes?
        One of the first things I do of course is I call the number on her business card but it really isn’t her number. Which is disheartening because I somehow had the idea that putting down a fake number, plus calling it a fake number, would somehow make it a real number, like multiplying minuses. So then I Google her – which is what we do with the mysteries nowadays, don’t we? – and bango! there she is, thousands of hits. Turns out Incunabula de la Luz is famous in an edgy, underground sort of way. Famous first of all for being a founding member of the Surveillance Camera Players, which was this troupe that went around Boston in the early teens performing in front of surveillance cameras. I mean like doing Ophelia’s mad scene and episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore Show in parking garages and ATM cubicles, with no audience except some low- fidelity videotape machine, doomed to be watched by exactly nobody unless a crime got itself simultaneously committed. Another thing she did was erect crucifi ed bunny rabbits on Easter. She and her gang took these pink stuffed bunnies with their cute smiley bunny noses and nailed them to crosses, stuck a crown of thorns on their heads, and put them all over the city. This rang a bell because I recalled there having been one on the steps of Widener back when I still had a future. It was pretty funny, I guess.
        There was lots more, but you get the picture. Basically, she’s an artist.
        So the fate of failed Harvard PhD students whose dissertations refuse to consummate themselves is they get a job administering the Living History program at the Boston Tourism Bureau. Which basically means they train out- of-work actors and other bohemian losers in how to be Abigail Adams or Paul Revere or Robert Gould Shaw. And they distribute them on the Common, or outside the State House,  or in the Granary Burial Ground, or anywhere along the so-called Freedom Trail so that they can entertain the tourists with informative crap about the Boston Massacre or whatever. You have to dress and act the part, like seriously. Women in period gowns, heads coifed, petticoats showing; men in wigs and waistcoats and buckle shoes ripped off from some long- gone production of The Crucible. There’s also these tours you can take: Revolutionary Boston, Puritan Boston, Transcendental Boston, Ghost Boston. Here, let me hand out some leafl ets.
        So yeah, while I’m waiting for Incunabula de la Luz to come take my cast off and otherwise save me, I fulfi ll the duties of my job. I’m a responsible person after all. The first couple of days I do my Increase Mather thing so the new Cotton Mather can learn the ropes. He’s not too bad, turns out. A bit of a ham, in fact. We take up our position next to the family crypt in the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground and have at it. Of course everyone wants to hear about the Salem witch trials, but one of my things is, is I’m on a one- man mission to rehabilitate Cotton Mather who’s gotten a bad rap in my view. So we tell them no, Cotton Mather was not a judge at the witch trials; that although his Wonders of the Invisible World chronicles those trials he was himself far from being a hanger of witches, instead took into his home young girls in the throes of possession in order to minister to them; that he was a scientist, one of the fi rst to support smallpox inoculation, and that because of that a terrorist bomb was thrown through his bedroom window with a note on it: Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you! I’ll inoculate you! Inveterate scribblers, the Puritans.
        But to return to Incunabula de la Luz (not her real name.)
        “Nut case,” my only friend Nina Smith says after I’ve told her about the cast and the online videos and everything. We’re sitting in Brando’s in the Italian North End, posters of Marlon Brando all around us, getting drunk as is our wont of a Friday evening. She’s dressed in her Abigail Adams costume; and I’ve just come from doing a Puritan Boston tour so I’m still in my Increase Mather garb. This gets us looks from the local clientele. That, plus Nina’s kind of pretty, curvy if you take my meaning, skin the color of an El Dorado plum. Also, she’s got her four- year- old daughter John Quincy Adams with her.
        “She’s not a nut case,” I tell her. “She’s an artist.”
        “Same difference,” she says.
“Same difference,” says John Quincy Adams who’s at that stage. She’s dressed like an eighteenth- century boy, hair short enough to pass. She’s several shades lighter than Nina, so she sort of passes there too. Nina, though, is dark. She’s an African- American Abigail Adams. I got her the job because she tends to be in dire straits, is what she tends to be in. She was a Harvard grad student too, a year behind me, but she took a spill. That’s her way of saying it. “I took a spill,” she says. The spill put her in Bulfi nch Seven, which is this locked ward at Mass General. But that’s another story.
And now, in case the reader has not been paying attention, I will pause here to point out that Nina is the fi rst name in the Nina/Beth/ Denise trio that serially broke my heart. But that’s another story too.
“Dude, just cut the thing off,” she says now because I’m using the serrations on the little plastic knife that came with our crab cakes to scratch under the cast. “She’s so not coming back. This chick is strictly hit- and- run.”
“Takes one to know one,” I say and then pull out my phone, dial up a YouTube video of Incunabula de la Luz as the Trash Girl, standing more or less naked on Boylston Avenue in a trash can, pieces of trash stuck to her for clothes, holding her hand out for passersby to take a Girl Scout mint. I give it to John Quincy Adams to watch. Whose real name, by the way, is Nibby. Nibby Smith. I call her the Smithereen.      
“Jesus, mother of god,” Nina mutters at the sight of Trash Girl. She shakes her head at me like the books in the BPL are right after all.
Of course it has to be said that Incunabula de la Luz is not, in all likelihood, going to come and take my cast off and otherwise save me. She is off doing some new thing, some edgy performance, has some new audient on whom she is casting her postmodern spell, Marty Lowell fading in the rear- view mirror.          
Loser, loser, loser! is what the books in the BPL say, just in case you didn’t know.
“You get my latest installment?” Nina asks, swirling the beer around in her glass.
  “No,” I say, though I have in fact gotten her latest installment. The envelope is sitting half- opened and scary on my kitchen counter. Also claustrophobic with metaphor, and generally unwell.
  “It’s my best yet,” she says, and then looking up: “I’ve outdone myself.” And then like she’s quoting a review or a blurb or something: “You’ll laugh! You’ll weep! You’ll reach for a hypodermic needle . . . !”             
  What it is, is Nina’s sending me a suicide note in installments. Suicide on the Installment Plan, she said when she handed me the first envelope, like ha- ha. Envelope, not email, because it’s a suicide note, get it? And it’s even sicker than that. She’s writing the note in the voice of these historic American women, not like they’re contemplating suicide, understand, but like there’s something about their lives – Anne Hutchinson excommunicated into the American 13 wilderness for her Antinomianism, Mary Dyer hanged on Boston Common for being a Quaker – that is emblematic of whatever it is that’s been eating Nina Smith. As though all of American womanhood – four centuries of the enslaved, the disenfranchised, the subjugated; women in mob caps and bustles and ’50s poodle skirts – the whole of American womanhood letting me know it plans on killing itself. Whether they’re real suicide notes or metaphoric suicide notes I’ve yet to determine. Because in addition to sending the notes to me, she’s sending them to this email writers’ group she’s part of, this lowresidency MFA thing she started doing after she got out of Bulfinch Seven. Which is cause for hope, I think, don’t you?
  “My other selves,” she says, “my sisters in American estrangement.”
  So far the installments have gone from 1637 to 1660 to 1693. Which means there’s a lot of American estrangement left to get through.
  “The loom of the real,” she says, which is the same thing she said when she handed me the first installment, tapping the envelope with a secret smile. Which smile seemed to say: If you’ve got the ears to hear.
  Which I do. At least enough to have half- opened the current installment, and half- seen that her next suicidal avatar is Mercy Short, one of the possessed girls Cotton Mather took into his home. It’s all in his A Brand Pluck’d Out Of the Burning: the girl’s parents and siblings killed in an Indian raid during King William’s War, she herself taken captive and adopted into a Sosoki family, then sold to the French in Quebec, and finally ransomed and returned to Boston where after beginning to work as a servant the poor girl began to suffer from inexplicable burns, cuts, paralysis, anesthesia, anorexia – all the somatic stuff demons and/or the psyche of abused women who end up on Bullfinch Seven are wont to inflict upon the body. In his A Brand Mather completely misses how the girl’s possession is a kind of pantomime of the trauma of her captivity, instead ascribing everything to the powers of the invisible world. The book was part of the reading list in History 2249: Colonial Women, the class where Nina and I first met. But that’s another etc.
  Now sitting there with a fat Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz above my head, Nina awaiting some response, I say the thing Christ said in the garden of Gethsemane, the agony thing: cup, lips, pass.
  “Too late, white boy,” she says, polishing off her beer, “you’re involved.”
  “Yeah, white boy,” says John Quincy Adams with this furious glare, “you’re involved!”

– 2 –
Suicide Note, Installment #3: Mercy Short, Boston 1693

I have been in a most loathsome Custodie. It has been some several Weeks I am told. I have been in and out of my Witts, conversing with unseen Spirits, and at other times most Horribly tortur’d. I did not eat the whole time, and now feel a Waning of my Limbs. Mr. Mather tells me I have been most Wondrously disorder’d in my Actions and in my Words. That I would quit my bed and sit upon the floor with my legs cross’d and speak a Language he did not know. That I would snatch his Quill and break it whenever he made to record my Speech. That one night I was found in his Study, reading of a book even though it was dark and the Matter could not be seen. Yet there it seems I was, reading and turning of the pages. The book he said was a French book of Idolatrous devotions. He has many such, he says, Popish and Quaker and Mohammedan books, for he seeks to know the Devil in all his feinting Guises.
  Now that I am brought back from this Abominable darknesse, from this spill my Soule has taken, and have my Senses restor’d to me, he sits beside me and holds my hand, and spoons Broth to my lips, and if I am up to it, a forkful of crab pancake. And he has renew’d his Request that I make a written Account of my time in the Wildernesse, and among the Heathen, with whom I sometimes feel I yet abide. I will do so, if only that it may provide an Understanding of where come these Wounds.
  During these Attacks there are sometimes a Dozen or more people present crowding my little room and spilling into the Keeping- room. They are praying Neighbors, members of our Congregation who at Mr. Mather’s direction have set aside a day of Humiliation, and fast, and pray for me. They inquire what it is like, where is it that I am when I am lost to this their World, and who is it surrounds me. How can I answer them? For when I am recover’d I can only see these things as in a Mist, or as through a Glass pane that has a running Drizzle upon it. Being told I am subject to Darknesse, I can but believe it. And so the Devil moves in me as a Worm through the earth, there and yet not there. Mr. Mather reports that during these times of Possession the Spectres are real to me, for I can describe them, can repeat their Blasphemous words, recount their movements and Doings. Yet when my senses are restor’d, these Spectres withdraw as fi gures into a Fog, or as a Dream which, upon our waking, evaporates into the brightening Aire.
  Here is my Conceit: that in these bad times I am as a Sea Creature surrounded by the eyeless, earless, legless life of the sea with its dark Caves and curling Vegetation, who only dimly knows that there is a bright world above where walk Creatures of great Beauty.
  In this most near Attack, it seems the Devils cut off all my fair hair. They left it in a Pile on the floor of my room. And they have caus’d my Fingernails to split open. And a great Swelling in my neck that I can barely swallow. And there are again Burns & Cuts upon my arms and trunk.
  Yet these Attacks are not the most Fearsome of my Possession. More chilling are those times when I am not Mad and yet still the Night season descends, when I feel myself most Horribly alone, and out upon Boston town the Watch calling the hours, and the Moonlight shining coldly on me, coldly across my Bedclothes. Then it is that a Darknesse that is not of the Night lowers over my Brain. Then it is that I feel a Zero in my Soule.
  There was an Instant in my Captivitie the memory of which is most horrific to me. It was the Midnight hour. My Indian Master and Mistress slept, as did all our forest village, when suddenly there came excited Cries from without. I thought in that first waking instant that it was as it had been at Salmon Falls and that some raiding Force was come upon us. But no, outside there were some Dozen or so of the Sauvages pointing excitedly and gazing Skyward. I look’d up and there in the Heavens saw something that even now makes my Bones freeze. For the sky was no longer the black Starry emptiness I was used to but rather lit with leaping Colour, green and blue and violet lights that flash’d as Ice, and melted upon and into themselves, and in an instant leapt down to the black Horizon and again back to the Heavens.
  I cannot write how stricken I was by this sight, how frighten’d and Amaz’d. For it came to me with a Terrifying certainty that this – these icy Sheets of light and melting Colour – was God. That God was not a Father in Heaven gazing lovingly down upon us, but was this Cascade of polar Colour spilling and tumbling upon itself as a Waterfall. That all of Humanity before this had been as a blind person. But here was God plunging upon Himself, rising and falling and leaping across the Heavens. This inhuman thing was God. This cold fire. This frozen lightning. This forming and reforming Being who gave not a thought to His creatures below. And that verse of Isaiah came to me with a Force that I thought must Break my mind: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, saith the Lord, neither are your ways my ways.
  Did I in that moment see a Revelation? Or was the vision as a Pustule of my Wildernesse condition, and so a mere Disease of my mind?
  For there is this in me too. To wit, that after this loathsome Captivitie, after I had been Sold to the Papists and was being taken to Quebec City, and had spent many days squatting in the dank, dark Hold of a Ship which cours’d ever eastward and away, I was finally given Leave to climb out of the Hold and stand upon the Deck in the Brightnesse of the day, where I could see the endless Greenery that lined the Seaway, and feel the fresh Breeze, and gaze upon the Bluffs that Majestically rose ahead of us, so that a great Love filled my Breast. How Beautiful was the world! Whether God be our Father in Heaven, or a cold leaping Colour in the Northern sky I know not, but here, here was this green and loving earth! And I resolv’d, standing there as my Home and my People and my Language mov’d ever further behind me, I would not lose it. I prayed as I had never done before, prayed with my whole Being that I would not be taken from out of the World, that though I was Blind and Groping, yet I lov’d Creation, lov’d it with every part of me, lov’d the moving water and the white Seabirds that cried above us, lov’d the blue of the Sky, and the Creaking of the ship’s Timbers below my feet, and the Green wings of the Dragonfly that rested on the taut rope beside me. I lov’d them all.
  Save me, I remember whispering to myself, whispering that someone might overhear. Do not let me go under.

– 3 –

Like Nina told me once: You’ve got to read it with all metaphors blazing. The eyeless, earless, legless sea creatures. The Zero in her soul. The abominable darkness. Is this a dance of death with American estrangement – pained, but ultimately, a literary dance – or is it Nina Smith’s personal dance of death? Just how metaphorical is the metaphor?
  Oh, in that grad seminar on Colonial Women I just couldn’t keep my eyes off her! I’d be sitting across the seminar table and we’d be discussing sumptuary laws or something, and I’d be telling myself not to look – don’t look! I’d say; I’d even write it in my notes, triple exclamation points!!! – but then of course I’d look and she’d always catch me. But I couldn’t help myself – her tiny teeth and her plump face and her retro- afro and her plum- colored skin and her long pink fingernails. And you didn’t see too many women of color in the colonial history classes. You just didn’t. It was all white guys. One time when I came back to the classroom after break she’d written Quit it, chum in my notebook. Underlined. That was our meet- cute.
  Five years later, after she’d dumped me, after she gave birth to Nibby, after spills one through three, after she got certified and put on SSI, I hired her to be Abigail Adams – race- blind casting, I told my superior in the tourism bureau.
  “Inclusiveness, diversity, e pluribus unum,” I told her. “You’ve seen Hamilton, right? It’s a whole new direction for us. You see an AfricanAmerican Abigail Adams and what’s the message you get? We’re all one, right? More than that, the wounds of slavery, the Nineteenth Amendment, the Vietnam War healed in the rocka- my- soul bosom of the Constitution.”
  “An African-American Abigail Adams,” my superior repeated.
  “Also we’re a governmental entity. Can’t just hire white people.”
  At which she scrunched her nose, looked doubtfully down at the application. “Nibby,” she read. “Nibby Smith?”
  So there’s that. Nina isn’t Nina at work. She’s Nibby. She uses Nibby’s name and Social Security number so she doesn’t lose her Supplemental Security Income. It’s a plan we cooked up because you can’t hold a job if you’re on SSI. If the government finds out you’ve got an income other than what they give you – which means you’re working, which means you’re not disabled – you lose your monthly check along with your Medicare. But Nibby’s Social Security number is clean. The computers won’t spit it out. Small matter of the whole thing being a felony.
  Just for the record Nina’s dissertation was going to be on AfricanAmerican slave quilts. Mine, of course, was supposed to be on Cotton Mather. We used to sit in Widener together winter afternoons, she with images of quilts from the New England Quilt Museum, and me with primary sources about the 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston, stuff I’d gotten from Houghton and the Massachusetts Historical Society. We were happy for a time, going out to movies, plays, quizzing each other on top ten stuff. Best rom- coms. Best meet- cutes. Leasttalented Monkee. Most over- rated rock star (Bono). Rock star you would most like to see overdose. And fi nally, was the Brad Pitt of Fight Club or the Denzel of Hurricane the most beautiful man to ever walk the earth? Ditto for most beautiful woman: Natalie Wood or Halle Berry? And who in a burning house would you save first, Audrey or Katherine? And where on these spectrums (spectra?) did one place the smolder of Loren, the languor of Brando?
  In the evenings after Widener we cooked for each other, watched TV together, and at night with the icy sound of snow against the windowpane in my bedroom, undressed each other, touching our lips, entwining our limbs. You know how this goes.
  But then we both took spills.
        Nina’s spill has been ameliorated to a degree by Vivactil. My spill I tried to ameliorate with twelve months of Beth, eighteen months of Denise. But some days I think there’s only one thing that can fix me: the return to my bed of Nina Grace Smith. Snowstorm optional.
  Over that bed – over that sad, empty, too- wide bed – I’ve hung a replica of the Lowell family coat of arms. A hand grasping three darts and a stag’s head for the crest. And the motto: Occasionem Cognosce.
        It’s supposed to be funny. Being over the bed, I mean. “Seize the Opportunity.” Too bad there’s no one to appreciate it. Or to seize, for that matter.
        (And you, Incunabula de la Luz? I’m counting the days. Nine down, fi ve more to go. Will you find it funny? As you lift your red Jewish, Arab, and/or Mexican lips to be kissed?)
        Not to put too fine a point on it, I have famous ancestors dangling from every limb of the Lowell family tree. Jurists, industrialists, abolitionists, three notable poets (James Russell, Amy, and Robert), a member of the Continental Congress, a President of Harvard, LBJ’s National Security Advisor. Suspended from one of the bigger limbs is the Lowell credited with starting the American industrial revolution. The city of Lowell is named after him, Lowell with its Mile of Mills [see Fig. 1], and its mill girls [Fig 2.], now a National Historical Park which I visited with a school group when I was ten, half- worried and half- hoping that someone would make the connection between my name and the city’s.

                And here’s to good old Boston,
                The home of the bean and the cod,
                Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
                And the Cabots talk only to God.

        Just so the reader can judge how far the current Lowell has fallen from his Brahmin forebears: this Francis Lowell went to England in 1812 and basically stole the technology for the power loom. He went from Lancashire to Shropshire to Manchester, everywhere gaining access to the long, brick, many- windowed mills that lined the inland rivers, buildings the likes of which the world had never seen before. And everywhere he went he asked questions of the operatives and mechanics, pretending he was just an American bumpkin flummoxed by the wizardry of the power looms, the dressing and the roving machines, but all the while memorizing their parts and castings, their actions, the heddles and harnesses. The technology was so prized that there were English laws that forbade mill workers or mechanics or anyone with technical knowledge of the manufactory from emigrating to a foreign country. On the way back to Boston Francis’s ship was even seized by a British frigate and searched for contraband. But there was nothing to find – the power looms, the bobbers and spinners were whirring in his mind only. He had written nothing down.
        From that mind came the founding of Lowell with its miles of canals, its water wheels three stories high, its brick mills and dormitories for the mill girls, the high- toned moral fiber of The Lowell Offering, abolitionist speeches on the street corners, and the burgeoning wealth that would underpin the New England aristocracy for the next century.
        But now we Brahmins have evaporated into history, kept around for purposes of local color, but estranged from the real.
        So I’m in just this state of mind – somewhere between snark and self- hatred – when the day comes, the two- week day. I’m thinking don’t be a fool, a loser. Incunabula de la Luz is not coming. Free Casts is so yesterday. She’s moved on to new art forms, new audiences. But all the same I make arrangements for Living History Boston to run on its own for the day, spend an hour picking up the apartment. And then I put on this black shirt, edgy but not too edgy. I have a look around. Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation is sitting on the galley window shelf that separates my kitchen from the dining area – I mean I’ve actually been trying to read it – but I figure that’s a bit over the top, so I slip the book into the microwave and lay out instead my copy of The House of Mirth, floppy and paraplegic from when Denise broke the spines on all my books (a note would have sufficed, Denise). My cast has been signed by my co-workers. It makes it look like I’ve got friends. Though if you actually read the names, you see my friends are John Hancock and Ben Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
        I imagine the knock at the door so often that morning – brisk, nononsense – that when I actually hear a brisk, no- nonsense knock I don’t get up at fi rst, just sit there reading The House of Mirth like what?
        “Keeping our spirits up, sir?” is the first thing Incunabula de la Luz says when she’s in my living room, turning around to face me. She’s in her nurse outfit still, her long dark hair pulled back in a bun, still with the English accent. There was a moment there – rewind the tape – when she couldn’t quite hide her pleasure at seeing the cast still on my arm.
        “I guess,” I say with this stupid smile.
        She nods as if to acknowledge the smile, and then gives a brisk, no- nonsense look around. I have enough presence of mind to note her note The House of Mirth (female author, female main character, artistic soul unappreciated by superficial society: good choice, Marty). She settles on the dining table, sits down and takes out a pair of surgical scissors from her black bag. I sit across from her and she starts in, professional, practiced, intent upon her work, head bowed so that there they are again, the wisps of hair that won’t get with the program.
        When the cast is off she washes my arm and dear God it’s nice to feel someone touch you, isn’t it?
        “There,” she says when she’s patted my arm dry. “All better,” she says.
        And then she’s putting her things away, standing up. It’s now or never, but I’m still kind of frozen, paralyzed with the presence of an actual, you know, woman in my apartment and can’t think of anything to say.
        What saves me is my phone ringing. My index finger goes up in the universal hold- on- a- sec gesture. It’s Nina, so I don’t answer. Text her instead. Occasionem Cognosce.
        “It’s a lovely apartment,” Incunabula de la Luz says when I rejoin her. She’s strolling about, nurse’s bag held primly in front of her. It’s not a lovely apartment, but it’s in the coveted North End, the old Italian neighborhood where there aren’t any Italians anymore but everyone pretends there are. The front windows look out onto the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground where the Mather family crypt is. The apartment costs more than I can afford now that Denise is not paying her half.
        “I’m thinking of renting a room out,” I say though I have not, in fact, been thinking of renting a room out.
        “Oh?” she says. She gazes around the living room with new significance. “I have a friend who’s looking for a place.”
        So that sounds like a handkerchief designedly dropped, doesn’t it? It’s our next performance piece, me showing her around the apartment like a landlord, turning the hot water on, turning the hot water off, flushing the toilet, showing the second bedroom. She grades out of her English accent into an American. It’s quite a feat really. I keep up my end pretty well. She asks how much? Are kitchen privileges included? Inspired, I say: “Television off at eleven- thirty.” We open and shut the hall closet, turn on the ceiling fan.
        “What’s your friend’s name?” I ask.
        “Incunabula,” she answers.
        “Common name, is it?” I say without missing a beat. We’re back in the kitchen now. She’s opening cabinets. Opens the microwave and finds Simulacra and Simulation.
        “I’ll take it,” she says, tucking Baudrillard under her arm.
        Later that afternoon when a taxi brings her back – trunk, suitcase, camera tripod – she’s dressed like a fourteen- year- old Chicana schoolgirl. She’s got the accent to go with it. And the strawberry-flavored hot pants.

– 4 –

“Wait, what?” Nina says, sweet- potato fry paused halfway to her mouth. She’s trying to process recent developments. “She’s like moved in?”
        On the wall across from me is Marlon Brando on his motorcycle from The Wild One: leather jacket with zippers up the sleeves, cute little cap, sexiness leaking out his fingertips. Nibby is coloring Belle and the Beast. In addition to the sweet potato fries we’ve got three different appetizers, and this time a whole pitcher of beer because damn the torpedoes. “
        Someone’s moved in,” I say. “I’m not sure who.”            
        At which Nina rolls her eyes, smutches up her nose like you can’t be serious and then unties her eighteenth- century Abigail Adams little white cap and puts it on the table between us.
        What I don’t tell her is how for the past week, in addition to a lot of other stuff, Incunabula de la Luz has been giving me her opinion regarding Mercy Short and Installment #3, how I’ve had to keep pushing her away from reading over my shoulder, her in her fourteenyear- old Chicana hottie™ panties and her 32-A bra, and the telenovela barking at us from the living room where she was supposed to be doing her homework. “This is one crazy muchacha,” she’d say, clucking her tongue, and doing the ooh- la- la thing with her fingers before going back to Paola and Alessandro and the quadratic equation.
        “Thing is, I got this check,” I say instead. I figure I have to ease Nina into the truth of the situation. “I mean she paid her rent, the first month’s rent, with a check.”
        “So what?”
        “So the name on the check is not Incunabula de la Luz.” And when Nina doesn’t say anything: “It’s a clue.” And when she still doesn’t say anything: “A handkerchief, designedly dropped.”
        Onto her face has come something of the old look, the another story look, the Jerry- Garcia- is- so- way- more- overrated- than- Bono look.
        “A handkerchief, designedly dropped,” I repeat. “That’s Walt Whitman, in case you didn’t catch it.”
To which she makes the okay- right- fine face and then asks if I intend to pick up this handkerchief.
“The handkerchief being her real name?” I temporize.
“Her real name and the body attached to it,” she says.
I don’t for the moment answer, instead look around the room.
There’s Marlon Brando as Zapata, as Mark Antony, as Don Corleone. You get to do that if you’re an actor. As a real person, not so much.
“I’m not sure,” I say finally. “I’ve yet to commit myself.”
“But she’s living with you? Right? Did I understand that correctly?”
“She’s not living with me. She’s renting a room from me.”
“But do you eat together? Do you have coffee out of the same coffee pot? Tell each other when you’ll be home? Is she still dressed like Florence Nightingale for fuck’s sake?”
I haven’t told her about the Chicana schoolgirl part yet. About the algebra. I was working up to it. Getting up the nerve, so to speak.
“What is her real name anyway?”
“Lucille,” I answer. “Lucille Villarreal.” And then, with some trepidation: “Professor Lucille Villarreal.”
“Professor?”
This, of course, is a sore point, being as how Nina and I are both failed PhD students – did I mention that yet? – and instead of writing about Cotton Mather and Abigail Adams we’re pretending we are Cotton Mather and Abigail Adams.
“Professor?” she says again, wide- eyed, indignant. Nibby stops her coloring, looks uncertainly at her mother, but Nina is no longer in mother mode. “Are you shitting me, Marty?”
“Assistant Professor Lucille Villarreal. Of the Wellesley College Art Department.”
“Wellesley?” she cries so that the people next over who have been trying not to look at Cotton Mather and Abigail Adams, can no longer help themselves. It’s insult to injury, is what it is. Images of sloping lawns, trees, the smell of worn leather briefcases, seminar rooms fi lled with rich- bitch- chicks, tenure, money, respect.
“And you know this for sure? This isn’t just another of her performances, another of her – her simulacra?”
I tell her I don’t have the consolation prize of a master’s degree from Harvard for nothing. I know how to do my research, I tell her. I can burrow and ferret with the worst of them. For the name designedly dropped I bring up the Wellesley website on my iPhone, show her Lucille Villarreal’s homepage, B.A. from the Museum School, M.F.A. from RISD, stuff about her performance art, her being Incunabula de la Luz, her early days with the Surveillance Camera Players. It’s all there. Including a photo of her in her office smiling and pretty and professorial – no kidding, she’s got this tweedy blazer on, which may or may not be a performance gesture in its own right – but even so, about as real as reality gets. There’s also this painting of her, a painting of her as Frida Kahlo. That famous Frida Kahlo painting where she’s posing with a monkey and a black cat on her shoulders and dragonfl ies in her hair. Only it’s Professor Villarreal’s face instead of Kahlo’s. This, from a class she teaches, Art 334: Imitations. I have to say the painting – the parody, the pastiche, whatever you call it – is pretty good.
“So,” Nina says, still eyeing the iPhone, “it’s her living with you, the professor, not the performance artist, whatever the fuck her name is.”
“No, it’s the performance artist. Incunabula. Not the professor.”
“She wears a name- tag?”
“No. But you can tell.”
And that draws the long look. “What, she is still dressed as Florence Nightingale?”
So I gird my loins (figure of speech) and tell her about the strawberry- flavored hot pants. How every morning Incunabula de la Luz (not her real name) goes off to school in her sexy clothes, bright- red lipstick, make-up, hair all bundled up atop her head, and comes home at night with her schoolbooks and homework to do. I have to make dinner because she’s got all this algebra she says, and because she’s only fourteen years old. She asks for help sometimes. On the algebra, I mean. Or for her report on Their Eyes Were Watching God. She speaks half- Spanish, half- English. There’s her tiny little ass going about my apartment, her 32-A bra draped over the shower head. This is some serious provocation, I can tell you. Around eleven o’clock I sit on the couch with her and she snuggles into me while we watch Trevor Noah or something. And then the next morning she’s off to school again.
“Yesterday I followed her,” I tell Nina who’s sinking more and more into herself. “I kept a good couple of blocks between us. If I’m caught, the whole thing’s off I figure. Although who knows, maybe I’m supposed to follow her. I’m the audience. But anyway I followed her down Hanover and past the Rose Fitzgerald. You know where she was going?”
“Middle school,” Nina says all bitter and really Marty?
“South Station,” I say like Q.E.D. South Station being where you’d catch the MBTA for Wellesley. Nina hitches her own not- so- tiny ass from side to side like she can’t get comfortable.
“You think she rides out to Wellesley each morning, teaches her classes dressed like a little Mexican slut?”
At which I give her a look meant to suggest we not get, you know, racist.
“Or you think she effects a translation from Incunabula de la Luz to Professor Villarreal at some point along the way? Steps into a phone booth, changes into her professor clothes, and voila!”
“Maybe.”
“To what purpose?” she says, and then, shaking her head, putting out the palm of her hand like the Supremes singing “Stop, In the Name of Love:” “Never mind. I don’t wanna know. Iglesia me llamo.”              
“Art,” I tell her.
“What kind of art is it that nobody sees?” And again, the palm out: “Never mind. Iglesia me llamo.”           
“I see it,” I say. What’s with the iglesia me llamo?
“So she’s like doing this postmodern lap dance for your benefit and yours only? Greta Garbo next? Some femme fatale straight out of Raymond Chandler? Where does she get off with this shit? Performance art. That’s all so 1970s.”
If I didn’t know better I’d say that Nina Grace Smith was jealous. Which is frankly gratifying. Since in the Nina/Beth/Denise era of Marty Lowell’s life it was he who was in each instance not the dumper but the dumpee.
“Loser,” Marlon Brando sneers, not for the first time.
“Or maybe the whole thing is Incunabula de la Luz as femme fatale,” Nina’s saying. “You ever think of that? The whole performance is a femme fatale thing with you as the schmuck, the fall guy. All her cute selves – the prim English nurse, the Latina schoolgirl, Eisenhower wife coming next – the whole Cindy Sherman act is designed to beguile you, bewitch you, to lure Martin Cabot Lowell, Jr. the waspy schmuck to his ruin,” she winds up in this melodramatic voice. “Wait till she shows up in her Fata Morgana shroud.”
And she takes a sweet potato fry and for punctuation pops it in her full- lipped Abigail Adams mouth.
So I wasn’t going to do this, but now I do. I get out my iPhone, bring up YouTube and show her this video I found of me and Incunabula de la Luz making out on my couch. Seriously. We’re fully clothed and we’re kissing, but that’s all. By fully clothed, I mean the Chicana schoolgirl is in her tiny hot pants and her tight top (out of which her 32-A breasts somehow still manage to spill) and we’re going at it, but no clothes get removed, no nether regions get touched. I am, I realize – in this enactment, this piece of performance art – the Boyfriend. I’ve got chinos and my Harvard hoodie on. Every once in a while Incunabula de la Luz whispers for me to touch her breast and when I do, the Chicana schoolgirl pushes my hand away. Then a minute later she whispers again, and again with the coquettish oh- noyou- don’t look she pushes my hand away. The whole thing becomes this virgin/whore motif, but sheesh! I’m thinking at the time. I know it’s a performance – the frickin’ camera is on, pointed right at us – and I want to do my part not just because I’m a trouper like I said, but because making out with someone as nice- looking as Incunabula de la Luz/Lucille Villarreal/the Chicana schoolgirl is . . . well, nice. Even if it’s not real. Even if we are only enacting the form of the thing without its essence, still it’s nice. What can I say? It’s been a while. And it’s art. But still, there’s a limit, isn’t there?
Every once in a while on the video Incunabula de la Luz gets up, goes over to the camera and speaks into it. Some Spanglish thing and then she’s back on the sofa, telling me to try to feel her up again.
“Este vato here, he is some naughty muchacho!” she says. Stuff like that. Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention there’s also this kind of postproduction chanting thing going on underneath it all. “White skin, brown skin,” is the chant. Real quiet, real solemn. A kind of Tibetanmonk chorus over and over. You can check it out for yourself.
“This is art?” Nina says when it’s over. Nibby has colored Belle in different shades of blue. The Beast though is all outside the lines.
“It’s Iconic Women II,” I tell her, pointing at the video label. Where it also says Incunabula de la Luz has 8,652 followers.
“It’s Unreality TV,” Nina says, sending a sad look at the empty pitcher of beer, “is what it is.”
The lips were real, I’m thinking. The feel of her hair, her arms around my neck, the couple of times I touched her breast. There was a woman there.

– 5 –

And then no sooner have the Chicana schoolgirl (Iconic Women II: cotton, spandex, flesh and blood, 2018) and Marty Lowell made out on the couch, and the resultant YouTube video uploaded, and the 8,652 followers viewed it, than Incunabula de la Luz is gone.
And everything with her. Her clothes, her trunk, her tripod, her algebra book, everything. No note, no nothing. And no key returned either.
For several days whenever I return home I think maybe she’ll be there – she paid a whole month’s rent after all – but no, there’s only the empty apartment, the ghost of her bra, the smell of her Walmart perfume lingering in the dull brown air along with the sound of Paco and Esmeralda arguing over that zorra Rosita. And I have to say, stupid as it must seem, the sense of loss is palpable. The narrowed vista, the closed- down possibility, the frying pan with only one veggie- burger in it. Marty Lowell is bereft of something. He’s just not sure what.
When he re- watches the YouTube of him and Incunabula de la Luz on the couch he can’t help but overlay his own cell, his own gradient, his own feeling like it’s Sensaround: the initial snuggling on the couch, the touch of her fingers, the sound of a telenovela in the background, her crispy hair brushing his cheek, the memory of her turning her face up to him, smiling in that serious way women have when they’re considering kissing you. And then he’s kissing back, thinking this is it. More kisses, and then Incunabula de la Luz gets up to turn La usurpadora off, turn the camera on. (Shot of her hot pants-clad rear end bending over, not on the video.) And then she’s coming back and kissing him again and telling him to touch her, and him thinking wait, what? There’s the taste of her lips. The wetness. The incipient crows- feet at the wicks of her eyes (she’s thirty- something, let’s remember). And should he stop? Was this only edgy, or did it tip over into creepy?
White skin, brown skin, she whispered once, her hot breath exploding in his ear. Only she said it like it was a good thing, a delicious thing, not the intoning zombie- Buddhist monks on the video. And she said it like it was her saying it, not the Chicana schoolgirl, but Incunabula de la Luz, or maybe even Lucille Villarreal, although let’s not get carried away, Marty.
And now she’s gone. And there’s only the video like an archeological ruin.
When I get depressed enough (a normal, healthy depression, mind you, not the major leagues Nina plays in) what I do is I drink enough bourbon to make the ghosts come out and then walk around the old parts of Boston imagining a different world. Which is what I do now, Incunabula de la Luz- less: I dream myself back to when there was a windmill atop Snow Hill, an actual dock at Dock Square, a forest of ship masts in the darkening harbor. I turn down this street, that street, pause before the shop windows with their wares of Mantua silks and Dutch wallpaper, walk down India Street to where Francis Cabot Lowell had his warehouse on India Wharf, the Lowell coat of arms above the counting- house door. Understand, all around me there are cars and buses and financial analysts on their Cannondale bikes, but for me it’s all the rectilinear certainty of twelve- over- twelve windows and dentilled cornices, the grate of oxcart wheels on the cobbles and the smell of animal entrails from Mill Creek where the butchers throw their waste. It’s a vanished world, yeah, but it was the world. Cow Lane, Flounder Lane, Turn Again Lane, the Bunch of Grapes Tavern. It’s all stuff I drill into my out- of-work actors, but in one of these states I get in, trying to walk out the crazies induced by the failed third attempt at my dissertation, or by Nina Grace Smith, or by Incunabula de la Luz and her avatars, the historic past blooms around Marty Lowell like a mushroom cloud. Say, this house here with its acorn pendants at the eaves, its center chimney, its bulls- eye lights, the house where the orphan Mercy Short was taken in as a servant girl when she returned from Quebec aboard the Six Friends. And the Old North church where shortly afterwards, in the gallery reserved for Servants and Negroes, she fell into her first fit and had to be carried senseless across Clark’s Square to Cotton and Abigail Mather’s house, which is just there, in the fading light, with its fresh- painted clapboards and its row of rooftop dormers and its calash out front. You can just see the enslaved Onesimus working in the side yard. . . .
All, all part of the mushroom cloud. And in time Marty Lowell, and Nina Smith, and Incunabula de la Luz, and you, too, Reader.
So just like with the seminar table and telling myself not to look, I tell myself not to take the MBTA out to Wellesley – don’t do it, dude! – but I can’t help myself. The real world comes roaring back – the glass skyscrapers, the Cannondale bikes, the white noise of the twenty- first century – and before I know it I’m down at South Station boarding the Worcester line. I have no intention of confronting her. I just want to see this other world she lives in. As if seeing it will help me realize it (as the transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody said of a tree she’d walked into), help me realize that she is Professor Lucille Villarreal, way out of Marty Lowell’s league, and that he should just go back home to his lonely frying pan.
I trust I do not need to mention the beauty of the Wellesley campus, the gently curving paths, the pools of shade, the flowerbeds, the polite reproach of the bell tower, the iron lamp posts with their savoir faire. Nor do I need to describe the green patina of the copper- covered cupolas, the pillowy clouds and the patented sunshine, and the sense of inferiority it all instills in the rejected, the marginalized, the discarded, the denied. The swans on the campus lake hold their necks in radiant cyma curves. The ducks do not deign to quack.
When I finally locate the art building I just stand outside for a time telling myself that this is enough. You’ve seen, I say, you’ve realized. But of course it isn’t enough. So I go inside, climb up to the third floor and go slowly down the hallway checking each office door until I find it – like reality has slapped me in the face – Lucille Villarreal, Assistant Professor of Art. But she’s not here. No one is here: it’s June, classes are over. I continue down the hallway, scoping out the place, making sure, and then come back to her door, plant myself in front of it.
There’s a little whiteboard on which someone named Dawn has written in purple marker Sorry I missed our appt, Lucy. See u in Sept! And there are art notices, and postcards with paintings, a leaflet for a lecture on the New Sincerity (post- 9/11, post- Trump, post- Postmodern) and a little basket with lollipops in it, and a stuffed salamander climbing the Eiffel tower. It’s the stock stuff of a popular young college professor, the detritus of the real, conclusive evidence. I stand and stare at it, lift the corner of one of the postcards as if there might be something behind it. Above my head the fluorescents hum. Somewhere there’s the sound of a photocopying machine.
Iconic Women III: The Professor in Her Tweeds.
Back outside I’d like to say it’s a daze I’m wandering in, but it’s more a vacancy, a lacuna in the fabric of the atmosphere. I walk toward the bell tower which takes the opportunity to ring the quarter- hour like a punch line. It’s not like I didn’t know I had wandered backstage, that everything around me – Incunabula de la Luz and the World War I nurse and the Chicana hottie™ – were just costumes, lighting, sets. That the kisses were stage kisses. That eventually the curtain would come down. I mean duh. But still.
I spend the hour on the train back to Boston trying to convince myself that I should go back to my dissertation, finish it by faking it. Do whatever you have to do, become newly sincere, but get it done, hand it in, b.s. your way through the defense. Exchange the mushroom cloud of the past for the Wellesley carillon marking the present with its genial illusion. Save yourself.
So I’m bummed and bitter and as unprepared as I can be when I get back to the North End, and after making my way through the fake Italians to my building, climb the darkened stairwell to the thirdfloor landing, unlock the door to my apartment and instead of emptiness, vacancy, bereft air, find Incunabula de la Luz seated in one of the living room armchairs. A little cry like nothing I’ve ever uttered before escapes my lips. She’s dressed in a miniskirt, blonde hair in an Aryan bun behind her head, notebook in her lap, legs professionally crossed, boot heel ready to oppress, looking at me with anticipation and something like disdain. This time there are two cameras on tripods, one pointed at her, the other at the empty couch. And there are boom mikes and a recording device on the coffee table in front of her. Lots of dancing LEDs.
“You are late, Herr Lowell,” she says in this German accent.
“Late?” I’ve got enough reality left to say.
“Please to not waste my time.”
And she flips over a page of her notebook, one of those top- bound jobs like maybe Sigmund Freud would’ve used. For a minute I can’t say or do anything. I’ve got this urge to call her out, but at the same time I’m grateful – Marty Lowell the big sucker is intrigued, a fish on the line if you will – grateful that the curtain that had come down a week ago was itself just part of the set.
“Apologies,” I say, treading water, buying time until I can figure out what my role is in this new performance piece. She crosses her legs again – it’s the miniest of miniskirts – and gestures toward the couch, takes a ballpoint from out of her blonde bun. A wig, of course.
“We spoke last time in regards to your feelings of betrayal and loss,” she says once I am seated, consulting the notebook on her lap. “Your experience of betrayal and loss,” she corrects herself.
At which I just look at her.
“Would you like to continue?” she asks.
Therapist/patient is it?
“People keep leaving me,” I blurt out. And I pause, trying to divine if that’s the right direction, and incidentally letting the insinuation sink in. “One day they’re there, the next day – ” and I make the pfft! into- thin- air gesture. She closes her eyes, and there’s this thinlipped reserve about her mouth, this ungiving professionalism, and yet I can’t help but feel that this is what she wants, sub- text, underlying currents, the symbol even if there’s no obvious referent.
“And this makes you feel how?” she prods. But I don’t answer. Thing is, I’ve got some fair- sized betrayal and loss in my life. But she can’t possibly know that. Everybody’s got betrayal and loss, right? It was a safe opening, is all. But still. I’m struck how utterly different Iconic Women IV: The Miniskirted Therapist looks from the English nurse sitting at her little table in Copley Square, how different from Lucita with her teenage alarm, her dark eyes flashing with basta, muchacho! She’s quite the actress, is Lucy Villarreal. But Iconic Women I and Iconic Women II, they both had about them a softness, an invitation, a – forgive me – femininity that Marty Lowell kind of liked. But this – the starched blouse, the knife- edge creases, the string of perfect pearls, the leather boots with their whiff of the frigid dominatrix. . . .
“Please to continue,” the doctor says, and when the patient doesn’t: “Bitte, Herr Lowell.”
I run my eyes over her, over her smooth cold face, and down her white blouse, out her arms with their tight cuffs, and then up her boots, up her legs to where the hem of her miniskirt stretches tight across her thighs. I’m trying to make up my mind. I’m poised on a course of action. Because here’s the thing. Her German accent doesn’t strike me as so good, and Harvard being Harvard, if you’re a PhD candidate in History you have to know two languages other than your native language. Latin is one of mine (all that Puritan disputation). But guess what the other one is?
“Verweile doch, Frau Doktor, du bist so schön.”
But instead of the look of panic and the scramble to hide it, there is on the face of Incunabula de la Luz the bloom of a smile, and then the scramble to hide that instead. I have hit her postmodern tennis ball back. And she likes it. It’s the equivalent of my still having my cast on after two weeks.
“Jawohl,” she says, then: “continue.”
So what I do is I launch into the thing nearest at hand, riff on Denise – my most recent betrayal and loss – a cataract of therapy clichés, half true, half made-up. How I was in love with her (sort of), how right we were for one another (false), how we were going to get married (no way!) and how the shadow of a former love (Nina) doomed our relationship. How Denise wanted me all to herself and how I could not bring myself to betray a friend who was in dire straits and needed me, and how Denise grew more and more jealous, angry, manipulative (let me open the latest issue of Self), controlling, selfmedicating, co-dependent. And how one afternoon when I was at work she broke all the spines on my books.
Frau Doktor, imagine! And me, a scholar!
And I get up to show her, go over to my book case and pull a book down, let it flop open, pull another one down, open it so a page flutters to the floor. But the Frau Doktor doesn’t seem surprised at this, which as actorly details go – we’re improvising here, right? – is a pretty good one. Not to mention a reminder of genuine – of sincere – pain, and therefore worthy of some acknowledgement on her part. But then I figure Incunabula de la Luz already knows about my books. From back when she was the fourteen- year- old schoolgirl checking out who I was. Who it was she was making art with. Picking up the dissertation chapter stranded on my desk. Reading any suicide notes on the installment plan that happen to be lying around. The broken spines are not news to her. So I reshelve the books, go back to the therapy couch.
“You are perhaps avoiding – neglecting – your own betrayal, ja?”
I don’t know what she means by this. Marty Lowell is not the kind of guy who doesn’t accuse himself of whichever of the seven deadly sins happens to be pertinent. If anything, he over- accuses. But there’s no betrayal he’s aware of.
“We have danced around this before, ja?”
I just blink at her.
“It is perhaps time to attempt to scale this Matterhorn.”
I’m aware of the cameras on us. The boom mike hanging over my head. The refrigerator humming in the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come, come! You do not?”
“No.”
She puts her notebook down, makes a little praying tent of her fingers. She seems for a moment poised on some thought, some course of action. And then she takes up the notebook again, flips backwards through it, finds whatever she’s looking for and starts to read. What she reads puts a Zero in my soul.
“ – but I knew I could not bring her with me, that Saigon was another world. There was no going home to Brookline with Quang.”
I don’t know what I would have said or done had I not already had my guard up, already been in improv mode and primed for some abrupt fiction that I would have to run with. Even so I have to suppress the urge to stand, to demand, to let the real come rushing in like an alibi. But I manage to keep a lid on it. Get the world to come back into focus. This trespass, this betrayal of the game I thought we were playing: I have for the first time with Incunabula de la Luz the sense of having been set up, that the innocent wackiness of the Surveillance Camera Players – Free Casts – has turned earnest. That whatever that was, this is premeditated.
“I think you have me confused with some other party,” I say in as cold a voice as I can muster. She lets her eyes rest on me, evaluating, noting, or the simulacrum of evaluating and noting. Then it’s back to her notebook, flipping pages.
“The sight of her trusting face was as a silent reproach, as was her slender ever- lovely figure in its white ao dai.” And then more flipping. “Quang, which means purity in Vietnamese.”
At the corner of my vision the camera LEDs glow. One o’clock high. I keep my head steady, my eyes on her. No give. No retreat.
“You’ve made an error,” I say eventually. “Those notes are from some other patient’s session.”
She closes the notebook, re- crosses her legs. “Client,” she says – weirdly, immaterially – “not patient.”     
“Some other client then,” I say. “I do not know any Quang in an ao dai.”
She taps the notebook with a forefinger as if to insist on its integrity. “These are not your words?” she asks, eyebrow going quizzical. “These are not the words of Martin Cabot Lowell?”
Clever, is Incunabula de la Luz. Always just enough terra firma – the dragonflies in Frida Kahlo’s hair – to anchor the fi ction. Saigon, Quang, going home to Brookline. . . .
“What year is it?” I find myself asking. She lifts her chin in quiet interrogation.
“What year do you think it is?”
We gaze at one another in a kind of ontological stand- off.
“The year is immaterial,” she says when I don’t speak. “These things – how do you say in English? – these things abide.”
At which she lifts her chin, sniffs the air as if for a clue.
“But perhaps you do not wish to speak of this just yet,” she finishes after a long pause. “Perhaps I have misjudged the moment. Misjudged your readiness. If so, my apologies.”
I’m staring her down, or at least I think I am. She smooths her miniskirt out, though the wrinkles are all caused by how tight it is, so there’s no smoothing them.
“Next Tuesday, ja? At three?”
And without waiting for an answer – though pausing long enough to issue me a cold smile – she puts her head down, begins writing in her notebook. I am being dismissed. It’s me, the patient – the client – who’s supposed to get up and go. The sheer chutzpah of it is like some test of whether I’m going to keep playing. Do you agree to the terms? her bent head seems to ask. Do you give your consent? You may think that I’ve played unfairly, overstepped some implicit boundary, but I have only increased the scope of the game, the richness.
So I go – I can’t help it, never mind the male pride, the ontological bullying, the vapors of irreality I’m trailing – I get up and after “Next Tuesday then,” leave the apartment. Outside in the street I stare into the four o’clock air like there’s another Marty Lowell across from me, the schmuck. And then for lack of anything better I cross over to the Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, wend my way through the grave markers, and stand sentry at the Mather family tomb. I figure twenty minutes ought to do it. I smoke an imaginary cigarette. Behind me various Brahmin ghosts shake their heads; in front of me silver torpedoes take off from Logan and arc into the blue.
When I get back to the apartment, she’s gone. Cameras, tripods, tape recorder.
So I pour myself a bourbon and then go and stand in front of my bookcases, running my eyes over the titles. And then I take down my father’s book – The Underside of the Weft, by Martin Cabot Lowell – hold the spine together as best I can and begin to page through it. I’m not sure what exactly I’m looking for. Maybe I want to see if the quotes are exact, if she was preparing for this – this new avatar, this new performance piece – even back when she was Lucita in her bra and hot pants. But as usual I end up pausing over the photos of my father, of his first wife with her Jackie Kennedy hairdo, of my halfbrother when he was a toddler. And then there are the black- andwhite photos of Saigon, of the cathedral, of the Kihn Do movie theater and Cheap Charlie’s, the streets choked with Renaults and cyclospousses. When I was a kid I used to stare at them as if they’d offer up some answer: the bar at the Caravelle, the Embassy swimming pool, a street vendor roasting chestnuts outside my father’s sandbagged building. And of course Quang, the single photo of her, a lovely young woman with wide- set eyes smiling into the camera. And then the pictures of the Montagnard unit my father “advised” earlier in the war. The jungle, the mountain paths, the hooches with their roofs of palm leaves. And finally the infamous picture of him outside Buon Ma Thuot, bare- chested, with a necklace strung with what look like dried apricots. Only the caption tells you they’re human ears, Viet Cong ears. Not an atrocity, my father writes, but a way of uniting with the Montagnards, of gaining their trust. Special Forces 101, he writes.

– 6 –

Suicide Note, Installment #4: Ana de la Encarnación, Santa Fe, 1798

They asked who it was who defi led me. “Iglesia me llamo,” I answered. They asked did I not pledge myself to the mestizo Osvaldo, and did I not betray him with this man I would not name. “Iglesia me llamo,” I answered. And was not my betrayal the reason the mestizo Osvaldo slashed my face with his razor. And even then I did not say what I wanted to say to them, but repeated what Father Martín had told me to say: “The Church is my name.”
Coyote! they called me, these men of the Governor’s palace, zorra! puta!
But they cannot force me to answer, Father Martín says. The church has given me sanctuary. As long as I am here they cannot touch me, he says. Even when my time comes, they cannot touch me. Here I may abide with the Virgin.
I will never tell them your name. Not even Father Martín when he asks. Not even the Virgin when I pray to her. But there are times when I am alone, when the moonlight shines onto the blanket Father Martín has given me, when the night wind lurks in the garth, when the dust stirs like an abularia, that I let my lips form the words, the name of my husband, the name that is like fire in my veins.
Father Martín says you are not my husband, that it is a sacrilege to say so, that we have not the sacrament of marriage.
The fire is the sacrament, I tell him.
You will come back. When your son is born you will come back. And you will kiss these scars on my face.
If I were free to speak, if the world would believe a mulata, what I would tell the Governor is that I never pledged myself to Osvaldo. That that was a lie he told to escape the pillory and the lash. I would tell the Governor how Osvaldo used to ride over from his father’s ranch always bringing some gift with him, some sopapillas from the kitchen, or a ribbon he had taken from his mother, and he would try to get me. And when I would not let him he would demand who did I think I was? My mother was a genízara, he said, and even if it was Don Porfirio himself who had used her, I was still just a mulata. Half the nobility of New Spain had their bastard children working for them as servants, he said. And then he would go away. But he would always come back.
I do not know how he learned your name, but he did, and then he came with no ribbon, no sopapilla. He held a razor to my throat and said he would kill me if I did not act the whore for him too. I was like a poison in his veins, he said. I was like a sickness. He would kill me, he said. But he did not have the courage to do it, not even to force me. Instead he grabbed me by the hair and slashed his razor across my cheek. And when that wasn’t enough, he did it again.
When Don Porfirio learned of what had happened he had his men ride over to Osvaldo’s father’s ranch. He would not have one of his servants treated so. He would not suffer such an injury to his calidad. They caught Osvaldo, bound him, and carried him to Santa Fe. There he tried to claim that I was his betrothed, that I had betrayed him, that in anger he had cut me, that yes, he was guilty of this but did not deserve the insult of a flogging. His mother was an española, he said. They would not whip her son for the injury to an Indian servant girl.
The Governor had me sent for. Holy Mother, forgive the lies I told. I did so only to protect my husband.      
Seven months later when I could no longer hide my belly Don Porfirio had my braid cut off, and then he had me carried in a donkey cart to Santa Fe and left on the street.
And then no matter where I went, whether among the Indian women in the Plazita, or down along the river in the Barrio de Analco, or out along the border where the town turns to fields, where even the burros may graze upon the dried corn stalks and wheat stubble, always I was shooed away, driven off, mocked, insulted, threatened.
Those first nights I slept with the goats for their warmth, drank from the acequia madre when no one was looking.
A body reviled for its motherhood, for its scars.
And then one morning I awoke to the face of Father Martín above me. Daughter, he called me.
In time the Governor’s men came looking for me. There was a new suit which the Governor must resolve, they said. Osvaldo’s father was demanding reparación from Don Porfirio. His son had been dishonored, he said. The word of a puta had been placed over his son’s. His son had been whipped at the pillory, and now this whore was revealed for what she was and the Don must make amends. The Governor must see to it.
So they came to the Parroquia to question me.
Iglesia me llamo, I told them.
Now the first warm days have come. I cook and clean for Father Martín. I look after the chickens, collect their eggs. And I bring a lunch to the santero who is carving a new reredos for the Parroquia. Sometimes he asks me to sit with him so he may have someone to talk to. It is lonely work, he says, making saints. Tiresome work, he says with this smile he has. Like he is telling a joke behind God’s back. He does the carving in the garth where the light is better, and when each figure is painted he brings it into the church and installs it in the screen. He is old. His clothes hang off him like he is a scarecrow. The reredos he is making is of the Annunciation. He has pointed out the different fi gures to me and told me the story. There is the dove flying down from heaven with its shimmer of gold. And there are all the saints around the edges. And at the center the house of the Virgin, and her bed, and the kneeling angel Gabriel, and gazing in at the window an ox and an ass. He is working his way up to the Virgin Mary, he says.
A group of españolas have come to Father Martín and said this criada Ana should not have been granted refuge at the Parroquia. She should go to San Miguel where the Indians and the half- breeds worship. That if she is going to give birth she must go to San Miguel, they say.
I wait. I wait for the pain and the beauty to begin.
Will you not come back?
The santero says he is from Durango, far to the south. He says he has walked the entire way from Durango to Santa Fe. It has taken him twenty years. All along the way he has carved saints or painted láminas, or made a small reredos for a village church. And for this he has been housed and clothed and fed. But now he is as far north as New Spain goes. The Indians to the north, he says with his smile, they do not want saints. So when he finishes the Parroquia’s Annunciation he will start the twenty- year walk back to Durango. But he will not finish the journey, he says. It is too far and he is too old. And then he holds up the figure he has been carving, the Holy Mother.
Do you see what I have done? he asks.
She is beautiful, I answer. The Blessed Virgin.
You do not see, he says.
I turn to him and his mysterious smile.
Look, he says, and he holds the carving closer to me that I might see better. It is your face, he says.
I let out a little cry at the blasphemy.
No one will ever notice in the dark of the chancel, he says, but it is. The Blessed Virgin about to hear the words of the Annunciation. It is your face, Ana.

– 7 –

A few days after my session with Iconic Women IV I’m sitting in a pew behind Nina at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help out in Mission Hill. I came in during the homily, slipped into one of the rear pews without her seeing me, and now I’m waiting. There’s the back of her afro to look at. And the movement of her head when she intones the responses in the Roman Missal.
Me, I’ll take the clean- swept, white- painted pews of the Puritans over the stained- glass hocus- pocus of the Roman Catholics any day. But Nina says it centers her. The soaring ceiling, the stony air, the echoes, the robes, the incense, the Stations of the Cross marching from one wall to the next. It’s an hour of deep quiet, she says. A haven of mystery, she says.
She has had three bouts with the ferocious torpor of unipolar depression, my Nina has. One when she was at college and I wasn’t around, then the one that put her in Bulfinch Seven when we were in grad school, and the last a couple of years ago when Nibby was two. I trust I don’t have to tell the reader that my coming home one day carrying a two- year- old African- American toddler and telling Denise we were going to be parents for a couple of weeks, maybe a month – good thing we have a guest bedroom! – hastened the final act of that not quite tragical love affair.
I sometimes think Nina naming her baby Nibby was a kind of thank you, a gesture toward Marty Lowell’s being the steadfast friend that he is. Because Cotton Mather had a daughter whose nickname was Nibby and sometimes I used to call Nina that. In those close moments in the dark. In the warm, lovely, teasing colloquy of our bodies.
It was that middle episode, the grad school one, that was really scary. I could feel her leaving me, the recession, the silences, the varnished eyes. At first, with no knowledge of her college breakdown, I took it personally – she wanted out; didn’t know how to tell me – but then it started getting worse, her not going to class, not changing her clothes, getting confused about stuff. Finally I got this call from the Harvard Health Services. Nina had been admitted to Mass General, this voice told me, and she’d listed me as the person to call in case of etc., so could I put together an overnight bag for her? Nothing glass, the voice said. And no belts.
Overnight turned into six weeks, every afternoon of which I’d take the Red Line from Harvard Square across the Longfellow Bridge to MGH, take the elevator to the seventh floor, get myself signed in to the psych ward. There were no doors on the bedrooms, nowhere you could be alone. We’d sit in the lounge with a platoon of schizophrenics, bipolars crashing out of their mania, anorexics looking like they’d just flown in from Dachau: everyone moving their limbs as if they didn’t belong to them, eyes submerged, minds dissolving. I tried my best but the sight of Nina with her face dazed and yet somehow startled, as if she’d just dropped something but didn’t know what, short- circuited everything I tried to say. After the first week I started bringing Toni Morrison with me – The Bluest Eye from when we did our top- ten novels – started reading it aloud to her and whoever else was sitting in the circle of institutional armchairs. I don’t know if she could concentrate enough to understand, but it was something at least. Something of her old self. Something she’d loved.
The few times she managed to speak in those worst weeks she called me Martin. Martin, she’d say with this distance like I was someone she had trouble remembering.
Now from my pew I watch Nina kneeling with the others at the altar, putting her tongue out to accept the Communion wafer, sipping the wine. The body and blood of Christ. On her way back she catches sight of me. For a moment I think she’s going to smile, but no, she keeps a solemn expression on her face, slips back into her pew, kneels and begins to pray. I’m thinking maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
When Mass is over, after we’ve picked up Nibby from the kids’ room, we head over to the Mission Hill Playground where it sits on its little rise overlooking the city. Nibby runs off to where some kids are trying to climb up the slide the wrong way, and Nina and I sit on one of the benches. After a minute she takes out a quilting square from her bag. Needle, thread, thimble. She’s a quilter, Nina is, hand pieces her squares, none of this machine crap she says. It’s what remains of her dissertation topic.
“So what’re you doing here?” she asks eventually, quietly, eyes on her work.
It isn’t frosty exactly, her tone, but I have a feeling of trespassing. As if the cleansed feeling she once told me she got from going to Mass can’t survive the grime of Marty Lowell, like this is her real life and that other life – Brando’s and beer and being dressed up as Abigail Adams – is a kind of suspension, an aberration.
It’s a down day, in other words. I’ve learned to recognize the signs.
“I’m on my way to my father’s,” I tell her. “My semi- estranged father,” I correct, which she knows all about. “I thought maybe I needed reinforcements.”
At which she gives me a look.
“You and Nibby wanna come?”
She shakes her head.
“He likes you,” I try. “You remember when he called you foxy?”
“He likes himself.”
“Doesn’t preclude him from liking you.”
Again the head shake.
Yeah, foxy. This was back when we’d sometimes visit my father in his office at the Kennedy School. He’d said it in full awareness of the charade of the word – the Jimi Hendrix- ness of it, a seventy- sixyear- old Brahmin calling a twenty- four- year- old Black chick “foxy” – and yet throwing it out there anyway, a challenge, a provocation.
Behind us the bells of the Mission Church start to ring. There’s a Mass in Spanish coming up.
“So,” I say after a time. “This Ana de la Encarnación. . . . ” And I wait a moment to see if this is okay. Is it okay to talk about what she’s writing when she’s feeling down? Her suicide note a kind of secret handshake between us even here, now.
“What about her?” she says without turning to me.
“I don’t remember her in Colonial Women.”
She turns her head to me like I’m the dense kid in the class.
“Mercy Short, okay,” I say. “Anne Hutchinson. Mary Dyer. But there’s no Ana de la Encarnación with anything like your story. Historically speaking.”
She smiles this little unfunny smile like she knows something you don’t. “I’m branching out,” she says.        
“Into fiction?”
“It’s all fiction.”
And she goes back to her piecing.
What I really want to ask is whether when I’m reading with all metaphors blazing am I supposed to be looking for stuff. Stuff she’s trying to tell me. To what degree has she coded her own life into the notes? And am I supposed to be one of the characters – Osvaldo, or the man Ana de la Encarnación will not name – Nibby’s father? – or just kindly, sexless Father Martín?
I have multiplied visions and used similitudes, she told me once. Hosea 12:10 in case you don’t have a Bible handy.
“Thing is,” I say, deciding on another tack, “it’s all really wellwritten. I mean, like, as fi ction. You know that, right?” And I look at her. “Your critique group must’ve told you that. Or your professor. Teacher, writer, whoever he is.”
Her needle pauses a moment, then goes back to pricking fabric.
“You could make a book of them,” I say, and when she still doesn’t answer: “Or maybe a play. Like the Vagina Monologues. All these marginalized, historically- silenced American women, speaking.” 
She inclines her head away from me, but I can’t help myself.
“Voices in the Wind,” I say, inspired, or resentful, I’m not sure which: “A one- woman play.”
“You’re doing the man thing, Marty.”
“Which man thing?”
She straightens the square on her lap, smooths it out. “You’re trying to fix things, solve the problem,” she says in her quiet voice. I literally hold the tip of my tongue between my front teeth, but still can’t help myself.
“What is the problem?”
And that, of course, does it. She puts her quilting down and gets up, crosses to where Nibby and the other kids are playing. She stands there, arms across her chest, bell- bottom trousers eddying about her ankles, rear end like a cancellation. I’m thinking I should leave. More than that, that I should give the whole thing over. She dumped you, I tell myself, so what’s with the masochism? But I just sit there, pick up her quilting square and feel the fabric, the seams. Loss, betrayal. After fi ve minutes she comes back, sits down and begins working again.
About a week or two after Nina told me to Quit it, chum, I unexpectedly sat next to her at a film society screening of Sense and Sensibility. Pure coincidence. I came in late, stumbled into a seat in the dark, and heard someone weeping softly in the seat beside me. It took until the end of the fi lm for me to turn and realize it was the Black girl from History 2249.
“When I was in the psych ward,” she’s saying now. “There were all these others. You remember? You remember that Leigh Ann when you visited? Starving herself? I couldn’t understand any of them. What’s wrong with you? I wanted to shout. Just eat! Even while I was myself so wrong, wrong, wrong.”
She stops, looks out across the city toward the Prudential building, the Hancock, the Christian Science Center, and then toward the trees and rooftops of Brookline, under one of which my father is probably having his Sunday brunch with Quang.
“We never understand someone else’s mental illness,” she picks up after a minute. “We can never see the bell jar or the black dog. From the outside it just looks like a pantomime. Practiced, theatrical, self- indulgent. Until someone actually kills herself, and then it’s like: See? I wasn’t kidding.”
“I know you’re not kidding.”
She shrugs. “But I am. Holding my hand over the flame, playacting, seeing what it would be like, seeing how long I can last, making fiction,” that last like it was the dirtiest thing you could do.
The scene she was crying over was the one where the Emma Thompson character tries to reassure the Kate Winslet character that the guy who broke her heart did in fact love her. Yes, Kate Winslet answers, tired, wounded, empty, but not enough.
“Anyway,” Nina says, “I get it. You can’t understand because you can’t understand.” And after another minute: “I couldn’t. So how could you?”
And there it is, the terrain that cannot be crossed. I know her body, know the smell of her skin, the feel of her lips, the little cry she gives when she loses herself. We have been intimate. White skin, brown skin. But it’s not enough.
“And thank you,” she says, “but I’ve got my own title.”
We watch the kids play. Behind us, the basilica’s bells ring again. There’s the sound of a siren stitching itself along Malcolm X Boulevard.
“Nina,” I say when another several minutes have passed. And now it’s me looking over the treetops to Brookline, me with a little stab of anger. “Is Nibby my daughter?”
She puts her work down, lets her hands rest in her lap, then picks it up again.
“You asked that once before,” she says.
I tip my head in acknowledgement but don’t say anything, just sit and wait. The question is still there between us, on its hands and knees, trying to cross the terrain.
”Iglesia me llamo,” she says finally.

– 8 –

Francis Ford Coppola is on record as saying that Colonel Kurtz – the deranged character Marlon Brando plays in Apocalypse Now – was a composite of several military men from the Vietnam era. The first of these was the Australian Barry Peterson who was reported to have “gone native” in the early 1960s and who was marked down by the CIA for assassination. The second was Robert Rheault who trafficked in rogue killings and whose cold, eighty- year- old eyes you can see being interviewed by Ken Burns in his Vietnam documentary. The third was Colonel Martin Cabot Lowell, my father.
“The last of the Boston Brahmins” as some article somewhere called him. Andover, Harvard, then a Rhodes Scholarship. Twentytwo years old and all set to go off to Oxford to study French Symbolist poetry when – in a fit of what in his memoir he calls “the need to feel alive” – he threw it all over and joined the army instead. This was 1961. Kennedy. Camelot. The American Century. The army sent him to Officer’s Candidate School, then to Special Forces Qualifi - cation at Fort Bragg, then to Nha Trang to learn Vietnamese, then to Darlac province where he recruited Montagnard tribesmen for guerilla work. It was there he started acting like Colonel Kurtz. I’m not going to go into it all here (read The Underside of the Weft if you want to know), but the army actually sent someone after him – the Martin Sheen character – not to kill him, but to rein him in, escort him back to civilization. There followed a backlog of purple hearts, then a posting to the Pentagon, a Master’s at Georgetown. By 1969 he was back at the Saigon Embassy in civvies, working as liaison between the CIA and Special Forces.
In his memoir he says he purchased Quang in an Embassy raffle, and then in full Boston Brahmin mode, tells how he took her home with him, fed her, gave her some money, and sent her back to her family. And that it was only later when he found her sleeping out behind the sandbagged building he had his flat in, that he took her in as his housekeeper.
Or maybe “housekeeper.”
If she’s alive, she’d be in her sixties. But in that photo, she is forever seventeen. Shy and lovely, and for the time being, saved.
If you’re of a certain age, you might have seen him from time to time on the PBS NewsHour with a graphic across his chest: Martin Lowell, Kennedy School of Government. Informed, thoughtful, articulate.
Now he’s eighty and his hips are bad and he needs oxygen, so when I step up onto the portico of the big house in Brookline (our house, I should say, the house I grew up in, the house my mother died in) and ring the doorbell, it’s not my father who answers, it’s Quang.
“You,” she says.
She’s dressed in jeans and this tight spandex top, totally twentyfirst- century American, so score one point for reality.
“You should call ahead,” she says, and then shifting into her Asian deference act, bowing her head slightly, “Anh Martin.”
So yeah, the reason I wanted Nina to come along was not so much to protect me from my father, but from Quang. Not the Quang of Saigon fifty years ago, you understand (we are not, after all, insane), but this Quang. The one who likes to mess with me. Twenty- eight, beautiful, with the requisite hips and breasts and everything. Not subjectively beautiful like Nina with her curves, or Incunabula de la Luz and her 32-year- old prepubescent body, but really and truly beautiful. Her black hair thick and rich and with purplish tints. The face that is neither this nor that, but a slightly eerie mixed- race beauty: her eyes with their black pupils and – get this – blue irises looking at you, watching you, expecting something from you, and at the same time with this hint of mockery in them, like she can’t believe you’re falling for her act, that you can’t see what you ought to be able to see.
And then there’s the lovely flaring of her nostrils, the sleek fl anks, 42 the narrow hips, the incurve of her waist, her tiny ankles, her soft voice, etc., et cetera, &c. If this all sounds too sexually imperialist on my part, what can I say: she’s beautiful. Even the gap between her two front teeth manages somehow to be quietly, infuriatingly, sexy.
Just to clear things up: I once snuck a look into her purse, found a Massachusetts driver’s license. Her real name is Julia. Julia Dinh. But in my father’s house, she’s Quang. Whether this is psychosis on the part of my father, or on the part of Quang, or whether once in an aged fog he called her Quang and now it’s a kind of edgy joke between them, I’ll let the reader choose.
“How is he?” I ask as she escorts me down the wide hall with its dark oak wainscoting, past the front parlor toward the library. As if I don’t know the way. But she doesn’t answer, instead pauses like a servant at the library door and then knocks. “Mr. Lowell,” she says opening the door, “you have a visitor.”
He’s sitting in his leather reading chair, his desk behind him, computer screen dark, walls lined with books. And more books in boxes and teetering stacks on the floor from when he cleaned out his Kennedy School office. At the sight of me something like a look of pleasure crosses his face. Although whether the pleasure is the simple one of seeing one of his sons – and a semi- estranged one at that – or the more complex one of the game being afoot, I have never been able to tell.
“Marty!” he cries, smiling, all hail- fellow, well- met. “You should have told me you were coming!”
“I like to keep you on your toes, sir.”
You heard right. “Sir.” I call him “sir.” Have done since I was a kid. It’s a WASP thing, a Brahmin thing circa 1920.         
“Good to see you. Good to see you.”
We shake hands and I take the chair across from him. Julia turns and leaves us, and for the next fifteen minutes or so we speak like normal father and son. I ask after his health, what his blood oxygen levels were the last time he was tested, and whether the steroid inhaler is helping. And in turn he asks how my dissertation is coming along – full first draft yet? I lie to him with a fertility and conviction that takes me aback. But no matter. One of the few ambitions I harbor is that he will die before I have to tell him the truth.
He bears – my father, in old age – a resemblance to John Huston as he appeared in Chinatown. A big man, a big frame compromised by age, shoulders hunched, waist thickened, the face lined, lips the color of intestines, the right cheek a little droopy like someone has melted cheese on it. But in their sockets the eyes are alive – with avarice in the case of John Huston, in the case of my father with duplicity.
Blue eyes, it should be remarked.
Behind him thumbtacked on the bulletin board above his writing desk are the family photos, unchanged from when I was a kid as far as I can tell, though they’ve curled with age. There’s his first wife, his second wife, my three half- brothers and their wives, my nieces and nephews, and then teenage me in concert tux with my stupid oboe. And there’s my mother, the trophy wife, young and lovely in her shorts and cotton top, sitting six inches off the ground in one of those abbreviated beach chairs – we’re probably out on the Cape – a cooler beside her, smiling into the sun, hand atop her straw hat because of the ocean wind, diagnosis still a year or two off. In the lower right, almost obscured by the leaves of a coleus, is the photo of Quang in her white ao dai.
One of those brothers, the oldest – he was already twenty- two when I was born – maintains my father got Quang out of Saigon. He says we’ve got another family, a shadow family. That Quang had children, and those children have had children. And that our father knows who and where they are. This is either true or not true. Quang living in an apartment in Bethesda in the 1980s or sent to a reeducation camp and long ago dissolved into the south Asian soil.
“And you?” I ask when we’re done talking about my dissertation. “How’s the rewrite of Weft going?” This, because it’s what he’s been working on the last year or so, a rewrite of his memoir now that stuff has been declassifi ed, his non- disclosure with the CIA trumped by time, first wife’s feelings no longer in play. But before we can get very far the door opens and in comes Julia with a tray of tea things.
“Ah – ” he says and he seems to waver a moment at the sight of her. She’s changed out of her jeans and spandex into a white ao dai. “Ah, Quang! Tea for the prodigal son!”
She smiles thinly and begins to set the tea things before us. Cups and saucers, not mugs. She keeps her face tucked in, turned from us. There’s no cup for her.
Thing is, if she was beautiful before in her spandex top and jeans, she’s otherworldly in an ao dai, a dress that manages somehow to be both modest and provocative. The flowing silk pant legs, the tight bodice and waist, the drapery of the rear and front skirts, the peek- aboo slit up the sides, as much skin covered as possible: a sure turn-on for Cotton Mather types.
“Won’t you join us?” my father says with his gentleman’s manner when she has finished pouring. She looks at him with what seems like incomprehension. So then he says something to her in Vietnamese. She places the teapot between us, puts up the palm of her hand in a gesture of demure refusal, then murmurs something in Vietnamese herself, and leaves the room.
I’m left with the trailing vapors of the theatrical. It isn’t the first time. I’ve been treated to the curtain rising before, the curtain falling, to the music of her Vietnamese, to the ghost of my father’s Saigon self. So it feels a little churlish of me when I stand up for reality.
“Why do you call her Quang when her real name is Julia?”
I had expected this might take my father by surprise, but I should have known better – nothing takes my father by surprise. In his memoir he tells how for years, back in Maryland, he slept with a sidearm under his pillow. Still, he temporizes, reaches for his steroid inhaler, takes a hit, then turns his eyes back to me.
“You are quite right. Her real name is Julia. And she has a sister, a twin sister, whose name is Martha. A writer. But there are times when it’s safer to call her Quang.” And he peers at me to see if I register this. “When she changes her dress, puts on that ao dai you just saw. Those are symptoms I’ve learned to recognize.”
I, of course, have heard this all before, but I encourage him anyway. “Symptoms?”
And we’re off, down the old chutes of duplicity and misdirection. I won’t replicate the whole song and dance here. I’ve sung and danced it for years, though the tune changes from being about his war experiences, to his serial wives, to his time as one of those men in a Senate hearing- room who lean over and whisper into someone’s ear. I mean the self- infatuation, the geo- political overlay, the concrete details meant to anchor the fiction. For the last eighteen months, ever since she came to work as his secretary, it’s been Julia, but Julia with the shadow- shape of Quang – the real Quang – in the background. Today he lands on Julia’s latest diagnosis. I add it to the stack I’m keeping: schizophrenia, Fregoli syndrome, paranoia, non- bizarre delusion disorder.
Non- bizarre delusion disorder. Don’t you love it?
Except, of course, it might all be true.
She’s written up in the medical journals, my maybe half- sister is. A remarkable case, my father says with something like pride. The systemic nature of her delusions, the internal coherence, the wellpreserved personality, the lack of deterioration of self. It’s a kind of dédoublement. LaForgue’s dédoublement, he says, did I know it? It’s as if she’s simultaneously herself – Julia Dinh, Wellesley grad, his capable secretary – and Quang, the boat women, the bar girls, the Pulau Bidong camp –
“She seems to think I’m her brother,” I break in. Maybe not as sly as I think. “She calls me Anh Martin.”
He makes a kind of equivocating gesture, like he could give me a lesson in Vietnamese pronouns but won’t bother, and then says how 45 it’s all part of the diagnosis, the paranoia, the delusion of grandeur, do I see?
“A Napoleonic complex of the abused,” he says. “When one of these – I don’t know what to call them: fi ts? trances? – when the thing happens to her it’s like she thinks she’s not only Quang but all the women who were damaged by the war, the girls forced into prostitution, the women whose children were taken from them, who were raped, drowned, failed their screening and were denied asylum, repatriated, re- educated, died in the camps. It’s rather extraordinary in its way, isn’t it? As a mania goes, I mean.”
“In your book,” I answer, “in your memoir, you never say what happened to Quang. After the war, I mean.”
He breathes in as if the question is too simple, too commonplace to be worth answering. From down the hall comes the sound of Julia in the kitchen.
“If what you’re really asking,” he says, enunciating each word like he’s speaking to a child, “is who Julia is, who her mother is, why she’s here, if she means something – ” and he closes his eyes as if savoring the non sequitur – “she’s expiation, atonement.” And then with the melted part of his face lifting in a kind of self- lacerating smile: “War reparations.”
I don’t say anything, just watch him as he looks over at the bulletin board, at the photos there. Three wives. Four sons. Quang. As if he’s gazing backward in time.
“When I was young,” he says after a full minute, “when I left Oxford, left my Rhodes, I thought that if you rid yourself of schoolboy morality, educated yourself in some kind of extreme experience, said to hell with the dreaming spires, in time you’d come to understand things. If you went to war, interrogated your heart, countenanced evil, a time would come when you understood.”
He looks at my face, at my eyes which are not his eyes, but my mother’s.
“But you never do understand,” he says. “Or if you think you do, it’s because you’ve simplifi ed the world, made it into something framed, curated, fi t between the covers of a book, a film with a run time of an hour and fifty minutes.”
And then, as if he’s reciting the irreducible: “Galang. Pinang Island. The Pulau Bidong camp. A young woman with a baby in her arms. Waiting. No voice- over, no nondiegetic music.”
And then closing his eyes, waving me away: “Asylum denied.”

– 9 –

But back in the hall I don’t leave right away. I don’t know why – it’s been years; what’s the point? – but I go quietly upstairs to where the bedrooms are, first to mine at the top of the stairs (it’s Julia’s now), and then to my mother’s down the hall where there is not even a token of her ever having lived here. None of her clothes hanging sentimentally in the closet, or her things on the walls. There’s a hairbrush and hand mirror on the bureau, but I couldn’t say if they were hers. None of this prevents me from opening the closet and looking at the bare hangers, the empty corners, pulling out a nightstand drawer. What I can picture, almost against my will, is her head on her pillow – just her head, no body – the head with its tufts of hair, her eyes burning, her voice slurred with morphine. And me twelve years old, drowning in my room down the hall. What was a pancreas anyway?
The year after she died I was shipped off to Andover, and for the next eight years I only came home for school vacations. And then not at all.
In the bathroom, aware I’m crossing some line, I look for a prescription bottle with – what? lithium? thorazine? – and then I look for evidence of contact lenses because I’m thinking maybe Julia just wears these super- blue contacts or something. But there’s nothing, just the usual bathroom stuff. So okay, maybe the eyes are real. But the schizophrenia, the paranoia, the delusions . . . ?
On the way back down the hall I can’t help myself, check into my old room, glad at least to see Kurt Cobain still on the wall. Otherwise, it’s a girl’s room now. I tiptoe inside and have a look around, look over the books in the bookcases, the regulation American Girl clothes hanging in the closet, lift a manuscript off her desk. I’m expecting my father’s updated memoir, but no, this is like a novel or something. At least I think it is. It’s Saigon, anyway. Only weirdly, it’s snowing. Snowing in Saigon.
In the header, there’s a title and a name: Martha Dinh. So either reality or a deepfake plant.
Back downstairs I could just quietly let myself out, but instead I turn into the dining room, then into the kitchen where I can hear Julia. She’s in her ao dai still, though she’s put on an apron.
“Ah! Anh Martin, I am just finishing a little treat for you.”
Like I told my father she calls me that. Anh. Basically it means “older brother,” but it can also be used with a friend, or as a term of endearment between lovers. Brother, friend, lover. Those self- cancelling three.
“Em gái,” I say, because I’ve Googled a thing or two. For a mo-ment her hands stop what they’re doing. I’m a little taken aback by the smile that flickers onto her face. It’s so like when Incunabula de la Luz has to scramble to hide her pleasure at my hitting her postmodern tennis ball back.
“I have been up since the early hours baking for you,” she says, removing a batch of little pastries one by one from a cooking sheet to a wire rack.
“For my father, you mean.”
“These are bánh bía. My mother used to make them for me when I was little. After she died I tried to make them once in my sister’s house, but they wouldn’t let me use their eggs, or taro even. That’s how it was then. Before they sold me.”
And that – good example – is the sort of thing that used to make me think she was just messing with me, playing some race card, some imperialist American card. A game, a performance, maybe even a kind of sexual taunt. On the other hand if it’s legit – if the delusion is legit, I mean – and she isn’t engaged in some elaborate ruse, some perverse make- believe, then what are the ethical boundaries here?
Still, they sold me – it sounds like a handkerchief designedly dropped, doesn’t it?
“They sold you?”
“Yes,” she says simply and begins on the next batch. I have to say she’s got an expert way of working – wrapping the filling, forming the little mooncakes, brushing the tops with egg wash. Even the way she wipes her hands on her apron. I mean she doesn’t look like some Vietnamese- American girl who’s learned a few things from her grandmother. She looks like she’s been baking her whole life.
“My mother always made us wait after she made bánh bía. They taste even better if you wait. But these are American bánh bía. We Americans don’t wait, do we?”
And she turns her devastating eyes on me, and then takes one of the pastries from the cooling rack and, enacting the universal metonymy for sexual seduction, holds it up for me to take a bite. (Eve in the garden, for one.) And what was that drive- by “we?” A dare? A secret hand- shake?
“Now, watch,” she says, going back to work. “Every Vietnamese woman has her own design stamp. It’s like a signature. This is mine,” she says and she dips a chopstick into some red food coloring and carefully pokes a design onto the top of each cake. “A triangle,” she says, stabbing, “and then another triangle like in a mirror. Et voilá! More tea?”
If you Google blue- eyed Vietnamese you’ll get images not just of mixed- race people, but seemingly full- blooded Viet with the most 48 stunning eyes. And then generally some mention of a century of colonial French rule. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
“Yes?” she says, standing mid- kitchen with her brows raised, teapot poised in the air, as if to gauge the extent of my acquiescence.
“Tell me about your sister,” I say and sit in the breakfast nook. I’ll let her decide which sister I mean. Her “real” sister, this Martha, the writer. Or Quang’s sister, fi fty years ago in Saigon.
“Ah,” she intones and she tips her head to one side so her hair hangs off her shoulder. She’s thoughtful for a moment, and then pours tea into two cups. “But you have read your father’s book. You already know.”
“I’ve read the old book,” I say. “Not the new. Not the one you’re helping him with.”
She stares at her hands. Some softer quality, some vulnerability, comes over her. “Talking about this,” she says quietly, “thinking about it – it’s diffi cult for me.”
“Yes,” I say, “of course.” She’s taken the seat across from me, and I’ve got this urge to play the older brother, to reach out and touch her, to place my hand on hers as if to say never mind, it’s okay. But I don’t.
“No . . . ” she says, though whether to the telling or the spectral touch, I don’t know.
And for a time she just sits and stares down at the table, a little off to the side to where the plate of mooncakes sits. And then I get a shock. Because for a minute her face darkens and her brow furrows and her eyes go absent so she looks like one of the Bulfinch Seven schizos: the eerily vacated expression, the concentration, the dark focus on something coming from beyond, from some other world. I bring my figurative hands back to myself.
“My sister hated me,” she says finally. For a moment, she lifts her eyes to me. There’s again the little flicker of a smile, though this time it’s fragile, exposed. And then she drops her gaze again. “I don’t know why. After my mother died, she had to take me in. I was fourteen. There was no one else. She was my elder sister, but she didn’t want me.”
There’s some sort of shift in her voice. It’s lost its American tone, gone a little off, a little distant. At least I think it has.
“She and her husband had a flat on Nguyen Huu Cau street and a stall in the Tan Dinh market. They sold fabric and jewelry and lacquer work. But also black market things they got from the American soldiers. Ritz crackers, Kleenex, Right Guard. But they had to be careful about displaying the black market items. There were MPs who came by and checked, who would then tell the Saigon customs police. So my sister instructed me how to sell the black market things. She told me to take them into the crowd around the market, and go from person to person, and sell them that way. But I’m not very good at this. I’m shy. I don’t know how. And there are others selling ahead of me.”
She’s not looking at me. She’s staring down at the table, her hair falling on either side of her face, almost speaking like I’m not there.
“In the crowd there are soldiers with transistor radios. I remember ‘Honky Tonk Women’ that summer. Everywhere I go I hear ‘Honky Tonk Women’ while I am trying to sell cigarettes. I wonder what is ‘Honky Tonk Women.’ ”
All right, I’m tracking her. The accent coming on board, the beginnings of broken English. And forgive me, but some part of me can’t help but be impressed. This grading from one character into another, like maybe she was a theater major at Wellesley.
“But then smart idea I have. There are no vendors in Saigon Zoo. They not allowed. But I so small, I crawl through dog hole in fence. I have – how you say? – captive market. I only one selling cigarette inside zoo.”
Okay. All right. Stop.
“Yes, even then, even during war, people like zoo, go to zoo. American even. I sell my cigarette to American. Lucky Strike, Chesterfi eld. They laugh because they know cigarette are black market. They know we steal cigarette from them, sell them back. But they don’t mind. They laugh. They say they want to kiss me, they say so pretty. They give me dollar for cigarette. Then my sister not so mad at me always. This is how it is for four, maybe five month. ‘Honky Tonk Women’ not on radio anymore. But then black market man, American soldier, he is caught, and no more cigarette. No more Right Guard. Then custom police come and arrest my sister husband. Search flat and find black market. So then my sister get mad again. She tell me I old enough now. Yes, honey, she say, you go to Continental, to Caravelle. You old enough to be like other Saigon girl who have no father. But I cannot do this.”
Okay, I’m thinking, the Occam’s razor here is that the girl really is delusional. Paranoid. Non- bizarre or otherwise.
“I see the girls,” she’s saying, staring down at the tabletop as if she really does see them. “I know. I see them in alley and on door stoop. They on their knees in front of American with his trouser undone. You know? They on their knees in front of him. I cannot do this, but my sister say I must do this. She lock me out. And then she learn this thing. There is this man in Tan Dinh market who can sell girl to American. He sell them in auction. He get highest price. My sister say this is better than Continental and Caravelle. Concubine, she say, not whore. So that is what is. They bring me into room where American playing card game. What happen then is all English. I do not understand. One man say something. Another man say something. There is laughter and there is drinking. And they keep playing card. And then your father say something that make everybody stop. Somebody else say something. Then they laugh and shake their head. And then my sister kiss me on cheek and leave with man from market. She never kiss me before. Your father say to me in Vietnamese to sit on chair and wait. I never hear American speak Vietnamese before. I obey him because I understand he buy me.”
“Okay,” I say, because really. “Okay.”
“Your father walk me to his flat, warm up some pork soup, feed me. Then he tell me I sleep there in chair and in morning I go home. So yes, this is what happen. He give me egg and rice in the morning and on street he say I go home. He shoo me like stray dog, and then he walk away. A day go by, two day, I don’t know. He fi nd me asleep in broken chicken coop behind building. I tell him I cannot go home. If I go home my sister sell me again. I say he buy me, he own me. I say I clean house for him. I cook for him. I say I get best price in market for him. I say Quang only need small bamboo mat for sleep. Quang only need chieˆ́utre. I say Quang be like một con chim trong loˆ̀ng. I say – ”
And as if she’s completing her metamorphosis, bringing herself – her persona, her delusional self, whatever – full circle, she starts speaking entirely in Vietnamese. Like I’m not even there. A stream of single syllables puncturing the air, the singing tones, the abrupt stops. This, in my mother’s kitchen. For a long time I just sit there, listening, looking at her through her hair, marveling at her voice, the sheer fecundity of whatever it is she’s saying. There’s almost something manic about it, like I’ve opened a floodgate in her and this is what’s streaming through: a torrent of trauma, just like my father said. Quang’s life and the life of those like her – the boat people, the refugee camps, the rapes, the starvation, the lost children, the re- education camps. Everything Quang and half- a- million other betrayed Vietnamese lived. Of course she might be reciting the equivalent of the Saigon phone book, I know that, but I have to say it starts to be too much for me – the voice, the words, the spilling emotion, the horror of her delusional self – and I reach out and touch her, try to bring her back from wherever she is, to pull her back from madness even if it’s half- feigned, an actor’s madness, but she keeps going, keeps going even when I say “Okay, okay,” keeps going until I lean in toward her and sweep her hair aside and with a kind of desperate inspiration, I kiss her. On the cheek, like a brother. For a moment she stops, startled, but then starts again. So I lean in again, and this time – god help me! – I kiss her on the lips. She freezes for a moment, and then – hesitant at fi rst, as if she’s not sure where she is – she kisses back. I say her name. Julia, I say. As if to bring her back to herself. And then it’s like she can’t get enough of me, kissing me in a kind of frenzy of arousal: my lips, the wicks of my mouth, her fi ngers in my hair. After a moment she draws back and whispers to me, a little hot explosion in my ear.
“G.I. like?”
“Not G.I.,” I say because I don’t know what else to say, and then because I want her to come to me, I say her name again: Julia. She leans in under her hair and kisses me.
“G.I. like young Vietnamese girl in alley? On door stoop?”
And that pulls me up, like I’ve been ambushed. “No,” is all I can manage.
“You don’t like? Yes, you like! All G.I. like young Vietnamese girl in alley!”
And she tries to kiss me again, but I push her away and stand up. I don’t know what kind of look I’ve got on my face – insulted, injured, ashamed – but on her face there fl ashes something toxic, a cutting amusement, and then something like vengeance. And in the blue of her blue eyes the evidence that incriminates.

– 10 –

Suicide Note, Installment #5: Tines Bowditch,
Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1852

I was a sickly woman all my life. Something gone wrong with me when I was little. And ever after, my lungs was no good, and my right leg was gone lame. Died of it, finally.
But something gone lame in my mind too. They say it happen when that driver Stingy John make me stay in the sun too long. They thrash out wheat and put it on big heavy sheets to dry, and Stingy John the driver say I got to sit out in the sun and keep the chickens offen it. I’m ten years old and useless on account of my lameness and seeing as my lungs don’t work so good. So I got to sit in the sun and keep the chickens off. One of the house womens bring out a sunhat for me, the kind they wear down in the bottoms, the kind they make from shucks and bulrushes, but when Stingy John see that, he come and take it off my head. And the sun so hot. Ever afterward it known that he try to kill me ’cause I useless. But I don’t die, I just get so hot, and I see things that ain’t there, and ever afterwards, I a little lame in the head too.
That’s what they do sometimes to the mens when they go wrong. The driver and the overseer they chain them down in the bullpen, face up to the sun till they nearly dies.
My name Ann but they call me Tiny ’cause I never was no size much. And then they call me Tines. They call me Tines like Massa Julian’s brothers call him Jules. They call me Tines, just like that.
And Stingy John wrong, ’cause later I the best seamstress on the plantation. I the best dressmaker. I the best ’broidery- woman. You don’t need no strong leg to sew, you don’t need no good lungs to quilt. It even help if you be lame in the head a little bit, ’cause then you sees things others don’t and you can put what you sees into your quilt.
        It was the yaller woman taught me to sew proper. This yaller woman from Baton Rouge who spoke French and dressed in fine style. Her name was Celestine. What a name that was! But we just call her the yaller woman. She not quite a slave, but she not quite a freewoman neither. Truth is, we don’t know what she is. But she work in a shop in Baton Rouge doing French fancy work for all the white ladies, and Massa Julian he bring her to the plantation and he build her a little house away from the quarters to do French fancywork for his womens. But that not the real truth. He bring her because he like her. He like that yaller woman.
I was put in the spinning house after I didn’t die. In the spinning house there were two looms and three spinning wheels all the time going. It took a lot of spinning and weaving and sewing to make things for a place so big. They say I was a likely girl for the needle. And wasn’t I! I quick, even when I but fourteen year old, I show them mammies how the quality does! Sure as shelled corn I do! Mistress Rachel hear ’bout this and take me out of the Spinning Room where they just making homespun for the hands, muslin and linsey- woolsey, and she have me do work for the white folks. I knit socks for the Master and his boys and I ’broider dresses for young Miss Betsy and I crochet little cloths so the oil the white mens put in their hair don’t ruin the sofas.
Massa Julian he take me aside and have me do this one piece of needlework for him. This after some brouhaha. He say he want me to ’broider a legend on a cap. Can I do that, he say. I don’t know what a legend is but I say if it needle and thread I can do it. So he say he will write it out for me and only then do it come to him that I can’t read. So he say, if he write out a design can I ’broider it. I say no one better.
It a cap that this here white nigger wears when he goes horseback into town to do the white folks errands. Everybody know Massa his father. That what make him a white nigger. He like Celestine that way, he got no friends. So I’m ’broidering what I know is a string of words onto the front of his cap and he hanging around while I do it. This what the words say: Don’t bother this nigger, or there will be hell to pay. Though while I ’broidering I don’t know what they say. I ask the white nigger once. What it say, I ask. And he say it say: Don’t bother this fine- looking gentleman, he real sweet. That white nigger he hang about and he hang about. Iffen I don’t already know that no mens want me on account of I got to walk with a crutch, I say he sneaking me. My sister Nicey say I bosomy for being so tiny. She say the meat that oughta done gone into my leg gone into my bosoms instead. And some mens like that, she says.
Afterward he make a pair of knitting needles outen second hickory and bring them to me. His name Cato.      
Mistress get an idea for the yaller woman to teach me fancywork. She have this funny look on her face. She say Tines, you going to ’prentice to Celestine here. She teach you everything she know about French fancywork and ladies’ dressmaking. Won’t you, Celestine, she say. And after Tines knows everything, then you can return to your family and friends in Baton Rouge, she say.
At the time, I don’t catch none of what is going on here. But now I’m dead and in the glory and I sees things better.
Later, when my sister Nicey have a baby, she want to name her Celestine but her husband Jimmy say no. Celestine a whore name, he say. But that don’t have nothing to do with what I’m telling.
When Mistress Rachel start showing she going to have a baby, she tell me she want something special. She say she thought the time for her babies was over, so this baby a gift from God, she say, and so she say she want a special quilt for this baby. She don’t want it made of scrap pieces like a usual quilt. No rag pieces, she say, she want it made of new cloth. I never hear such a thing. New cloth, I say. What new cloth. She tell me she want it made the best I can make. The stitches be real fine. The backing be a piece of Lowell cloth.
It take me a few days to get it in my head. But then I do. This quilt be the most beautiful quilt ever a woman’s hands make. And I be the one to make it. I tell the mammies in the spinning house that they got to do what I say. That they got to spin what I say, and they got to dye what I say. Nicey ask me what kind of quilt I fixing to make and I tell her tumbling blocks. Tumbling blocks, she say. That a evil quilt, she say. With them tumbling blocks you don’t know which way you is. It like you eyes gone crazy and can’t sees right. It like you seeing blocks one way and then you seeing blocks the other way. It ain’t no quilt for a baby, she say. But I want the baby to go this way and that way. ’Cause being a little lame in the head a good thing for a body, I thinks. I don’t tell her this but it true. Instead I tell her the other thing that’s true. That with tumbling blocks you got the light and the dark and the in-between squares, just like you got your white folks and you got your Black folks and you got your in-between folks and together they make up the wholeness.
So I get the mammies to dye up some light tan with oak bark set with copperas for the white folks. And I get them to dye up some dark purple with sweet- gum bark for the Black folks. And I get them to dye up some yaller with hickory and bay leaves set with chamber lye for the in-between folks. And when Cato ’companies Celestine back to Baton Rouge, I have Mistress Rachel tell him to get some fine store- bought thread. And we get a bolt of roller- print Lowell cloth that come all the way from the Yankee states.
And then I begins to cut and piece and quilt- stitch. I sitting in the little borning room off the center hall. Cato come by and he watch me sew and he talk to me. He say once I always giving him the sassy eye. I say I ain’t give you no sassy eye. And then I gives him the sassy eye.
You an artist, he say another time. I don’t paint no picture, I say back. You an artist all the same, he allow. You just use you thread for paint. And ever after, I can’t help myself, but I thinks pictures while I sew. I thinks stories. I thinks of all that I done, and all that been done to me. Even what Cato later done to me out behind the sugar house. And I thinking that it all in the quilt if folks have the eyes to see it. And I thinking that this is the fi nest thing a body can do, slave or free, to put something in the world that make the world more beautiful than it is. Something that wouldn’t be there if you never lived, if you never done what you done. Something that was you in the world, only not you but the thing. The quilt, the blanket chest, the forged hasp.
When I finish I trick young Miss Betsy into writing my name and writing what year it be. I tell her to make it like a legend. And then I ’broiders that into the backside of the quilt along the hem. And then I done, and that tumbling blocks quilt it do just what Nicey say it do. A body don’t know if a body looking at them blocks this side of paradise or the other. It make you woozy in the head.
When the baby come, the quilt go up into the nursery room and I don’t see it no more. But I know it there. I know my name on it.
Massa Julian he stand on the back door stoop of the house and he have a bucket of silver dimes and he throw them by the handfuls for the nigger children. Name of Julian, that baby. Like to replace the Julian that died.
A month go by and the days is shorter and then the awful thing happen. The baby, this new Julian, he die. He just up and die right there on that tumbling blocks quilt. He sleeping with his face down on the quilt and he just die. He just stop breathing. And no one want the quilt then. Mistress Rachel send it out the house. But no one want it. It end up in my cabin ’cause no one want it. Nicey give me a dirty look, say she don’t want to sleep with me no more. The womens give me looks like they think I conjure that baby’s death. They don’t come near me even more than the way it was before. And the mens won’t look at me. I don’t even have that white nigger Cato no more on account of what he done to me out behind the sugar house.
What he done to me out behind the sugar house I would of let him do if he’d of just kept being sweet to me a little longer. The whole time he do it, he say I sorry I sorry. He keep saying it while he doing it. I sorry I sorry. I try to stop him but I too little and also I can’t breathe and then I go away like I did that time in the sun. When I wake up, he gone. And I just all black in my head ’cause I would of let him do it. If he just ask me. If he just keep saying sweetness to me, I would of let him do it. But it don’t matter, none of all this matters, ’cause I dead now and in the glory.
And in the glory this is what I see. I see that I have that one moment in my life when it like the full moon shining beautiful on me, and something beautiful come out of me. It don’t matter that the baby Julian die. The quilt still alive. The quilt be alive forever. It don’t matter if I be slave or I be free. The quilt be free forever. Everything that happen to me, my sickness when I little, my lameness and my bad lung, and Stingy John and the wheat and the chickens and the sun, and the yaller girl, and Cato, and baby Julian, and the womens that won’t talk to me, and the mens that step outten the path when they see me coming, it all don’t matter. ’Cause that quilt, it be the glory. It be the purity and the beauty and the goodness that ought to be in life but ain’t.

– 11 –

“At first I didn’t touch her, Frau Doktor. Those first days. I could see she expected something. Cowed, waiting for the other shoe to drop. After all she must’ve seen what went on between the Americans and the Saigon girls. I mean the stuff you’d see going on in an alley, or in a doorway, or a door- stoop, you know – she must’ve known, but I didn’t do any of that. I didn’t want to scare her off, you understand. So I didn’t touch her.”
And with that I pause, drag on my cigarette, knock the ash off. It’s Iconic Male I: The Imperialist American.
“With each day that passed,” I go on after a moment, “she seemed a little less frightened, a little less on edge. With each day that found her only making breakfast, going to the market, cleaning, making dinner, sleeping on her bamboo mat at night – her tre ngủmat – with each day that passed like that her body softened a little. She even smiled sometimes. At night when I came back to the fl at she’d have this silk robe I’d gotten in Manila waiting for me and freshly ironed. And tea. And sometimes these pastries called bánh bía. Have you ever had them, Frau Doktor? They’re like Chinese mooncakes, only different. Was that wrong of me, do you think? Not touching her, I mean. Playing the waiting game. Sie in eine Falle locken? Was that too premeditated, do you think?”
The Frau Doktor watches me with her icy reserve. The cameras are on, the recording machine too. I’ve searched YouTube for our previous session – Iconic Women IV – but nothing’s up yet. Maybe when my therapy is finished. Then she’ll edit, splice, have the Buddhist monks intone body count numbers, who knows what else.
“She was fourteen years old,” I say.
I’m trying to provoke her of course. Because, why not?
“It was war. It was a blindingly immoral time. An immoral city. I think it’s safe to say that most men would’ve just forced her. After all, what could she have done? Her sister? The police? She simply had nowhere else to go. A concubine is better off than a whore, as the saying goes. But it was more fun not to. It was more fun to lay the trap of my being considerate. The constructed persona. The treachery of that waiting. Of her sleeping each night on her mat in the corner, and me away in the bedroom. And her thinking she was safe. There’s pleasure in such play, wouldn’t you agree, Frau Professor? Even if you are the only one who knows what the game is, nicht wahr? The only one who knows what the rules are? What the performance is, exactly? Don’t you agree, Frau Professor? Pardon me! Frau Doktor!”
Her foot is doing this little wagging thing. She’s got her legs crossed, miniskirt hiked up her thighs, stiletto heels, a flash of underwear when she shifts in her chair, a tortoiseshell comb in her blonde hair.
“So there’s this one day a couple of months in when I come home and she’s sitting with one of my books in her lap. The Quiet American, it happens to be. And she asks me – basically it’s the first time she’s ever asked me anything, anything more than could she have a little money for the marketing – she asks me if she could learn English. She’d like to learn English, she says. She says she wants to learn English more than just ‘You like, G.I? G.I. like Lucky Strike?’ So the next day I went through the book stalls outside the Central Post Office and I found an old English grammar, and I started to teach her. We’d sit at this little table in the parlor in the lamplight and I’d take her through each lesson, drill her on the vocabulary, the verb conjugations. I am, you are, he is. We’d be sitting so close, leaning over the book, just inches apart. And the soft light from the table lamp on her arms. And her eyelashes blinking when I’d look sideways at her. And her hair hanging down, touching the page so she’d draw it back behind her ear. You know that motion women have? Carelessly tucking their hair out of the way? So careless and so lovely!”
About the cigarette. It’s a Lucky Strike, non- filter. Part of the act – the 1971 white guy in power, the imperialist persona. What’s a little weird is I’ve just come from a Puritan Boston tour and so I’ve got my Cotton Mather duds on: the 17th- century waistcoat, lace collar, the big brass belt buckle, the gray periwig. I trust the reader appreciates the symbolism here.
(The real Cotton Mather by the way – I mean the guy I hired to be Cotton Mather – turned out to be a nut job. So I’ve taken over. No one cares about Increase Mather anyway.)
“Sometimes,” I go on, “during these lessons, our forearms would touch, or under the table our legs. I have to say – if you’ll forgive me – that during those sessions with her arm so close to me, and her falling hair, and the soft lamplight – I am, you are, she is – I sometimes found myself aroused. Ach, Frau Doktor! I hope I’m not being too graphic! But those six months taught me just how vital the forbidden is to sexual desire. No doubt something you psychologists already know. The wife of your best friend, the professor- student, the patientdoctor relationship. How fraught, how sublime!”
She keeps her gaze on me, level, unaffected, professional. And then she does it. Casually, without seeming to take notice of what she’s doing – she draws her blonde hair back behind her ear! And for the first time I have the sense of her having hit my tennis ball back.
“I told myself I’d wait until she was fifteen. Fourteen is a girl. Yes, fifteen is as well, but it’s not fourteen, is it? In the mountains I saw Montagnard girls with babies on their hips who didn’t look much more than thirteen. So fi fteen, I told myself. Outside the building I instructed the guards in their sandbagged positions to watch out for her. I told them she was to be protected, looked out for. And I taught them to say Chào buoˆ̉ i sang em. Good morning, Miss! All part of the plan, you understand. American soldiers being polite to her! When she could’ve been like the other girls on her knees in some alley, some doorway. The Americans with their pants undone. I don’t have to draw you a picture. But no. It was good morning, Miss!”
The miniskirted therapist crosses and uncrosses her legs. She finishes writing something on her notepad and then returns her gaze to me. “Please to continue,” she says with her German accent. I take one last drag on my cigarette – frankly it’s making me a little sick – and then stub it out, pick a fleck of tobacco off the tip of my tongue like I’ve seen Humphrey Bogart do.
“For her fifteenth birthday I bought her an ao dai. I took her to a tailor’s shop and the owner waited on us like that scene in Vertigo where Jimmy Stewart is trying to get the scuzzy Kim Novak to look like the classy Kim Novak. You know that scene? The real and the impersonation? Only it turns out the impersonator is actually the real? Anyway, we looked over bolts of cloth, looked through the patterns. Then one of the seamstresses took Quang away to be measured. The others in the shop kept eyeing me. Not since the French had a white man done what I was doing. A bespoke ao dai for a young Viet girl. They seemed pleased.”
In fact, it’s kind of like being Cotton Mather, being my father. I mean the impersonation, the way you have an armature of facts that you embroider on. A notebook of stuff like the study books I worked up for my sixteen- year- old Ben Franklin, for Paul Revere, for Abigail Adams. Only for my father it’s a few Vietnamese phrases, a street name even if it’s not the right street name, the Saigon cathedral I haven’t worked in yet, the sandbags, the fry smells from the street vendors, the book stalls that may or may not have been outside the Post Office.
“Have you ever seen an ao dai, Frau Doktor?”
And I wait. Because, you know, it’s a direct question. She’s doing this thing with one of her stiletto heels, slipping it off her foot, then slipping it back on, slipping off, slipping on.
“Nein,” she says finally.
“Ah! It’s the most beautiful of all female dress. And indeed how lovely Quang looked! Her thin frame, her small hips, the way the front and rear panels split along the leg, the gentle swell of her breasts! She only wore it at night, that and on Sundays when we went to church. After dinner, after she’d done up the dishes, just before her English lesson, she would change out of her servant’s clothes and put on the white ao dai. And she would draw her hair back behind her neck with a tortoiseshell comb. And she would come and sit down at the little parlor table with its dim lamp and she’d look like a nineteenth- century Kinh princess in a sepia photograph. And what a state I would be in, sitting beside her. Out of the corner of my eye the white shimmer of the fabric, the close fit around her ribs, under the table her legs sheathed in beauty!”
At which the Frau Doktor – or maybe it’s Incunabula de la Luz, or even Lucille Villarreal – gives me a look.
“But I kept to my plan. And my plan was this: the slowest of slow advances. I would proceed as if we were both young, both of us only just discovering. First a little touch, almost accidental. And then a smile, and then, in time, a brotherly kiss on the cheek. Above all, nothing threatening. And that’s what I did. While we were seated at our table practicing pronunciation, or reciting a dialogue between Susan and John, when she did particularly well I would smile, or touch her lightly on the hand, or kiss the hair on her temple. Quickly, with no dwelling on what I had just done, as if this was all the most natural thing. And then I began to gaze at her, a little longer, a little too long, and then shifting my eyes away. And it was during one of these moments, when I was allowing some troubled, uncertain look to cross my face, as if I didn’t myself understand what was happening that – you perhaps will not believe this – but it was then that she leaned over and, as if she meant to help me comprehend . . . ah, do you understand? It was she who kissed me.”
And there goes the Frau Doktor’s stiletto heel again. On, off. For a moment we’re in a kind of stand- off as to the loom of the real. Me and Lucille Villarreal. Not the Frau Doktor, not Incunabula de la Luz, but Lucy Villarreal.
And then I get this inspiration, this terrific idea that’s not part of my notes, not part of the improv armature. I start telling her how after that, Quang and I began to learn how to kiss. How for weeks on end after that first night we made out on the parlor sofa like high school kids, fully clothed, no touching, just kissing, until I can see Lucy Villarreal rewinding the tape in her head. The Chicana hottie™ and me doing the same stuff I’m telling her I did with fifteen- yearold Quang in 1971 Saigon. I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself I have to say. In spite of my impersonation of Cotton Mather during my Puritan Boston tours, Ralph Waldo Emerson for Transcendental Boston, I am not, after all, an actor. So yeah. When finally I get to the night I carry Quang into the bedroom, and how I undress her, and the way her skin flashes in the dim light, and how I lay my big American body on her slender Vietnamese frame, the Frau Doktor has stopped taking notes.
And then this weird thing happens. I have no idea where it comes from – I’m supposed to be the Imperialist Male after all – but while I’m telling her about having Quang that first time, this fifteen- yearold girl thin and naked and a little frightened under me, I start feeling that stinging, brimming thing in my eyes. In my eyes, I mean. Now. Not my father’s eyes fifty years ago. Not full- blown tears, you understand, but that stinging thing like tears are on their way. And my voice goes weird, husky, like my throat is swelling. I know she can tell, so I start scrambling to regain control and you know what I end up saying? I end up telling her that when I, you know, climax, I start saying: “I’m sorry!” Saying it right into her ear, into her hair, into the mattress under us. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I’m saying it in English, I tell her – the Frau Doktor I mean, not Quang – so maybe she understands, maybe she doesn’t. Quang, I mean. The whole time she’s watching me with something like alarm. Incunabula de la Luz, I mean. And I don’t know whether this is good or bad, what I’ve done. I don’t even know which good or bad I mean. Good or bad for my relationship with Incunabula de la Luz – who, after all, originally, if the reader remembers, I sort of harbored a romantic interest in – or good or bad for me – Marty Lowell, Boston Brahmin, Iconic Male Whatever – as a human being I mean.
So I stop talking, just sit there with that thing in my throat. You 60 know how when you have to swallow but you don’t dare because then everyone knows you’re nervous, anxious, uptight, whatever. Really stupid because eventually you have to swallow, and it just gets bigger, that swallow, the longer you wait, until you feel like a total loser doing it. Which is what I do. I have to. And I fi nd myself wondering if she’s regretting the miniskirt, the stiletto heels, the wig – is she regretting upping the estrangement?
“Allow me to ask one last question on this matter, Herr Lowell,” she says as if she means to get the whole thing back on track. She pauses with the difficulty of the question. “Allow me to ask how you felt about . . . ” and she pauses again, then redirects herself, “ . . . how you felt about the calculation, the – how do you say? – the premeditation of this . . . this moment in your life.”
“The premeditation,” I repeat, trying to get my feet under me.       
“Yes.”
“The premeditation of luring the girl into thinking I loved her, you mean.”
“Exactly so.”
“It was a kindness,” I say after a moment of appearing to consider the question. I’m back to being my father. Maybe. “A way of saving her.”
“Saving her?”
“Yes. A way of saving her from rape.”
She buckles a little at the word. “Colonel Lowell, you think you raped her?” she asks.
“Yes,” I answer. “But she doesn’t think so.”
“Ah!” she says. “I see. So you made the young girl believe she was loved and that camouflaged – nicht war? – the fact that you were raping her.”
“Didn’t it?”
“And therefore she was not raped?”
I just look at her, peer through the Frau Doktor to Incunabula de la Luz, and through Incunabula de la Luz to Lucille Villarreal.
“There’s that photo of Quang,” I say – and now I don’t know who’s speaking, whether I’m me or my father – “the indisputable reality of it, yes? And there’s the little flat on Nguyen Huu Cau Street, the sandbags out front. The planes taking off and landing at Ton Son Nhut, in the distance the sound of explosions, the body counts, Richard Nixon on the TV, ‘Honky Tonk Women’ on the radio. Frau Doktor, something happened in Saigon in 1972 between Colonel Martin Lowell and fifteen- year- old Quang Dinh, but what?”
She holds her notebook poised above her lap for a moment, and then as if sensing I’m on the verge of causing the performance to collapse, she puts it down on the little table beside her, unclicks the ballpoint.
“Yes,” she says, “these will be fruitful questions for next time. But our hour is up this week.”
And she stands, but I’m not budging, not yet anyway.
“It’s called Ho Chi Minh City nowadays,” I say.
She doesn’t respond, just smooths her miniskirt across her thighs, and when I still don’t move, extends her hand in front of her in the “after you” gesture. There’s nothing about her manner, her posture, her expression that acknowledges that I’ve broken the rules. She’s the Frau Doktor to the bitter end.
At the door I turn to her, and I don’t know what’s eating me exactly but I step forward, put my hand behind her back and pull her into me like I’m Clark Gable or something. I pull her into me and kiss her. It’s not, the reader will remember, the first time we’ve kissed. But this is different. This is like I’m forcing the real on her. Which is its own kind of rape.
One kiss. The cameras are rolling but they’re still pointed back at our chairs. She neither resists nor responds.

– 12 –

So, yeah. Delusional disorders. Non- bizarre. Fregoli. Reduplicative paramnesia. At the level of Google they’re pretty much what my father said. “Non- bizarre” meaning that whatever it is you’re deluded about could be real, like the CIA is after you, or Emma Watson is in love with you. With Fregoli syndrome you think different people are the same person, donning disguises, tracking you, tricking you. And someone suffering from reduplicative paramnesia believes a physical location – their childhood home, say – has been reduplicated elsewhere, although in Julia’s case it’s her mother who has been reduplicated, and reduplicated in her, Julia. (And what’s with the reduplicative? It’s just duplicative, right?) With each of these the deluded person seems otherwise reasonable, capable of high- level functioning, of socializing, going to college, holding a job, etc. It’s just in the one area, the monothematic delusion with its confabulation of false memories, that the person is psychotic. But like my father said, Julia is atypical for each. You have to stretch the delusion, view it metaphorically, to get it to fit.
But what I haven’t been able to find over the internet is case studies, whatever would be in the psychiatric literature if Julia has truly been “written up” as my father said. And that’s what I want. I want to find her in the black- and- white of print. Peer- reviewed reality, if you will. For that, I’m thinking, I need a proper library.
So a couple of days after my last therapy session (will there be more? or like with my cast am I “all better” now?), I pack up Nibby and haul her over to Cambridge on the Red Line. Nibby because of this thing Nina does, which is sometimes she drops her daughter off and without hardly a fare- thee- well disappears for a few days. I have my theories as to where she disappears to but I’ll keep them to myself. At any rate for the last twenty- four hours it’s been Chutes and Ladders, and Hoot Owl Hoot!
I once seized the opportunity of one of these drop- offs to swab some saliva from inside Nibby’s mouth, did the same with my own mouth. Pretended it was just another game we were playing. But when push came to shove I chickened out, never sent the swabs off. They’re still cowering in my freezer.
Anyway, up in one of the Widener Library reading rooms I set Nibby up with her coloring book and her Tigger doll, and do what I can to get a case study on Julia to show up in the PsycINFO database. I use limiters of Age Group, Population Group, Clinical Case Studies. And then various secondary keywords – Saigon, auction, prostitute, CIA, boat people – but nothing that’s indisputably her comes up. So then I have to get creative. One brainstorm I have is maybe her doctors are associated with Harvard Medical, so I put in “Beth Israel,” “Brigham and Women’s,” “McLean.” Then I go farther afield – black market, Lucky Strike, bar girl. Come on, if she’s written up, if her mania is described somewhere in the literature, then some of these words have to be in the article, don’t they? Whatever anonymity has to be maintained does not descend down to “Honky Tonk Women,” surely. But there’s nothing coming out. Or there is, because searches are like that, but nothing like what I heard from Quang/Julia. The whole thing gets more and more tenuous – Saigon Zoo, concubine, chicken coop – and poor Nibby: there’s only so much coloring in her coloring book she can do. So after two hours I give up, hoist the Smithereen onto my shoulders and carry her out of the library, across the Yard and into the Square, to Toscanini’s where her mother and I used to go for ice cream. We get looks. Vanilla and chocolate.
So no lithium in the medicine cabinet. No Southeast Asian woman who thinks she’s the Napoleon of raped and murdered women. A father who says she is. Where does that leave me?
When I used to get crazy myself – over Beth or Nina or Denise, or over my father, or over my stalled dissertation – the antidote was always to take the train up to Lowell and let the rectilinear sanity of the mills calm me down. There was something about the solidarity of all that brick, the quarter- mile- long façades and the rows of identical windows like a Magritte painting. I’d walk along the canals with their granite berms, past the quaint gatehouses and the spillways, and imagine the world as it was a hundred and fifty years ago. America still to be built. The vista of the future. The mill girls going to work each day in their aprons and their virginity.
So after our trip to Widener, and after another night in my toowide bed with the Lowell coat of arms over my head, and Nibby sleeping in Incunabula de la Luz’s room, that’s what I decide to do. I decide I’m going to take Nibby – my daughter, damn it! – up to Lowell, to the mills, to the National Historical Park. In addition to it being an educational experience, someone’s got to stick up for the other half of her heritage, don’t they? Expose her to rectilinear sanity, don’t they? So I get her dressed, stuff half a bagel into her, fi ll up her little knapsack with kid stuff.
Out on the street, guess who we run into?
“We’re going on a field trip!” says Nibby to her mother. Who’s looking pretty good I have to say, dressed in Capri pants and this silky, crêpey top, her afro freshly picked. Foxy, is the word. I tell myself not to, but I can’t help it, start checking her for signs of physical wellbeing, of the afterglow of recent orgasms not to put too fine a point on it. Because that’s my theory about what’s going on when Nina disappears like this. She is, after all, a grown woman with a grown woman’s needs. Easiest thing for her to do is to go looking for Mr. Hookup in the Copley Plaza bar: no commitment, no entanglements, no phone numbers exchanged. Better to keep it simple, faceless. Because imagine the sheer drudgery of having to write suicide notes to a whole stable of ex-boyfriends. I could go on, but I won’t.
“A field trip?” Nina says, scooting down to my daughter’s level.
So even though she’s likely to put a serious crimp on the rectilinear healing of the mills, we take Nina with us. On the train up I get to pretend that we’re a family, and when we go into the National Park it’s the family rate we pay. On the Canal Boat tour the athwart seat is just right for the three of us. A family.
“So this is it?” says Nina, who’s never been to Lowell before. We’re gliding along the smooth canal water, she with her arm laying over the gunwale so her hand is trailing in the water and Nibby safe between us. Around us are what remains of the Mile of Mills, the City of Spindles. Brick, brick, and more brick. The ghosts of longgone dormitories and bell towers, the millyards and the millraces. A world vanished and yet somehow still here: in the warm twenty- firstcentury air the exhalations of Nina and Nibby and Marty Lowell (a family!), but also the vibrations of the “going-in bell” like a nineteenthcentury fossil.
“Source of your wealth?”
At which I give her a look. No doubt there is some residue of the Lowell mills in my father’s bank account. Also of the triangular trade, though I’ve never mentioned that to her.
“If memory serves,” she’s saying, “you were going to write a novel set here.”
“Below the belt, Nina.”
“The Loom of America,” she says, because that was its embarrassing title. She’s smiling, lifting her face to the June sun, enjoying her advantage, not looking suicidal at all.
So yeah, The Loom of America. A novel about the grim beauty of red brick, about the poetry of power looms, calico, muslin, the bobbin girls with their shawls and bonnets, violets and wild geraniums along the canals, the Irish down in the Acre, a handsome bachelor Agent reading by an astral light, and the mystery of a boardinghouse girl who used a clove- hitch to hang herself from a beam in the attic – the first chapter of which sits in a drawer of my desk back in the North End. Just another cadaver. One that Incunabula de la Luz has no doubt discovered and dissected.
When we take our tour of the Boott Mill it’s a young – what? Cambodian, Hmong, Vietnamese? – woman who’s our guide. She’s dressed as an 1840s mill girl, calico dress, black shoes, simple bonnet. Small matter of her having a National Park Service badge sewed onto her breast. When we first came in we caught her slipping an iPhone into her apron, for which professional Living Historian Marty Lowell knocks her down a grade.
Race- blind casting, I whisper to Nina, who ought to know.
Before we go into the Weave Room where the racket of the power looms will be deafening she gives us her spiel, tells us about the thirteen- hour work days, how the girls were recruited from the surrounding farm towns, rounded up in slave wagons – that’s what they were called, she says with an inadvertent look at Nina – and brought in to the corporation dormitories, how at one point a quarter of Harvard students depended on money earned by their sisters in the mills. When the machinery on all four fl oors was running the building would shake from the synchronization, she says. And then in a Living History move I recognize she gets personal, tells us how when she was brought in at the age of thirteen she was made a doffer, which was the least skilled of the jobs. We slept three to a bed, she says, and you had to be on the factory floor by fi ve in the morning. But it wasn’t so bad, she says. You had to “do off” the bobbins every half- hour, but during the in-between time you could knit or read, or go out to play in the millyard she says with a smile at Nibby.
“We were forbidden ordinary playing cards as being immoral,” she winds up, “so we girls made our own with the suits changed to Charity, Love, Benevolence, and Faith.”
And she beams at us, though I can’t tell whether with genuine wonder or a kind of bemused disbelief. I raise her grade from a B+ to an A- . “Any questions?” she asks. And when no one says anything, shifting into her twenty- first- century self: “Any answers?”
In the Weave Room the noise of the looms – they’ve only got eight running; what must it have been like with eighty? – scares Nibby so I pick her up and we hurry the length of the mill building and out into the bell tower where we wait for Nina, and then climb the circular staircase to the second floor where the exhibits are. We’re sort of having fun, I think. There’s interactive stuff for kids. History stuff for me and Nina, artifacts uncovered in the various archaeological digs of the last fifty years: bobbins, bottles, a cooper’s croze. There’s a Bible in which one of the girls has written a kind of diary in the spaces between the printed verses, and a display case devoted to nineteenthcentury ephemera: theater programs, advertisements, labels, Victorian valentines, a handbill for “Blind Tom, the Negro Boy Pianist.” It’s all a wonderful remove from the gray world of Cotton Mather.
Afterwards we’re starving so we head downtown to fi nd a restaurant. I’m taken with the normalcy of everything. Man, woman, child. Plasticized menu with its hamburgers and Caesar salads. We get a pitcher of beer because what the heck. And Nibby’s busy with a kid’s picture book we bought in the gift shop. When we’re done eating she pulls her legs up under her, lays her head in my lap and falls asleep.
Nina’s got her eyes on me. I don’t know if it’s because the father act is getting to her or if something else is coming. I sip my beer, have a look around. On the walls are all these pictures of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Because that’s the restaurant we’re in. Naked Lunch, like get it? Kerouac being a Lowell native, don’t you know. After another minute Nina pulls a manuscript out of her bag, places it on the table and then pushes it across to me. She’s watching my face to see how I react, if something registers there.
“Is that your doing?” she asks.
“Is what my doing?” I say because I can’t make head or tails of the manuscript. It looks to be one of her suicide notes. Which is to say, it’s written in what fiction writers are pleased to call a “voice” – a seventeenth- century one in this case, eccentric capitalization and spelling, and with the stink of history about it. But it’s not headed Suicide Installment #6 or whatever. In fact it’s headed Anti- Suicide Love Potion #3 for chrissakes.
“All right, never mind,” she says and makes to take the manuscript back, but I move it out of her reach, keep reading. Nibby snuffles in my lap.
“Wait, what is this?” I say, but I’m already there. It’s someone writing to Mercy Short – Cotton Mather’s Mercy Short, which is to say my Mercy Short, the bewitched girl – responding to her, to Nina’s Mercy Short, I mean. Trying to bring her back from the edge.
“Where’d you get this?” I ask, offended, defensive, territorial like hey, I’ve got the patent on Cotton Mather.
“You didn’t write it?” Nina asks again.
I shake my head “no,” look back at the writing.
“It sounds like you,” she says.
It’s some guy, some seventeenth- century tallow- maker’s apprentice trying to bring Mercy Short back from the eyeless sea creatures, and yet at the same time to bring Nina back. The thing’s written with this double meaning, this bi-level insinuation so that everything he says that’s intended to save a seventeenth- century Puritan girl from demonic spirits can be read as saving a twenty- fi rst- century woman from suicide. I would be as a Tender Mercy to you, he says. I would Ransom thee with my body if I could. Come out of the Char of thy Disease, he says. And more. All of it in the guise of restoring the girl to sanity. Even while it’s pretty clear he wants to get into her seventeenthcentury pants.
“Not me,” I say.
She heaves this big sigh, sits back in her chair. “That’s all I need,” she says. “A stalker.”
“So who else has read this stuff? These – ” and I have a hard time getting it out – “these suicide notes.”
“Just you and my writing group. Potential stalkers all.”
“Not me,” I say again. I turn the manuscript this way, that way. I’m still offended, somehow weirdly jealous. “Did it come through your group? I mean how do you guys submit stuff?”
“Google Drive,” she says. “There’s a folder and a deadline. We upload our stuff, read it, upload our critiques. But this came in my email. My Bennington email.”
Bennington being the college whose low- residency MFA program Nina’s doing.
“So . . . ”
“So yeah, one of my group must have written it. Or a girlfriend, or wife, or husband, or live-in psychopath . . . ”
“Maybe Incunabula de la Luz wrote it,” I say. Because, you know . . . live-in psychopath.
“What?”
I do the could- be who- knows shrug. “She’s been going over my things, I’m pretty sure. My books. My desk. Whatever she finds lying around. Raw material for her art.” Air- quotes on “art.” At which Nina gets all wide- eyed and pissed- off looking.
“That Mexican bitch has been reading my stuff?” she says. “I thought you said she split. Took her algebra book with her.”
“She’s still got her key. She’s been going in and out when I’m not there.”
“The fuck, Marty! I don’t want just anybody reading my stuff!”
So yeah, I haven’t told Nina about the Frau Doktor business yet. It would entail telling her about Julia.
“Anyway,” I say, holding up my palms like no- harm no- foul, “Incunabula de la Luz didn’t write that. Not her M.O. Some guy in your group wrote it. Some guy who’s trying to get in your pants.”
“No one’s trying to get in my pants.”
“This guy is. Depend upon it.”
She picks the manuscript up, stuffs it back in her bag.
“How many are there anyway?” I say. “Guys, I mean. In your writing group, I mean. Process of elimination.”
She smutches up her nose, doesn’t answer.
“The residency thing, it’s coming up, right? Like aren’t you all getting together in July, meeting each other, critiquing stuff, going out for beers, et cetera?”
I know this because Nina’s asked me to take Nibby then, a full ten days like I don’t have a life of my own. I want to tell her that when the time comes, when she meets this guy – the stalker – she can set her angry round out- of-bounds body before him and tell him to quit it, chum. She’s good at that, I want to say. That’s her M.O., I want to say. But I don’t. I just sit there with Nibby’s sleeping head in my lap, two cotton swabs back in my freezer, and the world reduplicating itself around me like a conjuror’s sleight- of-hand.

– 13 –

A few days go by. A week. No sign of Incunabula de la Luz. Maybe that’s it. That triptych of sexual personae: the prim English nurse, the virginal schoolgirl, the frigid therapist mit miniskirt. And Marty Lowell left to resume his make- believe life.
There was this thing Beth of the Nina/Beth/Denise triptych used to say that made me grate my teeth. She’d say “True confession, Marty” and then pause for effect, and then she’d confess some banal thing about herself, like she didn’t think she could ever really love anyone. My teeth get sore just thinking about her.
Anyway, true confession: when I’m doing my Puritan Boston tour, I sometimes make things up. Me, Cotton Mather, the Boy Pope, making things up.
Like what? you ask.
Well, first you have to understand that there’s basically nothing left of Puritan Boston. There’s nothing for the tour guide to point to. Cotton Mather’s house is gone. As is the First Church, and the Second Church, and the New Brick. Not to mention the first Baptist, Quaker, Huguenot churches. And the windmill atop Snow Hill. The beacon atop Beacon Hill. The mill pond, the grist mill, the saw mill, the chocolate mill. And all the houses with their gables and overhanging second stories and decorative pendants. And the wharves with their forest of masts. Gone. Vaporized in the mushroom cloud.
So it’s all me, Martin Cabot Lowell, Jr. conjuring the past with words, taking a group of tourists through the narrow streets of the North End and creating for them the world as it was in 1690. I excavate for them the cellar of the Bunch of Grapes Tavern where there are casks of sack from the Canary Islands and madeira from Portugal, show them where the Mathers’ meetinghouse was and tell them the story of Mercy Short being taken over by demons in the midst of a sermon, falling in a fi t and having to be carried senseless across Clark Square to the Mathers’ house. And I tell them about the North and South Battery, the Sea Wall, the Barricado, the Out Wharves like the words are different wines in my mouth. And stories of the smallpox epidemic. Of the Hellfi re Club. Point out the ropewalks, the bowling green, and over there Ben Franklin’s father’s tallow chandlery. You can smell the animal fat being rendered.
So yeah, at first I just embroidered the truth. Small stuff. Like how twelve- year- old Cottonus Matherus, the youngest- ever Harvard student, used to get suspended by the ankles from his dormitory window by the other students who didn’t like the little stuttering so-and- so. Didn’t like his correcting their Greek. Stuff like that, stuff that has some basis in fact. Or I’d fill out the story of how Mather took some wag to court for naming his dog Cotton Mather. Or how he anticipated Freud in seeing that the physical ills of the affl icted – the mysterious cuts and “crutiating fi res” that tormented Mercy Short – were the somatic manifestations of psychological trauma. Were they familiar with Freud’s Dora?
But the one thing I make up out of whole cloth is this dream I tell them Mather recorded in his diary, this dream of how he’s soaring over the city of Boston like an angel, flying through its nighttime streets, its lanes and byways, over the wharves and housetops and steeples. It’s all recognizable as Boston – there’s the gilded unicorn and lion atop the Town House, the ropewalks to the south, the drawbridge across Mill Creek – and yet it’s Boston cleansed of all disorder, as if the wilderness Zion which had lit the minds of his forebears when they first stepped ashore was a reality. I tell them how there’s snow falling in this dream, and gradually as Mather flies, the fecundity of the world – the riot of its sights and sounds and smells – is calmed under a blanketing whiteness. The turmoil and anarchy of the times, I say, and I gesture around me as if there’s still a riot of Anglicans and Arians, Anabaptists and Quakers, Huguenots, Negro sailors from Salt Tortuga, the Hellfire Club, Jews, Antinomians, Deists, Indians, Papists all around us – all, Mather writes, bleached into orthodoxy by this divine snowfall. Red brick, black mast, painted clapboard; sound, sight, intellection – all obliterated under a holocaust of white until there is only the whisper of falling snowfl akes and the beat of Cotton Mather’s wings. No color, no spot, no maculation.
“That is seriously weird,” says Nina when I tell her all this. We’re in Brando’s only it’s much later than usual. We’ve just come from a production of M. Butterfl y. Two free tickets Nina scored somehow. Nibby’s having a sleepover with some playground friend. It’s almost like we’re on a date. “Black folks bleached white,” she says. “Did I understand you correctly?”
“Not me,” I tell her. “Not my dream. Cotton Mather’s.”
“Still, Negroes? Indians?”
“Also Anabaptists, Huguenots, Jews. White folks, in other words.”
“White folks bleached white?” she says.
“White folks bleached into conformity, compliance.” Then, hoisting Nina with her own petard: “You have to read the dream with full metaphors blazing.”
She wrinkles her nose like okay for you, white boy.
“The mill of orthodoxy,” I go on, “grinding away at all of us. The whole world ground into submission. Into singleness. One way. One path. One truth. It’s what the Puritans wanted. Not to mention the Taliban, the Khmer Rouge, MAGA Republicans.”
“It’s your dream,” she persists. “You just said so. This diary entry doesn’t exist. You made it up.”
“I made it up as Cotton Mather. Like you did Tines. Big difference.”
The strange thing is, the cast of M. Butterfly is here with us. They came in about half an hour after we did, took the table right next to us. The whole cast in their street clothes – Gallimard and Song, Comrade Chin and Helga – except there’s this one woman with them, this Asian woman with these big Jackie- O sunglasses who for a heartattack second I thought was Julia. But she looked right at me, and there was no sign of recognition.
“Martin Cabot Lowell,” Nina’s musing, “a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Who knew?”
I take her beer, have a sip, encourage some of my germs to emigrate.
“A centripetal reality,” I pick up. And as if that’s not enough: “Things don’t fall apart. The center holds. Something attractive in that, isn’t there? Coherence, unity, all the parts of reality fitting? Just imagine if it were true!”
And what do I mean by that? I mean imagine if we understood who we were. That the world had an ultimate reality just like Cotton Mather believed it did. Like the Taliban believes it does. We know who we are. We know what the purpose of life is. We know where we’re going. What awaits us in the clouds. You are this part of the cosmos. You can be no other part. No point in trying to reorder reality. No point in kicking against the pricks. No point in trying to make yourself. Just be what you are made.
“And that’s what you want?” Nina asks after I say something like that to her. “That’s the universe you want to live in?”
“No,” I answer.
“No?”
“No, it depresses me.”
Though the truth is, I don’t know whether it’s the cosmic totalitarianism of Mather’s world that depresses me, or the fact that that totalitarianism – God in the clouds weaving a single reality – so clearly is not the warp and weft of the world as we know it.
A good couple of minutes goes by without either of us saying anything. The cast of M. Butterfly is having a high old time.
“You’re the one who goes to church,” I say fi nally, like I mean to hang a “Taliban” sign around her neck.
“Okay,” Nina says.
“Roman Catholic, no less.”
“Okay,” she says, only this time she’s warning me off.
“What kind of foxy African- American woman becomes a Roman Catholic? Papal infallibility? Really?”
She’s got the quit it, chum look like she’s going to lay into me, but Comrade Chin has stood up, is holding her phone out to us.
“Sorry,” she says, putting the actorly charm in gear, smiling at Nina, at me. “Could you?”
So we both put on these civilized, married- couple faces and I take the phone from her, busy myself with composing a photo. The woman in the Jackie- O sunglasses tries to slip off to the side – not a member of the cast – but Gallimard tells her to get her little oriental ass back here. He says it in this totally over- the- top gay guy voice like he can get away with anything. So she does, and as she passes me, she gives me this embarrassed, I- don’t- know- what- I’m- doing- here smile and jesus! I about wet my pants. She’s got the Julia gap between her front teeth. But she still doesn’t seem to recognize me and the life- of-the- party actors are clowning around so I have to busy myself with the photo. When I’m done I turn to her again, but again, there’s nothing.
In their showboaty way they try to get us to join them for one last photo, but Nina’s already standing, shaking her head no, so we tell them we were at the play, how much we enjoyed it – Quelle coïncidence! one of them shouts – then we smile our way past them toward the door.
“Holy macaroni,” I say once we’re out on Hanover Street. Something my mother used to say.
“What?”
What, indeed? But I just shake my head, put my hand at the small of Nina’s back and start her down Hanover. It’s this gentlemanly, Brahmin, Cabot Lowell thing I do on our usual Friday nights after Brando’s, walk Nina down to where Hanover opens onto the Greenway. From there she can cross over to Haymarket and the Green Line. But tonight when we get to the end of Hanover instead of saying goodnight and her heading across and me turning back, we just stand there for a minute. It’s different tonight. We’ve gone out and done something like we used to do. Gone to a play. Man and woman.
True confession: I take Nina Grace Smith by the hand and ask her if she wants to come home with me. As the reader already knows we have not done this in a while. Fallen into bed for all the wrong reasons, I mean. But I ask her anyway. She looks out across the Greenway toward Quincy Market and then goes up on her toes, kisses me, not on the cheek or the temple, but on the lips.
“I don’t think so,” she says. She frees her hand and pats me – sweetly? consolingly? – on the chest. And then she’s off, heading across the Greenway, away from me, home to her daughter, home to her suicide notes.
Down Hanover Street the cast of M. Butterfly is coming toward me, laughing, grab- assing around. I step off the curb, cross to the other side so I don’t have to meet them. In their midst is the Vietnamese woman.
And I don’t know why it didn’t come to me before, but it does now. That’s her, isn’t it? Julia’s twin. Martha, the writer. Never mind the quelle coïncidence, it’s her. The gap in her front teeth, sunglasses hiding her blue eyes. Has to be. And that manuscript up in Julia’s room – my room – the novel or whatever it was, the one with snow falling in Saigon, the snow of New England falling on the streets and rooftops of Saigon, metaphors blazing: that’s hers. Has to be.
I turn and watch her go, watch her until she and the actors reach the end of Hanover where Nina and I had just been. My sister, I think.
And why that should be the thing that does me in I don’t know, but I start walking again, talking to myself this time, telling myself to face it about Nina. Get real, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter how there- for- her you are, how non- betrayal you are, how non- Martin Lowell Sr. you are. It doesn’t matter whether Nibby is your daughter or not. Whether you send off those swabs or not. It doesn’t matter that you’d marry her. That you’d work full time while she stayed home and wrote, that you’d sit quietly and hold her pencils like what’sher- name in David Copperfield if that’s what she needed. If that’s what she needed while she wrote about snow falling on the slave quarters outside Vicksburg or whatever. None of it matters. And the reason none of it matters is because the woman doesn’t love you. It’s as simple as that. She’d rather pick up some guy in some bar – Mr. Hookup – than be with you that way. It’s not depression, it’s not existential meaninglessness, it’s not Bulfinch Seven, it’s not race, it’s not American estrangement, it’s not bad timing. She doesn’t love you.
“She doesn’t love you,” I say out loud, loud enough so this couple coming the other way looks up like I’m the North End nut case they’ve been warned about.
I wend my way homeward. Past Paul Revere on his bronze horse, past Ben Franklin’s print shop, past the Old North. Through the wrought iron fence of the Burying Ground I can see the Midnight Ghost Tour with its single flickering lantern in among the gravestones. Seven days a week. Twenty dollars per person. The gate to the cemetery is ajar, lock hanging on its chain, so I turn in, head for the Mather crypt. It’s where I used to come when I had to think something through, wrestle some problem in my dissertation, some failure with Nina/Beth/Denise. But when I get there, there’s no problem to wrestle. It’s all solved, isn’t it? So I just look out over the harbor, over the ghosts of sailing ships, the wharves, the lading, the Negro sailors from Salt Tortuga, look out to Logan where the airplanes with their blinking lights are landing, taking off. I look up into the yellow sky where there’s no sign of snow. It’s July. There’s nothing more to say, but I say it anyway, to the darkness, to the graveyard.
“If she loved you, she’d be with you. Here, right now.”
There’s the sound of a siren somewhere off, distant. And the deeper sound of the city humming its midnight hum.
“That’s what people do who love one another.”
In the crypt ten feet away is what’s left of the body of Cotton Mather. Also his three wives, Abigail/Elizabeth/Lydia. Also eleven of his fifteen children. Including Nibby.
When I get to my apartment building there’s a light on in my front window up on the third floor. Which is odd because I always shut the lights off. But I’m feeling bummed, and tired, and a little drunk, so I don’t make the leap that the astute reader is already making.
      Inside I don’t see her at first. And then I do. She’s lying on the floor, on some sort of bamboo mat. Asleep, or faux- asleep, I’m not sure. And she’s dressed – it takes me a moment to realize – in an ao dai.
At first I just stand there, looking down at her. In the soft light from the table lamp and the nighttime stillness, she looks like a child. Lucille Villarreal, I mean. Vulnerable, the way people look when they’re asleep. But also Quang, Quang in a one- bedroom flat in Saigon fifty years ago, a child asleep in the midst of war.
Or not asleep. Who knows? By how many hours have I missed my entrance? How long has she been waiting for me to come on stage?
I take my shoes off and step quietly past her, go down the hall toward my bedroom. Whatever the performance piece is – if there’s going to be a performance piece – it’ll have to wait until morning. I turn into my bedroom and have the small shock of seeing that my bed has been made, and laid out on the bedspread are my pajamas. They may even be ironed.
       On the nightstand where I left it is Nina’s latest. Suicide Note, Installment #6. A mill girl named Maggie taken from her New Hampshire home to Lowell in a slave wagon. Incunabula de la Luz has no doubt read it. Slavery, abuse, the mirage of deliverance: these are the voices in the wind.
I’m unbuttoning my shirt when I hear something stir behind me.
“You have come home, Martin.”
She has let herself be framed by the bedroom doorway, back- lit so there is only her form, beautiful in the ao dai. Her hair is pulled back behind her neck the way a Vietnamese woman would do. She is small and slight and lovely.
“I was so worried. There have been explosions.”
She’s trying for the accent. It’s not bad. Not as good as Julia’s, but not bad. When I still don’t speak she takes a step into the room, clasps her hands in front of her waist. It’s Iconic Women V: The Submissive Oriental.
“Martin, I have made you something. A treat.”
Or perhaps not. Perhaps we’ve moved beyond the iconic to the actual, to the historically real if you will. It’s Quang Dinh the orphan, the housekeeper, the concubine. The girl in the photo, circa 1973.
“Quang,” I say.
And she smiles a Madama Butterfly smile, whether in pleasure at the sound of her name or in relief that I’m not going to pull the plug, I don’t know. And it’s only now that I think to look for a camera. But there’s none. No lights. No microphone boom.
“Come,” she says, her voice soft and liquid. She steps forward, takes my hand. “I make you treat.”
And she leads me out of my bedroom, down the little hall past her bamboo mat to the living room. It’s like we’re back to the English Nurse in Copley Square. No camera. No recording. A performance piece for just the two of us. Each the other’s audience.
I sit at the living room table while she goes into the kitchen. On the table there’s a pack of Lucky Strikes and – of course – an English grammar. It’s got the right look I have to say, the book does, copyright 1952: New York, London, Paris. Just what my father would’ve found in the used book stalls around the Saigon post offi ce in 1971. There’s even a piece of paper tucked inside, and written in pencil: I am, you are, he is. I have new respect for Incunabula de la Luz (not her real name).
“You remember?” she says when she comes out of the kitchen with a plate. She puts the plate on the table in front of me. “You – how do you say? – you recognize?”
They’re bánh bía. And for a minute I sort of stumble inside because she can’t possibly know what went on between Julia and me. But I mentioned them, didn’t I? – the mooncakes, the little pastries, right? – when I was being my father. She has the files of our therapy sessions, has only to rewind and listen to them like a property mistress. Google the name, download a recipe. But I notice there’s no design stamp. That was Julia, not the therapy session. Its absence is like an inadvertent slip, a prop that’s supposed to be there but isn’t.
“You try,” she says, “yes?” And she lifts one of the little pastries to my lips.
And that’s iconic too: a woman feeding a delicacy to a man – the surrogate intimacy. She rises again and goes to the kitchen, returns with a bottle of wine and a single glass, pours for me. The wine is French, as it would have been in Saigon, circa 1970.
“And you?” I say after I take a sip.
She shakes her head no, gathers about herself the gratifi ed look of the devoted servant. On the wine bottle’s label the 2016 vintage has been inked over to 1966. Somewhat crudely. Like the red cross made out of construction paper, an admission of illusion. A dare.
I’m in this kind of self- hating mood. The hangover of my epiphany. So I reach for the grammar, rifle through some pages looking for where we left off fifty years ago, settle on Chapter 8: The Future Tense.
And for the next ten minutes or so we are teacher and pupil, working on the difference between “will” and “going to.” I underline with my fingernail the explanations, the examples given. “Will” is used for statements of fact, I tell her, “going to” for future intentions, future possibility. And that in some cases, both “will” and “going to” may be used interchangeably, fact and possibility. We go through the examples in the text, and then the “For Further Study” at the back of the chapter. And when we’re done with all that, I start to quiz her. Which of these statements is correct, I ask: “You will live here with me,” or “You are going to live here with me?” or “You are going to live here with me?”
She turns her face up to me with her dark eyes, the broad, swift, recursive intelligence behind them. Her hair is black, but it’s Mexican black, not Vietnamese black. My shirt is still half- unbuttoned.
“I am going to live here with you,” she says.
“And which of these is correct?” I ask, and then like I’m cutting myself: “We will be happy here,” or “We are going to be happy here?”
“We will be happy here.”
And I have to say, just hearing her say that after my colloquy with the graveyard, I feel like bursting into tears. I have to camouflage the emotion, the stupidity of the emotion, by some stage business, lift the wineglass to my lips and then to hers, tipping it so she can sip.
“I will love you,” I say.
“I will love you,” she repeats.
In the kitchen the refrigerator compressor kicks in.
“I will marry you.”
“I will marry you.”
She’s watching me. She knows something’s up. But it’s all theater to her. Art, for god’s sakes. Across the room the windows are backed by the night. Somewhere out there Cotton Mather is flying in his snowstorm. Somewhere out there is Nina Smith who will never be my wife. And the Smithereen who will never be my daughter. And my father unreachable in the maze of his intellect. And like a mist over everything, the rumor of a real Quang.
“You are sad, Martin,” I hear beside me.
I turn back to her. She’s looking at me with her soft dark eyes, the slight lift of womanly solicitude in her expression, or the simulacrum of womanly solicitude. All the same I have to say it’s lovely to hear someone say my name, even if that someone is a construction of mist, reflection, recursion. It makes me wonder who I am to her. When Lucy Villarreal is home in Wellesley, making herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, how does she think of me? Did she ever intend to do something with me? With the reality of me? I mean.
“Say my name again,” I say.
But she just looks at me with her soft eyes, her pliant face, and then she tilts her head so the rope of her hair falls along her shoulder and kisses me.
It’s just a brief brush of her lips against mine, more the ghost of a kiss. And then she pulls back, though she keeps her face turned in to me, her hair still hanging between us. The language lesson over, are we now on to seduction by installments? Or is something else going on? After a moment she leans in and kisses me again, longer this time, but still so lightly it’s like a dream kiss.
“Say my name again,” she whispers like we’re back to rote repetition.
But instead I put my fingertips under her chin, lift her small face to mine and kiss her in return. Again, lightly – on the lips, along her neck – as though the lightness itself gives the lie to what Herr Lowell confessed to his therapist. The illusion here is that we are lovers trembling on the edge of our love. Colonel Lowell and Quang Dinh. Martin Lowell and Incunabula de la Luz. Marty and Lucy.
She lifts her hair, takes it out of its tortoiseshell comb, and lets it fall over us like it will hide us from the world, from the soldiers outside, from the sandbags, from the graveyard a street over. It’s all so different from the hot theater of Lucita: so restrained, so delicate, so like Quang in that single photo.
“Say my name,” she whispers again, her breath a hot explosion in my ear.
And of course, that’s it, isn’t it? Is she Quang, or is she Lucy? And if I say the one, will the other turn to vapor?   
So instead – how far does she mean to go? – I lift my hand to her breasts, feel her under the fabric of the ao dai. Unlike Lucita, she does not push me away.
And just as it must have been fi fty years ago in Saigon, I stand and slip my arms under her and sweep her small body upward. Something like a cry escapes her lips, but she does not protest, locks her hands around my neck instead and gazes into my face with the alarm of a fifteen- year- old girl. I carry her down the hall and into my bedroom, lay her on the bed. She has the stiff, awkward, opened look she ought to have, a trembling look. I take my shirt off, my pants, and lie down beside her, turn her into me and kiss her.
“Martin!” she whispers.
Beside us, on the nightstand is the mill girl Maggie, and under her Tines Bowditch on the plantation outside Vicksburg, and under her the Parroquia in Santa Fe, and under her the Pulau Bidong refugee camp. . . .
But for the moment, here in my bedroom with the world outside like a nightmare in recession, I am kissing Quang/Incunabula de la Luz/Lucille Villarreal, and she is kissing me back. I have her ao dai undone and there is bare flesh to be touched. English flesh, Mexican flesh, German flesh, Vietnamese flesh. Lovers lost in the immemorial act. Man and woman, the fit of body to body.
But if I could choose, if I could take by the hand one of the women from out of Professor Villarreal’s iconostasis, it would not be Quang or Incunabula de la Luz or any of her potions, but Nina Grace Smith, Nina with her black hair and her lovely plum- colored body spread across my bed like the fabric of the real. Nina with her African lips parted, her back arched, her dark eyes filled with the poison of desire, and across her face a look of love for Marty Lowell.
And from the other bedroom there would be the sound of Nibby’s breathing, and against the windowpane the whisper of snow beginning to fall. Snow falling in the street and across the way on Copp’s Hill, and northward on the canals of Lowell and on the brick dormitories where the mill girls sleep. Snow sifting from the night sky onto the slave cabins down along the branch outside Vicksburg, and dusting the bell tower of the Parroquia in Santa Fe. Snow falling on the streets and rooftops of Saigon, catching in drifts against the sandbags outside the Caravelle, falling on the schoolchildren as they hurry homeward through the deepening dusk, and on Quang, arms full of the evening groceries, stopping to gaze skyward at the whorl of impossible white.
Over all the wonders of the visible world, the healing whisper of snow.

---

Gregory Blake Smith is the author of four novels: The Devil in the Dooryard (William Morrow, 1986), The Divine Comedy of John Venner (Simon & Schuster, 1992), The Madonna of Las Vegas (Three Rivers Press, 2005), and The Maze at Windermere (Viking, 2018). His short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, The New Generation, and The Pushcart Prize.