do exactly as I pleased. It was absurd to do anything else. Although she wished I were more capable of enjoying something so simple as food.
“Don’t worry that it’s futile, dear,” she said, helping me to seconds. “Most things are.”
We let the dishes fester and retired to a lumpy couch in the same room. Helen fetched a family photo album, one of those old-fashioned, leather-bound books filled with self-adhesive pages that had lost much of their stick. The spine read Milford, the Connecticut town where Helen had grown up. Side by side we waded in. On the first page were pictures of baby Helen crying, smiling, eating, crawling, sleeping, pointing at wooden toys — the gamut of infant actions — held aloft, held in arms, held on laps, thrown high into the air. She’d been an ugly baby: scrawny, bald, and splotchy.
“That’s my father, Thomas,” Helen said of a fair-skinned man looking out of the frame as little Helen tugged on his sleeve. “He was a psychiatrist. And my mother, Edith, who stayed at home.” She was the standard white middle-class housewife, from the updo to the pumps. “My nanny, Valeria” — a Latin lady in a cornflower-blue apron. “She made me hot chocolate with marshmallows every day after school, using milk, whole milk, never water. And my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, Robert” — scowling, wild hair, thin face. “He lived not too far away, in Concord, where my father and Freddy were raised. My father got along with Robert well, he took after him, but he was a difficult man, extremely demanding. Anyway, I guess I’m boring you. You said you wanted to learn more about Freddy, so let’s skip to the Freddy years. My uncle wasn’t around when I was small.”
“He must have been in Europe then,” I said, drawing on my library research.
She nodded, neither surprised nor impressed by my knowledge.
“I met him when I was about fourteen. Well, I’d met him as a newborn but I don’t remember that.” Helen chuckled. “He came to visit, thinking he’d stay just a short while to get his bearings. He’d run out of money. But he never left.”
“I didn’t realize he lived with you.”
“Right up until he died, about four years. Though I was at boarding school for part of that time.”
Langley — I couldn’t bring myself to call him Freddy, not even in my thoughts — did not seem eager to smile for the camera. His longish hair had gone gray. Not a nice gray either, more like wet-squirrel color. Broken capillaries crept across his nose.
“Well?” Helen asked.
“What?”
“Well, don’t we look alike?”
They did not.
“Yes, the similarity is striking.”
Helen beamed, flashing her sharp little teeth.
“Here’s one where you can really see the family resemblance. Our nose and ears are just the same.”
Judging from Langley’s dazed expression, he’d been surprised by the photographer. He sat on his unmade bed, legs extended, back against a pillow, a beer resting precariously on his lap, wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt open at the collar. Slovenly. There was something strange about the proportions of the space around Langley, at least as captured on film.
“The ceiling looks slanted,” I said.
“He slept in the attic. My parents offered him a perfectly nice spare room. But he chose up there. He was a cliché.”
She stated this matter-of-factly, as if it were a perfectly ordinary way to describe a human being. He was a baseball fan. He was a journalist. He was a father of three. He was a cliché.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“How much do you know about my uncle, Anna?” she asked.
“Whatever’s in Freddy Remembered.”
“In that case, you know next to nothing. No one in my family had any interest in working with an official biographer — so nosy! — much less participating in a trivial oral history. The people rustled up for that collection — their impressions were stuck in the 1960s,” she said bitterly. “They thought of him as a gifted college boy. By the time he moved in with my parents, he was washed up. I don’t mean to sound harsh. I loved him. He was nice to me. He doted on me, gave me pocket money. Even as a girl, though, I could tell something was off. He’d stay cooped up in the attic for days at a time. Do you understand? That’s what I mean when I say he was a cliché.”
Helen kept flipping pages. Langley in front of a birthday cake, grinning and bearing it; Langley and Thomas playing cards, grinning and bearing it; Thomas mowing the lawn with Langley looking on from the front steps, grinning and bearing it. Langley’s lackluster attitude prompted me to ask the question that had been nagging at me since the library.
“Why did your uncle stop writing after Omega?”
“He didn’t.”
“But —”
“He didn’t. Well, for a long while he did. He’d just had enough, as far as I could tell. Then he started again. He kept notebooks. I figured you knew. I figured that was part of why you were here.”
There were two notebooks, Helen told me. Langley had started the first in 1978, when he’d been living in the attic for twelve or fifteen months. It contained ideas, outlines, scattered thoughts. He’d started the second notebook not long before he died. It contained the rough draft of a longer project. Both notebooks were now in the possession of the university’s rare-books library, the Elston, about a mile away from where we sat. But they weren’t available for public consumption because Helen claimed they belonged to her and had sued the library to establish her rightful ownership.
“Anyone who wants to study the notebooks needs my permission until the courts sort this out,” she said. “Only a small handful of people have read them — including me, naturally, but that was years ago and I don’t remember much. All I can say definitively about the notebooks is that they’re mine.”
I could hardly believe my luck: Inspired, de-inspired, re-inspired. The fifty dollars I’d given Helen at the supermarket was starting to look like the best investment I’d ever made.
Helen announced that now was as fine a time as any to show me a letter from her uncle that was “very revealing.” She led me through the house to her bedroom, which faced a patch of concrete that an ambitious broker might have called a backyard. It was spartan: a bed, a nightstand with a cheap metal lamp, a dresser and mirror. That was all. No plants or art. No personal touch. I loitered at the door, feeling awkward about entering Helen’s retreat while she knelt beside the dresser and opened the bottom drawer.
Helen knew precisely where to find what she was looking for. Without hesitation she fished out a postcard displaying a sunny Connecticut beach — Hammonasset — with the Connecticut motto, Qui transtulit sustinet. “He who is transplanted still sustains.” On the back, in messy cursive: Dear Helen, Remember what we talked about. Love, Freddy.
I returned the cryptic postcard to my host. She received it carefully with both hands, like a raw egg or a football.
“Let me explain,” said Helen, reading my thoughts. She sat on the bed and I leaned against
