professor at a New England college organizes a tag sale in which he attempts to sell material from his unpublished and/or abandoned novels, and the ways in which this act affects the destinies of people dear to him.
Sky Captain. An Irish priest, chaplain to the crew of a merchant marine training ship, dies in a Marseilles brothel and is transported back across the Atlantic in the ship’s freezer among sides of beef, cartons of hamburgers, and crates of dead chickens.
Hearts and Minds. A fifty-five-year-old chemist, in line for a Nobel prize and in need of a heart transplant, receives the heart of a 19-year-old black woman who has died in an automobile crash; following the transplant, he abandons his scientific research in favor of the life of a bon vivant.
Her Private Train. An historical novel based on Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 wolf hunt—the tale told primarily from the p.o.v. of his daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth—for which hunt TR set out for the territory of Oklahoma in a private train of 22 cars, with 70 fox hounds, 67 greyhounds, 60 saddle and packhorses, 44 hunters, beaters, wranglers, journalists, and one woman.
Charlie’s Story. A charming young man in his mid-thirties takes up residence in an international city in the Far East, and becomes involved with a less than charming man whose fate has (wonderful) trans formative effects on our hero.
The James Brothers. In heaven, Henry and William join with Frank and Jesse to steal the pearly gates.
Max Baer and the Star of David. The tale of Max Baer’s relationship with a black couple who, before and after he becomes heavyweight champion—a Star of David first adorning his trunks when he defeats Hitler’s boxer, Max Schmeling, in Yankee Stadium—serve him faithfully as Man Friday and housekeeper, and in which tale we discover that the couple are not husband and wife but brother and sister, and that their child is Max Baer’s son.
Make-A-Wish. A gifted young violinist, knowing she has but a year to live, shows up at her mentor’s door and declares that, like those children who get to meet their favorite athlete or rock star before they die, she has chosen to live with him for the duration.
Jules and Jim Go to White’s Castle. In 1947, two young Brooklyn Dodger fans make a pilgrimage to Maine to visit their favorite writer, E. B. White, in order to persuade White to write a book in which he has the boys befriend Jackie Robinson, thereby enabling Robinson to survive a signal moment in his first year in the Major Leagues.
We Gather Together. A Thanksgiving reunion wherein the children and grandchildren of a warring Irish family bring the family back together on the occasion of the silver anniversary of their parents’ divorce.
The story I kept thinking about on our way across Massachusetts and up toward Tenants Harbor was Make-A-Wish , even though—because?—I had not chosen it as one of the three I thought would make the best novel for Seana to work on. The three I chose were Charlie’s Story, Tag Sale, and A Missing Year, mainly because they contained elements I could relate to from Max’s life or my own.
Which, Seana had declared while we sat at the kitchen table my first night home, had nothing to do with whether or not any of them would make a good novel. Because something had happened to you, or might happen to you, had zilch to do with what made fiction work. In fiction—this is what she said she’d learned from my father—imagination and empathy: being able to conjure up lives and times unlike your own—were everything.
“Does that mean that what I’ve been believing all these years—that Triangle was based on your relationship with your mother and father—had no truth to it?”
“Don’t try to get funny with me, young man,” she said. “My life’s my life, and my stories are my stories.”
She fixed us tumblers of Drambuie over ice, then came around the table and sat next to me, an arm across my shoulder as if we were old schoolyard buddies, and said that she’d been thinking about Nick’s death, and had decided it was a bad idea for me to go up to Maine by myself, and that she was going to go with me.
“Even if I ask you to?” I said.
“Even if you ask me to,” she said, and then, before I could try to kiss her—and oh boy did I want to!—she drained her drink, chucked me on the arm, and left me in the kitchen. I waved good-bye to her after she was gone, but instead of thinking of her sweet mouth, or trying to recall what it felt like the time we did kiss, or imagining what it would be like if I went into her room later, lay down beside her, and began kissing her—I found myself picturing the two of us arriving at Trish’s house, with Trish embracing me, and the two of us kissing.
What I’d also begun wondering about, from the moment I read the Make-A-Wish synopsis, was whether the story about the violinist was really about Seana, and if, like the woman in the story, Seana had come to our house in Northampton because, knowing she was dying, she wanted to be near her mentor during the time she had left. The idea for the novel had been my father’s, but I had to wonder if Seana had either confided her situation in him at some point, or if he somehow guessed that the only reason she would take up nesting rights in our house was because it was the one place where she felt safe—at home—and because she wanted to be close to him on her way out. I stood, felt my knees wobble, and put a hand on the back of a chair to steady myself. The room tilted to one side, and then to the other, as if it were a ship going through high, rolling waves, and I told myself that I’d done much too much wondering for one evening, and that it was time to go to sleep so that I might, if I got lucky, become lost in a wild and lovely storm-tossed sea of dreams.
After we’d made our way across the small cuff of New Hampshire that connected Massachusetts to Maine, and stopped for lunch in a shoreline diner outside Kennebunkport, I remembered what I’d been thinking the night before, and asked Seana if Make-A-Wish had anything to do with her.
“It was your father’s idea, not mine,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “But you said you thought he might have imagined some of the stories—at least the ones you showed me—in part because it was his way of giving you notions for novels that you imagined he might have imagined would be novels you might imagine.”
“Don’t get meta-fictional on me,” she said.
“Meta-who?”
“Actually, if you need reassurance, let it be known that Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan subjects herself to regular check-ups—cervix, breasts, colon, heart, lungs—the works—and that the best medical teams have failed to discover anything to worry about. Which means I have to keep writing.”
“But I thought you love to write. You told me that nothing gives you more pleasure than writing.”
“I love to write,” she said, pointing a fork at me. “But you’re missing the point, Charlie.” She tapped the flat side of the fork against the side of her head. “Use your noodle, fella. Whose story is it?”
“Oh,” I said. And then again: “Oh.”
“Oh,” she said.
“But he seems fine.”
“So do we all, some days.”
“But,” I began, and leaned forward. “I mean, do you really think that’s what it’s about?”
“No,” she said.
“But
