The Papers in the Attic

This is a simple, non-erotic story of a son learning about his mother. It is a variant on my novel I Am Alex Locus.

BOREDOM WAS, I THINK, WHAT sent me to the attic when I was alone in the house that afternoon some Augusts ago. Petra, my wife, was on a shopping trip with someone from the city, and the rain that began shortly before noon showed no signs of letting up.

It is an old Dutch colonial painted in a light blue with an out-of-place front porch on which sat mismatched chairs, rockers, and a couch where we waved to the people going to and coming from the beach a quarter mile down the road. The house was larger than it looked from the street and cluttered with things. Somehow, four bedrooms were on its second floor and another two on either side of the steps that led to the attic. The place still had a closed-in feel, and the long-lingering smell of cigarette smoke seemed to have settled on every surface such that on humid days one could imagine a party of drinkers and smokers milling around with their cocktails retelling stories that did not improve on their retelling.

It was the humidity on that on that August Thursday that brought back these memories after The Times was read and its crossword nearly done.

I brought several books with me when we drove out on Saturday, with the best intention of getting through at least some of them. In addition to an autobiography of a politician whose name I do not recall, I selected several novels, the carrying to-and-fro having become an August ritual. After lunch and with me being too lazy to venture out for a run, I tried to get past the third chapter of one of those novels--I cannot say which--and then the sixth chapter of another, also unremembered. Bored, as I say, I went to our room--one of the two off the stairs that led to the attic--to get something or other and as I left, for some reason I noticed the door to the attic. I went up and through. It was very warm and humid and it was some time since I ventured up that way.

The roofline dramatically defined one wall. Along that wall was a row of bankers' boxes. I turned on the light, and saw my father's organizational skills on display, with each box having a number that I was certain corresponded to a notation in a ledger book he kept in the rolltop desk that sat in his den and that he long prized. It had been, he told me more than once, his father's desk and when he was gone it would be mine. "But," he said more than once, "until it is yours it is mine and you are not to disturb it." I was often tempted to disturb it--surely I could restore it so he would be unaware of my trespass--but perhaps fearful of being locked in the yellow room at the top of the house I resisted.

Had I ever paid much mind to those boxes against the wall? I cannot say I did. They were the boxes of my father, an accountant, and I could not imagine what tedium they contained. Just as I was about to turn to look to see if there might be something that was of interest in the attic, my eye caught sight of three boxes stacked some slight distance from his organized ones.

The three were without labels and the dust made it clear that it had been some time since they were disturbed.

I lifted the top box and put it in the middle of the room. Somehow two or three chairs found their ways into the attic, and I sat on one as I bent down to remove this box's lid. This revealed what looked to be a random assortment of papers and pads and binders, not my father's work.

I wrested one of the legal pads out and recognized the neat, Catholic girl's script of my mother. The paper was yellow, and it and the handwriting were faded but that it was my mother's was unquestionable. I stared for a moment. My mother died when I was really just a kid. Fifteen. The victim of a pick-up that ran a red light and t-boned her. She was dead before paramedics arrived, not yet forty.

"The Waves" by Charlotte Reynolds.

The light was not good, but it was enough for me to read this story of a mother watching her children play along the ocean's edge, the toddlers laughing when the lapping of a dying wave caught their ankles and rushing back to challenge the next one until they were exhausted and it was time for lunch and a nap.

It was a sweet story, about the dynamics of a young mother tending to her children while her husband was in the city. I almost felt the grains of sand that found their way into my bathing suit and the salt that got up my nose that time I ventured too close to a cascading wave and fell weightless in the Atlantic for an eternity before recovering. When I finished "The Waves," I flipped the pages back so I was looking again at the first of them, it's margins covered in editing changes with little lines directing words she preferred to the crossed-out ones she'd first used.

I rifled through the box and into the second until Petra entered the attic in a panic.

"Oh, my god. I didn't know where you were. There was no note and I couldn't find you and... how long have you been up here?" Hours. I read countless stories. Long. Short. Happy. Sad. Fantasy. Romance. Even some erotica. These and some I had not gotten to from the first two boxes--the third sat where I first saw it--were strewn about the floor, and she was confused as I looked at her, her bag still over her shoulder.

"What have you been doing up here all this time?" She wasn't suspicious. Just, as I say, confused. As, in some respects, was I. "These are my mom's." Petra never met my mother. She sometimes asked me about her, and I know she sat down with my father, cloistered in a corner at some family gathering, to talk about her. My father was always touchy on the subject. He was not a lost cause though. Far from it. I encouraged him to meet other women, and that he did. He joked to me and to Petra, who also prodded him to settle down, that he still had plenty of wild oats to sow. He was a widower who was barely fifty and in good shape with a house in the Hamptons and a full head of hair. The three of us knew he would have no problem settling down when he decided it was time to settle down.

Mom was a touchy subject because he sometimes fell into a had-I-not-asked-her-to-pick something-up-for-me-at-the-drugstore-she-would-still-be-alive funk but he did like to talk about her, and more with Petra I think than with anyone. I was so enthralled by what I was reading and so excited about seeing what else might be in the trove of my mother's writings that Petra's interruption was almost like me bursting through the waves to get air that morning on the beach when I was a kid. I sucked in all the air I could, but in this case it was from my wife's comforting arms.

* * * *

PETRA HELPED ME GET what was spread on the floor into one or the other box. She carried one and I carried the other two, including the unopened one, to the dining room. There we could get some order in the chaos of the attic. Plus the chairs were more comfortable. And the light was better.

While I divided the contents of each box on the dining table as well as I could, likes with likes, she opened a bottle of Chianti and found a place on the table to put a glass for me. I again lost track of time but realized it was approaching six and though I was on cooking duty Petra said she'd run into town to get something. By the time she returned, I was satisfied with my organization. While she was still away, I called my dad. I asked about the boxes and about my mom's writing.

"It was a hobby," he said. "She'd go to the stationery store in town and buy a box of legal pads and boxes of pens. Especially when we were at the house and it was not beach weather, she sat on the porch and wrote." I told him that I sort of remembered her doing that or sitting on the beach beneath an umbrella keeping an eye on me while she wrote. I never asked or really thought about what she was doing. Adult stuff. She often got excited, he said, about something, something as slight as a turn of phrase in the fragment of a sentence, and would hand him the page and point and, he admitted, they were elegant more often than not, even to his accountant's eye. She would not let him look at a story until it was completed and "she felt it ripe to be read.

That's how she referred to it," he said. "Ripe to be read." From what I could tell, only drafts were in the boxes, so I asked about that.

"I guess I forgot about those boxes. I'd carried them up after she... passed. Put them off to the side of my stuff." He chuckled. "I thought they weren't as important as my stuff, but maybe I was wrong, eh?" "They are wonderful, dad, insofar as I've read the drafts. Though, I confess, since I've never read anything in any of your boxes I can't really compare them." "What can I say? I'm a numbers guy. I thought the stories your mother wrote were nice enough but not my cup of tea." My father was an action/crime/mystery fan who would no more read Jane Austen or Edith Wharton than, well, I don't know what. Ludlum. Le Carré. Stephen King. Even Conan Doyle.

The thing is, that would pretty well describe me at the time. But the drafts of my mother's stories had a visceral connection with me, heightened by my being able to touch the pages themselves.

I asked about her completed works.

"Did you look in the dresser?" he asked.

"In the attic?" "That's the one. Let me know if you find anything." With that, I was off the phone and on my way back upstairs. The dresser was another of those things that somehow found its way to the attic. It was painted a putrid green that must have been in fashion in some distant era, and it sat behind and beneath a potpourri of items destined to end up in an attic. I brushed aside what I needed to get access and wrenched open the top drawer. It was cluttered with things among which were no completed stories.

As I opened the middle drawer, I heard Petra call up to me, and I called down to her and she joined me.

"My dad said there are completed stories here," and together we found them. There were three neat stacks and in each were documents either stapled or clipped, depending on how long they were.

"Holy fuck," Petra said before I could. I opened the third and lowest drawer and there were three more stacks, and I looked at my wife and I daresay she had the same look of astonishment that I did. I loaded what I could into her arms and then put the rest in mine, and we carried them down to the dining room.

"Look," she said, "take a deep breath and inhale the room. Then we'll have dinner. They'll still be here but you need a break." She'd gone to a local Italian place with good takeout and large portions, and we sat on the kitchen table amid the aging cabinets and fading linoleum with our Chianti Classico and our penne arrabbiata and garlic bread and talked about something that I don't recall but had nothing to do with my mother.

* * * *

A FRIEND WITH WHOM I REGULARLY RAN worked at one of the big publishing houses at the time, though not on the editorial side. On a run together a bit after Labor Day, I mentioned my find. I told him I thought the stories my mother wrote might be decent and asked whether he knew someone who could take a look. Give the opinion of someone who knew what they were talking about.

Petra and I had, by then, gone through everything, including drafts. Some of it we went through several times, and I was amazed by seeing the transformation of the cursive script on a yellow page into a typed story, a real story on a piece of paper. The computer on which they were finalized and stored was long since gone so I went to Staples and got the papers scanned onto disks so they were at least safe.

My buddy gave me a call a few days after our run with the name of a young editor at his house who volunteered to take a look. When I spoke to her, she made me promise to give her first crack at formally editing the works if an agent or house picked them up.

"I'm not saying they will and I am saying it is really tough to get an unknown's fiction picked up or even to get it published in a literary magazine let alone The New Yorker and I've not seen anything yet but if it is one of these revelatory discoveries I'm in. Yes?" And "yes" it was, and the next Saturday I took a cab to her place with a box of my selection and carried them up three flights of stairs so she could have her look. With the box placed on her coffee table, I was anxious that she open it and read, read, read. She would tell me how wonderful and inciteful they were.

Sue was her name and she was a bit geeky looking, with dark hair and glasses. She was in her pajamas and barefoot and her toenails were polished in some kind of aqua blue. It seemed she had not gotten much sleep and was up way earlier than she was used to on a Saturday morning.

I apologized for coming by so early, but she brushed it aside with an "I should be up by now anyway." She looked at the boxes. "Thanks, I need some coffee. I'll let you know what I think," and with that I was back on the street and walking across the park to my apartment. Petra was waiting and I told her pretty much what I just said. "What did you expect?" she said with her usual clarity of thought. "It took us a while to have it seep in. And you knew your mother directly and I knew her through your father. Give her time." Some of the stories I had doubts about. They were sketches. Perhaps she intended to build a real story around them. Bits about a dinner among friends in an apartment, house, or restaurant.

Frightening scenes of marital disharmony. I knew it was unfair, of course. Sue was doing me a favor, and I was pissed that she didn't immediately tell me how great my mother's writings were. Writings of which I was oblivious just a month earlier. Just when I was resigned to an extended wait, on Sunday morning Sue called.

"Look. I think we can do something with this. I like most of it. Can you come by this afternoon?" She was fine with Petra joining me, and the two of us sat on Sue's lumpy sofa with the editor across from us. There were three stacks on the coffee table. It was early afternoon, but Sue insisted that we relax and have some vino--"vino rosso" she called it without a hint of pretension--and the wine glasses were safely on side tables after our initial sips and an impromptu toast from our host. A toast to my mother.

"You've probably figured out the three stacks," Sue said, and we nodded.

She placed her hand on the tallest stack.

"These could maybe go somewhere, but they are more the type of things that show up in an anthology of an author who is already a literary sensation. I liked several of them, but they just don't work." Seeing my disappointment, she added, "Relax. If they were all I had I might be able to work with them and maybe someday I will. But we don't need them." She shifted to a shorter though not insignificant stack.

"These are very good. You wanted my opinion, and my opinion is that these are very good." She put the stack on her lap and began lifting the stories, calling out their titles. "Sunset." "The Casualty." "An Inconclusive Affair." (She lowered her voice. "That one I really enjoyed and wondered how true it was," which, frankly, Petra and I had too but I was pretty sure it wasn't.) She continued with the titles, which included "The Waves." Then she returned the stack to the table. Petra and I knew these stories intimately and except for one or two that were included and several that were not they were, she and I agreed, the best of the stories.

Sue placed her hand on the third pile. It was the smallest. "And these, my friends, are the maybes. I'll go through each again and those that I think could work we'll go over." I nodded.

"But for now," and her hand returned to the yeses, "we have to talk about these and how you want to proceed.

"I took the liberty of calling an agent friend with whom I've worked. Just to get a feel. No names yet. No commitment. She promised to read whatever I send to her. A story collection is a hard sell, and I wish there were something longer, even novella length but, I told her, I have what I have. Are you sure there's no novel? Even an almost-complete one?" I said, "I've searched and searched, and I'm afraid this is it." "And do you know if she ever tried to get anything published?" "I assume there'd be some letters if she had, but there are none." "Maybe she didn't think she was ready to write a novel but, as I say, it is what it is. Que sera, sera."

* * * *

IN THE END, NOTWITHSTANDING Sue's efforts and those of that agent, we did not get my mother's stories published. We could have done a private publication, but they deserved better. They deserved to be read and some were, in smaller literary magazines. It was not enough to interest a publishing house. I became a bit of a pest, giving copies to friends and acquaintances. "My mom wrote this. It's really good. Let me know what you think." If I said it once, I said it a thousand times. And that's all right. This was never about fame and fortune and a spot on the Times's best-seller list. I got excited at times at thoughts of those things. In the end, though, what mattered was that these were my mother's stories. Even those on Sue's reject pile, some of which I have become quite fond, were my mother's stories.

I sometimes take out the pads. The original pads. My father has looked at them and the stories in a new light and before he remarried he showed them to Ellen, his new bride and Petra and my new friend, as a means for her to understand the first love of his life but, he assured her, "not the last." Ellen understood, as did my father and my wife. That these documents provide a unique gift.

My dad, now retired, and Ellen now live in that blue house, and Petra and I still visit with Abby and Peter. Quite often, in fact. And it somehow still retains that cigarette smell though smoking has been banned for over a decade. And the attic is still yellow, though an even more faded yellow than it was that afternoon I was bored and went exploring, when it was already pretty faded.

We all have copies of the stories. In time, I put them up in a cloud so they won't be lost, even though I doubt anyone will be interested in reading them. Other than, perhaps, Abby and Peter who someday will like to have the chance to touch their grandmother, the one in whose lap they will never sit. But the originals, those legal pads, are in our house. Not in an attic or the basement.

My mother's venture into the world of letters had the effect of igniting an interest in me. Over the years, when I've taken a classic novel on our week-long vacations to the house, I finish it.

On the porch watching the people pass or sometimes on the beach (though Woolf hardly qualifies as beach reading) watching the waves crash. And I write. I had walnut bookcases installed in my "space" in the house, and they are lined with books and photos and bits of memorabilia. Paperback copies of my own novels that few have read but about which I, and Petra, are proud.

Beneath them is a series of cabinets. In the one closest to my small desk--the rolltop remains at my father's house and I have yet to trespass in it--are the stacks of legal pads on which my mother's Catholic schoolgirl script and editing marks appear precisely where she put them. I am at the point where I need only look at the cabinet's door to sense my mother's presence in the room but I still, on evenings that are hot and humid and those that are cold and windy and several in between, sometimes take them out and run my hand along my mother's words.