She had come from the Millhaven Foundlings’ Shelter, established in 1918 and everywhere referred to as either ‘the Children’s Home’ or, as its familiars knew it, ‘the Block.’ All in all, Willy had spent something like two and a half years ‘on the Block.’
Tee Tee Rowley, who stood five feet tall and weighed perhaps eighty pounds, responded to challenges by squaring up to them and suggesting her readiness to do anything necessary to instill respect in her challenger. Unlike some of her peers, Tee Tee did not default to crazed violence at the first sign of difficulty, but the willingness to employ craziness and destruction spoke from her posture, her eyes, the set of her mouth.
That of all her acquaintances from the Block the one to pay a phantom call should have been Tee Tee made perfect sense to Willy. It was to Tee Tee that Willy, who had begun to enjoy a small reputation as a storyteller, had told the best story of her young life.
From the first, Willy Bryce half-sensed, halfsuspected, and, she hoped, half-understood that she had not fully explored the dimensions of the inner life awakened by the books she devoured in the Block’s library: that it contained some element, some enigmatic quality that was of immense importance to her. Deep within, this unknown element shone.
Willy’s discovery of what the unknown element contained had led Tee Tee’s shade to appear. Willy had discovered how to save her own life.
This was how it happened: one day, tough, ten-year-old Tee Tee Rowley materialized before eight-year-old Willy Bryce in the second-floor lounge and asked her what the fuck she thought she was doing there anyhow, you fucking piece of shit. Instead of backing away and slinking off, Willy said, Listen to this, Tee Tee. And told her a story that almost instantly drew half a dozen other girls to that side of the lounge.
If she had stopped to think about what she was doing, doing it would have been impossible. But she did not have to think about the odd little tale. It spun itself out of the unknown element and gave her the right words, one after the other. She launched into the first real story of her life.
—When Little Howie Small stood before the ancient wizard and wiped the tears from his eyes, the first thing he noticed was that a sharp-eyed bird was peering out at him from within the wizard’s enormous beard.
And an entire adventure followed, a story involving an eagle and a bear and a furious river and a prince who rescued his princess-to-be with the aid of a walnut discovered by the bird who had been hiding in the wizard’s beard. The whole thing just rolled off Willy’s tongue as if it had all been written out in advance. Whenever she needed some new information or a fresh development, the perfect thing arrived at the proper moment to be inserted into a blank space exactly its size and shape.
—That was a real good story, said an astonished Tee Tee. You got any more like that?
—Tomorrow, Willy said.
Tomorrow came, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, and on each of them, day after day until she walked out of the Block for good, Willy entertained the Tee Tees and Raylettes and Georginas with episodes from the adventurous life of Little Howie Small. As far as she knew, the little person within her who had come into her own, the secret Willy, always told the truth. She was like Scheherazade, except at the time she was not fighting for her life.
That came twenty-nine years later, after her companion on the Block began calling on her in Massachusetts.
—You’re writing again, Willy? asked Dr Bollis. I think that’s excellent news. Is it a story, or is it about yourself ?
—You don’t know anything about fiction, Willy told him.
Dr Bollis smiled at her.—I do know how important it is to you. Will this one be like your others, or are you going to try something new?
Dr Bollis had let her believe that he had read her books. Willy thought he had probably read perhaps half of both of them.
—Something new, she said.
Her doctor gave her a look of careful neutrality.
—It’ll be good for me. It already is.
—Can you tell me what it’s about?
She frowned.
—Who’s the main character?
—A brave little person named Howie, she said, and immediately burst into tears. Willy had never told Dr Bollis that when her daughter, Holly, was first beginning to speak, and then for a long time after, she spoke of herself as ‘Howie.’ In fact, Willy tried never to speak of Holly to Dr Bollis.
Willy could remember writing very little of her third and most successful book. Much of what happened in the Institute had been a blur of smeary voices nattering on and on; the same blurriness took over when she thought about the beginning of her book, except that the incessant voices had been those of her characters. After she seemed to have recovered sufficiently from the shock of her great loss, she returned to New York feeling like an unpeeled egg. She settled herself back in her little apartment, where In the Night Room amplified itself into a kind of fever dream from which she awoke, dripping with sweat, pulse rocketing, only long enough to order Chinese food, do the crossword puzzle, or collapse into sleep. Once, on a slow day for both of them, she played Scrabble with her old, amusing college friend Tom Hartland, who wrote detective books for boys, and crushed him, pulverized him, left him gasping and bleeding on the board. She had met with her dead husband’s lawyers and discovered that she was, by almost anybody’s standards, wealthy; two or three times in that period, she had lunches or dinners with Molly Harper and Tom. (He had once told her that his greatest problem was keeping his boy hero from having sex with the other boys he met in the course of his investigations.) An utterly kind man, Tom came around four or five times to make sure Willy was eating—actually, he used his concern about her diet as his way of making sure she could keep herself together. And she was, largely due to her furious obsession with her book. Willy knew she was using the book as a kind of therapy, also as a way of shutting out the world, but it was as though she had no choice as to how these months were to be spent. In the Night Room had taken her over, demanding to be written. When people praised it to her, Willy felt as though she were being given credit for someone else’s accomplishment.
During one of their lunches, Tom Hartland told her, I wish I could write a book that way sometime.
—No you don’t, she said.
Tom knew nothing about Willy’s background. The facts of her childhood would have horrified him. The facts of her childhood would have horrified most of the people she called her friends. But not all of Willy’s childhood had been harsh and difficult: although the years from birth to the age of six, during which she had been a child living with her parents, had passed entirely from her memory, they had left behind a shimmer of warmth and vanished, never-to-be-replaced pleasure. Before her parents had been killed in an automobile accident, they had loved their daughter, they had cherished her. Willy knew this. As far as she was concerned, this shimmer—the glow of her earliest childhood—explained why, during the worst of her many wretched times, she had escaped descending into despair or madness.
Tim Underhill was like a kind of Scheherazade, telling stories to save his life. Fiction gave him entry into the worst and darkest places of his life, and that entry put the pain and fear and anger right in his own hands, where he could transform them into pleasure. In his youth he had been without direction, reckless, too loud, a real pain in the neck. After he let himself get drafted into Vietnam at the age of twenty-two, he reinvented himself based on the more obnoxious aspects of his character and became louder, profane, open to violence. He made a point of taking as his lovers slight, girlish young Vietnamese boys of eighteen or nineteen, whom he referred to as his ‘flowers,’ daring anyone to call him on it. He used drugs whenever they were available, and the drugs gave him the toxic gift of addiction. In these years, he