12

I made a right turn at the next corner, went past Alan's house, and saw him walking up the path to his front door beside Eliza Morgan. It was getting a little cooler by now, and she must have taken him for a walk around the block. He was waving one arm in big circles, describing something, and I could hear the boom of his voice without being able to distinguish the words. They never noticed the Pontiac going down the street behind them. I turned right again at the next corner and went back
to Berlin Avenue to go back downtown to the east-west expressway.

Before I saw Glenroy I wanted to fulfill an obligation I had remembered in the midst of the quarrel with John.

At the time I had spoken to Byron Dorian, my motive for suggesting a meeting had been no more than my sense that he needed to talk; now I actively wanted to talk to him. The scale of what April Ransom had been trying to do in The Bridge Project had given me a jolt. She was discovering her subject, watching it unfold, as she rode out farther and farther on her instincts. She was really writing, and that the conditions of her life meant that she had to do this virtually in secret, like a Millhaven Emily Dickinson, made the effort all the more moving. I wanted to honor that effort—to honor the woman sitting at the table with her papers and her fountain pen.

Alan Brookner had been so frustrated by his inability to read April's manuscript that he had tried to flush thirty or forty pages down the toilet, but what was left was enough to justify a trip to Varney Street.