Emulation, Repetition, and Identity Theme Analysis

She wasn’t married, she was married off, said Reenie, rolling out the gingersnaps. The family arranged it. That’s what was done in such families, and who’s to say it was any worse or better than choosing for yourself? In any case, Adelia Montfort did her duty, and lucky to have the chance, as she was getting long in the tooth—she must have been twenty-three, which was counted as over the hill in those days.

When I was the age for it—thirteen, fourteen—I used to romanticize Adelia. I would gaze out of my window at night, over the lawns and the moon-silvered beds of ornamentals, and see her trailing wistfully through the grounds in a white lace tea gown. I gave her a languorous, world-weary, faintly mocking smile. Soon I added a lover. She would meet this lover outside the conservatory, which by that time was neglected—my father had no interested in steam-heated orange trees—but I restored it in my mind, and it supplied it with hothouse flowers […]

In reality the chances of Adelia having had a lover were nil. The town was too small, its morals too provincial, she had too far to fall. She wasn’t a fool. Also she had no money of her own.

And so Laura and I were brought up by her. We grew up inside her house; that is to say, inside her conception of herself. And inside her conception of who we ought to be, but weren’t. As she was dead by then, we couldn’t argue.

Although I was beginning to like him better, I’m ashamed to admit that I was more than a little skeptical about this story. There was too much melodrama in it—too much luck, both bad and good. I was still too young to be a believer in coincidence. And if he’d been trying to make an impression on Laura—was he trying?—he couldn’t have chosen a better way.

Not only were they outside agitators, they were foreign outside agitators, which was somehow more frightening. Small dark men with moustaches, who’d signed their names in blood and sworn to be loyal unto death, and who would start riots and stop at nothing, and set bombs and creep in at night and slit our throats while we slept (according to Reenie). These were their methods, these ruthless Bolsheviks and union organizers, who were all the same at heart (according to Elwood Murray). They wanted Free Love, and the destruction of the family, and the deaths by firing squad of anyone who had money—any money at all—or a watch, or a wedding ring. This was what had been done in Russia. So it was said.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging as a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible, of course.

She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.

Laura herself didn’t know it, of course. She had no thought of playing the romantic heroine. She became that only later, in the frame of her own outcome and thus in the minds of her admirers. In the course of daily life she was frequently irritating, like anyone. Or dull. Or joyful, she could be that as well: given the right conditions, the secret of which was known only to her, she could drift off into a kind of rapture.

I was relieved: all might yet be well. Laura was still in town. She would talk to me later.

She has, too, though she tends to repeat herself, as the dead have a habit of doing. They say all the things they said to you in life; but they rarely say anything new.

What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial of some kind. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

Lest we forget. Remember me. To you from failing hands we throw. Cries of the thirsty ghosts.

Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.

As for the book, Laura didn’t write a word of it. But you must have known for some time. I wrote it myself, during my long evenings alone, when I was waiting for Alex to come back, and then afterwards, once I knew he wouldn’t. I didn’t think of what I was doing as writing—just writing down. What I remembered, and also what I imagined, which is also the truth.

It was no great leap from that to naming Laura as the author. You might decide it was cowardice that inspired me, or a failure of nerve—I’ve never been fond of spotlights. Or simple prudence: my own name would have guaranteed the loss of Aimee, whom I lost in any case. But on second thought it was merely doing justice, because I can’t say Laura didn’t write a word. Technically that’s accurate, but in another sense—what Laura would have called the spiritual sense—you could say she was my collaborator. The real author was neither one of us: a fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

The photo has been cut; a third of it has been cut off. In the lower left corner there’s a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass. It’s the hand of the other one, the one who is always in the picture whether seen or not. The hand that will set things down.