asked.
“Mutilé would be more like it,” Seana said. “And as for you, Max—didn’t I hear you say it was past your bedtime?”
Seana stood, steadied herself by leaning on the table, said that it was true that she and I had things to talk about, and that, to prepare herself, she would now proceed to brew a cup of coal-black coffee.
She swayed a bit as she made her way to the kitchen, stopping at my chair, where she touched my shoulder briefly, even as my father said again what a joy it was to have me home. He wished us both pleasant dreams, and headed upstairs.
The list Seana gave me—titles with brief one-sentence explanatory tags attached to them, like log-lines you see in television listings for movies—was in her handwriting, which was exquisitely graceful, a skill of small value, she asserted, and one shared by most girls who’d survived a childhood of Catholic schools. My father’s full list—titles with and without the tags—was extensive, she said. Amazing, actually—page after page of titles and snippets in search of authors and stories—so that what she’d done was to choose a baker’s dozen that on a first reading seemed the most obviously promising, and, more to the point, ones that she liked to imagine Max had had in mind for her—for novels he imagined she might imagine into being were she to come across them one day.
What she wanted from me was not my opinion—how could one have an opinion of an unwritten novel that might be based on a title and a squiggle of words?—but my immediate and, more important, my unreflective reactions.
Because what made me an ideal collaborator, she added pointedly, was that she believed me capable of a truly thoughtless response.
“Thanks,” I said.
She stared past me with glazed eyes, then blinked. “Okay,” she said, as if she were waking up. “You’re right. Okay then. I’ve thought about this and here’s what I’ve come to—that I’ve never collaborated with anyone before, so I’m doubtless wary of doing so, and covering my wariness—my sadness? my fear?—with aggression. A familiar pattern because—and I’m on a slight roll now, Charlie, so don’t interrupt, please—unlike Mister James, a writer more generously sociable than most, who wrote that the port from which he set out was the essential loneliness of life—hardly an unusual journey for an Irishman—I’ve always believed my compass was set in an opposite direction: that the port to which I’ve been heading was the essential loneliness of my life. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” she repeated, and she pushed several pieces of paper across the table. “So here’s the list—what I wanted to ask you about. And now that I’ve given it to you, do you know what that makes me?”
“List-less?”
“It is apparent that you are more your father’s son than either of you understand.”
“Maybe. But consider this too—that because you made your deal with him, he’s become listless too.”
She tapped on the list with the eraser end of a pencil. “To the task at hand, young man,” she said. “Read them and then tell me, please: Which ones appeal most? Which ones seem of no interest? Which ones inspire your curiosity, and—question numéro uno—which one do you think I should use as the basis for my next novel—or, to make it easier on you, why don’t you choose three, say—but in ranked order of preference.”
I picked up the pages.
“Is that too much to ask?” she said. “Too much responsibility for an innocent young guy like you?”
“Innocent and thoughtless,” I said, correcting her.
“Oh Charlie,” she said. “You shouldn’t take my words as seriously as I sometimes do. I was just trying to get a rise out of you. My apologies—okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
This is the list she gave me:
Pagello’s Surgery. Memoirs of an aging Italian country doctor who had once been George Sand’s lover.
A Missing Year. A veteran of the Korean War, suffering intermittently from suicidal impulses, returns home to Kansas in order to marry a fellow soldier’s widowed wife even while he struggles to come to terms with the death of that soldier, an act of murder he may or may not have imagined.
Hector on 9/11. Story of a Puerto Rican teenager who, on the day the World Trade Center towers come down, has an exceptionally successful 24 hours of romance with his social studies teacher and several frightened teenage girls, all of whom are in extreme need of tenderness and consolation.
Tag Sale. A retired 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