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Advanced Reviews
“In her debut novel Union Square, author Adrian Koesters brings to life the hardscrabble residents of a once grand neighborhood. Its denizens take us with them Rashomon-style through a single weekend, Thursday through Palm Sunday. Their often violent lives intersect in richly mysterious ways: a would-be Irish prizefighter ruins his prospects in exchange for the satisfaction of beating up a neighborhood rival. A recluse who can barely get out the door of his house finds himself hopping trains to help rescue the beaten boy. A girl on the cusp of adolescence falls in and out of love hourly, her physical and emotional turmoil carrying her into real danger. The place, the people, and the moods of an era are vividly evoked by Koesters’ gifts for visceral detail, dark humor, and the most forgiving sort of empathy. Scenes from this deeply evocative novel will stay with you like strange and unforgettable images from your dreams.”
— Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia
“Union Square is about neighbors and neighborhoods, about the play of light and shadow, about spiritual connections made and lost. Honest, haunting, refreshingly idiosyncratic. I was captivated by the novel’s balance of nostalgia and gritty realism, and fascinated by the lives of these characters navigating prejudice and fear.”
— Timothy Schaffert, author of The Swan Gondola
“It is rare to find a debut novel written in such beautiful, lush prose and yet packing such a powerful punch that you feel as if the world has been knocked off its axis. Adrian Koesters shines as a brave new fiction talent in Union Square, a story that reverberates with rawness and truth-telling as a family confronts the darkness of its own secrets against the backdrop of the corruptions in their community. Koesters’ breathtaking lyricism shines on every page, lifting the characters and the reader beyond the darkness of their story toward the redemptive hope of connection.”
— Jonis Agee author of The Bones of Paradise
“I loved this book. It is flat-out the best thing I’ve read in several years, and that includes a number of award-winning novels. I hardly know how to describe the experience of reading it. Koesters reminds me of Virginia Woolf in her atmospheric power and ability to convey interiority, of Hemingway in her clarity and punch, and, once-in-a-lovely-while, of Cormac McCarthy in her syntactic drive and her swooping dives into metaphysical brooding. She gets everybody, from cocky-but-yearning teenage boys to psychically shattered, violent young men to snarky, guilty old pedophiles to heartbreakingly innocent young girls torn between desire and God. Really—if you have another novel you’ve started, put it aside and read this one. The other one will wait. This one will pin you to the wall.”
— Kent Meyers, author of Twisted Tree
UNION SQUARE
A Novel
UNION SQUARE
A Novel
Adrian Koesters
Copyright © 2018 by Adrian Koesters
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).
First Edition
Printed in the United States of America
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-62720-192-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-193-3
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62720-194-0
Design & Development by Rachel Kingsley
Marketing by Alessia Hughes
Author Photo by Eugene Selk
Cover photo used with permission from The Baltimore Sun, made possible by the generous support of Trif and Stacey Alatzas.
Published by Apprentice House
Apprentice House
Loyola University Maryland
4501 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210
410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)
www.apprenticehouse.com
for Jay Bates
and
Boyd W. Benson
“Baltimore was as far a place as you could go with those you loved, and it was where they left you.”
– Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter
“I said, ‘Hey, Carmen, come on, let’s go downtown.’
“She said, ‘I got to go, but my friend can stick around.’”
–“The Weight”
Contents
Part Two: Young Mr. Emerson. 15
Union Square, Baltimore, Thursday, April 3rd to Sunday, April 6, 1952
Part One: Carmen.
Thursday Morning: Good-bye, House of Good Shepherd
Carmen Stunchen was not in bed. As she leaned into the glass of the front window, peering out from the third floor over to Union Square, she was thinking of Mr. H. L. Mencken, on his Hollins side of the park, who had sometime opined that, “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking,” and she was trying to see over to his house. It pleased her that he lived there. All she knew about him was that he was famous, she didn’t know why or what for. Really, she thought that it was a shame he was so old and, what they said, so ill. She wanted to believe he looked down into the square at night, and she wanted to know that when she was there, he was looking at her when she strolled, or sat, or much later at night when no lights were on and no police patrolled. She would agree with this observation Mencken made, misunderstanding him or perhaps not altogether.
Otherwise she wasn’t noting much else in particular. She was beat. She could hear her seven-year-old daughter, Lucille, crying in the next room. She supposed Mr. Morris had hit her or something. He had slept, but he woke, and when he woke after staying the night always wanted to get down to things, but Carmen was not interested in his foolishness first thing in the morning, definitely not on her living room couch. She had sent him off to the bathroom to make himself a little more respectable, if possible.
The sun peels over the row houses on the right-hand side of the park, she thinks, and watches the slowness of its light begin to fill up Union Square. Through the day, the clean, weak sunlight will pass over the tarred lengths of the roofs, slide over the straight moldings, and a block away stagger downhill.