He searches frantically for the stationmaster, but then he sees, gliding past above, more slowly than if she were walking, Violet’s face in the window.
He shouts her name, and she looks down, but just a bit, and he isn’t sure she’s seen him. He refuses to run along the platform like a fool in a French novel. He can keep pace by walking, for at least a moment, and he thinks what can be done. He could take Ross’s horse, but it’s more than thirty miles to the city. He might track down an automobile. If nothing else, he can wire the Palmer House and make sure she arrives, make sure she’s seen to.
The train picks up a bit of speed, and he’ll trot, but just barely, not for much longer. Above him, she has put her white knuckles to the window and is knocking, slowly, listlessly. Looking straight at him now, with no expression at all. A cruel and pointless knocking: not to get out, and not to call him in. As if to demonstrate, simply, that the glass is thick.
He can almost hear the knocks, above the hiss of steam and the sound of the pistons. But he can’t, he knows he can’t. It’s in his head. The train only gets louder, and it only moves forward.
He will see her tomorrow, in the city, but this feels for some reason like the last glimpse of her he’ll ever get: staring through him, pale and inscrutable behind the glass.
Oh Violet, Violet, Violet! He wants to shout it, but he won’t.
Let me in.
Let me in.
Let me in.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a novel about, among other things, how much artists need a community. These are a few of the communities that have sheltered me during the writing of this book:
The wonderful people of Viking and Penguin: Kathryn Court, Lindsey Schwoeri, Scott Cohen, Veronica Windholz, Nina Hnatov, Nancy Resnick, and Kristen Haff; as well as Josh Cochran, who gave Laurelfield the red sky it needed.
The stupendous Nicole Aragi (the Queen of Pentacles) and Duvall Osteen.
A phalanx of early editors: the writers M. Molly Backes, Alex Christensen, John Copenhaver, Tim Horvath, Brian Prisco, and Emily Gray Tedrowe; and the readers (the world needs more readers like them) Shelley Gentle, Margaret Kelley, and Pamela Minkler.
The friends who let me bother them about technical details (and aren’t responsible for my errors): the writer David M. Harris on series ghostwriting; the writer Margaret Zamos-Monteith and the photographer Matthew Monteith on photographic history and 1920s darkrooms; Edward McEneely on WWII history (so much work for so few words!); and my social media hive-mind for everything from the drying time of oil paint to oak stump decomposition to pry bars.
The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where the first chapters were encouraged, and where Christine Schutt’s kind read convinced me to keep working on this book.
The colleges on Chicago’s North Shore that have been kind enough, in the time since I originally drafted the first part of this novel, to welcome me to campus or let me teach. The college in this book is explicitly not based on any of those institutions.
The Ragdale Foundation and The Corporation of Yaddo, and everyone I met at both, whose work — from sonnets to paintings to smashed teacups — has inspired my last few years. What sort of world would this be, without refuges?
My family — Jon, Lydia, Heidi, Mom — who have been, variously, great editors and/or less requiring of diaper changes than they were three years ago.
Also, all five of the people I’ve forgotten.
This book started as a short story about male anorexia. I have no idea what the hell happened.