Happy New Year--sharing a bit of "A Continuous Present"

In honor of a bright shiny new year, I thought it might be fun to share a chapter from my novel "A Continuous Present" with all of you who actually read this blog. This is one of my favorite scenes, where Liz discovers that the story that Emily left behind in her diary isn't quite what it seems.

I hope you'll  enjoy it (and if you do, I'd love to hear from you!)

Chapter Twenty-Two

 

To my amazement, miraculously, the lid suddenly loosened and slid all the way open, revealing its hidden cargo: A stack of small paper booklets. Dozens and dozens of them. Booklets made of ordinary sheets of white writing paper, folded in half, and hand-stitched along the spine. Booklets in remarkably pristine condition, all covered in a small, neat handwriting that I instantly recognized. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I could hardly breathe.
― Syrie James, The Missing Manuscripts of Jane Austen

Pulling open the trunk, I considered the contents. I lifted the quilt off the top, still carefully folded right where I’d first found it. I would definitely take that home with me, hanging it on the wall somewhere in the house where it could be seen and appreciated, not folded away in the dark and forgotten. Setting it on the chair, I turned back to grab the books that had been stacked up under it.  Pulling them out one by one, I looked them over, wondering if one of them would make the perfect gift for Daisy and Justin—seed for a library of their own someday.

Unpacking all the smaller items under the quilt, I considered the day, just weeks ago, when I’d opened the trunk the very first time—finding Emily’s diary, opening the drawers and unpacking their contents…

Wait a minute!

 I’d never gotten that second drawer open. How could I have forgotten? I’d been so distracted once I'd found the diary, I’d never even tried a second time to open it.

Maybe I could get it open now.

Tugging on the handle, I could see it was still jammed.  A wad of paper in the drawer runner seemed to be holding it closed. Wondering if a knife might be able to reach inside and dislodge it, I ran to the kitchen and grabbed one.

It took a bit of finagling, but I managed to jimmy the drawer open with the knife, just enough to pull the papers that were blocking it out of the way. After that, the drawer pulled open easily—so easily, I decided the wad of paper must have been put there to keep the drawer closed and in its place inside the trunk. Since it was now so loose, I simply removed the drawer so I could look over its contents.

It was filled with a few loose papers covered with what looked like algebra problems, several small booklets that appeared to be sewn together by hand, and one volume that had a label inside the front cover proclaiming that it came from Congar’s in Manchester. Each was filled with writing—in the same hand that had transcribed the volumes of Emily’s diary. My heart began to race. Were these earlier diary volumes, maybe from Emily’s childhood? There was only one way I knew to find out.

A bit warily, I picked the hand-bound up pamphlets, aged and fragile without a protective cover. Several of the pages were difficult to read as the ink had faded or the paper was tattered. Still, I looked them over one at a time, examining them for dates or anything else that would offer a clue as to what they were. Nearly every booklet began with a date, just as the diary volumes had, so I sorted them into chronological order, leaving aside for the moment those few that looked to be a draft of a story, drawings, or a collection of poems. Leafing through them, I noticed that there was something familiar about several of the dates. The earliest began in 1858, just as the diary volumes had. It seemed to me that many of the months and days here were the same as those in some of the books I’d already looked at.

I hurried into the kitchen where I’d carried the diary while I was working on the short stories. Taking the earliest volume from the stack, I opened it to the first page and looked at the date.  March 29, 1858. Returning to the living room—diary in hand—and the mound of booklets on the floor next to the trunk, I picked up the first in the stack.  It began with the same date. What was this? Were these copies of the larger diary volumes—or could they be original writings? Had Emmie had begun her diary in these handmade books, only later copying them into a format that was more likely to last? It made sense.

What an amazing find this was. If these were indeed earlier texts, I was curious to see whether there were differences between these and the later copies. From my own experience as a teenage diarist, I remembered that I had more than once vehemently scribbled out embarrassing lines when I reread some entries months or years later. Once or twice I’d even torn out pages to avoid embarrassing my future self with what I then viewed as childish declarations of undying devotion to someone whose name I barely even recognized. I had occasionally “made a good story better,” recording things as I wished they’d been, not as they actually happened. Even as an adult, I knew that I had not always written the whole truth of a situation, because it was simply too hard to face—even in a book I kept only for myself. A diarist always chooses what she will write.

Could Emily, just like nearly every other person who ever kept a diary, have taken a bit of artistic license with her words, altering her life story in some way—maybe to erase things she might have considered distressing, or to portray herself in a different light? Had she created a picture of herself in her earlier writings that she later wanted to alter in some way?

How would I ever know for sure?

It made the most sense just to begin at the beginning. With the first volume and the booklet that began with the same date open in my lap, I started to read the very first entries to see how they compared.

March 29, 1858 was the first date in both versions.  The paper copy was a bit hard to read in places, but except for what appeared to be a few inconsequential grammatical changes—cleaned up syntax and spelling—they looked pretty much the same. If I was going to recopy my diary fifteen years later, I’d correct my errors, too.

The second entries in both copies held a few more differences, with more detailed descriptions of her day’s activities in the bound volume version than in the booklet. There were also a few small changes in who she spent her time with on her visits. The booklet had her having dinner with “Uncle Horace Garlick”…then calling on Ann Salsbury. The bound version had her calling on “Mrs. Green,” then staying “with Lucy Ann to dinner. At two p.m. started to go to Uncle Marcus’…arriving at four o’clock. Tired.” Small changes, and likely unimportant, but she’d clearly done a little editing to one version or the other.

The two versions continued on this way, with mostly tiny differences between them, until an entry on April 20, 1858. The paper booklet read as follows:

Tuesday: Did not rise very early this morning. Emma Culver came after some flower roots. Harriet went home with her, got some flower seeds, and Hattie Hall. While we were eating dinner it rained. Hattie got up from the table and ran all the way home because she was afraid of the rain. Got as wet as a drowned rat. After tea, Fanny Brower came to go home with her mother. Done a little of everything. It is quite lonely now that Pa and Edna are both gone. At home.

It read like a pretty ordinary day—just a list of things she had done. It was a bit odd to read that Hattie ran all the way home in the rain because she was afraid of it, but some people are funny (or maybe Hattie was only ten years old; that could explain a lot). When I turned to the bound copy of the diary for its version of the day’s events, though, part of it was like reading about another day altogether.

After beginning the entry as she had the other, somewhere in the middle the tale took a sharp turn, becoming another story altogether—one I had come to know pretty well.

Last Christmas & New Years I attended Cotillion parties at Canandaigua with Sylvenus Hamlin. Lizzie wants him pretty badly…

Well, that certainly sounded familiar. Emily had apparently added this little plot point about Venus and Libbie to her diary at some point in time. But the real question was, since both entries had the same date, which was the original? Could she have made one version to share with her sisters or friends, perhaps—and another for only herself? And if that was the case, which version was more likely to be the truth?

I spent the rest of the night reading through the booklets, comparing them with the bound volumes—but too caught up in Emily’s revisions to do much more than scribble notes while I read. Luckily, they only covered about eight months in 1858 or I could have been on this mission for weeks. With a growing list of differences I had discovered stacking up in the journal that Will had sent, I was left with the feeling my treasure hunt had evolved into an examination of the evidence in a mystery novel.

Just as the horizon was beginning to lighten, I opened the last book I’d found in the drawer, a store-bought accounts book from Congar’s. Written across the top of the first page was a single word, References, followed by a note from Emily herself, no doubt written to remind herself or any future reader exactly what her purpose was in this book.

To day is the sixth of May 1873. I have my diary written in small books & commence to copy it in this book. It almost causes a tear to start to when I look back to the commencement of my keeping a history of my life. Aye, 15 years ago. I only regret that I did not commence as early as when I was a merry school-girl of fifteen.

Here, written in Emily’s own hand was the answer to the question I asked when I first discovered the alternate version of her diary: had Emily rewritten her life in some way? Up until this moment, it certainly appeared so, but I couldn’t say for sure. How would I ever know which version had come first, or why the various volumes didn’t match up? Yet here, Emily herself had supplied the answer.

She had rewritten her life.

Oh not in every detail, but in those which for some reason mattered to her, even fifteen years after the fact. But that still left me with one question, perhaps the most important one of all.

Why?

Suddenly the dream I’d had after I wrote the account of Emily’s trip from Michigan to Iowa came roaring back. How angry she’d been with me, accusing me of revising her life to suit my purposes. It made me laugh now, realizing that what she’d accused me of in my dream was exactly what she’d done herself.

It made me wish I could talk to her, to ask her why she’d done it. To hear her answers face to face. With only her diary in front of me, I could imagine that she’d wanted to leave a different image of her life for her children, for posterity. Her life had not turned out the way she’d hoped, that much was clear. Her long hoped-for loving marriage turned eventually to a nightmare. The things she was raised to believe were a woman’s greatest honor became ashes in her mouth, souring her on everything to do with her husband. Yet those values still fought for preeminence in her identity.

But all this was simply conjecture. I could only guess at why she felt the need to polish her image painted within the pages of her diary—I would never really know.

Abruptly, in the midst of all my supposition, I had an idea. A conversation. Why couldn’t I have one—with Emily? In my dream, she’d had the chance to speak her piece, begging me to listen to her story without judgment or embellishment. Maybe it was time for us to talk to each other.

But how?

In the space of a single heartbeat, it all became crystal clear. Snatching up a pen and the diary that Will sent me, I flipped to the next blank page and smiled to myself. I knew exactly how to begin.

It was time for Emily and me to have a little chat.

***

Dear longsuffering reader, I can only guess what you must be thinking right now: “This is becoming ridiculous.” Emily is long since dead and buried—and you’re right…she is. However, I am a fiction writer--it’s my job to imagine and invent improbable actions. To create events that didn’t happen—or even those that cannot happen—and help you believe in them, even if just for a little while. 

I think it’s time for me to do just that.

But I need to you to buy it, to hang in there with me while I do my best to uncover Emily’s truth. Can you do that? Can you listen, without judgment while we get to the truth—the veritas—at the base of her story? If you can, maybe we can all find something that we’re looking for…Emily, myself—and maybe even you.

It’s time for me to tell you a story…

Want to hear more? I'm working on making that possible! :)