Literary Agent Hypothesis

Writing, always writing. He’s as shy as the day she first met him, and as oddly solemn as he’s been every night since that night in Rumania– sometimes the only time they communicate is when he’s handing over cut-out pages from his journals, carefully and lovingly censored. Whole incidents cease to exist by tacit agreement; she and Jonathan would stay up late into the night discussing obscenity laws (not that that concerns them much) and prudence, what is polite reading and what is a necessary unpleasantness. (Jonathan insists she keep in the scene with the devil’s concubines, seducers of good and religious young men. She deletes some of the Count himself’s charming turns of phrase, whole or fragmented conversations that make her skin creep and the color rise to Jonathan’s good young cheek, despite the premature color of his hair.) Whole sections are added in, for the edification of the reader. (Certainly it wasn’t Jonathan’s idea.) The ugliness of Lucy’s death is something she tries to spare him, working on those sections in the early afternoon with the sun spilling on the green parlor wallpaper, not haunting their nights. Let him dandle Quincey on his knee, teach him his prayers and let Quincey grab at the resolutely un-English crucifix that hangs about Jonathan’s neck. She is preoccupied with the business of mothering their other child, this second child. Longer and much more painful in bearing.

It wants tending constantly, for one. She’ll wake with a start to the sharpest of pains in her forehead like a driven nail and if she is lucky an incident that makes her fingers itch with the desire to elaborate or to edit down. Whole scenes are lost. Unflattering undertones. The occasional grammatical or factual error to be corrected, though not, to her blazing embarrassment later, all.) Letters, telegrams, shreds cut from newspapers. Raw goods, the stuff of which nightmares are made and so troublesome to compile and put together. It’s not the unvarnished truth, but to show that to anyone who might read it? Impossible. This is the story as it was, except in the places where it’s as it should have been. This is the story they’ll tell Quincey once he’s fully grown, and man enough to understand it. This is the way their collective memory ought to have been.

After their manuscript is put together for reference, after their child is full-grown, after this ghost has been exorcised… then she and Jonathan may rest easily.