“Exactly!” she says, clearly pleased. “The grounds were designed by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted.” She pauses, as if waiting to see if I recognize the names. I recognize Olmsted, but it takes me a moment to realize that the person she is calling Calvert Vox was the one I’d always thought of as Calvert Voe.
“Didn’t they design Central Park?” I say, thinking this is something Laurel would know.
“Yes,” Sky says, giving me an odd look. Maybe it’s so obvious that I shouldn’t have said anything. I’d noticed that with Laurel sometimes, like you were supposed to know that the Orbit stroller was the one to buy but you weren’t supposed to bring up the fact that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West had one. Maybe Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted were the Kimye of their day. “The founders of Crantham wanted their patients to enjoy the same restful environs as Central Park. There was a croquet lawn and dairy farm, a chapel and a little theater. It was like a quaint English village. I loved running around it.”
“You had access to the grounds?” I ask. “Wasn’t that dangerous? I mean, they were still mental patients.”
Sky gives me a reproving look. Should I not have said mental patients? What else am I supposed to call them? “My father felt very strongly about setting an example of trust and community. He actually wanted to live on the grounds, but my mother drew the line there so my father had this house renovated for us. My father had a path built that went directly down to the grounds and he installed a back gate—I’ll have Billie show it to you later; it’s been years since I was able to navigate it—and I would follow him down every day. When he was treating patients, I’d go see the cows in the dairy and talk to my favorite patients. There was a famous poet who left poems for me in secret hiding places and an old woman who believed she was Marie Antoinette, who taught me French, and an artist who painted my portrait . . .” Her eyes glaze over for a moment as if she is seeing her younger self, and then she jerks herself to attention and begins rifling through the papers. “Here—” She extracts a sepia-toned photo of a group of men and women decked out like Russian peasants dancing around a Maypole. “That’s from the Founder’s Day Fete and this”—she plucks a printed program from the pile—“is from the Annual Dance. As you can see it was a very fairy-tale atmosphere.”
“And therefore important to your formation as a writer,” I say.
She smiles, my Vaux-Olmsted gaffe forgiven. “So you see why I’d like all these documents included with my papers.” She waves a crabbed hand behind her and I take in the stack of file boxes that I hadn’t noticed when I came in. There must be at least twenty.
I pause, confused. Hadn’t she said last night that she wanted her father’s papers to go to the hospital? I don’t recall her saying anything about organizing them as part of her papers. But then maybe I’ve misunderstood or forgotten something she said. I feel a flush of heat in my cheeks, followed by an icy prickling across my scalp. What if all those baby hormones have washed out all my brain cells, and I’m not actually capable of doing this job? I can feel her waiting for my response, the silence growing heavy.
When in doubt, repeat what’s been said to you, Laurel once told me. People love to hear their own words.
“You want me to include your father’s papers in yours?” I say, making it halfway between a question and a statement.
“Yes,” she says, smiling.
I return her smile, my equilibrium regained, and ask, “Is there anything in particular that you want me to focus on?”
She sorts through the pages on the table and picks out a formal portrait of a middle-aged man wearing a dark suit and sitting stiffly at a desk with a bookshelf and a bust of Freud behind him. He has the same square face and light eyes as Sky, but on him the features look even more intimidating. “I would like my father’s legacy preserved,” she says. “People today . . . they hear ‘mental asylum’ and they picture One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest or something out of a Tennessee Williams play. They see the man who ran such a place as a soulless bureaucrat. I’d like to tell a different story about him.”
“I understand completely,” I say. It’s the truth. I understand, better than I could say, wanting to rearrange the facts to tell a different story.
WHEN SKY LEAVES I stare at the stacks of boxes and realize I have no idea what an archivist does. I was a school librarian. I specialized in knowing the titles of every Judy Blume book ever written, reshelving the Nancy Drews in series order, and retaping the bindings of the Twilight books. My Intro to Library Science class had covered the archiving of private libraries as a career option but our professor said such positions were rare so I didn’t take the follow-up class. There was nothing rare about me.
Not like Laurel, who had gone on from her archival degree at the University of Edinburgh to work as an assistant to the rare books librarian at the National Library of Scotland. She’d spent a summer cataloguing the private library of a laird in Perthshire . . . recording every boring letter his grandfather had written about fishing on the Tay, she had told me. I had to record what box it came from, what it said, if it mentioned anyone famous, then store it in an acid-free folder,
