The garage-library. Plywood floors with clear polyurethane finish over 2-x-4 sleepers nailed into the concrete; unfinished floor-to-ceiling bookcases lining the walls. Bob’s inexpensive, elegant design. No first editions, but, for the writer, a treasure house.

Reading the news one morning, the writer learns that a man in New York City was smothered—died of suffocation—when one of his bookcases fell over. Out in the garage-library later that day, the writer experiences an access of shedding. Books on the stock market (A Fool and his Money); countless anthologies of short stories, complimentary from publishers; midtwentieth-century tomes on rural Ireland, picked up there in 1974 on a trip with Katrin; Back to Eden and others of her sixties cookbooks. He places them in a cardboard box, puts it out on the tree lawn. The writer’s making clear to himself he doesn’t intend to write about the dotcom mania; feels he knows what he needs to know about the range of short fiction, will keep only the work of writers he savors; will never get to write about Ireland; that his diet is as healthy as he can...stand. So, relief, books gone. Which leaves? Shelves and shelves of different alphabets: sex and death; Hawai‘i; the South Pacific; fiction and some literary nonfiction; writing and the writer’s life; surfing; ocean; nature writing; epigrams and lying; Boston and New England; California and the sixties. And shelves with book clusters. Fairytales / myths / children’s stories (toward retelling the story of Cupid and Psyche?). Cuba and Afro-Cuban music. Judaica. Truth commissions. Versions of the Don Juan story.

Almost immediately, the writer rues putting out the box, goes back to check titles. Convinces himself, just, not to retrieve the books. God, he thinks, what must it have been like for bibliophile Walter Benjamin, German Jew fleeing Paris as the Nazis arrived. Leaving his library behind, carrying the manuscript of his magnum opus. Soon, trapped, to commit suicide. As Jay Parini renders it, Benjamin wrote, “Death is what sanctions everything the storyteller can tell. Indeed, he borrows his authority from death.”

Storytelling: whatever its animus, for the writer it’s an inherited gene. Lares and penates: beneficent ancestral spirits, schoolboy Latin, part of the lingua franca when the writer was young. In the cottage’s study, the writer has his lares and penates on the bookshelf: copy of the Boston Globe editorial on his father’s death—“medical legend...legend in his lifetime.” And, beside the row of his mother’s thirty-plus books, pictures of his parents: together, separately. In one photograph, his mother, seventy, holds a copy of her recently published How Does It Feel to Be Old? (1979), in which the narrator says to her granddaughter,

Have you noticed, I’m shorter, almost than you?
I’m shrinking, you’re stretching. What else is new?
Well, sun keeps rising,
journeys of planets continue exact.
Wind keeps blowing,
sky stays wide.

In this photograph, playing the grande dame, the writer’s mother has gathered herself—level gaze for the camera, slight smile, eyebrows slightly raised. She has four years to live.

The writer’s father died in 1973. Grieving, the writer’s mother composes Year of Reversible Loss, Basho-like poetry and prose, endeavoring by very close—desperate—observation of the natural world to make a case for the continuity of matter. Of love. How, she wondered, how affirm dissolution.

Of the many books that followed during her next—last—ten years, one was Something Further.... Its author’s bio note, which she composed, read in part:

Wife, mother, widow, grandmother: Norma Farber considers these characterizations her leading roles.
     Additionally she has enacted actress, concert singer, poet, translator, author of books for children.

The provenance of the book’s title is the finale of Melville’s The Confidence Man: “Something further may follow of this masquerade.” In the 132-line title poem, the poet argues that in both natural and human worlds all is disguise. The sun a masquerader—as if it cared about our survival! Genesis a divine performance, and, given the changes of, say, the molting dragonfly, then “Where’s that insect essence?” Leading the poet to posit that “who you are, is less/than how you play.” Finally, the poem concludes, “I mask/my soul, and subterfuge/invites the show to follow.” Readers left to ponder just what a show is—revelation; deception; display? And to wonder what is that something that may follow this masquerade. From time to time the writer takes Something Further... down from the shelf, rereads the poem, always disturbed by it, feeling it somehow eludes him, or is trying to tell him something he’s not eager to know.

Da capo: Italian, from the beginning; repeat. From the sheet music of the writer’s childhood. Stories he tells now, has told before. Looking for what? Raised by a stage-door mother, as a child the writer’s mother excelled in an endless round of lessons—ballet, singing, elocution, piano, languages—while envisioning escape from that overwhelming empowerer. At eighteen, against her mother’s wild subversions, she married a brilliant young doctor, then never, ever again saw or corresponded with her mother. This while as lieder singer and actress she became very much the performer her mother had had in mind: “Elegance, intelligence, refinement and subtlety” (Cleveland Plain Dealer); “masterful” (Christian Science Monitor); “tour de force” (Boston Globe).

Social roles. Boston, where the writer’s mother lived her entire life, really was a little England: status- and class-ridden; you knew your station. And when the writer’s father became world famous, there was the role of consort, an impeccability to insist on. Audience: Boston a kind of panopticon. And, inevitably, medical politics—critics; rivals.

Widow on display. In the high rise near Harvard Square, full of local luminaries, you perforce presented a self on the elevator or passing the front desk in the lobby. Gossip and schadenfreude to stave off; secrets to keep. Groundlings insinuating. So many permeable membranes. All this was strenuous, requiring sustained resolve. Or perhaps, having lost the love of her life, the writer’s mother now had only stage presence to hold herself together.

The past, where, Ross McDonald wrote, “crucial events and conversations of our lives repeat themselves forever in the hope of being understood and perhaps forgiven.” The dying of the writer’s mother: during her terminal illness, attended to by her four children, she had no apologies to make. If one of her “leading roles” was “mother,” in that life script she could not but “follow,” the line “I love you” was nowhere to be found. Surely she had her reasons—that mother who taught her to avoid (cheap, manipulative) sentiment at any cost. Still, the writer had imagined there were things she’d try to set straight, take back, reconcile, with one or another of her grown children. To help them free themselves. How could someone so phenomenally articulate remain so mute? But no, no such impulse, capacity. Or was it, no such generosity, grace? The writer’s disturbed by these words, says them to himself twenty-something years later, knowing they’re going to feel unfair, wrong. What he and his siblings experienced back then was compassion for their mother’s suffering; guilt that they could not save her; grieving for impending loss. Nor did it seem conceivable to do less than care for her as their father would have wanted. Endeavoring to be gallant in her dying, in any case, playing her part, cherished privacy gone, their mother suffered the good intentions of the physicians, former pupils of her late husband, whose ministrations only prolonged her misery. What a game!

Books: running in the family. The writer’s mother gave him a copy of Something Further..., inscribed it, “For Tom—this Masquerade.” Telling her son what? The writer rereads to weigh who she was. To see himself in her, or not. Risky, such revisiting. This posthumous conversation, his mother reminding him—chiding, rebuking, reproving—from the Far Side that the dead are at the mercy of the living. “Do with me what you will,” she says. Laughs: “Your failure to grasp this slays me. What do you think your books are? Do I make myself clear?” Demanding assent, as always when she disciplined her young children, but as if he’ll never/ever figure it out. Which leaves the writer wondering, what work of the art she lived by is she referencing from out there in the Great Beyond? The writer takes a shot at it. Yeats, maybe, on Cordelia / Lear / Ophelia / Hamlet:

if worthy their prominent part in the play [they] do not break up their lines to weep.