Large Lenny would follow the kids when they got out of school, proclaiming: ‘Be not deceived, children, be not deceived. Many will come claiming to speak in the name of the Father, saying that the end of the world is nigh, but they are liars. Do not listen to them. Listen only to me.’ After school, the kids would always have stale cookies and bits of chalk in their bags and would throw them at Lenny to try to get him to shut up, but Large Lenny would not leave the Scriptures in peace. Nothing could stop him. When night fell and people took refuge in their houses, they could still hear the giant’s supplications over the noise of Passover celebrations, bar mitzvahs, over the din of the television. ‘Come from your lairs, your burrows, and touch me,’ he’d roar. ‘I am not a spirit, because a spirit has no flesh, no bones, and I do, as you can see!’ ‘You’d have to be blind not to see you, lardass!’ they would call from their houses. ‘That’s enough now. Go home to bed!’
Three or four times a month the mayor’s office would get a petition asking that Large Lenny be committed to an asylum. Nothing ever happened, however, because it would be a drain on public funds and also because his meanderings along Main Street brought in tourists from Princeton and Metuchen. ‘Large Lenny might not be in his right mind,’ Nancy said to me, ‘but he’s gentle as a butterfly.’
I left before it got dark, just as Nancy was trying to convince me that, with a bit of patience, it was possible to win a fortune playing bingo and the lottery. By then, I had managed to persuade Emilia to lend me some Stabilene sheets and partially completed maps her husband had drawn.
As she showed me out, she asked if I would mind meeting up now and then for a chat. ‘I can’t remember the last time I heard an Argentinian voice,’ she said. I promised to call her, almost out of a sense of guilt. A week later, I bumped into her outside the Bagel Dish Café opposite the pharmacy and, having nothing better to do, agreed to join her for coffee. Without Nancy Frears around, Emilia turned out to be exactly as I expected: an intelligent woman preoccupied by the misfortunes of the world. She had just read Philip Roth’s novel about Charles Lindberg and offered to show me the house where the hero’s son had been kidnapped in 1932. ‘If you like,’ she said, slipping into the familiar Spanish tuteo, ‘I can introduce you to the nice old man who lives there now. He’s convinced he’s Lindberg’s lost child — he certainly acts like a child.’ ‘What do you mean, a child?’ I asked. ‘Twenty months old,’ she said, ‘the age Lindberg’s son was when he was taken.’
When Emilia began to tell me her life story, I was writing a novel set in Buenos Aires and the last thing I wanted was to hear anything that would put me off: other people’s memories can stir up private memories which I find distracting. But it was impossible not to be captivated by the skill with which she wove the tangled web of her story; by the measured, confiding tone that implied this was something she would not tell anyone else in the world. Sometimes, if I closed my eyes and followed the story, like a sailboat going where the wind takes it, it was like being alone with a good book because, like Maugham (Emilia had at least ten volumes of Maugham in Penguin Classics), she was a master of concealing the essential in order to reveal it gradually.
She was an avid reader with a keen intelligence. She could appreciate the similarities between Kafka’s early work and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and gave a detailed account of Guillermo Sánchez Trujillo’s study on the influence of Crime and Punishment on The Trial, which theorised that Dostoevsky’s novel provided Kafka with a template that allowed him to recount the break-up of his engagement to Felice Bauer. Our conversation was a series of endless, aimless stories, but we didn’t care because this was why we were here, to talk about things that would be meaningless to anyone else in the town. I contributed my own share of trivia, mentioning — though it had nothing to do with the conversation — Dante’s influence on Borges’ mature poetry, something that seemed self-evident to me. I was about to explain why when Emilia interrupted me and recited long passages from Infierno and Purgatorio, interweaving them seamlessly with verses from El otro, el mismo and Elogio de la sombra, collections which Borges published just before he turned seventy. I don’t know which Spanish translation of Dante she was quoting, but I know that what she did was a revelation, it made them seem like the work of a single poet. ‘In both of them,’ she said to me, ‘and contrary to what the romantics and the symbolists believe, the state of blessedness and joy can attain an intensity that is more moving than that of suffering.’
I felt so comfortable in the hour and a half I spent with her, so surprised by her erudition, by the enthusiasm with which she bounded from one subject to another, that I invited her to join me for coffee at Starbucks in New Brunswick the following Saturday. When I called her at the Hammond offices on Friday to confirm, she asked me to swing by and pick her up half an hour earlier. She had something she wanted to show me, she said, and a story she wanted to tell me.
When I arrived, she was standing waiting for me on the stoop wearing jeans and sneakers with her hair pinned up. Only in that morning light did I notice that her eyes looked tired, her eyelids heavy, as though one half of her was hidden beneath the waning moon of her face.
‘You know Loews cinema on Route 1?’ she asked me.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Everyone does.’
‘Then you’ll know that there’s a grave in the middle of the parking lot.’
I was surprised, because I didn’t know, though I park there every time I go to the movies. Sometimes, on summer nights, I drive up to the hill overlooking Raritan and gaze down at the gently flowing river and the lights on the far shore where my house is.
‘What grave?’ I asked.
‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
The vast wasteland of concrete behind the cinema stretched out in front of us. I parked next to a squat brick wall with an iron railing running around the top, as unremarkable as the oblique, lukewarm mid-morning sunshine. I had driven past dozens of times assuming it was an electrical substation, or a vent for the cinema’s air-conditioning system.
‘This is where they buried Mary Ellis,’ Emilia said. ‘According to legend, beneath her ashes are the ashes of her horse. If you come closer you can see her gravestone.’
I’d vaguely heard of Mary Ellis at some teachers’ meeting, but always assumed she was a fictional character, someone from some unfinished novel by one of the Brontë sisters. But the delicate marble bust depicted a real woman with a long nose and ringlets in her hair, and underneath, her dates, cut into the stone: 1773–1794.
‘Mary Ellis’s diary is in the Princeton manuscript library,’ Emilia told me as we sat down in Starbucks on George Street with our cappuccinos. ‘According to their records, nobody ever bothers to read it. The information about her childhood I’ve managed to find in encyclopedias on New Jersey is not very reliable, but what Mary herself wrote — her story — is as moving as Cathy Earnshaw’s confession in Wuthering Heights. Mary, as she herself says many times, was the man she loved. At eighteen, she became engaged to a young lieutenant called William Clay. Mary was an orphan, she had no dowry and lived with a paternal aunt in a house in New Brunswick. Once or twice a week she would ride down to the riverbank to meet with Clay alone. The townsfolk talked. When the pastor of the local Presbyterian church gave a sermon about couples who outraged decency and courted the wrath of God, a number of accusing faces turned to stare at her. But Mary didn’t think the sermon referred to her. She was about to get married; she was happy. Two weeks before the wedding, Lieutenant Clay asked her to meet him urgently at their usual place by the river. There, he told her that he had been called up to quell a farmers’ uprising in Pennsylvania and was due to ship out that night. “Within the month,” he told her, “I will come back for you; I’ll hoist a yellow shawl on the mainmast and announce my arrival with two shots from a harquebus. Then we shall be able to marry.” As proof of his love, Clay gave her the magnificent black horse he had inherited from his father. A month passed, and then another. News eventually reached New Brunswick that the uprising had been quelled in a matter of hours without a shot being fired and the troops had been given leave. After she heard this Mary would saddle the black horse every afternoon and ride to the clifftop overlooking the Raritan. Her diary begins here, in the first week of her wait. She gives a detailed account of her daily two-mile ride, describes the countryside in rain or fog and her trepidation whenever a ship hove into view.’