Specimen Days

Michael Cunningham Specimen days

This novel is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Dorothy

Fear not O Muse! truly new ways and days receive,
surround you,
I candidly confess a queer, queer race, of novel
fashion,
And yet the same old human race, the same within,
without,
Faces and hearts the same, feelings the same,
yearnings the same,
The same old love, beauty and use the same.

Walt Whitman

Author's Note

Any writer who sets part or all of a novel in an identifiable time and place faces the question of veracity. The simplest answer is also the most severe historic events must be rendered with absolute precision. Battles must be fought where and when they were actually fought; zeppelins may not appear in the sky a moment before they were invented; a great artist cannot appear at a masked ball in New Orleans when he is known, on that particular evening, to have been recuperating from gout in Baton Rouge.

The strict sequence of historical events, however, tends to run counter to the needs of the storyteller. Biographers and historians may be required to account for all those missed trains, canceled engagements, and long periods of lassitude; the fiction writer is not necessarily so constrained. Novelists must usually decide what degree of slavish accuracy would make their stories more alive, and what degree would make them less. We seem to fall along a broad spectrum in this regard. I know novelists who wouldn't think of tampering with recorded fact, and I know and greatly admire a certain writer who invents everything, from habits and customs during the time of Christ to botany and the workings of the human body. When questioned about it, he simply says, "It's fiction."

Specimen Days falls somewhere between those two poles. It's semi-accurate. To the best of my ability, I've been true to historic particulars in the scenes I've set in the past. But it would be a mistake on the reader's part to accept any of it as literal fact. I've taken especial liberty with chronology and have juxtaposed events, people, buildings, and monuments that may in fact have been separated by twenty years or more. Anyone interested in the absolute truth about New York in the mid to late nineteenth century would be well advised to consult Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, which was the primary source from which I spun my own variations.

In the Machine

Walt said that the dead turned into grass, but there was no grass where they'd buried Simon. He was with the other Irish on the far side of the river, where it was only dirt and gravel and names on stones.

Catherine believed Simon had gone to heaven. She had a locket with his picture and a bit of his hair inside.

"Heaven's the place for him," she said. "He was too good for this world." She looked uncertainly out the parlor window and into the street, as if she expected a glittering carriage to wheel along with Simon on board, serene in his heedless milk-white beauty, waving and grinning, going gladly to the place where he had always belonged.

"If you think so," Lucas answered. Catherine fingered the locket. Her hands were tapered and precise. She could sew stitches too fine to see.

"And yet he's with us still," she said. "Don't you feel it?" She worried the locket chain as if it were a rosary.

"I suppose so," Lucas said. Catherine thought Simon was in the locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn't expect him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with.

The guests had departed, and Lucas's father and mother had gone to bed. It was only Lucas and Catherine in the parlor, with what had been left behind. Empty plates, the rind of a ham. The ham had been meant for Catherine's and Simon's wedding. It was lucky, then, to have it for the wake instead.

Lucas said, "I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end."

He hadn't meant to speak as the book. He never did, but when he was excited he couldn't help himself.

She said, "Oh, Lucas."

His heart fluttered and thumped against the bone.

"I worry for you," she said. "You're so young."

"I'm almost thirteen," he said.

"It's a terrible place. It's such hard work."

"I'm lucky. It's a kindness of them, to give me Simon's job."

"And no more school."

"I don't need school. I have Walt's book."

"You know the whole thing, don't you?"

"Oh no. There's much more, it will take me years."