I would sit there, day after day, contentedly toggling between the drab present and the richly hued past.įor the letter I wrote that day, I used the “good” onionskin paper, anxiously feeding each sheet between the rollers of a black cast-iron Underwood typewriter that had been salvaged from my grandfather’s braid-and-trimmings factory in the city. Over a grainy black-and-white photo of the ruin as it appears today you could flip a color transparency of how the building had looked in ancient times, gaudy with red and blue paint and gilding.

I had got her street address from the Who’s Who in our school library, where I often spent recess, bent over an encyclopedia entry that I particularly liked, about the Parthenon. The stranger to whom I wrote that day lived in South Africa, a fact that I had gleaned from the brief bio under the author photograph on her book jackets, which showed a middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and tightly coiled gray hair, her eyes narrowed and crinkling at the corners: perhaps humorously, perhaps simply against the sun. We lived on Long Island, in one of twelve identical “splanches”-split-ranch houses-that lined a street in a suburb that had, until relatively recently, been a potato farm. One spring day in 1976, when I was fifteen years old and couldn’t keep my secret any longer, I went into the bedroom I shared with my older brother, sat down at the little oak desk we did our homework on, and began an anguished letter to a total stranger who lived on the other side of the world. “WHOEVER TOLD YOU I’D SEND YOU A ‘FORM LETTER’?”

The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault