The Notebooks of William Wilson

By P. V. LeForge

On a chilly evening in March, 1917, 17-year-old Virginia Lampley disappears from her upper-class home in Richmond, Virginia. Her straight-laced parents never see or hear from her again. Seventy years later, her granddaughter Christine begins an earnest search for Virginia, using a single diary entry as the only clue to her whereabouts.
In March, 1977, austere and cheerless reference librarian William Wilson begins his own diary in an attempt to explain why his existence is so loathsome to him. When he meets Christine by chance in the library, he begins to be as obsessed by her as she is by her grandmother. When he finds that she has been writing a journal about her activities, his boring life takes a turn that he never could have imagined. Their search takes them not only into the life of the theater in the early 1900s, but into their childhoods as well, where it turns out that nothing is what it seems.
Three notebooks; three diaries; three very different fates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Bay Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310030383

P. V. LeForge

P. V. LeForge lives on a horse farm in north Florida with his wife Sara Warner, who is a dressage rider and trainer. Their stable includes Fabayoso, who was Southeastern Regional Stallion Champion, and his colt Freester, who was Reserve Champion USDF Horse of the Year in 2011.LeForge is also an e-book formatter who can be found on Mark's List. He enjoys formatting Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Drama.LeForge's other books of poetry and fiction can be obtained in ebook and paperback at most on-line book outlets. In addition to writing and doing farm chores, he enjoys songwriting and target archery.

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The Notebooks of William Wilson

By P.V. LeForge

Copyright 2015 by P. V. LeForge

Cover design by Black Bay Books

Portrait of Fanny Ballou (The Leafy Hat) by Don Shepler

from the author’s personal collection

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

There is no note on any instrument that has not been played before. That said, The Notebooks of William Wilson is sheer fiction. Any resemblance of names, places, characters, and incidents to actual persons, places, and events results from the relationship which the world must always bear to works of this kind.

Published by Black Bay Books

Books for people who like to think about what they read.

Books by P. V. LeForge

Fiction

The Principle of Interchange and Other Stories (1990)

Hell and High Water (with Anne Petty) (2012)

Museum Piece (with Anne Petty) (2013)

Time Piece (with Anne Petty) (2014)

The Notebooks of William Wilson (2015)

Book Stories (2017)

Poetry

The Secret Life of Moles (1992)

Getting a Good Read (2002)

Ways to Reshape the Heart (2008)

My Wife Is a Horse (2009)

Drama

Little Saigon and Other Plays

Notebook One

Monday, May 9, 1977

There is something unsound about the trees. Enormous branches are snapping off the pines, the pecan trees, and the ancient live oaks, and hurtling to the ground with great force. This morning I was jolted awake by a splintering crack like a thunderclap. I threw open my curtains, but the sky—just beginning to brighten—was clear. No storms, no rainclouds. Yet something had caused a large branch from the pecan tree near my driveway to snap away from its foundation and tumble thirty feet to the ground. I pulled on a pair of pants and rushed outside to see what damage the branch had caused.

The limb lay like a broken giant, more human than plant, covering most of the driveway and some of the yard. Leaves were scattered about in all directions. At its thick end the wood was larger in girth than my chest, and massively heavy. Had my Saab been in its usual place in the driveway, it would have been crushed beyond recognition. How did such a branch break off? There was no lightning and the breeze was light. It had simply fallen of its own accord. There was something frightening, almost suicidal, about it.

I felt a chill in the cool morning air. The grass was dewy and my feet had left a shining slug's trail over the lawn. My alarm clock screamed at me from the window and I rushed in to turn it off. While I showered, I remembered other instances of trees falling for no apparent reason. The last time I visited my parents in West Palm Beach, the coconut palms had begun to fail. The fronds drooped, then blackened and fell off, leaving the tree a depressing brown amputee. It was diagnosed as a disease, but a disease no one understands. Researchers have studied it without finding the cause. Perhaps there is none. I suspect this to be the case.

I remember another tree that toppled over entirely, its branches coming to rest only a few feet from where I stood watching in dumb horror. I was eleven years old at the time and although I was not at all impressionable, that tree, and the absolute silence with which it fell, changed my life much like smoke changes air. Even now, memories are floating in like leaves, and I know it will get worse.

It's disquieting. If there is a defect in the trees, there is no guarantee that anything is adequate.

I shaved and drove to work. When I returned, the debris had been cut, raked, and stacked by the roadside with the trash.

Tuesday, May 10, 1977

I live in a single-story boarding house on the student side of Tallahassee (that is, near the university). On the downward slope of Pensacola Street there are three such boarding houses in a row—long, white slatboard houses built in the '30s and now divided into several apartments. The house I live in is in the center of this row and consists of four units and a shared kitchen. I live in the left side of the front apartment—a fairly long two rooms that accommodate me and my possessions comfortably. Although I am not a student (in fact, I loathe students) and have a well-paying job as a university librarian, I prefer living here to living alone in a large house with its inherent mortgages, lawn mowers, and barbecue grills. I dislike the other inhabitants of my boarding house, but there is little I can do to escape them. In fact, there is a forced intimacy among us, and among the people living in adjacent boarding houses. Through long conversations with neighbors (who sometimes lie in wait for me to come home from work), and block parties (to which I am invariably dragged), I have learned a lot about these people.

The young woman in the next room, for instance, is a nymphomaniac. At least, because she has many visitors who stay for varying amounts of time, I think she is. This suspicion—and her visitors—often drives me out of the house in despair. In fact, when I came home from work Sunday evening, one of these visitors was parked in the driveway (despite the fact that the driveway is on my side of the house). Instead of stopping, I drove to a bar for a drink. Sometimes, you see, l can hear noises from the next room—the squeaking of springs, or a rhythmic banging against the adjoining wall. I may only be imagining this. It is possible that these sounds are made by a leaking faucet or a faulty toilet.

When I returned from the bar, over an hour later, the car was still in the driveway, so I parked on the street. Diane's lovers rarely stay the night and I have a horrible fear that if I park behind them, one of them will knock on my door and superciliously demand that I move my car so he can get out. In such a case I would comply like the obsequious rodent I am, but my resentment would build up over a period of days into a black brooding. Eventually, I would explode.

Many times I'll come home too drunk to hear the noises, or at least to be bothered by them. In fact, I rarely see the people who make the noises; my curtains are drawn too tightly. Perhaps there really are no noises after all. Maybe Diane has a lot of brothers, or maybe her visitors are not male. Perhaps they are not even her visitors at all, but friends of someone else on the block. Still, I am grinding my teeth in disappointment that the visitor, whoever he was, left before the tree branch could transform his car into a concertina.

Wednesday, May 11, 1977

Do you find it strange that a man who has a steady income, a wall of books, and a knowledge of economics that Malthus might envy—a man who, furthermore, is an outwardly staid and respectable librarian—should choose to run out of his room like a spook three or four nights a week to get drunk? Perhaps it is strange. On the other hand, perhaps it is normal.

I was born in Detroit in 1947, thirty years and two days ago. When my parents died in a suicide pact I moved to West Palm Beach to live with my uncle.

That isn't true. My parents are still alive. I have no uncles. We moved from Detroit to West Palm Beach when I was eleven. I finished high school when I was nineteen and came to the university in Tallahassee, where I have lived ever since. I suspect that my parents have remembered my birthday with a Hallmark card and effusive greetings. I refuse to look in my mailbox. I have not seen my parents since the visit I referred to earlier, over five years ago.

That is true. I have no reason to lie, although for that matter, I have no reason to tell the truth either. I have no reason even to begin this journal, yet it is begun, and it will be written to the last page, regardless of what rambling nonsense it contains.

I could call this The Diary of a Schizophrenic, for years ago, I was two persons. Now I am only one, yet the person I am now is different from the former two in every way. I may even be only half a person. How did I get this way, and how was I changed?

My name is William Wilson, but here I will call myself Proto, because that is what she called me, in that strange, sibilant, and droning language that was solely our own. If you are thinking that this is just another ridiculous love story, you are wrong. It is not a love story at all.

I wrote earlier that I was born in 1947 in Detroit, but I did not mention that I had a twin. My parents named her Barbara, after our mother. (In fact, we were both named after our parents.)

When Barbara was born she did not howl like other babies newly slapped into consciousness. She simply looked around with curious and frighteningly intelligent blue eyes, unnerving an intern so badly that he nearly dropped her. I noticed this from my own study of the hospital room, which I can still remember in the minutest detail. Near my mother's bed was a tray holding several steel instruments that glinted fiercely in the light of a gigantic lamp suspended overhead. The walls were an institutional green and the marble floors had slight track marks from the gurneying in and out of patients. The doctor, the nurse, the intern, and my mother were all dressed in white. The doctor and nurse wore white shoes as well, but the intern had on a pair of brown oxfords. This gave both Barbara and I the impression that there were two races of people: those who wore white shoes and those who did not. (This was corroborated as we grew older.) This first view of life, from an upside down position, seemed natural to us.

I remember feeling immense freedom at being born. After all, Barbara and I had spent our whole lives heretofore in a particularly dark and constricted prison. Now that we were out we meant to make every use of our freedom, and the sooner the better.

At birth, Barbara was quite ugly, even to someone who must have looked quite like her; yet as she grew, her features softened from the wizened ruddiness of an old peach to the smoothness of a fine sculpture. Her eyes, as I have already stated, were bright and piercing, making her face seem slightly thinner than it actually was. Her teeth, when they grew in, were large and very white. When she laughed she made me think of lustrous sheets of blank paper. At seven, her hair was thick and black and quite unmanageable, which often gave her the appearance of a very young but very busy business executive. This is, in fact, what she quickly became.

Like most babies throughout history, we found the ability to make sounds, but for us, the sounds had distinct meanings. As time went on and our surroundings grew more varied we would point to new objects and give them names. It didn't matter which of us did this, for either of us would have given the same name to the same object, as if we were born with an innate knowledge of the universe. By the age of two, we were having discussions on a variety of subjects. Our language and vocabulary were very advanced; our comprehension of abstract terms and qualities highly abnormal.

Our father was a state senator and was rarely at home. (The fact that I see him even more rarely now gives me great satisfaction.) Our mother, although infrequently accompanying him to Lansing, often took excursions of her own, and treated us with frightened indifference. (Now I treat her with indifference.)

Our first nurse was a kind woman from Innsbruck named Olga, whose only quirk was cooing and speaking to us in German rather than English, which she knew perfectly well. It was a surreptitious and conscious attempt to teach us German, probably out of sheer perversity. Whenever my mother or father would come into the nursery to see us (yes, it was that kind of home), the German disappeared from Olga's speech as if she were American born. Nevertheless, my mother knew what Olga was up to and often upbraided her about it. When, by the age of three, we had yet to speak a single word of English (even though we spent most of our time talking and gesticulating with great animation), she feared the worst and dismissed our German nurse.

But it wasn't German we were speaking, as Olga well knew, and despite the spate of proper Bostonian and English nurses and tutors that followed, we remained, to them, speechless; but that is only half the story. Barbara and I often asked our parents very specific questions, only to have them put on puzzled expressions, smile awkwardly, and slip from the nursery to shout at each other over some defect in our upbringing. It took us quite a while to comprehend that neither our parents nor our nurses could understand what we were saying. On the other hand, we could understand them quite well, even Olga.

The explanation is simple (although even today my parents know only half the truth). When most children are born they do not intuitively wonder what to call the people or the objects around them. They are content to let others feed them such information just like they are fed milk from a bottle. For such children there is no automatic flash from object to idea. Yet for Barbara and I there was such a flash. We knew instantly what to call each object in our world. I know now that this was because we were, to some degree, able to exchange thoughts or thought patterns. To the modern researcher this is no great revelation, but to the average parent of the 1950s it would have caused a lot of concern. This is neither here nor there as we had no intention of telling anyone about ourselves. We knew that our abilities were special, and we wanted to be able to develop them in the purest way. Speaking no English was simply one way to stay pure. In fact, in the entire time Barbara and I were together, we spoke only one English word apiece. My word was Barbara.

One day in our nursery I awoke to find Barbara sitting alone in a corner. Her hair (always an embarrassment to her as she was quite vain) was more matted than usual, and her mouth was moving silently. Her usually lively eyes were still. I called out to her using the name that existed only in the language that we shared.

Don't use that name, Proto, she replied. From now on, call me what everybody else calls me.

But you have a more natural name, I cried.

Yes, she answered. But that doesn't mean I have to like it or go by it.

You like being called Barbara? I asked incredulously.

Yes.

It's our mother's name.

Mine, too.

Next you'll be changing other things, I said.

And if I do?

Then our future might be changed as well.

Oh no, she replied seriously. Her eyes were alive again and she tried to fluff her hair with her tiny hands. That's the one thing that can never change.

Thursday, May 12, 1977

If you think I stopped writing last night because I was tired, or because I wanted to leave you in a sort of interested suspense, or even because I might want to get a greater distance from my story for reasons of perspective, you are wrong. I stopped because I didn't feel like writing any more.

As I suspected, there was a letter from my father in the mailbox. It has probably been there for days. But does it contain a birthday greeting? No! It simply says that he and my mother are thinking of driving to the Midwest for a vacation. He hints that they may stop in Tallahassee for a few days. It's unthinkable. Next, he will want me to go with them. I dashed off a letter full of imprecations and innuendos, telling them that I wouldn't see them; that anyway, I was planning an extended trip to the Virgin Islands at that very time. That won't stop them, I know. They have spies. They once even hired detectives to follow me.

At work I got into an argument with the head of another department—a vacuous elephant—over something quite trivial, not even worth mentioning. I made her leave the room in a huff, but by pursuing such a ridiculous argument, I made an ass of myself in front of everyone. I am sure to hear repercussions of this later, and see sly and disgusting smirks turned in my direction. To make it worse, Diane has a visitor, and my ears are cringing with anticipation.

All my life l have been reacting to very specific stimuli, like a plant to light. You speak, I retort; you yell, I rant; Diane pounds the springs, I flee.

Friday, May 13, 1977

I am a bibliographer. I state it with pride, not because I enjoy being a bibliographer, because I loathe it, but because I know that you will react to the term with disgust and tittering. You think that I must be a boring fool. Perhaps I am. I will further confound you by saying that I spent most of today reading with great relish the introductions to a number of extremely technical scientific indexes. Not only do I accept your assessment of me, but it makes me squirm with delight. With my bibliographical knowledge I can find out any piece of information imaginable. This infuses in me an almost godlike sense of power. Let me elaborate on my job.

Even though it is my legal title, I approve of the term bibliographer. Because of its monotonous but formidable connotations, people treat me with a distant, although derisive, respect. It is my job to take a broad reference question, such as, say, What is idioglossia, and where can information on this term be found? and compile an extensive listing of articles, publications, and abstracts pertinent to or containing the term idioglossia. I enjoy this work as much as it can be said I enjoy anything. I work slowly and comprehensively. I read the articles I collect and become a source of knowledge on each subject. I dislike having to give this information to others, however, and am often tempted to withhold parts of what I've compiled, or to quit my job altogether.

These more exhaustive questions are rare, however, and I usually stay busy by reviewing source materials (as I did today), or by answering a large number of trivial questions (such as, Who won the World Series in 1955? or Was August 1, 1477 on a Monday or a Friday?) that are of no use whatever, and that I'm convinced people make up to ridicule me.

Idioglossia: twin speech, or more precisely, a language that is spoken by siblings to each other and to the exclusion of everyone else. I have never had to gather information on idioglossia, although such a search would be easier than most: the pioneering work on the subject concerns my sister and me. As I began to explain before, we could understand English perfectly, but refused to communicate in any language other than our own. We had no need to talk to anyone else. In fact, our rapid-fire babbling embarrassed our parents so much that we were rarely allowed downstairs with company present.

What could such young children talk about, you might ask? We talked about things very similar to those which old people talk about. Toward the end of his life, W. B. Yeats continually lamented the fact that he was growing more and more enfeebled each day. He felt his mind expanding to great heights, yet his bones were crumbling. Barbara and I, on the other hand, were vexed that our bodies were not yet well-developed enough to move about freely. Our cribs were, quite simply, jails. Until we learned to let down the bars of our beds (when no one was looking), and to sneak about the house at night, we were unable to find anything to read. Even then our short arms made it impossible to reach anything higher than the arm of a chair. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let me go back.

One night, by chance, my parents, Barbara, and I were in the living room watching TV. My father seemed bored and listless, although this was the rule rather than the exception, and only an inbred sense of duty kept him in the house even for short periods. Stifling a yawn, he asked, What's on next?

I happened to be wobbling near my mother's chair as she picked up the TV listings from a coffee table and ran her finger down the programming. I was nearly in her lap, watching attentively as she found the correct listing and said, "Topper is on channel two, The Life of Riley on four, The Ray Bolger Show on seven, and wrestling on nine."

Whichever of these shows they ended up watching, if indeed, they watched any at all, is not important here. What is important is that later I managed to snatch the TV listings from the table and ran mischievously into my room with it, laughing and squealing. I hid the book under my mattress and it wasn't found until days later. During that time, Barbara and I managed to figure out the symbols for Topper, The Life of Riley, The Ray Bolger Show, and wrestling, as well as most of the numerical system. With this infrastructure, and with the newspapers we found lying around, we taught ourselves to read proficiently by the age of four.

Barbara and I, together, were special. Even though virtually identical, we were separate. Therefore neither the uniqueness nor the identicality of our situation impressed us much. We were concerned only with our lives and in fulfilling our potential, for we soon realized that we had a ten-year, possibly a twenty-year head start on almost everyone in our generation, and we did not intend to look back. We had to begin our life's work immediately, but it was soon apparent that we did not know what that work was.

From TV and from newspapers (our only sources of information) we knew a great deal about killing, hatred, violence, disaster, death, and destruction. Obviously, these were not good things, even though the viewing and reading public seemed to delight in them with an almost drooling delectation. Moreover, our father had voted for added defense funds, backing wholeheartedly the police action in Korea. He became not someone to look up to, but rather someone to look askance at. In our naïveté, preventing such things seemed called for, so we made our plans accordingly. But our plans involved many people, not just two.

Twins are a very exclusive and tightly knit community. In fact, Barbara and I were inseparable almost to the point of grotesqueness, but there is more to it than you might imagine. Most people search their entire lives for a compatible mate, but I was born with one. Maybe that was too easy; maybe we didn't have to search hard enough for it to have been a valid experience, but when you find one person just like yourself, it is only a short hop from assuming that there might be a whole gang of you hidden away somewhere. Indeed, it becomes a virtual certainty.

We knew (or at least strongly suspected) that other people learned to talk at three, read at six, and think at seventeen. This, in our opinion, made us abnormal. We grew conceited. Yet if the world was too large for us to be planning its salvation, it was also too large for our situation to be completely unique. We felt that we needed those others—our exact counterparts who had heretofore been hidden away from us. We would find these others, set up some kind of a foundation, and begin our work. The first things we needed were self-sufficiency and a power base. We had neither.

I should make it plain that we held no animosity toward our parents for being so distant and aloof with us. In fact we often thought them to be model parents in that they did not beat us or burn us with cigarette butts. (Burning with cigarette butts seemed to be a common method of chastisement according to the days' newspapers.) We talked about them often, and longed at times to speak just a few words of English. We were living and thinking in a vacuum and it was telling on us. We feared that we might never become self-sufficient.

Our parents had their own fears about us: on our fifth birthday, they decided that we were hopelessly retarded. Echoes of their old arguments throughout those first five years come back to me vividly. I can visualize my father—still a bulky man then—sitting back in his plush leather armchair, lighting his pipe. Unlike me, he was a handsome man: clean shaven and well dressed. Any coarseness he possessed had grown from the city itself. He was a very patient man, although he always seemed to be going somewhere. This made his armchair pronouncements the more memorable. Across a great expanse of thick carpet, my mother sat demurely. It was her idea that a wife should be reserved around her husband, but not necessarily around anyone else. She was an outgoing, outspoken woman who often got ink in the political columns (a notoriety that my father could neither achieve on his own, although he tried, nor understand). Having returned from a trip to California, he once laughed from deep in the recesses of his armchair. This must be a mistake. There’s an article in the paper that says you gave a press conference in Washington yesterday. They even quoted you as saying that the administration's mental health program is too extensive.

It wasn't a press conference at all, my mother responded. "Just a couple of reporters got me into a corner. I had to say something."

"But in Washington?" my father cried.

"Well, I did drop down there for a few days to see Mamie, but just as a courtesy."

It must be a mistake, my father mumbled, but he had little reason to complain. My mother was molding his political future much more firmly than he could have done by himself. Although a tenacious and often doggedly single-minded worker, my father tended to support legislation that was either silly or superfluous. He would work for a year to bring a bill before the Senate, only to have it superseded a year later or to find that it was already a minor part of another, more important, bill.

Woody Wilson was Michigan's youngest senator, partly because of my mother's high energy, partly because his own father had been one of Detroit's most popular used car dealers before he died in 1949. Woody was the result of a year's thought in preparation for a political future. It was the name, along with the quotation marks, that appeared on his first campaign posters, despite the fact that his name was not Woodrow—it is William, like mine—and he had been called Bill all his life.

You must have dropped them, my father pronounced languidly one day, or actually, on many days, for it was his favorite topic, especially when we were in the room.

As always, my mother gazed around the room, her eyes lingering on the many art reproductions on every wall, the chandeliers, and the fireplace, before she answered softly, Both of them?

Must've.

On the same places on their heads?

Not impossible.

I think it was the night you hit me in the stomach, my mother replied, as if seriously trying to come up with a logical, plausible solution for our idiocy.

I never did, my father said calmly, puffing on his pipe.

The night you tried to make me abort, she answered.

I don't remember it, he said.

Olga might have done it, Barbara Sr. offered.

You've got a point there.

She might have left them in the bath water too long.

Could that have done it? he asked.

That depends. . . . she mused. Then, without looking at each other they nodded to themselves silently and sadly. I once mimicked them for amusement but my father caught me at it. The horror of hope that lit up his face lasted for three gruesome months, and I was careful never to do anything like that again.

Those were our progenitors.

~ ~ ~

There, did you like that? Have l begun to get the feel of a story? Am I making my characters true to life? It occurs to me that you may think that most, or even all of this story is exaggerated, or downright nonsense; that the idea of anyone springing, full-blown as it were, into this life is utter absurdity. My retort is that, although I care about almost nothing, I care about what you think of my story even less. I am totally indifferent to everything. Diane's visitors are more than welcome to use these pages to check their oil. At this moment, the entire idea of writing a journal is loathsome to me.

Saturday, May 14, 1977

I attended a play tonight at the smaller of the university theaters. It was Waltz of the Toreadors, a comedy. For over two hours I managed to forget my job, my childhood, and Diane's lovers.