Miranda, on a Night of Rain

New Fiction from One of the Most Creative and Skilled Zionist Writers of His Generation

Photo by Rich Soul on Unsplash

Editor-In-Chief’s Note: I’ve been a big fan of Benjamin Kerstein’s writing for years, deeply enjoying his Zionist op/eds and appreciating his journalistic coverage of the Middle East. It is deeply satisfying to now support his creative writing by beginning to publish his short fiction. Please follow him on Substack and Twitter. Also read his articles at Jewish News Syndicate and visit his website.

On a moonless night in 1946, Miranda Constance-Byrd went into the rain. Beyond this, almost nothing is known, because she never returned. It is a mystery, and likely an insoluble one. There is only the final memorious image of Miranda, glimpsed through a drenched window, illuminated by a splash of dim light — a little more than nothing at all.

The passage of so many years, so many momentous decades, precludes the survival of a concrete testament to Miranda going out of the world. So, we are driven to distraction wondering if she did indeed go out of the world; or if she simply chose to leave us, and seek the solace of rain. What remains to us? Only the void into which Miranda disappeared.

That void lay beyond the door of 45 Charles Street in Abington, Massachusetts, a relatively affluent suburb of Boston to which the Brahmins repaired as the city itself was consumed by what they saw as the dregs of Europe, disgorged daily from the immigrant boats. A strange place, perhaps, for Miranda; but while Miranda had known hard times, Abington suited her because she was a person of some fame, and in America, fame is enough. It means you are, if not rich, at least loved by a great number of people, and popular acclaim is respected even by the overclass of a democratic society. The republic defers to adoration, and grants it indulgences it would never grant to an unknown but very rich upstart. I do not mean to say that Miranda had achieved universal fame — Charlie Chaplin in his day was far better known and adored — but she was known, and had been known, and was once thought of as possessing an incandescent promise.

The reason was the book. Orantio the Fairy King was published early in 1912, when Miranda was a mere girl of 11 — born in the first year of the new century — and met with instantaneous acclaim and excellent sales. Due to her youth, many naturally believed that she could not possibly be its composer, and that she had been at the very least substantially aided in its composition; but certain manuscript pages, which though in the hand of an 11-year-old nonetheless displayed prose of a quality beyond her years, were produced, and there was soon little question that this child had proved the equal of Lord Dunsany and even the Brothers Grimm. Miranda was declared, by acclamation, the Mozart of American letters, and no doubt destined for literary glory.

I happily admit that I concurred with this assessment. Especially considering the author’s youth, Orantio was a profound work of the imagination. The character of Orantio himself, the great king who fostered a civilization of mystic love and wonder within the Great Green Wood, was no whimsical child’s fantasy; as one read on, he revealed himself as less a benevolent ruler and more a naive fool beset by ignorant hubris, which in turn rendered him helpless before the sudden onslaught led by his great enemy Tryphon the Black. That Tryphon was also Orantio’s own brother — an identical twin, in fact, but for his shock of black hair that counterpointed Orantio’s blond halo — only intensified a sense of irony usually unknown and incomprehensible to children.

It was only much later, with the coming of the Great War, that we discovered Miranda was not only precocious, but prophetic — she had been, of all things, ahead of her time. In her vivid descriptions of the desolated wood following the great battle between Orantio and Tryphon the Black, strewn with the bodies of beautiful Fairykind, their fine castles in the elms reduced to tinder, who could not see what was to come? The trenches, the gas, the shells, the machine guns that chewed men to pulp — she had dreamed it all. Nor could we ignore the uncanny accuracy with which she had depicted the denouement: Orantio, slain in a duel with his wicked brother, has left his one son to preside over the ashes of the wood, the boy having killed Tryphon in turn by means of a cowardly but adept assassin. That is, Miranda had grasped, even before it came, the terrible disillusionment that followed the silence of the guns, when men emerged to wander, bewildered, amongst the remains of a world so devastated that it seemed impossible such a thing as victory could exist. This young authoress seemed to be more acquainted with the horrors of life than those orders of magnitude older than she.

There were explanations offered. Certain literary critics later claimed that the model for both Orantio and Tryphon was Miranda’s father Herbert, who was a man with a certain benign countenance and Orantio’s blond mane. And like Orantio, Herbert often appeared to be a well-meaning but clumsy despot. Certainly, he cultivated Miranda’s imagination: as a literary agent himself, he had surrounded her with books and tales, from children’s stories to the latest masterpieces of the day, and carefully nurtured her talent. He instinctively recognized that she had penned a masterpiece, and thanks to his connections assured its publication.

But there was also a hint — and sometimes more than a hint — of Tryphon about the man. Herbert was himself a frustrated author, mostly producing mediocre short stories; so, once Miranda became a sensation, he had to face the inevitable envy that comes when one of your own blood finds success, and thus power, that so far outstrips your own; and who was to say that she was more deserving than he? There likely was, there must have been, a mute jealousy at work in him. Herbert, like Tryphon, was also enormously ambitious; but in Herbert’s case, this ambition decoupled itself, and came to rest on Miranda. It was never overt, and certainly never spoken, and she herself never even hinted at it, but there is little doubt that the dreams and failures of the father had descended upon the daughter. One wonders if, in her merciless destruction of the beautiful Orantio, Miranda was wreaking a terrible revenge upon Herbert — ensuring that he would be canonized forever as the fallen king who cannot even save himself, but nonetheless presumes and pretends to be the savior of an entire world.

But who, in good conscience, could gainsay Herbert? Behind every great fortune, as they say, lies a crime. It may be true that Herbert made terrible use of his daughter as a surrogate for his own ambitions; but it is impossible to deny the enormity of his achievement. Whatever price he may have exacted from Miranda, she nonetheless gave us what we all know to be a great work; and had her gift been left to lie fallow, would she have been happier?

In the end, it may be that, all unknowing, Miranda anticipated that this odd partnership of father and daughter was in some measure a tragedy. Herbert’s ultimate abandonment of Miranda and her mother Helen in favor of his social secretary Mabel Morrison would constitute, without doubt, a terrible ordeal for Miranda; but she nonetheless did love that selfish, unworthy man who, perhaps for the worst of reasons, had given her so much.

In truth, the burden of Herbert’s treason fell heaviest not upon Miranda, but her mother Helen. Helen found herself first neglected in favor of her shining child, and then abandoned by the man in whom she, as women did back then, placed all her hopes and affection — her fate and destiny, in fact. It may be that it was Helen’s stoic acceptance of this, her uncomplaining absorption of it all, that ultimately led Miranda to hate her. Few who did not know Miranda, but all who did, came to see an anticipation of this in the person of Miranda’s Desmoiselles — Orantio’s winsome fairy maid, who as she grows old dutifully sews his clothes, cooks his meals, shines his saber, and does numerous other menial tasks, ever worshipful and genuflective before that great and feckless ruler. Desmoiselles was a worshiper of an unworthy object, and thus condemned and selfcondemning; a creature, in other words, without hope. 

At the time, this character was ignored as a cliché, which perhaps it was, but we are all in our own way clichés; since life, in its cruelty, takes so few forms. As a result, the critics failed to note that perhaps the most insightful and tragic aspect of Orantio was the sad fate of Desmoiselles. As the story proceeds, it becomes clear that, by some strange osmosis, Demoiselles’ own vital principle is intimately connected to Orantio’s. As he grows powerful, so does she in her own small way; and as he weakens and, ultimately, dies, so does she languish and decay. It is only as she lies on her tiny deathbed, with Orantio already slain, that she realizes it did not have to be. She shows her few companions who have gathered for the death vigil a silver thread, hanging slack, its color dunned by time. Desmoiselles sighs and murmurs, “How easily it could have been cut.” Then she weeps and, closing her eyes, passes out of the world. A small child fairy then remarks that he had seen the thread before, but once it had been shining and beautiful, perhaps the most shining and beautiful of its kind in all the world. It was only in the brief hours since the great king’s death, said the childfairy, that it had begun to decay.

I wonder now if Miranda knew even then that, at some point, a choice might have to be made; a choice her mother had chosen not to make and because of this shared the fate of Desmoiselles; and perhaps Miranda was telling us, if she did indeed choose, why she had chosen as she did. It is possible that Miranda was not merely penning an expression of empathy toward her mother that she neither could nor would express in life, but was in fact making something like a declaration. She was telling us, as a girl of 11, precisely what she would and would not do; and I wonder whether, in the end, she made good on that threat.

I believe it was this quiet sense of tragedy, astounding in one so young, that made Orantio such a success among all ages. Within weeks of publication, it was already clear that, though written by a child, Orantio was by no means a children’s book. A children’s book may do quite well, but it does not sell out four printings within a year; nor does its author of tender age become such an instant object of bewildered fascination.

And fascinated they were. With Herbert on her arm, little Miranda became, in that brief moment of respite before the war, a star; and not only upon the literary firmament. She was sired from salon to salon, always the center of attention, always queried first on her favorite color or animal, but then very soon interrogated thoroughly on such things as the development of her inimitable style and her thoughts on the deeper resonances of the fairy tale in light of the recent and quite controversial theories proffered by a certain Dr. Freud. I do not mean to say that Miranda could hold her own in a discussion of the Viennese alienist; but she was quick-witted and possessed that intuitive gift common in children to an unusual degree. Once it was described to her with some clarity and simplification, she seemed able to grasp almost anything, and then formulate a response that, while not overly original or insightful, was nonetheless impressive from someone who knew nothing — could know nothing — of the world. Like most writers, she was a gifted observer of what people wanted to hear.

It was not long before these performances in the drawing rooms of the New York nobility became one of those things “everybody talked about.” The newspapers soon came calling; at first for interviews — so many that Miranda and Herbert were forced to block out two full days a week exclusively dedicated to them — but then for Miranda’s own writing. This was the age of the dailies, the nation lived in newsprint, and Miranda wrote for almost all of them. She began with brief columns in the children’s supplements each weekend; but soon she was writing about nearly everything: literature (of course), fashion, cooking, homemaking, painting, high society, education of the young, agony advice, and even the occasional foray into politics (she disapproved strongly of the Wilson administration).

But most of all, Miranda wrote about the photoplays. It was the art’s age of infancy, and we were all newly transfixed — as no generation could be again, because we were the first — by those images dancing before us; and by the new palaces that dotted the great cities, the memory of their beauty still undimmed by time, where one could see them. To us, the silents seemed like a life that had become more than life, a land of beautiful ghosts dancing mute in black and white, alien to the violent and convulsive colors of the world.

This sensation was shared by all of us, but by Miranda most of all, and it was in her monthly photoplay column that it found expression. There, she sang of the tragic beauty of Charlie Chaplin, the winsome loss in the eyes of Lillian Gish, the muscular agnosticism of Douglas Fairbanks, the staid dignity of Buster Keaton (so often insulted by the material world) — all the glittering stars of the time, the luminous constellation that has long since gone dark.

I see now that, in this too, Miranda was ahead of her time. Today, fame is a thing that, we believe, has always existed and always will exist; but in those ancient days, it was as new as we felt the world itself to be; new as those ghosts projected before us in the golden palaces. Men had been famous before, but they had won fame by means of some great work — and still do, even today -— but what the photoplays ushered in was new: the man or woman who won renown not by deeds but by becoming a ghost. A ghost that haunted both the alabaster screen and the insurmountable world of forms; and we dearly wished that the two might be the same. We wanted both the ghost Chaplin and the Chaplin of the flesh; but we could know nothing of Chaplin except his ghost; and even when I met him, I found that, at least among friendly strangers, he was determined to remain a ghost. The flesh was studiously concealed. 

It was this that Miranda, before almost anyone else, understood; perhaps because she knew what it was to be a type of ghost, and to wear the mask of a ghost — the ghost of the wondrous child “wise beyond her years.” How mysterious it must have seemed to that young girl, and how deftly she maneuvered and anatomized that mystery. Whether she solved it, none can say; though perhaps, in the end, she did so by becoming a mystery herself.

Then the war came. And when it passed, we found a world in which we all wanted to enjoy ourselves, to make money, to drink deep despite the law, and to contemplate the possibility of an endless normalcy; a normalcy in which the world would simply go on forever as it was, with its aeroplanes and cars and telephones and radios and all the other glittering things. And how glittering was the world back then; how proudly we Americans stood astride the world, enjoying all its benefits and none of its costs. We could live at last as we wished.

In the midst of this newly intensified existence, we also found another Miranda; because in the mad rush of history, ignited by war and disappointed by peace, we had forgotten all about her. This was, to some extent, her own doing. She deeply despised and opposed the war; so much so that, when it arrived, she found herself suddenly discredited and disliked by all. The daemon of combat had taken hold of the country, and when it became clear that Miranda would neither revise nor recant her opposition, one by one the newspapers dispensed with her services, the society admirers fell away, there were no more lectures or parties to attend, and no more awards given. In their place came a wave of denunciations from her former friends and colleagues; and even these ultimately fell away, until obscurity consumed her.

It was only when it was all over, when the fever had broken and the golden age of money arrived, that we were prepared for Miranda again. With the end of the war, there was no further reason to ostracize her, and many were more than willing to contemplate the possibility that she had been right all along; so, as the parties resumed and high society reconvened, we found her on our minds and in our midst; and we were shocked to discover that, during the long interregnum, Miranda had grown up. I well remember my first glimpse of her, at the salon of a noted critic whose parties were always open to the luminaries of the literary world. The 11-year-old wonder-child was gone. It was 1921 and she was 20 — slender, petite, and with her famous blond locks carefully bobbed. This new Miranda, we realized with astonishment, was all flapper, all new woman, one of the first to emerge in full. As I watched her that night, saw her smoke and drink and swear, arousing the ardent admiration of men and the scandalized jealousy of women, I sensed with mounting anxiety that something new and previously unknown was aborning; that women were not the same and would not be the same. The war or money or the rush of invention that had convulsed the nation had opened a Pandora’s Box, and what escaped might be fine and glorious or terrifying and evil — perhaps both — but whatever it was, it had come, and had chosen Miranda as its first representative. Or, perhaps, she had chosen it.

When Miranda and I made love that night in my room at the Savoy Hotel on Fifth Avenue, she revealed nothing to me but the intensity of her pleasure, her impossibly soft skin stretched taut as the rictus I saw on her face, the clawing fingers on my back shameless but defiantly alive. This was a woman I had never known before. She cared nothing for tenderness or mercy or maternal affection; she was simply wracked with a violent paroxysm, telling me with each shudder of her body that she too was a living thing. When dawn broke, she kissed me on the cheek and disappeared into the city. I knew as I lay among the mangled bedsheets that I would never see her again, and I was right.

The ghost of Miranda was inescapable, however. As in the old days, she was everywhere again: the newspapers, the magazines, the radio, even the occasional university lecture. Her column had graduated from the Hearst press to a regular slot at the Saturday Evening Post, and her lacerating wit was soon universally seen as Dorothy Parker’s only serious competition. She even obtained an audience with president Coolidge, which she then chronicled in a devastating satirical essay, earning her the brief rebuke “didn’t read” from the famously laconic statesman. She brought back firsthand reports from the infant Hollywood, in which she observed and interviewed some of the glittering ghosts — Chaplin, Fairbanks, Keaton, Pickford, Arbuckle (before his disgrace) — to whom she had once written paeans from afar. There were even rumors of an affair with Joseph P. Kennedy; though this, even given Miranda’s daring appetites, I believe to be untrue. Her whispered liaison with a young Irving Thalberg, however, has been privately confirmed to me.

Amidst this whirlwind, Miranda also began to write about jazz, which though it eventually gave its name to the age, was still regarded with suspicion and disdain by men of letters. She wrote of this new music from its homes in speakeasies and nightclubs; and from the back rooms where the musicians gathered late at night to play for no one but themselves. Miranda extolled its melodies when others spoke only of its rhythms; its stark beauty where others saw only primal, savage intensity; and the great release it granted its initiates, on which everyone else remained silent, terrified of the proximity to orgasm. Soon, she had several musicians under her wing, providing generously for their upkeep via the high fees her writing now commanded; and her Park Avenue apartment, much to the chagrin of the neighbors, became a Mecca for musicians seeking a late-night venue, with drummers striking the antique dinner table with sticks and the likes of Duke Ellington sounding chords on her grand piano.

I believe Miranda loved jazz because, like her, it was a music that desperately longed to be free; but for her and it, freedom was a terrible struggle. Jazz might fly off into improvised tangents of wild intensity, but it was nonetheless hemmed in by the reality of the twelve tones; by scales that were not inexhaustible; and, of course, by the demands of an audience that knew what it wanted to hear, even when the musicians refused to give it to them. Like jazz, Miranda was hurling herself against the walls, and with jazz she felt those limitations had, for a brief moment, collapsed, and she was finally at liberty — free to become whatever she truly was.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the Jazz Age was Miranda’s age; she was at the height of her powers; she ruled over something like a dominion. Millions read her, millions loved her, other millions hated her; but she could not be ignored. The great world spirit seemed to have merged with her own, and unlike so many of us, she experienced that rare feeling of being exactly where she was supposed to be.

Today, those few who remember believe it began to go wrong when Herbert committed his terrible betrayal. It was, of course, not so unusual for men to take up with their social secretaries; but it was very unusual for them to leave their wife and famous child in order to marry their social secretary. Precisely how Miranda was given the news is unknown; she never spoke of it, and neither did any other party to it; but we do know that, soon after the story was blazoned across the scandal sheets, Miranda went silent for the first time in a decade. A few articles and essays appeared, but those of us familiar with the publishing world understood that they had been “in the pipeline” long before the scandal broke; and once six months had passed, we all knew, if we did not dare to say, that Miranda had put down her pen.

In some ways, we had expected something like this silence. Miranda needed time to mourn the monstrous and loving father who had given her so much, and I believe she would have done so. Herbert’s betrayal was not the decisive blow. It weakened her, but she would have written again had it not been for Gregory Forster.

Precisely where she met him, I do not know; though I imagine it was at one of the innumerable society events that feted Miranda at her peak. He was of that species of tall, boisterous men who in those days ruled the stock market — which meant that, to some extent, they ruled the country — and was possessed of a minor fortune that he was busy expanding into a large one. More to the point, he was a fixture on the Manhattan social scene; though because he was without the cultivated, patrician air that Miranda effortlessly possessed, he was forced to buy his way in, and was seen by the best people as not one of the best people. This changed when he took up with Miranda, because suddenly you could not have Miranda without Gregory, and everyone wanted to have Miranda. So now they not only had to tolerate Gregory, they had to like Gregory, to be enthusiastic about Gregory — and so they were. Inevitably, we began to see Gregory’s ghost grinning out of newspaper photographs, read of Gregory in the society pages, and hear of Gregory on the tongues of highborn gossips, of which there were many. Gregory was, quite suddenly, significant.

The reaction on the part of the more thoughtful witnesses, and I hope I was one of them, was not so much irritation but bewilderment: what did this talented young woman see in this big, coarse, blustering man? No one ever seemed to have a satisfactory answer to this question, but now that I am old, I believe I have one. What was Gregory Forster, after all, if not the polar opposite of Herbert? One was erudite and educated, the other blasé and ignorant; one was deeply concerned with social graces, the other unconcerned who he offended; one was a believer in the life of the mind, the other saw value in money and nothing else; one placed the interests of literature before his own, the other had no interests except his own. Miranda, I was certain, had chosen Gregory because he was not Herbert.

At the time, no one I knew believed that this strange courtship would amount to anything. Miranda had stepped out with numerous suitors, many of far higher quality than Gregory, and all were ultimately discarded; and the truth is that most people did not want to contemplate the possibility of that shining girl bound for life to a specimen of America’s vulgar manhood — so they decided that it could simply never happen. They were proved wrong when, six months into Miranda’s renewed silence, a brief missive in the New York Times informed us that acclaimed children’s author Miranda Constance-Byrd and businessman Gregory Forster had married in a brief ceremony.

The explosion of scandalized gossip was immediate, especially after it emerged that Miranda and Gregory had repaired to Rio de Janeiro for their nuptials, and were now planning to honeymoon via a raft trip down the Amazon. Dispatches from the field by intrepid reporters — most highly fanciful — chronicled the voyage, including Gregory’s bout with cholera, the loss of a guide to a six-foot caiman, and the party’s triumphant return to Rio, the happy couple looking noticeably thinner but otherwise unscathed. Smiling broadly, they posed for photographs with the medals awarded them by the president of Brazil and expressed their enthusiasm at the prospect of a swift return to New York. Shortly after, it was announced to much fanfare that Miranda had received a then-extraordinary advance of $5,000 from Knopf for a memoir of the voyage. The publishing industry was astounded; not merely at the outlay of cash, but at the prospect of a thrilling tale of love and adventure on the Amazon by the supreme literary prodigy of our time. No one thought it was money badly spent. Miranda was bestride the world.

But Miranda was destined to be forgotten once again. Two days after the announcement, the world shook upon its axis. Gregory’s precious stock market collapsed, then the banks failed, followed by everything else, and the bust took hold. The glittering lights that had shone for barely a decade went dark. For many months — and for some, many years — we were preoccupied with a new purgatory. We lamented over the loss of fortunes, the liquidation of assets, the terrible retribution exacted by imprudent investments, and then, among some, outrage at the new exactions of the Roosevelt administration: the cost that the wealthy bore for the sake of the New Deal, which, though they remained wealthy, they nonetheless despised for not leaving them wealthy enough. The times, in other words, devoured us. Even the Savoy Hotel, where I had known the oceanic depths inside Miranda for those few fleeting hours, was gone, folded away into the detritus of a fallen world. There were still ghosts upon the screens, of course, and we watched them eagerly for respite from our horrors; but now we too felt like ghosts, gray in the receding light, wondering if we were dead or if life were dead; if nothing would or ever could be beautiful again.

It took some time for most of us to raise our heads and look around; to take stock of just what and who was left standing after the worst of the storm had passed. It was then that a few of us — literary men, mostly — realized that Miranda had not written in a very long time. There was no sign of her long-forgotten chronicle of Amazon adventure; there had been no talk of it since that announcement so long ago and in another world; and even those with connections in the publishing world found that no one seemed to have any idea what had happened to it, or to Miranda herself.

There were rumors, of course; there always are: Some said Gregory and Miranda had moved to Paris, which was plausible given the colony of American expatriates there; and the thought of that beautiful couple alongside the likes of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald was pleasant to us; but as the political situation in Europe worsened, it was considered increasingly unlikely. Others said that Gregory and Miranda were on an around-the-world cruise, which Miranda would chronicle in a book of which the Amazon adventure would constitute only a single chapter; but since no such book was ever even rumored to exist, this theory too was discarded. It was also suggested that Gregory and Miranda had gone to Hollywood, one of the few industries that had remained profitable throughout the bust, and she was now writing photoplays for the ghosts she had always loved; but contacts on the west coast refuted this almost immediately. There were more fanciful rumors as well: the North Pole, Paraguay, the South Seas, Tibet… none of which were credible.

Then the second war came, and we once again forgot Miranda completely. The great armies and all the ships at sea battered each other, thoughts turned to Pearl Harbor and Stalingrad and Omaha Beach and finally Berlin and Hiroshima. And when it was over, we awoke again to a world that had mauled itself beyond all recognition; broken and bloodied with its death camps and shattered cities and so many millions of dead that life itself seemed to have become a numerical abstraction. How far we were then from Miranda’s beautiful kingdom of the fairies; how correctly, in that kingdom’s fall, had she predicted the fall of our own kingdom; and now there was almost nothing left of it, and nothing left of her.

It was only in the late spring of 1947 that I was, quite suddenly, reminded of Miranda. In a secondhand bookshop in Greenwich Village, I happened across a now-ragged first edition of Orantio the Fairy King, now Miranda’s only novel. At home, as I leafed through it, I was struck for the first time by its remarkable prescience. Here, by some strange alchemy, was the history of our times, played out in a child’s tale in a child’s hand, long before it had ever occurred. Miranda, I realized, had been our Cassandra, and if only we had listened to her instead of merely adoring her.

So, I began to contemplate Miranda again. Was she still writing? If so, what had she written? Were there further prophecies to be had? And I saw her face in the dim light of the table lamp, her small hands on my back, the scent of her sex as she arched beneath me; and I found that I wanted to know what had happened to her. How had she ridden out those years of poverty and war? And what was the terrible secret behind her long and inexplicable silence?

My inquiries were discreet. First, there were quiet conversations with friends, then letters exchanged with those who worked and celebrated with her, and with my contacts in the publishing industry. After that came consultations with her inner circle of friends and family; and finally, with Helen. Helen was, after all, more or less the last witness, as Herbert had died more than a decade before at an unadvanced age. Slowly, I began to piece together the outlines of a narrative both banal and terrifying; banal, at least, until its denouement, which was so like the beautiful and terrible world Miranda herself had conjured.

It went like this: Following Miranda and Gregory’s return from the Amazon, the bust had annihilated Gregory’s holdings and decimated what remained of his inheritance. For some years, he sank into a stupor of debauchery compounded by infidelity; that is to say, he drank, and then did as drunken men of blunt charm often do. For Miranda, who had already known betrayal by one man in her life, this was devastating. She had chosen Gregory because he was not Herbert; but now Gregory had proved to be very like Herbert indeed; in fact, worse than Herbert, because Gregory’s betrayal was not singular and shocking, but repeated and constant; it had a terrible multiplicity, a compounded treason.

It is not surprising, then, that Miranda, like the country — and Miranda was always so like the country — sank into melancholy. She rarely left the Park Avenue apartment, saw few visitors, and produced no work; at least none that anybody was aware of. What precisely transpired in that apartment as the months became years remains largely unknown, even to those few who knew her best; because so few were granted entry to Miranda’s sanctum. Only two were willing to recount their journey inside, and both revealed little, because little was revealed to them. Miranda appeared to each of them in the same diaphanous and somewhat threadbare white gown, her once luxurious black hair now flecked with premature gray. Her speech was slow and measured, lacking all the speed and verve for which she had once been famous; and her eyes were dulled, rather than the luxurious green so many remembered from her youth. Miranda sat with her guests for tea, and they spoke only of small things, as if it had not been years since they last spoke; none of the guests having the courage to request an explanation for her reclusive silence. Even to mention Gregory’s name, they sensed, would be a violation of Miranda’s near-pathological insistence on privacy. They left no wiser than they had come.

There were rumors, of course, and I heard them all: a lost child, or perhaps an abortion; a predilection for excessive consumption of strong drink or substances even more drastic; money troubles brought about by Gregory’s sloth and profligate ways; an innate tendency to melancholy that had finally extinguished her spirit; inconsolable grief at the death of Herbert — endless possibilities were mooted. Some even went so far as to say, no, Miranda was indeed writing; she was hard at work on that masterpiece we had expected for so long; a masterpiece that would place her at the head of American letters; and her reclusive silence was merely Miranda’s flair for drama. She planned to confound all expectations, to shock and stun the world with a phoenix-like return.

There was not the slightest hint that such a thing was in the offing, but the will to believe in it spoke well of us. It showed that, in the end, our dearest wish was for Miranda to return, to be among us again, and to be even greater than the glittering girl the world once knew. The vagaries of that world had taught us all that we were very slowly growing old; and for the comfort of it alone, we wanted Miranda, with her child’s imagination, to grow old with us. Instead, she was frozen in time, like Chaplin, ever tumbling and tarnished; like Fairbanks, ever lithe and fierce; but no screen had ever captured Miranda; we alone had to carry the burden of her ghost. We all wished that there might be more than this; but there was not, and never would be.

What I found, in the end, was that I was a year too late. The details of Miranda’s 1946, meagre as they were, came to me via the clipping service I employed when all other rivers ran dry. They revealed that the rumors of a dwindling fortune were accurate, and Miranda and the usually absent Gregory were forced by circumstance to vacate the Park Avenue apartment and repair to Abington, Massachusetts. As I have said, Abington was a domain of the rich, but it required an outlay of capital considerably smaller than Manhattan; so, in the end, it was a compromise between expense and prestige, and probably the best they could do.

They acquired a small, antique two-story house on Charles Street, off of Abington’s main thoroughfare, if a word like “thoroughfare” can be used to describe any street in a town so small. It was the type of place everyone calls “quiet,” with drooping elms shading the sidewalk, overgrown gardens around houses that stood across from low-rise stone apartment buildings, and only two streetlights — one at each end — that left Miranda’s house draped in something like perpetual darkness each night but for a small light above the doorway, which was comforting in the humid summers and depressing during the long New England winters. The house itself was in the colonial style, painted a soft tan that gave the impression of bare wood, with large windows whose overhanging eaves were carved in the shape of flowers and grapes — a strange contrast with the otherwise austere aesthetic, and likely a later addition by a more baroque-minded owner. Of its interior appointments, I cannot speak, as no one I could interrogate had ever been inside, and the newspaper reports contained no relevant information.

Gazing at the photographs of that house, however — always face-on, those high windows staring out like a pair of angular eyes — I have never felt anything other than a profound sense of unease. It may be because I know what eventually happened there, but there is nothing about that house that I like, nothing in it that I care to know or think of; though I had to think about it, if I was to know the truth…

For some time, the house on Charles Street had been notorious in Abington. By this point, Miranda and Gregory’s marriage was quite volatile. Neighbors spoke of frenzied arguments taking place with increasing frequency and duration, often stretching long into the night. Due to the house’s detached location and thick walls, no one ever succeeded in discerning precisely what the altercations were about, but they were soon the talk of the town, and on several occasions the neighbors called the police, both because their sleep was disturbed and because they feared possible violence. But the police never found anything more untoward than a husband and wife who appeared to hate each other, and there was little they could do when confronted at the door by Gregory — it was always Gregory — except issue a warning and occasionally a fine for violating town ordinances against excessive noise beyond a certain hour of the evening.

The night of August 14, 1946 was a night of rain, with the tail end of a summer hurricane, not unusual in New England, pounding the roofs and pavements of Abington. It was a storm rain, a rain that drenches the earth and everyone upon it, ricocheting off the ground like ocean spray. There was occasional lightning, followed almost immediately by eruptions of thunder that shook windows across the town. Gregory would later recall in his statement to the police that he and Miranda had been arguing for some time, perhaps longer than ever before; about what, he couldn’t remember, because he had been very drunk, and Miranda only slightly less so. He remembered clearly, however, that at or near 11:30 pm, Miranda took her coat and stalked out of the house, slamming the door behind her.

An elderly woman who lived across the street in a ground-floor apartment was sitting beside the window and admiring the rain — as some do — at that moment, and she would testify that she saw the door to 45 Charles Street open, a figure step out, descend the stairs, turn right, and disappear into the rain. This was the last sighting of Miranda Constance-Byrd (as Miranda) on Earth.

It took several weeks for the full implications of that night to enter the official record. According to Gregory, he simply lay down on the sofa and descended into a drunken sleep. He woke up at noon the next day with a hangover that he quickly nursed with whiskey, and thought nothing of Miranda’s apparent absence. He assumed his wife had simply repaired elsewhere; perhaps to a hotel, perhaps to her mother’s residence on Long Island. After several days, however — again, so he said — Gregory was disturbed enough to make halting inquiries. He spoke to Helen by phone, but she had heard nothing from Miranda since an outing for cocktails more than a month before. He made the rounds of the friends and relatives listed in the datebook Miranda had left behind, but most had not seen her in several years, and those that had knew nothing of her whereabouts. Gregory stated that this was when certain morbid possibilities began to suggest themselves. A month after the night of rain, he contacted the police.

This was an age long before such vanishings were almost automatically assumed to be the result of foul play, so the first reaction to them was usually something like benign neglect. This was even more the case in Abington, which was relatively crimeless — as was most of the country back then — and as a result, it is likely that the authorities suffered from a failure of imagination. Sinister explanations did not even occur to them, at least not in those early months. Faced with Gregory, they mostly dismissed his concerns, telling him that, in all likelihood, it was the domestic dispute that had driven Miranda away, and once she had tasted the cruelty of life without a husband, she would inevitably return. They also noted, somewhat less sympathetically, that if she did not, it was after all her right to leave if she wished to; even if they found her, they had no right to force her to come back.

Gregory appears to have accepted this, and made no further inquiries; as a result, for all practical purposes, almost no one — interested or uninterested — had any idea that the thing had actually happened. We all lived in blissful ignorance, and perhaps this was our fault; to us, after all, Miranda had vanished long ago.

This general ignorance was so profound that it took another year before news of the incident reached the outside world. It came via Helen, who despite Gregory’s reassurances had grown increasingly concerned. She finally informed the Abington Gazette of the incident and granted them a generous interview when they showed considerable interest in the story. “Acclaimed child author disappears,” after all, made an excellent headline. Although Gregory did not consent to an interview, the Gazette did acquire his initial statement to the police, and then went door to door along Charles Street until they found the witness at the window who caught the thus far final glimpse of Miranda as she went into the rain. As a result, they were fairly successful at reconstructing the basic facts of the event.

The centerpiece of the article was Helen, who gave a full and frank account of Miranda’s recent troubles, and hinted — perhaps more than hinted — that she considered Gregory the prime suspect in what was likely a terrible crime. Needless to say, this was impossible to prove, and contradicted the testimony of the witness at the window, who stated that, while the receding form of Miranda had an agitated gait, it appeared to be otherwise unharmed. The Gazette, with admirable integrity, noted all of this, but nonetheless left the question of foul play very much open. After all, even if Gregory was uninvolved, how easy it would have been for Miranda to have encountered some monster in the rain. The Gazette did note, however, that there were several other plausible scenarios: Miranda might have met with an accident, or run off with an otherwise unknown lover. There was even the discreet but palpable implication of a possible suicide, given that there was no doubt Miranda had been upset and despondent that night. 

The final scenario offered by the Gazette was the most banal but perhaps the most likely: Miranda had chosen to disappear. Exhausted by a turbulent marriage and the downturn in her fortunes, she may have simply detonated her life and started a new one, likely somewhere to the West, where so many have gone to become someone else.

There was another possibility, however, that was proposed by no one. I believe it to be mine alone, and so I keep it for myself: perhaps some great compelling force, rising up out of the past, came that night and swallowed her. Perhaps she even invited it, knew it was coming, went out to meet it in the rain, and gave herself to it. Was it the shade of Herbert, the only man she had ever truly loved? Or his alter ego, Orantio, who Miranda had created as a child in order to make herself whole?

When I saw Charles Street for myself many years later, steadying myself on a cane and squinting to make out the numbers on the buildings, I found what I thought was proof of my speculations; because now even the house itself has disappeared. There is a 44 Charles Street and a 46, but 45 is gone, if it ever existed at all. There is now an apartment building, a brace of trees, and a community center, with no sign of the eldritch colonial from which Miranda decamped on the night of rain. Whatever came for Miranda, it must have been terribly powerful; it not only swallowed her, but consumed the house itself; and with it, any memory of what had transpired there. It does not wish to be found.

But I am not a mystic, and I know that this is impossible. The truth I have often sought to avoid is that the most likely explanation for Miranda and what happened to Miranda is indeed the most banal. She simply decided that she no longer wished to live this particular life, so she set out to find another. She could have gone anywhere and become anything: a secretary in Los Angeles, a farmer’s wife in Nebraska, a schoolteacher in Georgia, or more exotically a voyager down some great river or up a great mountain, searching for cities of gold and the roof of the world.

If this is true, then only one thing is certain: if Miranda simply became someone else — so she could continue being, in her own way, Miranda — then she would be a very old woman by now, nearly as old as I am. And I have grown old, watching as all the tragedians leave the stage. Helen died five years after her interview with the Gazette, still believing that Gregory had done some terrible thing on that night of rain. Gregory himself finally succeeded in drinking himself to death in a dingy hotel room in Kenmore Square, a week before the assassination of president Kennedy. His abused liver ceased to function, and he was found three days later in a state of decay by a cleaning woman. Along with them went all the friends and admirers who loved Miranda in the halcyon days: the publishers and critics, the readers and writers, the gossips and frauds, the lovers and enemies, and the friends false and true — until only I remained.

Now, my hands shake from time to time; my bones ache during the long winters; my limbs have grown thin, sagging, and atrophied; and more and more I forget things large and small — but I have not forgotten Miranda. The arms that once held her are weak, but the memory of her flesh remains. I know that she was real. Every year, I read Orantio again, hoping that a skeleton key to Miranda’s fate might be concealed within it; but I have not found it yet, and time is running out. Time is all there is, and I do not expect it to be any kinder to me than it already has. I wonder if time has been kind to Miranda. Perhaps she is still out there, and perhaps she is happy. If so, I hope she knows how much I loved her.