Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling (27 page)

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About the author

Meet Michael Boccacino

B
ORN IN UPSTATE
N
EW
Y
ORK
and raised in central Florida, Michael blames his love of books on his father, who began reading him the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy when he was six, but stopped when he found out his son had snuck a VHS copy of the animated adaptation because he couldn't wait to see how it ended. Eventually Michael learned enough patience to earn his BA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and his MBA from Rollins College. In addition to writing, Michael likes to travel to far-off places and pretend that he's Indiana Jones, or experiment in the kitchen and convince others that he might not do so terribly on
Iron Chef
. He was quite possibly British in a past life, but he lives in and loves New York City.

 

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About the book

Behind the Book

C
HARLOTTE
M
ARKHAM
began life, quite literally, as a dream. The setup itself was fairly simple: an English governess stood on the side of a dirt road with her two young charges as they consulted a homemade map. They were debating whether or not to enter a forest up ahead and I knew, as dreamers often do, that something terrible awaited them in the woods. I remember being fascinated by where they were going, and the next morning I wrote the first draft of what would become Chapter 4. I filed the scene away, but it didn't really crystallize until my mother died of cancer at the age of forty-four.

I was the only member of my family not at her side when she passed away, mainly for the reasons given by Paul over the course of my novel. Her body was cremated before I could get back home, and so one day she was alive, and the next she was simply gone. I'm not sure I ever completely came to terms with her death, and a lack of closure can play tricks on the mind.

I dreamt of her nearly every night for the next few years, and though we both acknowledged in those dreams that she was supposed to be dead, we continued to have some semblance of a relationship. Sometimes she told me she had eluded Death, that her illness was a mistake, a simple misunderstanding. Or we would fight about old arguments with such ferocity that I would wake up shaking. Occasionally we just sat in a room and talked about our problems. Reconnecting with her in this way fascinated me, and I realized that the children from my previous dream were looking for a way to reunite with the mother they had lost.

Though it seems hard to believe now, it took me a few drafts to realize that I was writing about myself every time I mentioned the Darrows. I knew that I was writing in response to my mother's death, but the deeper I got into my revisions, the more I came to understand that I didn't know
why
I was writing. I was searching for something: a reason why I continued to haunt myself with with my mother's memory.

Two months before her death, she wrote letters to each member of our family to say the things she couldn't verbalize without bursting into tears. I read my letter exactly once in the weeks leading up to her death, when she was too sick to see or speak and the disease peeled away the last pieces that made up the woman we loved. I didn't think about her writings again until this past December, as I struggled to complete my final revisions to the novel.

I was having trouble finding the emotional center of the story, and as I sat in my dad's house during the Christmas holiday, staring at the manuscript on my laptop, I asked him about the letters. He looked far away for a moment, but nodded and said he would figure out where he had put them. A few days went by, and I asked him again. He promised that he would get around to it before I left to go back to New York. He just had to dig them out of his closet, where they sat in a lockbox, untouched and unread since before their author had died. The day I left, he woke me up and handed me a small, nondescript black notebook.

After years of dreaming up imaginary conversations, I held her words in my hands. To say that I was excited sounds morbid, but it would also be an understatement. I'd read my letter once, years before, but I was so distraught at the time that I could hardly remember what she'd written to me. It could have been anything and everything: my relationship with my mother, boiled down, isolated, extracted, and scrawled in her own hand over the course of less than three hundred words; a reason for the dreams; an explanation for the book. I read what she had written:

 

To my son Michael,

I just want to let you know how much I love you and how proud I am of you. You are my little boy, the apple of my eye, always smiling. I remember you teething and drooling on my shoulder. I just loved it until you bit me hard . . .

You are such a creative person. All the leads in plays, etc. Your writing, even though you haven't let me read anything. Your teachers always said how creative you are.

I think you will go very far. You are handsome (beautiful), talented, smart, and very motivated. You are such a joy and the best little boy. You loved to cuddle up with me to watch TV. You loved to read with your dad at night. When you went to college it was the hardest. I couldn't even say your name without crying. Now you are 22 and I know you won't be living at home again and that's ok. I still get sad when you leave.

Dad and I wish we could of helped you more with school. That upsets me. But we didn't have the money; we just didn't plan well.
I'm sorry
. But having you work and go to school has made you independent and that's a good thing. That's what my parents did for me. I think you are a very well adjusted person.

I love you with all my heart and always will. Think of me with happy thoughts. Be happy in your life. Think of all the fun things we have done with our family. You are my
Bud
. You are my son and I love you.

—Mom

 

I surprised myself by smiling instead of crying. It was her voice, real in a way my dreams had never been able to capture, and yet in her last memories I am forever twenty-two, still angry about not getting to go to the expensive private university that would have crushed me beneath a ridiculous amount of debt. People often say that loved ones stay with you after they die, but in a way, reading my mother's letter made me realize that while the departed might stay with you, there's no way for you to stay with them.

A month later I saw my dad again at a cousin's wedding. We were having some wine, and I thanked him for finding the letters. I knew it was painful for him, just as he knew it was important for me to find some way to reconnect with her. He sighed and became visibly uncomfortable before admitting that there was something he had kept from me and my sisters. My mother had a tape recorder with her in the weeks before she died. The doctors thought it would be good for her to record her thoughts. No one else knew about it and he was never able to bring himself to listen to it. It might have been blank, or she might have talked for hours. He was sorry he had never told me, and I put my arm around his shoulder. We said nothing more about the tapes.

Two weeks later, a package arrived at my apartment containing a silver handheld tape recorder. I wrenched it out of the box, popped in some batteries, and placed it gingerly on the table in my living room. I sat cross-legged on my couch and pressed the play button.

“Hi family. It's on Thursday around eleven, and I want to tell you about my day . . . I'm much better,” her voice cracked, and the next few words were unintelligible as she fought back tears. She sounded groggy, and her voice was higher than I remembered. She talked about the people who had visited her, what she had to eat that day, and where she was going, before she settled on addressing each member of our family individually, as she had done in her letters.

“Michael, you do well at anything you touch. You're a very brilliant boy. You're a procrastinator, which you shouldn't be, but you're really a very talented boy; man, I should say. Keep it up and not be such a procrastinator, Bud. You need to get things done and not wait. Like with summer school now, you're struggling, 'cause I'm sick and you have to go to school and work. It's tough for you and I know that. I'm sorry we couldn't help you with school, but . . . that's how it goes sometimes. And we apologize for that. We weren't financially able to. But, anyway. You'll do well in your business degree. I hope you get accepted to Columbia, that'd be awesome.”

I'd forgotten that I was even going to apply to Columbia; another reminder that this was an echo, both of her and the person I was. She went on.

“My lunch just came in, so I'm going to take a few bites, and I'll be back. I love you Michael, Stephanie, Lauren, and my honey. Hopefully I'll be coming home tomorrow, and I think I'll feel a lot better being home. Bye.”

Silence. I let the tape play on, trying to will her voice back into existence, but that was where it ended. She spoke for just over eight minutes. I listened to it again, and again. These were the sad, frightened recollections of a person faced with her own mortality; she didn't offer any revelations about herself. I know no more about my mother today than I did the day she died, and perhaps I never will. But that, I came to realize, is beside the point.

I didn't so much write the novel
to
her, but in response to what happened to her and our family. Now that it's finished, the book will never change, just as the voice on the tape will always apologize for the things that upset her in the weeks leading up to her death. Like the letter and her recording,
Charlotte Markham
is a portrait of a moment in time; the ghost of an emotion to match the one she leaves in my dreams. The two have each other now, and nothing can ever take that away. Not even death.

—Michael Boccacino
March 14, 2012

Read on

Have You Read?

T
HE FOLLOWING BOOKS
were helpful and/or inspirational in the writing of this book.

For Gothic angst:
Jane Eyre
, by Charlotte Brontë, and
Wuthering Heights
, by Emily Brontë

For other problematic governesses:
The Turn of the Screw
, by Henry James

For an examination of mortality:
Never Let Me Go
, by Kazuo Ishiguro

For repressed, unrequited love:
The Remains of the Day
, by Kazuo Ishiguro

For mommy issues and creepiness:
Coraline
, by Neil Gaiman

For one of the best Victorian/ fantasy mash-ups ever written:
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
, by Susanna Clarke

For the Old Ones:
Black Seas of Infinity
, by H. P. Lovecraft, selected by Andrew Wheeler

For the best in new “weird fiction”:
Perdido Street Station
, by China Miéville

For luck: The Harry Potter series, by J. K. Rowling