In the mass of things needing to be done in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death, the task of contacting her friends about the funeral fell to me. Her address book was an enormous gray spring binder, creased and dilapidated, but still bearing the faded insignia of my father’s old firm, where it had originally been prepared. It contained a thick sheaf of old printer paper—the kind you had to pull apart along the perforations after each printing job—interspersed with newer sheets of miscellaneous size, added as need arose. In the years since my father’s death my mother had done her diligent best to keep it up to date, scribbling or whiting out obsolete addresses, ­writing down the new ones in her increasingly unsteady hand, adding email addresses and mobile phone numbers as those things came into existence, crossing out the names of deceased friends with an eloquent single line of ink (apparently she couldn’t bring herself to consign them to total oblivion with the white-out brush), and inserting an occasional more recent acquaintance, sometimes on a thin snippet of fresh paper pasted onto the overcrowded ­original sheet.

Going through it was an unsettling experience. The names of my parents’ friends, living and dead, already had a certain talismanic significance for me. Together they brought back a powerful aura of that vanished world, which had come to seem about as remote, in my eyes, as that of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, and almost as heroic. That much I could have predicted. What I hadn’t reckoned on was finding myself back in the force field of Marco Rosedale’s saga. It hadn’t exactly been at the forefront of my mind since my mother’s stroke, so it was a surprise to be confronted by the names of so many of its principle players as I turned the pages.

Marco’s parents, Alec and Gabriella Rosedale, were there, their unchanged information testifying to a rare marital and geographic stability. Renata Shenker, proprietor of Whitethorne Press, was there, along with her neatly crossed-out late husband Otto. And Julia was there, too. She and my mother had of course been close once, but that was at a time before even this ancient tome had been compiled, before personal computers and perforated printing paper had been invented. She’d faded from our lives, and I was under the impression that she and my mother had lost touch.