Most people are familiar with Casey’s more famous work. Her story “Kitchen Things,” about a woman who made a set of silverware from her husband’s bones, was taught in a lot of college classes alongside “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” English 220: Gothic Literature. “And of his femur I made a serving spoon.”

They stop at the broad white steps of the library, and Cora steals the last sip of Esther’s coffee before giving her a mocha-flavored kiss. “When do you think you’ll be done?”

Esther bites her lip. Cora’s said she’s fine entertaining herself while Esther works—It’s D.C., she said, I’ve never been before. I won’t be bored—but Esther still doesn’t feel right saying she’ll probably be here until the library closes. And back the next day. “I’m not sure.”

Cora gives her a fond, tolerant look, which comforts Esther even as it irritates her. “Do you want to meet for lunch?”

Relieved, Esther nods. “Come back and get me when you’re hungry?”

“No problem.” Cora shakes her hair out, dislodging a little tumble of glittering snow, and clasps Esther’s shoulder for a second, firm and steadying. “Good luck,” she says, with an earnestness that Esther cannot help but smile back at, grateful.

When Cora waves goodbye, her bony fingers stand over the wool cuff of her coat like birthday candles. Esther is occasionally astonished by the beauty of Cora’s individual components. This is—arguably—Esther’s first real relationship, and she’s unused to this new kind of intimacy; noticing the poetry of someone’s knuckles, the fracture lines of dark hair sweat-stuck to a throat.

The manuscript reading room is less lovely than the rest of the library. No marble statues, no blue-and-gold frescoes. The room reminds Esther of college: the flat ceiling LEDs, plain tables, pocked navy carpeting. At the librarian’s desk, Esther turns in her bag and identifies herself as the woman who called about the Anais Casey boxes. She feels, even as she recites this legitimizing phrase, like a trespasser.

The first story in Housecat, Wildcat is small and sad, a silver button of tragedy called “Slack Your Rope.” It’s a monologue delivered by a woman whose lover is to be hanged the next day. The narrator will not name her lover or say what he is hanging for. It seems as though, in the patter of her speech, she is being asked by some invisible interviewer and refusing. “That part is not important. I won’t tell you. I don’t have to.” And then, on the last page, she begins to list the things she would trade so he could be allowed to live:

I would give you the sight of my eyes, I would give you my eldest daughter, I would give you myself, I would give you my little house with the thatched roof, I would give you my son in my stomach, I would give you my shoes.

* * *

Anais Casey was born Anais Hamilton in 1918 and raised unglamorously in a lower-middle-class suburb of New York. Her father was a translator and traveled often. Her mother was an alcoholic of the housewife variety, and so Anais was raised primarily by an older sister, Victoria, with whom she mostly quarreled.