Esther pictures Anais as very narrow, thinks of her as someone who fails to take up space. She feels a little guilty for this imagining, does not want to understand Anais as young and thin and pale and pretty, but she pictures her with too much tenderness to do otherwise. Tenderness and beauty are inextricable for Esther, though she wishes that they weren’t and that her understanding of beauty was different.

Esther cannot say exactly when she began to fall in love. It’s not a process she wants to minimize by pinning it somewhere specific, to an exact line in an exact story. But, in the titular story of Housecat, Wildcat, a girl, Tabby, goes away to boarding school and makes a friend, Alice, who is angelic, all gold and loveliness. It reads like a chapter of Jane Eyre until the two girls get up one morning and, without any reason, hold hands and walk into the woods. The rest of the story, its majority, comprises descriptions of survival—building fires with callusing hands, felling an injured deer, sleeping curled like pigeons in the trunk of a tree. It’s one of Casey’s earliest published stories and far from her best. But it belongs to Esther and is about love.

I always imagined that Alice had a beautiful secret knowledge, something that she kept from me, not out of cruelty. Out of savage kindness, I think, knowing I wouldn’t be able to know in the same way she did, not wanting to hurt me like that. I did not like to think that she was confused, or frightened, but I did like, a little, having a secret knowledge she couldn’t yet, knowing something about what we were that I couldn’t tell her. I stroked the hair at the back of her neck, like she was a great cat curled in my lap. I thought I could be the first person to ever show her kindness, to ever know her for herself and love her. “I am going to make you a house in the trees,” I told her. “I am going to grow all the boughs together so you can live there like a pear. I am going to bring you chocolate and cheese and not leave you alone.” I wish that I had told her our secret then, but I thought I would have her forever.

* * *

Esther is seated at a table. Anais Casey has thirty-nine boxes in the Library of Congress, and the letter Esther is here for is in Box 31, Folder C, but she asks to start at the beginning. The buildup feels necessary. Esther thinks there must be some threshold of context that will make her able to approach this letter.

The librarian fetches her request. He is a thin man, scholarly, big round glasses with gold rims and a first fine layer of wrinkles on his brown hands. Esther wonders if there is something here he defines as belonging to him, certain boxes he pulls when the room is empty.