“That’s it exactly,” Desmond said. “It’s the one thing pop singers never are anymore. They can be strong or accomplished or loud, but they’re almost always packaged and overrehearsed, carefully modulated for a particular audience. You listen to them and you have no idea who they are or where their voice is coming from. No honesty.”

Jane had lost the thread of her initial idea, but it was gratifying to know she’d at last said something right. “How close were she and Judy Garland?” she asked.

Desmond tipped his hand from side to side. “Hard to say. She often mentioned her in concerts, the kind of thing you just heard, or: ‘I’m sending out a special hello to my pal Judy,’ but I haven’t been able to find any evidence the two actually met.”

“No letters, anything of that sort?”

“I found one memo Garland sent to her lawyers asking them if they could get ‘that broad in the housedress’ to stop mentioning her in concert. That’s really about it. Anderton was famous for performing in simple outfits.”

When she asked Desmond when he’d be finished with his book, he looked out the window at the river flashing past and the low collegiate buildings of Cambridge on the other side of the water. Something was holding him back, he explained, some missing piece of information. He had all the facts, the dates, the times, the places. “But,” he said, “I still don’t have the essential truth of her life, the core of who she was. Until I find that, I don’t have a coherent narrative of a life so much as a collection of incidents. ‘The clothes and buttons’ of a person, to use Mark Twain’s phrase, but not the person herself.”

The subject seemed to fill him with a degree of melancholy that struck her as just a touch overdone. “I hate to interrupt,” she said, “and I don’t mean to be indelicate here, but can’t you just make something up, some essential truth, then fit the other pieces around it?”