Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 Anonymity Julian Leslie Whatley Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES ANONYMITY By Julian Leslie Whatley A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2008 Copyright © 2008 Julian Leslie Whatley All Rights Reserved The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Julian Leslie Whatley, defended on March 28, 2008. ______________________________ Mark Winegardner Professor Directing Dissertation ______________________________ Debra Fadool Outside Committee Member ______________________________ Andrew Epstein Committee Member ______________________________ R. M. Berry Committee Member Approved: ______________________________ Stan E. Gontarski Director of Graduate Studies The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………… iv 1. PART I: HALLOWEEN .....………………………………………………………….. 2 One ……………………………………………………………………… 3 Two ……………………………………………………………………. 25 Three …………………………………………………………………... 44 Four ……………………………………………………………………. 66 2. PART II: ANONYMITY ..………………………………………………………….. 94 Five ……………………………………………………………………. 95 Six ……………………………………………………………………. 115 Seven …………………………………………………………………. 138 Eight ………………………………………………………………….. 164 3. PART III: REVENGE ….…………………………………………………………... 185 Nine ………………………………………………………………….. 186 Ten …………………………………………………………………… 205 Eleven ………………………………………………………………... 229 Twelve ……………………………………………………………….. 246 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ……………………………………………………….. 262 iii ABSTRACT Anonymity is a novel divided into three parts—“Halloween,” “Anonymity,” and “Revenge”—of four chapters each, a total of twelve chapters, each approximately thirty pages long. The four chapters of “Halloween” take place on the afternoon and evening of Halloween of 2005, almost two years after the disappearance of an eleven-year-old child, Grace Mays, in Auburn, Alabama. Warren and Margaret Mays, two years after the disappearance of their daughter, have decided to separate. Warren, who teaches American history at Auburn University, has moved out of the house and spends much of his time compulsively walking the streets of Auburn, haunted by his missing daughter. He’s begun, through a misunderstanding with a colleague, a recovering alcoholic named Red Hall, to attend AA meetings. In “Anonymity,” Warren learns, through the web of relationships in AA, the identity of the man responsible for the death of his daughter. In “Revenge,” Warren struggles with his discovery and eventually confronts the man who killed his daughter and the police detective whose job it has been, for the last two years, to find her. iv I am bound by a duty to the dead far greater than what I owe the living; among the dead I must abide for ever. —Antigone Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift As meditation, or the thoughts of love, May sweep to my revenge. —Hamlet PART I HALLOWEEN 2 One Less than two years after their eleven-year-old daughter, Grace, went missing on Wednesday, the twelfth of November, 2003, Margaret and Warren Mays decided to separate. It was an easy decision, amicably reached, without much emotion of any kind. Neither of them could have explained, exactly, how their marriage had come apart except to say that they had become, to use what they assumed must be the correct term, estranged. Amicably and estranged were the sorts of words they used, during the onerous evening phone conversations they had increasingly begun to have, in this new era of their lives, with their family and friends, who had, apparently, decided to monitor their emotional states. Warren and Margaret privately hoped that these reasonable-sounding words would pass for an explanation. No lawyers were involved, and they had not yet thought of inviting any further official persons into their lives. They had already had enough of trying to get others to show them how to go about doing unpleasant things. Of course the separation was, almost entirely, the result of the disappearance of their small daughter, and this is what was assumed without question not simply by their friends and family but by the Mayses themselves. Surely it was common for couples that have lost a child to separate, but how or why this might be the case, neither Warren nor Margaret could explain. Because it was not so simple to recreate the story, to connect the dots between that afternoon in November when Margaret had last seen Grace, in jeans and sneakers and a dark green sweatshirt with a hood, wheeling out of the driveway on her small bicycle—it was pink, with pink and purple plastic streamers sprouting from the ends of the handlebars—Warren and Margaret had spent one Christmas Eve together assembling the thing, with training wheels, in the living room, and now it sat, stained with graphite from a police fingerprinting kit, in a corner of the storage shed behind a folded ping-pong table and some cans of paint, recovered from the front yard of the Sewells, their neighbors three houses down the street whose daughter, Natalie, had been one of Grace’s special friends—and the night in early August almost two years later when, sitting 3 together on the back porch in the twilight, Warren informed Margaret that he had found a house for rent a few streets away and that he thought he might take it before the fall semester began at Auburn University, where Warren taught American history. This announcement she had received without comment, saying nothing more than okay. To tell the truth, there were no dots to connect these events. A lack of dots was, in a way, the problem. There was the feeling between them, though they had never spoken about it, both of them perhaps assuming that there was nothing to be done in any case, that their life had lost its punctuating moments entirely, that one event no longer led in any discernable way to the next, that there were no longer, in fact, any events at all. Everything about their day-to-day lives had lost its feeling of being made up of discrete moments, which might have attained the status of events, and had become a uniform substance, like mud, through which they wrestled their hours, leaving them feeling smothered and exhausted and clueless. They understood, of course, that they were depressed, and they had both been willing to accept medications—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, mood stabilizers of the sort that were advertised on television during the nightly news—from the psychiatrist, an impassive Hindu named Dr. Harmman, to whom they had been referred by Dr. Gardner, the family doctor they had acquired when Grace was born. But in a surprisingly brief time, the depression itself had lost the strident pitch of anguish, and neither of them particularly cared to be relieved of the drizzle of feelings that remained. They felt as though they were somehow required to continue to hope for the return of their daughter, but the hope itself had become an irksome obligation brought on by those late-evening phone calls, a preoccupation that seemed to have more to do with maintaining a reasonable set of relations with their neighbors than with anything that ever happened within the gloomy enclosure of their home, so that they had each, privately, allowed what small hope they had left to diminish to a hard node of pain deep within themselves that was occasionally touched by an encounter with a tiny rolled-up sock or the plastic fragment of a broken toy discovered in the dust behind a piece of furniture moved away from a wall or by the sound of children playing in the street that interrupted the reverie of a weekday afternoon or by a postcard check-up reminder from the orthodontist pulled from the mailbox on a day that had otherwise been passed blindly, 4 without much prior thought or confusion. Now it seemed somehow wrong to be happy again, and in this way they had become accustomed to depression. The new, solemn earnestness of demeanor which had come most naturally to them, like a protective shroud each had acquired, had, in effect, become a sort of happiness in itself, the happiness of resignation, of purposelessness, and in separating from each other, Warren and Margaret were simply eliminating from their lives the last major obstacle that prevented them from devoting themselves completely to this new emptiness. Warren’s move had been more an abandonment of his old life than a move toward a new one. In the old house on Carroll Street, Warren still had clothes in the upstairs closet, books on the shelves in his study and papers and lecture notes in the desk drawers, shoes behind the side door and coats on the rack in the laundry room off the kitchen. Everything else in the home, despite the fact that he had helped choose all the furnishings, the dishes and rugs and curtains and the art on the walls and everything else, he now regarded as belonging to Margaret. Even his own things, all those books and papers, the record albums he had collected since he was a boy, the boxes of old photographs and tintypes and daguerreotypes that had once been the focus of his research and the extra copies of the one book he had written, A Place of Honor: Photography and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century America, published by a university press, for which he’d received tenure, in 1997—he wanted none of it. In fact, the house showed few signs that anyone had left, and he continued to visit most days. Margaret didn’t seem to mind, and if she did, the new demeanors they were so devotedly cultivating prevented her from making anything like a fuss. Warren had become restless, unable to sit still for more than a few minutes at a stretch.