The Haunting of Byerly Hall:WC Ben Miller (bio) let us go and make our visit Piketty's economic theories were being debated at Peet's over mocha lattes, in Harvard Square students were protesting fossil fuel investments, and in my quiet brick corner of it all, the fellowship year office in Byerly Hall, I kept returning to the fact that I should be gone like my younger sister Mitzi. That I wouldn't have made it to twenty, let alone forty, and now fifty, had I not, as an anorexic, Prufrock-reading teenager, encountered the allies she—an artist also—was unable to locate at a spot where the Mississippi River tackles two Midwest states in a fury of chemical-laden mud. Her skin was fair, and her hair—unlike that of her sisters—was blond. She used a curling iron when she could find one. She had the plush Miller lips (thank you, father) without the wide, fuzzy Stanley eyebrows (thank you, mother). Veracious, fine features made her profile a bold one. The sufferer of bulimia and alcoholism—dead of heart failure at age forty-four—she found trouble at levee keggers. I, instead, bumbled upon the way-out world of gentle writers trying to be honest, and if failing, trying again. I had broadly outlined the community's influence on a troubled kid in my first book, River Bend Chronicle, but for the most part had set aside its geographical expanse and peculiar personalities to explore the preceding years of pre-adolescent drama playing out in the dark jaw of a trashed house on the edge of the wealthy McClellan Heights neighborhood. My rescue-via-art was not just the winning of an award at the right time, although that was one way, the quickest way, to think about it. No, the operation of reengineering a fate was as profuse as fate itself, a face-by-face, meeting-by-meeting, meandering momentum toward alternative outcomes: more life rather than more death, new understandings, or less confusion. Little was sure from the start. I nursed doubts equal to any hopes, fleeing a Writers' Studio gathering in tears not long after I joined the club. In the Byerly Hall restroom that memory pounced. If I roosted too long, appreciating the almost plush cradle of the ergonomic seat, surfaces of the immaculate space turned gray. The environmentally sublime water-conserving faucet began—did it not?—to drip in a-kilter pentameter. The floor parted to reveal dusty floorboards. Walls slid closer to bare knees. A shallow efficient basin deepened, morphed from porcelain to iron, paint flaking, and there I was—back in the wretched crapper down the wretched narrow hall from the sweltering [End Page 24] rented room in a wretched downtown building. Cowering there. Heaving sobs. Cracked like the toilet. the voices dying with a dying fall I was a new sophomore at Central High. I felt sure the poem I'd been tweaking after classes, at the modern main branch of the Davenport Public Library, would be adored. It would be loved because I had crouched so low over the page for so long, blocking out so many things. I ignored the mysterious men in old clothes sitting on the new red couches reading newspapers dangling off wood rods, as if stories had been reeled in like gray fish. I ignored the library building design of Edward Durell Stone, the Kennedy Center architect, with its tinted slit windows and white-painted interior identical to the exterior façade's pattern of endlessly repeating little squares within squares. I tried to block out Rochelle Murray, my first librarian, still at her guardian desk in the front of the children's section. She dressed like Amelia Earhart without the goggles and flight cap. At seven I was sent to that desk from a running car with my arms full of overdue books, some soiled by cats and infants. In a pocket jingled the random amount of change the car's driver, the unemployed attorney and mother of four, had dumped out of the belly of Moby Purse. "That should be enough!" she guessed. At ten I asked Rochelle...
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