11
HEARING THE STORY of the fire in the Nevsky mansion from so many sources on so many occasions taught me something about how to shape a story, because I got to see the storytellers at work, employing techniques of refinement, of elaboration, and, perhaps the most important of their techniques—certainly the most useful one—of making adjustments on the fly to accommodate and disguise mistakes. I got to see nearly all the Babbingtonians of my parents’ generation at work on a collaborative fiction, for fiction it turned out to be. As a child I watched, with my mind’s eye, as the years went by and I listened to more and more of those stories, while the conflagration, the brave efforts of Babbington’s volunteer fire department, and the small heroisms of the storytellers grew with time and tellings, and still I assumed that all of it was essentially true, but years later, when I began to think of writing this account of my happy hours in bed with the Glynns, I wanted to know more about the carriage house where they lived, so I turned to back issues of the Babbington Reporter, and there, in the microfilm files in the town library, I found an account of the fire, with pictures. That first fire, the one that all the stories were based on, had been a small one, the first of a series of small fires that occurred over the course of several days, each one consuming another small part of the mansion, until eventually the building was uninhabitable. Nevsky himself was suspected of setting them—for insurance money, of course—but he was never, at least in the span my research covered, actually charged. In some of the coarse photographs, I thought I could make out some of the people I’d heard telling stories of the fire, just standing there, on the edge of a crowd, behind a police line, watching, the light of the fire and the slightly odd expressions of an earlier time making them look like yokels. Had they been lying about the fire and their part in it? No, I don’t think so, not quite. They had made the fire in fact match the fire in the mind, and had worked the same transformation on themselves. The story of the fire was something they could salvage from it, and people in a seacoast town are very serious about the right of salvage.
[to be continued]
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🎧 812: Hearing the story . . .