P a m e l a   T h o m p s o n

If I hadn’t bought up every last copy of Betsy B. Jones’s wonderful monograph Edwin Romanzo Elmer: 1850–1923 from the basement of the Smith Art Museum, those interested in the “facts” could go there to determine for themselves what really happened.
     All members of the Elmer family who come into the pages of Every Past Thing were born and died in the places and ways and times attributed to them in the novel. Frank and Susana Tannenbaum, Jimmy Roberts, Nellie, Dave, and Grace are all fictional, as is the baby in Alice’s belly. (Though Samuel and Alice did have a child together, he would have already been kindergarten age when Edwin and Mary arrived in New York in 1899.)
     Some of Edwin’s paintings in the novel can be seen in museums, and others are invented. His Magic Glasses (Still Life with Magnifying Glass) painting “half a tiny world upside down and half a tiny world upright” is at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, as is Arab Modeling. The portraits of Mary and Samuel are, with the Mourning Picture, in the Smith Art Museum. His portrait of Alice is my invention, as are his ideas for pictures of the train and the river, though he did paint and draw many landscapes. And he was also an inventor: of a double-acting butter churn, roof brackets, and a whip-snap machine, for braiding the silken ends of horsewhips.
    Neither Mary nor Edwin left behind any written record that might have given me an inkling of what they were thinking when they went to New York, when they went home to Massachusetts, or at any other time. Except for the letter Edwin wrote home to the Deerfield Valley Echo.