The Memoir He Wrote
Every witness owes the record a testimony.
Legacy || Writing || Truth
Gerald Wren wrote a memoir. He told Elena about it on a Sunday phone call in December, with the diffident air of someone announcing something that has been in progress for a long time and is now, unexpectedly, nearly finished. He had been writing it for twelve years, he said. He had never intended to publish it. He had written it the way he had maintained the transmission loop: as an act of witness, for the record, on the chance that the record might someday be needed. Now the record was needed. “I’d like you to read it first,” he said. “If you’re willing.” “I’m willing,” she said. It arrived by courier three days later: 340 pages, handwritten, in a precise and slightly archaic script that was completely legible and entirely personal, the handwriting of someone who had learned to write when handwriting was still taught as a skill.
She read it in two sittings. It began in 1961, with a boy in rural Oregon fascinated by radio. It ended in the present tense, with an old man in Astoria watching the sea and waiting to give testimony that he would, in March, finally give — in federal court, in a proceeding that would add three more charges to the ongoing prosecution, in a voice that had been on the airwaves for thirty years and that now, in person, was tired and exact and absolutely credible. “Should I publish it?” he asked her, on the next Sunday call. “Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “But let me write the foreword.” He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Your father asked me to say hello, by the way. I reached out to him.” She had not known they were in contact. She held the phone and felt, again, the vertigo of connections she had not previously seen: two men in their sixties and seventies, linked by a network they had each, in different ways, helped build and then tried to undo, speaking to each other across decades of silence, saying hello. “Tell him I’ll call him Tuesday,” she said. And she did.