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only he, and possibly I, and certainly the person whom he was writing about, would ever know that what was written had not been said.
    I used to marvel that he was never caught. Indeed, the reverse was true: The more license he took, the more successful he became. The license gave him a style, a pungency, that other writers envied. I think that perhaps the people he interviewed were at first stunned to see their words misstated in print but, after the initial shock, came to like the charming, more intriguing voices Harrold had created for them.
    Ironically, it was myself, precise notetaker that I was, who had more complaints from the people I wrote about. For their quotes, though accurate, would sound prosaic, seldom witty, and, even if important, rarely intriguing. Such people would want to disown their quotes. I would, of course, have my notes. I could tell them, if they asked: This had been put just this way; that word had, indeed, been used. And yet I knew exactly what it was they objected to. What had been written wasn't what they had meant to say at all.
    And this was the question Harrold and I would debate: In his writing, did the truth get lost? Or did he, with his license, preserve it better than I did?

    You asked, when you were here, about my background. I'm not sure what to tell you, what will be relevant.
    My mother was the first in her family to make it to the suburbs and to the middle class simultaneously—though it seems to me now, looking back, that this had more to do with geography than with economic status. My mother was a single parent, a working mother, when all the other mothers were at home. She had never had a husband; my father, barely out of his teens, had abandoned her on the day she told him she was pregnant, and he had joined the army within the week. I don't think she ever heard from him again, and he died, in France, before I was born. My father's parents owned a bar on the south side of Chicago, not far from the tenement in which my mother had grown up, and they gave her money after my father died, so that she would not have to work to support me. Instead she used the money as a down payment on a small white bungalow in a town twenty miles south of the city. She went back to work then, as secretary to the president of a. company that distributed office supplies. Until I went to school, I was cared for during the day by a neighbor, at the neighbor's house. My mother was determined that no matter what the cost, her own child would not be raised amid the perils of the city, as she had been.
    At five-ten every evening, I would walk down the narrow street on which we lived to the austere wooden train station at its foot and meet my mother, who would alight, in her hat and her long woolen coat, from the high top step of the second car on the train. She would be carrying her pocketbook and a satchel, in which she took her lunch to work, and would have come from her office building in Chicago, a trip that took her forty-seven minutes. Our suburb, barely a suburb, was a cluster of prewar bungalows, each like the other, so that the streets had about them an ordered and tidy quality noticeably missing in the city from which my mother had so recently escaped. Our walk up the street—the pastel houses lining each side—was my favorite time of the day, a time out of time, when I had my mother to myself, and she had me, and there were no distractions. My mother would be animated, smiling, and might even have a surprise for me—a gum ball wrapped in cellophane, a paper strip of caps—and if she was tired, or her day had gone badly, she did not share this fact with me. She kept to herself whatever hardships she had to endure in the city, or perhaps her train journey home to her child had erased any discomforts of her job.
    During this walk up our street—she would walk slowly to prolong our time together; I would walk backward or twirl around her or, when she was speaking to me in a