Fidelity Union

Fidelity Union is the bank whose safe-deposit box holds Michael Noonan’s unpublished manuscripts, turning an ordinary financial institution into a recurring marker of his changing relationship with writing. What begins as a practical reserve of completed work becomes an increasingly stark measure of his creative paralysis: manuscripts leave the box to meet publishing deadlines while his capacity to write a new one fails.

The manuscript reserve

Noonan keeps a large safe-deposit box at Fidelity Union, accessible only through the paired keys he and a bank employee use. The box contains cardboard manuscript cartons, each labeled with a title. He had been publishing a book a year since 1984, but in four of those ten years he wrote two books, publishing one and setting the other aside. He describes this practice as saving up work rather than anticipating writer’s block; at the time, he regarded it as a source of freedom and fun.

The reserve acquires a different meaning when Noonan’s ideas repeatedly fail. By February 1995, he can no longer deny the seriousness of his inability to complete a new book. His agent, Harold Oblowski, calls because Noonan’s customary January delivery has not arrived and the publisher’s schedule is tightening. Noonan conceals the problem by claiming that he has finished a manuscript that day. He then goes to Fidelity Union, opens the box with the bank manager’s assistance, and takes the most recent manuscript, simply because it is nearest the front.

That manuscript is All the Way from the Top. It is published in November, in time for the Christmas season, and reaches number eleven on the Times bestseller list. Noonan dedicates it to his late wife, Johanna. Its successful publication temporarily allows him to tell himself that the crisis may pass, while the fact that he has drawn on stored work rather than written a new novel remains the underlying reality.

Repeated withdrawals

Fidelity Union becomes the site of a sequence of withdrawals that tracks the years of Noonan’s continuing difficulty. The following year he takes Threatening Behavior, a manuscript written in the fall of 1991 and remembered as one of Johanna’s favorites. In March 1997, during a snowstorm, he retrieves Darcy’s Admirer. Although he continues to tell other people that he is writing plenty, the books he sends out are products of earlier periods, and his public reassurance increasingly conflicts with his private dependence on the box.

After Oblowski reads Darcy’s Admirer and calls it Noonan’s best work, Noonan cautiously raises the idea of taking a year off. Oblowski responds by asking whether he is all right. The question brings into focus what Noonan has avoided explaining: a string of apparently fresh deliveries has been sustained by manuscripts accumulated before the blockage took hold, not by a return to ordinary productivity.

Two days before Christmas 1997, Noonan makes another visit. On the walk down to the bank’s safe-deposit area, he and the manager, Mr. Quinlan, repeat their familiar exchange: Quinlan mentions that his wife is an enthusiastic reader, and Noonan jokes that he must get hold of her. Noonan privately calls this recurring ritual Banker's Communion. The conversation’s easy repetition contrasts with the distress of the errand itself.

The nearly empty box

By the 1997 visit, the safe-deposit box is almost empty. Noonan remembers it as vast, with the single remaining manuscript box, labeled Promise in thick black letters, appearing stranded in a far corner. The image marks a decisive reversal: what once looked like an ample reserve has dwindled to one old manuscript, and Noonan can barely recall what its story concerns.

He removes Promise and closes the box. In doing so, he recalls Johanna’s words from a dream, in which she claims the manuscript as her dust-catcher. The recollection connects the bank’s depleted archive to grief as well as to writing: the remaining pages belong to the life he shared with his wife, yet they must also serve as material for a final professional obligation.

Noonan has prepared two notes on his computer, one for Oblowski and one for his editor, Debra Weinstock. He can still use the computer’s Note Pad function, but opening Word Six brings on the difficulty that prevents him from composing a novel. He has tried longhand without success and understands that attempting to write in Note Pad might jeopardize even that limited use of the machine. The problem is therefore not an inability to use a screen or to write anything at all; it is specifically the loss of access to novel-writing.

The last delivery

The notes accompany the manuscript Noonan calls Helen’s Promise. He presents it as a new book and explains its roughness as the result of having worked extra hours to finish it quickly. The account conceals the crucial fact from its recipients: Helen’s Promise is the last unpublished manuscript he has retrieved from the safe-deposit box, not a novel newly composed for them.

At the Federal Express office, Noonan waits nearly an hour in a line of people mailing packages before Christmas. He carries Helen’s Promise under one arm and reads a paperback copy of Nelson DeMille’s The Charm School with the other hand. Only after reading almost fifty pages does he entrust the manuscript to the clerk. The errand completes the pattern established by his earlier visits: the contents of the box become successive deliveries that preserve the appearance of uninterrupted publication while postponing the moment when the reserve runs out.

The bank’s role is practical rather than dramatic, but its repeated use gives the manuscript box a narrative function beyond storage. Each withdrawal records a different stage of Noonan’s concealment: a 1995 rescue of the publishing schedule, later substitutions from earlier years, and, by Christmas 1997, the removal of the sole remaining carton. Fidelity Union thus stands at the intersection of his public career and private loss. The manuscripts stored there keep his books appearing on schedule, even as the shrinking box makes visible how little new work he can produce.