Autumn 2013

Autumn 2013 links the last days of a 102-year-old hospice resident with a September gathering of the True Knot, setting intimate care and impending death beside the group’s secret business. The novel makes the period vivid through specific rooms and routines, while placing events thousands of miles apart in the same evening.

Eleanor at Rivington House

That fall, Eleanor Ouellette was the oldest resident of Rivington House. Her age was reflected in the French pronunciation of her surname, which she had never Americanized: Dan Torrance called her Miss Oooh-La-La, and the name made her smile. Despite severe illness—including failing liver function, lungs damaged by decades of smoking, colorectal cancer, and an exceptionally fragile heart—she continued living, a fact that one of the hospice doctors described to Dan as evidence that life could sometimes outlast death.

Eleanor did not look as though she were on the threshold of dying. When Dan entered, she sat up in bed stroking a cat; her hair had been permed the day before, and her pink nightie was immaculate. Dan greeted her with a playful French compliment. The scene gives Autumn 2013 a human scale: a hospice room, the habits of daily care, and a patient whose appearance and persistence resist the prognosis of her failing body.

The September Gathering

In September, nine members of the True Knot assembled at Overlook Lodge, the building that served Bluebell Campground as a restaurant when it was open to the public. Its ordinary calendar of breakfasts and dinners, bingo, card parties, and weekend dances gave way that evening to a private business meeting. The lodge’s familiar, rustic public function thus stood in contrast to the group’s concealed presence there.

Jimmy Numbers sat at the head of a table on the polished maple floor, his open PowerBook displaying a photograph of his hometown in the Carpathian Mountains. He joked that his grandfather had once entertained a young London solicitor named Jonathan Harker. Three time zones east, Dan sat beside a dead woman and waited for a visitor. The parallel places the True Knot’s meeting and Dan’s vigil within the same September evening, setting a clandestine gathering against a deathbed encounter without collapsing their separate circumstances.