I Have to Write a Note to Mrs. Fenton

“I have to write a note to Mrs. Fenton” is an involuntary phrase that surfaces in Thad Beaumont’s speech and then repeats in his thoughts. Mrs. Fenton has been dead for months, so the supposed note is not a practical errand: it is a verbal symptom of Thad’s growing compulsion to approach the typewriter, accompanied by pain in his hand and the return of the sparrows.

The phrase’s first appearance

At the English Department, Thad is preparing to leave and tells Manchester that he only needs to put back the files he will not be using. Then the note intrudes into his speech. He says he has to write to Mrs. Fenton, adding that she is the department secretary, but he does not know why he is saying it. The self-explanation does not make the remark sensible; it makes its strangeness more visible. An ordinary office task has arrived without intention, as if the words have already been chosen for him.

The interruption initially passes amid mundane conversation. Manchester asks whether there is time for coffee, and Thad agrees, even joking about cookies. Yet he feels that things are out of joint, an unease that becomes stronger as he leaves. The contrast matters: the phrase does not come with an announcement or a clear supernatural explanation. It breaks into the day’s routine, while Thad’s own reaction registers a disturbance he cannot account for.

A dead recipient and a living secretary

Rawlie DeLesseps repeats the instruction when Thad is about to go, reminding him that he has a note to write. Thad’s cheeks grow warm as he remembers the fact that makes the errand impossible: Althea Fenton, the English Department secretary since 1961, died of throat cancer in April. The repetition turns the first odd remark into a more pointed contradiction. The note has a recipient, but she cannot receive it.

The phrase next returns in Thad’s own narration as he walks back to his office. He pauses while putting away the last files he had taken out by mistake and looks at his beige IBM Selectric. Lately, he has been almost hypnotically aware of writing instruments, imagining a different version of himself inside each one, like an evil genie in a bottle. Against that unease, the note to the late Mrs. Fenton reads less like a forgotten administrative duty than like a summons toward writing—and toward the machine that stands before him.

Repetition becomes compulsion

Thad immediately recognizes the absurdity of trying to contact a dead woman with an electric typewriter, thinking that a Ouija board would be more appropriate. He remembers Mrs. Fenton’s exceptionally strong coffee, but that familiar detail does not explain why she was on his mind: he had not been thinking about her at all. The gap between the trivial memory and the command sharpens the phrase’s force. Its meaning lies not in the note’s content, which is never supplied, but in its return despite Thad’s lack of conscious purpose.

As the phrase repeats once more, pain intensifies in the web of flesh between Thad’s left thumb and forefinger, beneath his bandage. Rubbing the spot against his trousers makes the itch worse; the sensation deepens into throbbing heat. Thad feels that the sparrows and the maddening burn can be relieved only by using the typewriter. Sitting down before it feels horribly natural, like putting a burned hand into cold water. The phrase is thus joined to a bodily pressure that steers him toward writing.

The phrase opens onto the sparrows

The command appears again at the point when the typewriter’s pull has become difficult to resist. Alongside it comes a threatening thought about getting started by nightfall and the warning that Thad will not be the only one to suffer if he fails. The urgency is no longer merely a misplaced office obligation: it belongs to a coercive demand with consequences for someone beyond Thad himself.

His physical sensations and the image of the sparrows intensify together. In his mind he sees Ridgeway in Bergenfield beneath a mild white spring sky in 1960, with the world apparently dead except for the common birds he understands as psychopomps. They take wing until their mass darkens the sky. The recalled scene culminates in the phrase that the sparrows are flying again. The note to Mrs. Fenton therefore marks a threshold: a dead secretary’s impossible correspondence, the typewriter’s attraction, Thad’s burning hand, a deadline, and the renewed bird vision converge in a single sequence. Its repetition gives an everyday sentence the force of an order, while leaving Thad—and the reader—to feel the supernatural pressure before its source is fully explained.