Rogers Park

Rogers Park is both a landscape of memory and a crucial address in Brett Bohlinger’s search for her biological father. The neighborhood connects her childhood bond with Carrie Newsome to the earlier history of Elizabeth Bohlinger’s life on Bosworth Avenue, where a musician named Johnny Manns once lived nearby.

Childhood and Carrie Newsome

Brett recalls Rogers Park as the setting for her close childhood friendship with Carrie Newsome. When Carrie’s family moved to Madison, Brett understood the separation as a rupture in her world; Madison seemed impossibly distant from Rogers Park. Five weeks after learning of the move, Brett stood on Carrie’s porch and watched the moving van leave. The girls wrote faithfully during the first year, but after Carrie returned for a visit, they stopped speaking. Brett’s recollection gives the neighborhood an intimate significance: it marks the home ground of a friendship whose loss continued to weigh on her.

Bosworth Avenue and the family secret

Rogers Park also contains a clue to Brett’s parentage. In Elizabeth’s journal, Brett finds that her mother and Charles Bohlinger lived on Bosworth Avenue before Brett was born. Johnny Manns, the musician with whom Elizabeth had fallen in love, sublet the apartment above theirs. Elizabeth’s final journal entry describes the day Charles discovered the affair and Johnny left town. The address therefore anchors the concealed history in a specific neighborhood and building arrangement: Johnny was not a distant figure from her mother’s past, but a tenant living directly above the household.

A place in Brett’s search

When Brett tells Brad Midar what she has learned, she identifies Johnny as a musician from North Dakota who worked at Justine’s, a bar just down the street from the Bosworth Avenue apartment. The remembered geography gives Brad a practical lead, and he proposes going to Justine’s to ask whether anyone remembers Johnny. Rogers Park thus turns the family secret into an investigation: the neighborhood’s old address and nearby bar offer possible routes from Elizabeth’s diary to the man Brett believes is her father.