Stargazer

She kept the telescope on the balcony of the apartment her father had bought her, on the eighteenth floor of a building on Riverside, where the sky, on the right kind of night, came down close enough to the city to be mistaken for a ceiling.

Her name was Isobel Frame. She was the youngest of four, and the only daughter, and her father, who had made a great deal of money in a way nobody in the family quite discussed, had bought her the apartment in 1922 as a graduation present, and had then, in the spring of 1923, died, leaving her the apartment outright and a private income that was modest by the standards of her brothers and entirely sufficient by the standards of a woman who did not intend to leave the eighteenth floor.

She had been a quiet child. She had been a quieter girl. By the time she was twenty-four she had become the sort of woman the family did not, on the whole, bring up at dinners — not because there was anything wrong with her, exactly, but because there was nothing, in the ordinary vocabulary of the family, to say.

She watched the sky most nights. She had bought the telescope herself, from a shop on Fifth Avenue whose proprietor, a Hungarian gentleman with a small accent and a smaller wife, had asked her, on the day of the purchase, whether the instrument was for her husband. She had said no. He had asked whether it was for her brother. She had said no. He had asked whether it was for her father. She had not answered. He had sold her the telescope. He had not asked again.

She drank, on the balcony, on the colder nights, a thing she made herself in a small glass — butterfly-pea infused into cachaça until the cachaça went the colour of the sky at the moment after sunset, a measure of pisco for sharpness, a knife-tip of pimento, a Ceylon tea cooled to room and laid over the top. She finished it with a dusting of something she called stardust, which was sugar she had burnt to the edge of carbon and then, with a great deal of patience, powdered. It glittered, in the small balcony light, like the inside of a thing that was not supposed to be looked at directly.

The neighbours called it eccentric. That was the polite word. There were other words. They got passed, at the building’s annual Christmas drinks, from one wife to another the way a recipe gets passed, with a small lift of the eyebrow and a small laugh that was not, in the end, a laugh.

She did not marry. There had been one offer, in 1925, from a cousin of a friend of her brother’s, a kind man whose interest in her had been chiefly that she was not, like the others, frightening to talk to. She had thanked him. She had said no. She had not, that evening, gone to the balcony, because the sky had been cloudy, and the saying no had taken something out of her that she did not, for once, want to spend on the stars.

She did not have children. She did not, by any of the available measures, do what was expected. The brothers, after the third Christmas she did not come down to, stopped expecting. The mother, after the fifth, stopped asking. The aunts kept asking, in letters, until they died.

She filled notebooks. She filled them slowly, in a hand that grew, over the years, smaller and more deliberate, until by the late 1940s she was writing in a script that her doctor, when he finally saw it, mistook at first for shorthand and then, on closer inspection, for nothing he recognised at all.

She catalogued the stars. Each one she had looked at. She named them — not the names in the books, which she had read and rejected, but names of her own, drawn from a vocabulary she had begun to build in 1924 and had been building, with the kind of patience that only a woman with an eighteenth-floor balcony and no husband can really build, for the better part of forty years. She described them. What they looked like on a clear night in March. What they looked like on a wet night in August, when the city was bright underneath and the stars came through it the way pins come through velvet. What they looked like on the night her father died, which she had not, at the time, known was the night her father died, but which she had marked anyway, because the air had been strange.

She did not show the notebooks to anyone. Once, in 1939, a young man from the building, who had taken an interest in her in the way young men sometimes take an interest in older women they sense to be untouched, had come up to the balcony on a pretext and seen one open on the small table. He had asked, with what he believed was charm, what language it was in. She had closed the notebook. She had not answered.

She lived to be seventy-eight. She died on the balcony, in a chair, in the early morning, with the telescope beside her and a small glass on the railing in which the last of the stardust had settled, fine as ash, at the bottom. The doorman found her at nine. The sky, by then, had gone white with day.

The notebooks were found stacked from floor to ceiling in the spare room, which she had not, in fifty-six years, slept in. There were one hundred and forty-three of them. The nephew who had inherited the apartment did not know what to do with them. They were sold at auction in 1962. A collector in Switzerland bought the lot, and had them shipped, and put them in a glass case in a private library outside Geneva, where, fifty years later, a young woman with very good Hungarian and a small private income of her own began, slowly, to work out the first dozen words.

Isobel Frame, who had never in her life sold a thing, would have found this funny, in the small dry way she found things funny. She would have raised her glass to it, on the balcony, and watched the sky, and said nothing, because there had never, in the end, been anyone up there to say it to, and that had been, all along, the point.