WHEN I GOT HOME FROM Bulgaria, someone at the Harvard archives wrote me to say it had no evidence that the class where Gramly claimed he and Jane had met was ever taught. Where did the truth end: the class, knowing Jane, or both—or neither?
I turned to the notes I took during my two phone calls with Gramly, hoping to find a version of events that would feel like it held together for at least a moment. And that’s when I saw it: It was during the second call, when he had been describing his difficult breakup with Mary McCutcheon—who became one of the Golden Girls.
“In fact,” he had told me, “her sister was a student in the master’s program at the university somewhere. I even baked her a birthday cake.”