MY MOTHER HELPED ME WITH MY very first effort at writing. We were living in a duplex in Raleigh, on Forest Road, near the new shopping center. Out in California a three-year-old girl had fallen down an abandoned well, and I was determined to console her. I was only a few years older than this child, so my mother must have taken dictation. I couldn’t begin to tell what I said. What could I have said?

I’m sorry you fell down a well.

Please don’t be sad.

I hope they get you out soon.

What I do remember is how I’d pictured this letter being delivered: someone dropping it directly into the well, like a wishful coin consigned to a fountain, before it drifted down through the clammy darkness into the little girl’s outstretched hands. I figured she would be expecting the letter, awaiting my words of comfort. And my words, if I just chose them carefully enough, would save her in the end.

I suppose my mother must have heard a mailing address on the radio, one provided by the family. Either that or she never mailed the letter at all, intending it only as an exercise in empathy, a homemade remedy for her heartsick, overimaginative child.

The point is: I remember nothing, happy or sad, about the fate of Little Kathy Fiscus. A quick Googling reveals her name and the fact that her attempted rescue in 1949 was one of the first calamities ever to be broadcast live on television. I know now that the well was only eighteen inches wide and that the rescuers recovered Kathy’s body a hundred feet beneath the field where she’d been playing three days earlier. The doctor who broke the news to thousands of rapt onlookers said she had died of suffocation only hours after “the last time her voice was heard.” A haunting detail, but one I don’t remember. I would surely have remembered that voice.

My mother must have changed the subject as soon as the truth was known, distracting me with a Little Golden Book or an antiques store. (I enjoyed antiquing at a revealingly early age.) My mother spent most of her life withholding things, shielding her children and her husband from uncomfortable truths. I’m sure she must have learned this at the feet of her own mother, an English suffragette who had a few doozies of her own to hide. Still, my mother believed in the curative power of letters. She must have written thousands over the years. When she wasn’t at The Bargain Box, selling used clothes for the Junior League, or hosting a radio panel show for teenagers, you could hear her writing in her den, clattering away on a millipede of a typewriter that popped out of a desk like a Victorian magic act.

I remember the letters she sent me at summer camp and how I reread them daily like a soldier at the front. There were four or five pages sometimes, covering the front and the back, the type inevitably crawling up the margins to a sideways ballpoint finale. Love, Mummie. That signature was my undoing at camp. Another boy spotted it, and since no kid in his right mind called his mother Mummie, there were immediate taunts about moldy pharaohs in their tombs, complete with bedsheet impersonations. My mother, who called her own mother Mummie, never knew of my humiliation. By the time I was a teenager I had decided to call her Mither, a name that struck me as elegant and ironic, so the joke could not possibly be on me. I did the same thing with my father who became Pap after years of being called Daddy, a name only children would use. I was learning to build my manly armor with words, being careful, so careful, like my mother.

Her letters were my only balm at Camp Seagull. Those were days of random self-disgrace in the prickly Carolina heat, days of capsized sailboats and fumbled baseballs and arrows landing short of their mark. There was one other kid who felt like a friend, another miserable ectomorph, but he bunked in another cabin, so our time together was limited. Sometimes we would meet up at twilight to walk along the shore of the Neuse River, away from our torturers, swapping notes on the universe as we poked in the sand for sharks’ teeth. (What was his name, goddammit? He looked me up in San Francisco in the early eighties, when a few published novels and a listed phone number made me easy to find. He told me he was gay like me but not very good at it. He liked my books, he said. He seemed so profoundly sad. I’m wondering if he ever made it past the plague, or if he lives with the virus, or if he died in one of the other ways, or if he’s on Facebook right now, like so many people I never expected to hear from again, posting videos of cute interspecies friendships.)

When he wasn’t around, this nameless boy, I would linger in the mess hall after supper and vanish into the comforting whir and flicker of a movie. They were usually war movies, my least favorite kind, but there was always a moment when the gunfire stopped and a lady appeared, a wife or a girlfriend, speaking softly amid soft music. How I craved a woman’s gentleness in that all-boy bedlam. I even considered sharing my anguish with Miss Lil, the wife of Cap’n Wyatt, the camp director. She was the only lady around, and not nearly as glamorous as my mother, but she bore a passing resemblance to Dale Evans and might be a sympathetic ear.

I never worked up the nerve. Nor did I share my homesickness with my mother, though she seemed to sense it from afar. Her letters soothed me with detailed visions of my imminent deliverance: “We’ll put a mattress in the back of the Country Squire so you can stretch out and read to your heart’s content. I’ll have all your favorites, darling—lots of Little Lulus and Uncle Scrooges. Don’t say I don’t mollycoddle you!” I never said that, never even used the word. It was Daddy who believed that sensitive boys could be permanently warped by sympathy. What was the point in making a man out of me if my mother unraveled it with her love?

On the way back to Raleigh, battling in the back of the station wagon with my brother and sister, I felt the sweet relief of our family made whole again. When we played Cow Poker or read aloud the Burma Shave signs, or, in the case of Mummie and me, lobbied my father passionately for a stop at a flea market, it was easy enough to believe that life could always be like this. It was easy to forget that camp had made me glimpse the hardest truth of all: that my mother’s absence would one day be permanent. I had done the arithmetic more than once, lying in bed after taps. She was in her late thirties; in another fifty years she would be dead.

As it turned out my figures were off considerably.

My mother must have known who I was even then. She called me her little Ferdinand, the Disney bull who sat in the pasture and smelled the flowers rather than go out and fight in the ring. It took me another quarter of a century to level with her. It makes sense that I chose to do so in a letter, getting the words exactly right, the way she had taught me. My letter was a work of fiction addressed to a fictional character in “Tales of the City,” but I had poured my heart into it with such naked intimacy that I knew she would realize that the message was meant for her.

I waited for a response, but none came. Not a letter or a phone call that might speak to the long unspoken. Though what right had I, really, to expect an answer? The letter had appeared in a San Francisco newspaper, where millions of people could see it, including my parents in Raleigh, who subscribed to the paper because of my work, but it could hardly be described as an act of bravery. I had avoided the chance of rejection by addressing my message to everyone and no one.

I had thrown it down a well, and there was no voice from the bottom.