Bequeath by Melora Wolff Review by Aline Soules

Bequeath by Melora Wolff

Review by Aline Soules

Publisher: Louisiana State University Press 

ISBN: 978-0-8071-8277-2

Publication Date: September 13, 2024

Pages: 167 pages

According to Melora Wolff in a Tupelo Quarterly interview with Kristina Marie Darling, her work “is an elegy for [her] family, and recalls [her] girlhood spent in 1970s Manhattan and the troubling events, family tales, and eccentric relationships that have haunted [her]; and that New York City then was glamorous and dangerous, a realm of intoxicating feminist ideals and threatening misogyny, where [she] was muddled by fear and by desire.” 

“Masters in This Hall,” the first of ten memoir essays in this book, immerses the reader in deeply lyrical language woven through a series of vignettes. Each vignette is complete in itself, a literary gem and the cumulative effect of these vignettes is a complex and affecting view of “the fathers”. The first two-paragraph vignette asks: “Who were the fathers?” and “Where were the fathers?” 

We wanted to see them, to hear them—their coughs and quips, their songs and snorts, their belches and yawns, their whoops and rants—we wanted to hug them, to thug them all the time, to practice daily our hugging of fathers. (3)

The second paragraph is rooted in time (1970s) and expands to picture family and school:

They [the fathers] weren’t in the lobby of the school. They weren’t waiting to escort us beside the East River safely home. That was not the duty of the fathers, but of the unemployed mothers, who walked with us along the boardwalk or under the school pier past the loiterers, the skateboarders and bikers, or across the busy New York City avenues. (3)

The remaining vignettes in this first memoir essay offer other aspects of the fathers as they relate to their daughters and the school—the gym, the Christmas Assembly, the famous Mod Squad father eclipsed by the gynecologist father, Friday Film Day. The fathers are drawn into the Christmas Assembly to sing, and, in a glorious finish, the author writes:

We knew in our bones, this was a sound—like the rumbles of a shifting earth—we would never hear again. In our strongest voice, we sang with our fathers.

The ten essays are linked by time, place, lyrical language and the arc of story. We are given exquisite details in each. “Mystery Girls,” for example, opens: 

The dance hall at the Riverside Community Center was pitch-dark. Bodies collided. Limbs thrust. Mouths gasped. Girls bobbed up and down and gulped for air. The air was thick, dank. Older men we had never seen before played live music that vibrated the damp walls decorated with frames of faux gilt. The beat was steady, consuming, a tell-tale heart (73).

The girls, aged thirteen, are “fueled by anonymity and by their stolen cigarettes.” The boys “chose their partners scattershot.” The economy of language is stunning. The details are finely wrought and all the more immersing for being spare. The author offers just enough detail to fuel the imagination, to present not just the scene and story, and enable readers to connect to their own memories as girls growing up to find their place in the world. 

Yet, this essay does not end well. Fear enters in the form of a serial killer. Art is now edgier: The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the forbidden Taxi Driver. When another victim is murdered, the girls are forbidden to go home alone. Yet, Wolff writes:

We wanted to go wild. We wanted to swivel our hips and feel a shower of glittering snowflakes fall on our hot skin. We wanted to feel a sexual weather sent down from a flashing disco heaven. (83)

What growing girl has not experienced such a moment, even as restrictions continue and the mothers caution, “Do you have any idea what is going on in this city right now?” 

In July, the day before bars will be installed on the windows of their brownstone, the daughter, left alone, slips outside without locking the door or leaving a note. When she comes home, her mother has called the police. “There was a man trying to kill me!” the daughter exclaims. When the police bring a man for her to identify, she feels back at school with the other girls until she knows she is alone. We are not told whether she identifies the man. We are given a description of the fire hydrant, “open and flowing weakly,” and the liquid that 

…streamed into the gutter and into the cracks of the sidewalk. Wide pools spread across the pavement toward me. The light of the police car kept spinning, casting its shade across my vision. Everything was bathed in red. (94)

The title story, “Bequeath,” begins with the father bequeathing his “savings and property” to his two daughters. Unexpectedly, he stipulates that his car go to the author and his piano to her sister, but two other instruments the sisters “associate most intimately” with their father are not named in the will: a clarinet which the sister takes, and an alto sax, which the author keeps. The car and the piano feel like burdens, neither needed. The essay continues with alternating remembrances of the car and the piano in the father’s and daughters’ lives; for example, Pete, who lived below them, “deplored pianos with fury,” most notably saying (with a smile)

If you don’t shut those dear children up I’ll bring a hammer and an axe up here, beat this door down, and chop that fucking piano into smithereens! (153)

The author’s youthful response was, “I loved that new word ‘smithereens’.” 

The essay toggles back and forth between the piano and the car. In the end, the author imagines the piano dismantled, just as Pete had threatened, the rooms emptied after her father’s death. “The piano vanished” and

The wall where it had stood was vacant. My father was gone. I didn’t see the axe fall, I didn’t hear the hammers hit the strings, but there were vibrations for many years. (160)

That feels a fitting end to this collection, but there is one more essay: “Begin.” In only a couple of pages, the author recounts sitting with her mother, looking at the illustrations, while her mother reads aloud. The key to this simple experience is explained: “I remember very well turning to a particular page that became the first page of my life.” She expands on this, ending with the idea that even if survival and the future are unknown, “something must, something will, if you believe.” This last short essay is essential, ending on a positive and important note, placing the entire collection in the larger context of the world. 

This is a memoir to sink into, to enjoy for its content, and for the words and images that allow readers to enter into a specific time and place and revel in its uniqueness. This is the author’s childhood, the fabric of her life and her family and her growing years, a youth that is not lost but brought to exquisite life. 

Melora Wolff’s work has appeared in publications such as Brick, the New York Times, the Normal School, Best American Fantasy, Speculative Nonfiction, and Every Father’s Daughter: Twenty-four Women Writers Remember Their Fathers, and has received multiple Notable Essay or the Year citations from Best American Essays. She is director of creative writing at Skidmore College.

Aline Soules’ work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and others. Her book reviews have been published by Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review, and more. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Online: https://alinesoules.com 

3 December 2025