Lisa Perry

Spouse of Scott Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Lisa Perry was born in 1961 at Houston, Texas, and is living today in that city, where she has worked for forty years as a secretary among the shipping channel, oil offices and bayous that she has never wished to leave. She is not of any house of the Ledger and is entered in the family papers as unaffiliated, but in 1988 she married the shipyard welder Scott Proctor, the younger son of the electrician James Proctor and the hospital cook Mildred Chandler, of the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. They raised two daughters, Lisa Perry Proctor, born in 1990, and Shannon Proctor, born in 1992, neither of whom was called. Lisa was never a hunter and is not a vampire slayer. She has no craft, alias or gear beyond a Selectric, a shorthand pad and a drawer of carbon paper, and she served the Ledger for thirty-eight years as the family's secretary in the old sense of the word, the person who is told things, writes them down and keeps them to herself. The Proctors say that she has taken more dictation from the dead than any other woman in Texas, though she has always insisted that it was only ever from their cousins. She was born at the county hospital in the south of the city, in the hot week at the end of a long August, the third child of a tugboat deckhand and a church organist, neither of whom appears in the family papers by name, since the Ledger, in its courteous way, respects a family's wish to be left out. She grew up in a frame house in the Heights, a street of pecan trees, porches and screen doors, within sound of the freight trains, and she was a small, neat, fair, serious girl who took to the typewriter at nine, when her father brought home a broken Remington from a ship's office. She mended it with a hairpin. By eleven she could type forty words a minute with two fingers and a look of stern disapproval, and by the end of high school she had a certificate in shorthand, a year of night classes in business English and a firm conviction, which was never to be shaken, that most of the world's difficulties were due to bad filing. She said that if everything were written down in the right place, nobody would have to remember anything. She said it so often that her mother, between hymns, took to calling her the Recording Angel. She went to work at eighteen in 1979 as a junior typist in the front office of a shipyard on the channel, a firm that repaired tugs, barges and offshore supply boats, and she rose, over five years, to the post of secretary to the yard manager, a bluff, loud, forgetful man who had never found a letter that he had signed. She learned the yard's life through its paper. A boat came in with a cracked hull and left with a work order, an invoice, a bill of lading and a note, and she kept the whole of it in a grey filing cabinet that she alone could open. It was in the spring of 1986, in the worst months of the oil bust, when half of the offices on the channel were empty and the yard ran on a skeleton night shift, that a young welder from the next berth came into the office at ten at night to ask for a form, and found a woman of twenty-four typing by a desk lamp, with a thermos and a mild frown, a letter to a creditor. He said that he did not wish to interrupt. She said that he already had. Scott Proctor was a quiet, heavy-shouldered, laconic young man of twenty-two with a burn scar across the back of one hand, the younger son of a family that he said was a little unusual, and he had come to the yard at eighteen as a helper and been a certified welder by twenty. He could lay a bead in a hull plate so clean that an inspector once took it for a machine's. He asked what she was typing. She said that it was a letter telling a man he owed forty thousand dollars and was not to be paid. He said that he liked a straightforward letter. They were married two years later, in the spring of 1988, in a small church in the Heights, with his brother Marcus as best man in a rented suit, her father giving her away with the air of a man handing over a spare part, and her mother-in-law, Mildred Chandler, in the front pew, with a pot of beans in the car. She was told about the family on the Sunday after, on the sleeping porch of the house on Telephone Road, by Mildred, who took her through the matter in six sentences and offered her a bowl of caldo. Lisa asked whether the Ledger was kept in order. She was told that it was kept by a number of people. She said that she would very much like to see the correspondence. She found it, in her first year, in a shoebox. It was the paper of the Gulf coast cousins of the White Ledger, thirty years of it, postcards, telegrams, scraps on the back of church bulletins, cards from hotels and a bundle of letters in four different alphabets, with no dates, no order and one shared address. She spent a winter on it, in the evenings, after the girls were in bed. She sorted it by year, by writer and by subject, and she typed a master index on a Selectric, with a cross-reference, in quadruplicate, and gave one copy to Mildred, one to the cousin in San Antonio, one to the cousin in Birmingham and one to the Ledger. The cousins, who had been looking for a letter of 1971 for a decade, found it in four minutes. After that, they sent her everything. For thirty years she has taken the Ledger's dictation, by telephone, by post and across her kitchen table, in a shorthand of her own devising, and she has the reputation of never having lost a line. A hunter who has been up for two nights and cannot remember what he saw can ring Lisa Perry and read it to her, and she will take it down, and in the morning there is a typed sheet. Scott's part was the iron. A shipyard welder who has spent his life making steel do as it is told is a useful man to the safe houses of a hunting family, and he has fitted, over thirty years, bar gates, steel door frames, cellar hatches and a number of window grilles to the houses of the Gulf coast cousins, always at cost, always on a Saturday, always with a small hand-lettered tag welded to the inside that says only that it is sound. He made the gate at the house on the bayou that Raymond Proctor Navarro had used in the sixties. He was told, when he asked, that it was not for burglars. He did not ask again. Her daughters were born in 1990 and 1992, in the same hospital, in the same week of the same month, and each was named, as the Ledger likes, for the mother's side and the father's. They grew up in a house in the east of the city with a workshop in the garage and a filing cabinet in the hall, and each was told the truth at fifteen, over a plate of eggs, and said that she supposed it explained the shorthand. Neither was called. The elder became a paralegal and the younger a pharmacy technician, and both, in her turn, were taught to file. In the attacks of September 2001 Lisa was at her desk in an office on Louisiana Street, with the radio on, and she did not stop typing until the building was cleared, when she was seen to have taken the master index, in its binder, under her arm. In the pandemic years she worked from the kitchen, with a headset, and was observed by her husband to be happier than at any time in the previous thirty years, as nobody had interrupted her filing. She is sixty-five, small, grey and exact, and she lives with Scott in the house in the east of the city, with the cabinet in the hall. The index has run to six volumes, and she still takes the Ledger's dictation on Sundays, from nine to eleven, with a pot of coffee and a pencil. A cousin who asked, in a spirit of idle curiosity, what the whole of it came to, was told that it was in order. Lisa Perry is remembered in the Proctor family as the secretary of the White Ledger, the woman who sorted thirty years of the Gulf coast's paper into a single index and never lost a line of what the hunters said. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers of records who never took the field, who knew that a hunt is half remembering, and who showed that a typed and cross-referenced page is, in its own way, a rampart.