David reached into his pocket and took out the envelope she'd given him; maybe she'd left an address or a phone number. Inside were two Polaroids, stiff, the color poor, muted and toned with gray. The first showed Caroline, smiling, her arm around the girl beside her, who wore a stiff blue dress, low-waisted, with a sash. They were outside, posed against the brick wall of a house, and the sun-washed air bleached the scene of color. The girl was sturdy; the dress fit her well but did not make her graceful. Her hair fell around her face in soft waves and she smiled a bright smile, her eyes nearly closed in her pleasure at the camera or whoever stood behind it. Her face was wide, gentle-seeming, and it might have been only the angle of the camera that made her eyes slant slightly upward. Phoebe on her birthday, Caroline had written on the back. Sweet Sixteen.
He slid the first photo behind the second, more recent one. Here was Phoebe again, playing basketball. She was poised to shoot, her heels lifting off the asphalt. Basketball, the sport Paul refused to play. David looked at the back and checked the envelope again, but there was no address. He drained his champagne and put his glass down on a marble-topped table. The gallery was still crowded, buzzing with conversation. David paused in the doorway and watched for a moment with curious detachment, as if this scene were something he'd stumbled on by accident, nothing to do with him. Then he turned away and stepped out into the soft, cool, rain-dampened air. He slipped Caroline's envelope with its photos in his breast pocket and, without knowing where he was going, he began to walk.
Oakland, his old college neighborhood, was changed and yet not changed. Forbes Field, where he had spent so many afternoons hunched high in the bleachers, soaking in the sun, cheering when bats cracked and the balls rose over the bright green fields, was gone. A new university building, square and blunt, rose into the air where the cheers of thousands had once roared. He paused, turning to the Cathedral of Learning, that slender gray monolith, a shadow against the night sky, to regain his bearings.
He walked on, down the dark city streets, past people emerging from restaurants and theaters. He did not really think about where he was going, though he knew. He saw he'd been caught, frozen for all these years in that moment when he handed Caroline his daugh?ter. His life turned around that single action: a newborn child in his arms—and then he reached out to give her away. It was as if he'd taken pictures all these years since to try and give another moment similar substance, equal weight. He'd wanted to try and still the rushing world, the flow of events, but of course that had been im?possible.
He kept walking, agitated, muttering to himself now and then. What had been held still in his heart all this time had been set in motion again by his meeting with Caroline. He thought of Norah, who had become a self-sufficient and powerful woman, who courted corporate accounts with glittery assurance and came in from dinners smelling of wine and rain, traces of laughter, triumph, and success still on her face. She'd had more than one affair over the years, he knew that, and her secrets, like his own, had grown up into a wall between them. Sometimes in the evening he glimpsed, for the briefest instant, the woman he had married: Norah, stand?ing with Paul as an infant in her arms; Norah, her lips stained with berries, tying on an apron; Norah as a fledgling travel agent, staying up late to balance her accounts. But she had shed these selves like skins, and they lived together now like strangers in their vast house.
Paul suffered for it, he knew that. David had tried so hard to give him everything. He had tried to be a good father. They'd collected fossils together, organizing and labeling them and displaying them in the living room. He'd taken Paul fishing at every chance. But however hard he worked to make Paul's life smooth and easy, the fact remained that David had built that life on a lie. He had tried to protect his son from the things he himself had suffered as a child: poverty and worry and grief. Yet his very efforts had created losses David never anticipated. The lie had grown up between them like a rock, forcing them to grow oddly too, like trees twisting around a boulder.
The streets converged, coming together at odd angles, as the city narrowed to the point where the great rivers met, the Monongahela and the Allegheny, their confluence forming the Ohio, which trav?eled to Kentucky and beyond before it poured itself into the Missis?sippi and disappeared. He walked to the very tip of the point. As a young man, a student, David Henry had come here often, standing at the edge of land, watching the two rivers converge. Time and again he had stood here with his toes suspended above the dark skin of the river, wondering in a detached way how cold this black water might be, whether he would be strong enough to swim to shore if he fell in. Now, as then, the wind cut through the fabric of his suit, and he looked down, watching the river move between the tips of his shoes. He edged out an inch farther, changing the composition. A glimmer of regret flashed through his weariness: this would be a good photo, but he'd left his camera in the hotel safe.
Far below the water swirled, foamed white against the cement piling, surged away. The arch of his foot, that's where David felt the pressure of the concrete edge. If he fell or jumped and couldn't fi?nally swim to safety, they would find these things: a watch with his father's name inscribed on the back, his wallet with $200 in cash, his driver's license, a pebble from the stream near his childhood home that he had carried with him for thirty years. And the photos, in the envelope tucked into the pocket above his heart.
His funeral would be crowded. The cortege would stretch for blocks.
But it would stop there, the news. Caroline might never know. Nor would word travel any farther, back to where he'd been born.
Even if it did, no one there would recognize his name.
The letter had been waiting for him, tucked behind the empty coffee can of the corner store, one day after school. No one said any?thing, but everyone watched him, knowing what it was; the Uni?versity of Pittsburgh logo was clear. He'd carried the envelope upstairs and placed it on the table by his bed, too nervous to open it. He remembered the gray sky of that afternoon, flat and blank be?yond the window, broken by the leafless branch of an elm.
For two hours he had not allowed himself to look. And then he did, and the news was good: he had been accepted with a full schol?arship. He sat on the edge of the bed, too stunned, too wary of good news—as he would always be, all his life—to allow himself real joy. It is my pleasure to inform you…
But then he noticed the error, the dull truth rising up and fitting just where he'd expected it, in that hollow place just below his ribs: the name on the letter was not his. The address was right, and every other detail from his date of birth to his social security number—all these were correct. And his first two names, David for his father and Henry for his grandfather, those were fine as well, typed pre?cisely by a secretary who had perhaps been interrupted by a phone call, by a visitor. Or maybe it was only the lovely spring air that made her look up from her work, dreaming herself into the eve?ning, her fiance there with flowers in his hands and her own heart trembling like a leaf. Then a door slammed. Footsteps sounded, her boss. She started, drew herself together and back into the present. Blinking, she hit the return carriage and went back to work.
David Henry she had typed already, correctly.
But his last name, McCallister, had been lost.
He had never told anyone. He had gone off to college and regis?tered, and no one ever knew. It was, after all, his true name. Still, David Henry was a different person from David Henry McCallis?ter, that much he knew, and it seemed clear it was as David Henry he was meant to go to college, a person with no history, unburdened by the past. A man with a chance to make himself anew.
And he had done just that. The name had allowed it; to some ex?tent, the name had demanded it: strong and a bit patrician. There had been Patrick Henry, after all, a statesman and an orator. In the early days, during those conversations where he had felt himself to be at sea, surrounded by people wealthier and better connected than he would ever be, by people utterly at ease in the world he was so desperately trying to join, he would sometimes allude, though never directly, to a distant but important lineage, invoking false an?cestors to stand behind him and lend support.
This was the gift he'd tried to give Paul: a place in the world that no one could question.
The water between his feet was brown, edged with a sickly white foam. The wind rose, and his skin became as porous as his suit. The wind was in his blood, and the swirling water flashed, drew closer, and then there was acid in his throat and he was on his hands and knees, the stones cold beneath his hands, vomiting into the wild gray river, heaving until nothing more could be expelled. He lay there for a long time, in the darkness. Finally, slowly, he stood, wiped the back of his hand against his mouth, and walked back into the city.
He sat in the Greyhound terminal all night, dozing and jerking awake, and in the morning he caught the first bus to his childhood home in West Virginia, traveling deep into the hills that sur?rounded him like an embrace. After seven hours, the bus stopped where it always had, on the corner of Main and Vine, and then roared away, leaving David Henry in front of the grocery store. The street was quiet, a newspaper plastered against a telephone pole and weeds growing up through cracks in the sidewalk. He'd worked in this store to earn his room and board above it, the smart kid come down from the hills to study, astonished by the sounds of bells and traffic, the housewives shopping, the schoolchildren clus?tering to buy sodas at the fountain, the men gathering in the evenings, spitting tobacco and playing cards and passing the time with stories. But that was gone now, all of it. Red and black graffiti covered the plywood-covered windows, bleeding into the grain, unreadable.
Thirst was a fire in David's throat. Across the street, two men, middle-aged, one bald, one with thin graying hair to his shoulders, sat playing checkers on the porch. They looked up, curious, suspi?cious, and for a moment David saw himself as they would, his pants stained and wrinkled, his shirt a day and night old, his tie gone, his hair flattened from his fitful sleep on the bus. He did not belong here, never had. In the narrow room above the store, books spread out on his bed, he'd been so homesick he couldn't concentrate, and yet when he went back to the mountains, his yearning did not di?minish. In the small clapboard house of his parents, set firmly into the hill, the hours stretched and grew, measured out by the tamping of his father's pipe against the chair, his mother's sighs, the stir?rings of his sister. There was the life below the creek and the life above it, and loneliness opening everywhere, a dark flower.
He nodded at the men, then turned and started walking, feeling their stares.
A light rain, delicate as mist, began to fall. He walked, though his legs ached. He thought of his bright office, a lifetime or a dream away. It was late afternoon. Norah would still be at work and Paul would be up in his room, pouring his loneliness and anger into music. They expected him home tonight, but he would not be there. He'd have to call, later, once he knew what he was doing. He could get on another bus and go back to them right now. He knew this, but it also seemed impossible for that life to exist in the same world as this one.
The sidewalk, uneven, was soon broken up by lawns on the edge of town, a stop-and-start pattern like some sort of Morse code, abandoned for intervals and then gone entirely. Shallow ditches ran along the edges of the narrow road; he remembered them full of daylilies, swelling orange masses like running flames. He slid his hands under his arms to warm them. It was a season earlier here. The lilacs of Pittsburgh and the warm rain were nowhere. Crusts of snow broke under his feet. He kicked the blackened edges into the ditches, where more snow lingered, broken through with weeds, debris.
He'd reached the local highway. Speeding cars forced him to the grassy shoulder, spraying him with a fine mist of slush. This had once been a quiet road, cars audible for miles before they came in sight, and usually it was a familiar face behind the windshield, the car slowing, stopping, and a door swinging open to let him in. He was known, his family was, and after the small talk—How's your mama, your daddy; how's the garden doing this year?—a silence would fall, in which the driver and the other passengers thought carefully about what might be said and what might not to this boy so smart he had a scholarship, to this boy with a sister too sick to go to school. There was in the mountains, and perhaps in the world at large, a theory of compensation that held that for everything given some-thing else was immediately and visibly lost. Well, you've got the smarts, even if your cousin did get the looks. Compliments, seduc?tive as flowers, thorny with their opposites: Yes, you may be smart but you sure are ugly; You may look nice but you didn't get a brain. Compensation; balance in the universe. David heard accusation in each remark about his studies—he'd taken too much, taken everything—and in the cars and trucks silence had swelled until it seemed impossible that a human voice could ever break it.
The road curved, then curved again: June's dancing road. The hillsides steepened and streams cascaded down and the houses grew steadily sparser, poorer. Mobile homes appeared, set into the hills like tarnished dime-store jewelry, turquoise and silver and yel?low faded to the color of cream. Here was the sycamore, the heart-shaped rock, the curve where three white crosses, decorated with faded flowers and ribbons, had been pounded into the earth. He turned and went up the next stream, his stream. The path was over?grown; almost, but not quite, disappeared.
It took him nearly an hour to reach the old house, now weather-beaten a soft gray, the roof sagging at the center of the ridgepole and some of the shingles missing. David stopped, taken so powerfully into the past that he expected to see them again: his mother coming down the steps with a galvanized tin tub to collect water for the laundry, his sister sitting on the porch, and the sound of the ax strik?ing logs from where his father chopped firewood, just out of sight. He had left for school and June had died, and his parents had stayed on here as long as they could, reluctant to leave the land. But they had not thrived, and then his father died, too young, and his mother finally went north, traveling to her sister and the promise of work in the auto factories. David had come home from Pittsburgh rarely and never again since his mother died. The place was as familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.
