by Liz Moore
He wrote to George to let him know what he had done.
A wonderful idea, said George. I’d like to meet her.
And so three times he had taken Ada to meet the original David George Sibelius, who was going by George Wright exclusively, the name under which he’d always made art.
The first time he went to Washington with Ada, after more than two decades of being away, he glanced over his shoulder, nervous about being recognized; but he had gone completely bald, for one thing, and he had gotten thinner from adopting a running habit when he got to Boston.
He introduced George to Ada as a friend he’d grown up with. It satisfied some deep and resonant part of him to know that they knew one another—even if Ada was not aware of the whole truth.
He thought, always, that he would tell Ada his story as soon as he felt she could understand it. When she was born, he imagined telling her when she was thirteen; and the age registered itself to him as a reasonable, concrete number. And he thought the world, too, might have changed by then.
He followed the news carefully, gauging the climate of the country, trying to judge when it might be safe to reveal his story. In his lifetime, surely, he thought. Still, he remained silent.
The fear, of course, was that he would not be believed. He did not want to risk going to jail; more than that, he did not want to risk putting his daughter in danger, making her the bearer of a secret that she could not tell.
He monitored government activity. How interested was the State Department, these days, in rooting out spies? He clipped articles out of the Times and the Globe. He stored them in a filing cabinet that he took with him from his studio apartment to the house he bought in Dorchester. For a time, in the seventies, anti-espionage activity seemed to diminish, and the gay rights movement picked up traction. He thought, several times, of explaining himself to his daughter.
But in the 1980s, a series of events made David reconsider. First, in 1981, President Pearse himself was finally forced out by the board of the Boston Institute of Technology, who had gotten word of his being investigated by the federal government years before. An anonymous source had reported it. Some said it was his successor, McCarren, who had been provost while Pearse was being investigated. This was never more than hearsay: but David could believe it.
Next, anti-espionage activity in the United States became frenzied, frantic. In 1984 alone, eleven Americans were arrested for espionage or treason. Thomas Patrick Cavanagh, Robert Cordrey, Ernst Forbrich, Bruce Kearn, Karl Koecher, Alice Michelson, Richard Miller, Samuel Loring Morison, Charles Slatten, Richard Smith, and Jay Wolff. He pored over the facts of their cases obsessively. He looked for patterns.
Had any of them, he wondered, been framed? Were any of them like him?
The thought prevented him from saying a word.
His brain, meanwhile, began to fail him, and Liston noticed. For a year she badgered him to see a doctor, but he avoided it, knowing what they would say. When he returned from his first appointment, he fell into a deep and abiding despair.
The correct thing to do, he thought, would be to tell Ada everything. But she was still only twelve: perhaps too young to bear such a weight. Too young to be burdened with a story that she could not tell.
This, at least, was what he told himself. The truth was more complex: mixed up with his wish to protect Ada was something less noble, a wish to protect himself, to shield himself from her wide inquisitive eyes, from the questions that were certain to come tumbling out of her. The look of betrayal that would pass across her face and perhaps stay there, a long shadow.
One day, working with ELIXIR, a solution presented itself to him cleanly and precisely, as all correct solutions do.
ELIXIR, he realized, could function as a sort of time capsule: a bundle of information that would be released to Ada later, ideally much later, when the world had changed. And he felt increasingly that it would change: he felt the ground shifting beneath him in surprising directions. He felt a movement gathering strength.
He wrote out his story; he told it to ELIXIR over a series of conversations that occupied him for two months.
He programmed it to respond to a specific command. Who is Harold?
It was the only direct intervention ever given to the program. He tested it out.
Who is Harold? he asked it, and his own story was presented to him, line by line, as he had typed it.
He created a puzzle for his daughter—one he thought might take her several years to figure out. Solving the puzzle would yield the command.
He spoke to Liston. “Make sure to keep it running,” he said, about ELIXIR. “For as long as you live. That’s my only wish.”
Liston had looked at him, hard. She was smarter than he was, he thought often; she knew things he did not know. He waited.
“All right,” she said, “I will.” She asked nothing. He knew that she would do it.
He had come to think of ELIXIR, by that time, in a somewhat familial way. At times the machine seemed like his child, like Ada’s sibling. Other times the machine seemed like a manifestation of himself; it had acquired many of his speech patterns, his verbal tics and irregularities. Beyond all rationality, he trusted the machine as much as—more than—he had ever trusted a human.
Still, he was also deeply aware that this mechanism was a risk. And so, a good scientist, he conceived of two alternatives, two backup plans in case his original idea failed. The first was President Pearse, whom he instructed to tell Ada the truth when she reached eighteen, by which time he imagined that he, David, would be gone—or at least so incapacitated mentally that he would be unable to convey his story.
As for the second: after much consideration, David decided to contact George. It had been several years since they had spoken, and when he tried the telephone number he had for him, he found that it no longer worked. He tried the coffee shop, too, at the Hamilton Arms; but that number was answered by somebody else, a certain Rhoda, who told him he was confused.
He could have been, he thought. It was possible.
So, one Saturday in August, 1984, he took the train to Washington, D.C. He was fading fast by then; the name of the community in which George once lived was entering and exiting his mind with a stuttering frequency. Hamilton Arms, it was called; but sometimes it occurred to him as Mantle Arms, or Armilton Place, or sometimes it would not come to him at all.
For this reason, before he left, he had written the name of the place, and the address, on his train ticket. He had also written down George’s name, what George always called his brush name, the one he went by exclusively now: George Wright.
David, upon arriving at Union Station, found a taxi and displayed his ticket stub to the driver. He had been clutching it in his right hand for hours, making himself focus on its contents, so that it was slightly softened, slightly damp. The address was vaguely smudged.
“Georgetown,” said the driver, and off they went.
Although David’s appearance had changed almost completely since he had worked in Washington, the vague fear of being recognized returned to him, and he reclined his head against the backseat of the cab. He drifted off for a moment.
“Hey, buddy,” the driver was saying, as he awoke. For several moments he was completely disoriented. He shook his head slowly. Was he in Boston? In New York?
He was clutching a piece of paper in his hand. Washington, D.C., it said, under an address. George Wright.
His feeling of disorientation increased when he exited the cab. He did not recognize the block, nor the buildings on it. He wondered if the driver had taken him to the wrong place. Though at home he had had difficulty picturing the buildings of Hamilton Arms, he had hoped that being physically on Thirty-first Street would awaken some collapsed memory. Instead, it did the opposite. He turned in a slow circle. The neighborhood had brightened, improved; the buildings looked newly painted. The last time he had been there, with Ada, it had been alarmingly run-down. He had steered her quickly through the gate
.
“Can I help you find something?” asked a young woman. She was pushing a baby stroller.
“Hamilton Arms,” said David, looking down at his ticket, and the woman shook her head.
“Haven’t heard of it,” she said. “Is it a restaurant?”
He turned in another circle. And then he noticed that there was a gate still, yes—perhaps the gate that once let him into the courtyard that led to George’s house.
“Never mind,” he said. He walked toward the gate. New metalwork displayed the words HAMILTON COURT. And the buildings beyond were all different: gone were the Swiss-style cottages, gone the empty swimming pool, the murals. The buildings were more upscale now. Totally nondescript. David wondered for a moment if he had made some mistake. He had been making them frequently.
An old man, a vagrant, was seated on the sidewalk, his back against the building that David remembered, suddenly, as what had once been the coffee shop. It, too, was different: the red brick had been painted a light gray; the sign was gone.
David approached him.
“Do you know—” he began, but the old man cut him off.
“Everyone’s gone,” he said. He looked away.
David almost gave up. He walked around the block several times—right and then right and then right and then right; that was a block, he reminded himself—to try to decide what to do. It was only on his third pass that he noticed an art gallery displaying paintings of the sort George used to make: large-scale abstract expressionist pieces in muted browns and blues.
They weren’t George’s, said the gallerist, when David went inside, but yes, he knew George Wright.
He looked at him strangely as he said it.
“Do you?” he asked David.
“Very well,” said David. “We’re old friends. Do you happen to have his new number?”
The gallerist, not wanting to give him the number directly, called George for him, and then proffered the telephone to David, and then stood to one side, an arm crossed about his torso, waiting.
George answered after six rings.
His voice, for several syllables, sounded rattling, disused. He cleared his throat. “Of course,” he said, when David asked if they could meet.
He was not far away. He no longer liked cafés, he said, so they met instead on a bench that overlooked the Potomac from a park that spanned the waterfront. It was the same one they always used to sit on together, said George by way of instruction, and David had to confess that he could not remember.
“Hang on,” he said, and he wrote down the directions messily on a slip of paper that the gallerist handed him.
When David arrived, George was waiting for him already. From the back, he looked hollow: as changed as the buildings he used to inhabit. His shoulders were sharp. David could see the bones of them through the light shirt he wore.
He paused for a moment, and George turned around. His face made it plainer. It was a skeleton’s face: it was painful to look at.
“I’ve got it,” said George, waving a languid hand before his body, as if to indicate, all of it.
It was then being called GRID, but George didn’t use the term. It, he said, and David understood.
They sat together for an hour. There was no use in explaining to George the favor for which he had sought him out: he would outlive George, David knew, even with the onset of his own disease. Instead, they both fell silent.
One memory, intact, occurred to David: It was of seeing George, for the first time, in the Mayflower Hotel, his hat rakishly askew, his clothing dark and warm-looking. He had looked strong; he had looked fearless. David, then, had imagined touching him. He touched him now: put an arm around George’s shoulders, felt the bones in them loosen slightly, felt the insubstantial weight of him shift almost imperceptibly toward David.
I’m sick, too, David could say, but what use would that be? It was different. He closed his eyes. The sun was going down; he could sense it through the skin of his eyelids, the gathering dusk, a familiar dimming of the sky.
He would count on Pearse, then, and ELIXIR, to deliver his story. He would count on the hope that he had taught his daughter well enough for her to one day solve the puzzle he had laid before her: an offering.
David returned to Boston on an overnight train. He had reserved a bed in a sleeper car, remembering his fascination with the idea of them as a boy; but he found he was too tall for them now, and he slept first fitfully, and then not at all.
He returned to the house in the morning and found that Ada wasn’t home.
He would wait, he thought; he would make her a nice lunch later. He was looking forward to seeing her. His daughter. His best and most valuable creation.
2009
Boston
When Ada emerged from Frank’s office, it was 5:00 in the evening and dark outside already. She had read for seven hours straight. She had gone back over several passages twice. She had not eaten since breakfast. At first she could not find Gregory and Frank; she wondered if they’d left. But finally she wandered around a corner and found them sitting on chairs in a sort of slapdash waiting room.
Frank was laughing, nearly shouting, at what seemed to be Gregory’s recitation of some shared memory. How nice it was, thought Ada, to be in the presence of people who knew her father and Liston.
“I’d imagine,” began Gregory, and then he saw her, and paused.
“I’m finished,” said Ada.
She felt pale and unsteady.
They stared at her for a moment. Then Frank rose to his feet, brushing off the legs of his pants. “Right!” he said. “Is there anything else you need?”
They did not ask anything further of her. It was not their story to ask for.
As they were leaving, Frank put both of his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. His face looked like family. In his embrace, for the first time in years, she felt young, childlike. She felt he could see into her past. He had known her since she was small: there were only a handful of people in the world who could say that.
“David was a good person,” he said. “We all knew that.”
Together, in silence, she and Gregory walked back to where he had parked. Their breath came out before them in long clouds. A cold frozen rain had begun.
“I’ll bring you to your hotel,” Gregory said, and he said nothing after that.
They pulled onto Mass Ave. The windshield wipers beat slowly. Gregory had his hands on the wheel at ten and two. He looked tense, expectant. She kept her head straight forward, but in her peripheral vision she could see him glance at her every so often.
She wondered what his life was like now: alone in Liston’s old house without Kathryn. She would share David’s story with him later—she owed it to him—but for the moment it was too large, too recent. There were too many more questions to ask.
Who is Harold? she had asked ELIXIR, and a document had presented itself to her containing transcript after transcript, the first dated June 20, 1983.
Nearly eighty thousand words. It was David, in conversation with ELIXIR. It was Harold Canady. It was the story of his life.
Suddenly Ada had the urge to see Shawmut Way again, one last time, before Gregory left.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
“Not at all,” Gregory said, looking straight ahead.
An alarming amount about the street had changed, even in the last five years. One of the more decrepit Victorians, and one of the nicest, had been knocked down and replaced by modern houses with modern conveniences that looked anachronistic to Ada: Driveways paved in stone. Energy-efficient windows that looked somehow as if they lacked both age and wisdom. Low shrubs in place of a beautiful old oak that had been the best climbing tree in Savin Hill. One front lawn had been replaced by a rock garden.
It was January 8, and most of the houses still had their holiday decorations up. Shawmut Way had always looked beautiful at Christmas, when Ada was a child; and David and Liston had always led the charge in decor
ating it. Both had preferred fat old-fashioned Christmas lights in bright colors, the tacky ones that most of the other residents of Shawmut Way had traded in over the years for small and classy white ones. Now both houses were dark.
Gregory pulled into Liston’s driveway—his driveway, Ada reminded herself; and Kathryn’s driveway, soon—and they both got out.
“I’ll be right back,” said Ada, and she walked four houses down and stood for a while in front of David’s house. Joanie had updated her on its most recent sale. These days it belonged to a family called the Johnson-Akimoyes, both parents doctors at MGH. They had two children, probably teenagers by then. The curtains on the windows at the front were open, and Ada stood for a while, looking into the lit house, considering how long ago it was that she and David had lived inside that house together. She was reminded, suddenly, of their annual pilgrimage to Gramercy Park: the two of them straining to see inside the windows of the house that had never been David’s. He had been pretending, then, to look into his past, when really he was looking into some alternate reality, some different version of his own history, some unseen world.
A quick motion at the living room window, a face. The Christmas lights outside went on, and then the curtain dropped. Perhaps she had been noticed.
