The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Page 27

  His hand was on her arm and they were moving back into the crowd. Caroline couldn’t seem to speak. People were waiting, glancing frankly in their direction, curious and whispering. She reached into her purse and handed David the envelope she’d prepared, with the latest photographs of Phoebe. David took it, met her eyes and nodded seriously, and then a slight woman in a black linen dress was taking him by the arm. It was the woman from the audience again, beautiful and faintly hostile, asking another question about form.

  Caroline stood where she was for a few minutes, watching him gesture to a photo that resembled the dark branches of a tree, talking to the woman in the black dress. He had been handsome and he was still. Twice he glanced in Caroline’s direction and then, seeing her, turned his attention fully to the moment. Wait, he’d said. Please wait. And he’d expected that she would. The sick feeling rose up in her stomach again. She didn’t want to wait; that was it. She’d spent too much of her young life waiting—for recognition, for adventure, for love. It wasn’t until she’d turned with Phoebe in her arms and left the home in Louisville, not until she packed up her things and moved away, that her life had really begun. Nothing good had ever come to her from waiting.

  David was standing with his head bent, nodding, listening to the woman with dark hair, the envelope clasped in his hands, behind his back. As she watched, he reached up and put the envelope casually in his pocket, as if it contained something trivial and mildly unpleasant—a utility bill, a traffic ticket.

  In moments she was outside, hurrying down the stone steps into the night.

  It was spring, the air crisp and damp, and Caroline was too agitated to wait for the bus. Instead she walked quickly, block after block, oblivious to the traffic or the people passing or even the slight danger involved in being out by herself at this hour. Moments came back to her, in swirls and glimpses, strange disconnected details. There had been a patch of dark hair over his right ear, and his fingernails had been clipped down to the quick. Square-tipped fingers, she remembered those, but his voice had changed, become more gravelly. It was disconcerting: the images she’d kept in her mind all this time had altered the moment she had seen him.

  And for herself? How had she seemed to him tonight? What had he seen, what had he ever seen, of Caroline Lorraine Gill? Of her secret heart? Nothing. Nothing at all. And she’d known that too, she’d known it for years, ever since the moment outside the church when the circle of his life had closed against her, when she had turned and left. In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.

  She had walked five blocks. It had started to rain. Her face was wet, her coat and shoes. The chill night seemed to have entered her, seeped beneath her skin. She was near a corner when a 61B squealed to a stop and she ran to catch it, brushing off her hair, sitting on the cracked plastic of the seat. Lights, neon, and the watery red blur of headlights moved across the windows. The early spring air was cool and damp on her face. The bus lumbered through the streets, picking up speed as it reached the dark stretches of the park, the long low hill.

  She got off in the center of Regent Square. A roar, shouts, swelled out of the tavern as she passed, and through the glass she glimpsed the shadowy figures of the players she’d seen earlier, glasses in their hands now and fists pumping in the air as they gathered around the television. Light from the jukebox cast stripes of neon blue across the arm of the waitress as she turned from the table nearest the window. Caroline paused, the wild adrenaline rush of her meeting with David Henry suddenly gone, dissipating into the spring night like mist. She felt her own isolation acutely, the figures in the bar joined by a common purpose, the people moving around her on the sidewalk drawn along the lines of their lives to places she could not even imagine.

  Tears rose in her eyes. The television screen flickered and another cheer swelled through the glass. Caroline moved off, jostling a woman carrying a paper sack of groceries, stepping over a pile of fast-food trash someone had left on the sidewalk. Down the hill and then up the alley to her house, the city lights giving way to those so well known and so familiar: the O’Neills, where a golden glow spilled out over the dogwood tree; the Soulards, with their dark stretch of garden, and finally the Margolis lawn, moonflowers growing wild up the hillside in the summertime, beautiful and chaotic. Houses in a row like so many steps down a hill and then, finally, her own.

  She paused in the alley, looking at her tall, narrow house. She had closed the blinds, she was sure of it, but now they were open and she could see clearly through the dining room windows. The chandelier glowed over the table where Phoebe had spread out her yarns. She was bent over the loom, moving the shuttle back and forth, calmly, intently. Rain was curled on her lap, a fluffy orange ball. Caroline watched, worried at how vulnerable her daughter seemed, how exposed to the world that swirled so mysteriously in the darkness behind her. She frowned, trying to remember that moment—her hand turning the narrow plastic stick and the blinds falling closed. Then she glimpsed a movement deeper in the house, a shadow shifting beyond the French doors to the living room.

  Caroline caught her breath, startled but not yet alarmed, and then the shadow took shape and she relaxed. This was no stranger but only Al, home early from his travels, puttering through the house. She was surprised and strangely gladdened; Al had been taking more jobs and was often gone two weeks at a time. But here he was; he had come home. He had opened the blinds, giving her this moment to savor, this glimpse of her life, contained within these brick walls, framed by the buffet she had refinished, the ficus tree she had not yet managed to kill off, the layers of glass and paint she’d washed so lovingly all these years. Phoebe glanced up from her work, staring unseeing out the window at the dark wet lawn, running her hand along the cat’s soft back. Al walked through the room, holding a cup of coffee in one hand. He stood beside her and with his cup gestured to the rug she was weaving.

  It was raining harder now, her hair was soaked, but Caroline didn’t move. What had been an emptiness outside the tavern window, a bleak vacancy real enough and fearful, was banished by the sight of her family. Rain hit her cheeks and streaked down the windows, beaded on her good wool coat. She took off her gloves and fumbled in her purse for her keys, then realized that the door would be unlocked. In the darkness of the lawn, as the eternal cars swooshed past on the freeway, their headlights catching in the dense lilac bushes she’d planted as a screen so many years ago, Caroline stood still a moment longer. This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.

  She shut her purse, then. She climbed the steps. She pushed the back door open and went home.

  II

  SHE WAS A PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY AT CARNEGIE MELLON and she was asking him about form. What is beauty? she wanted to know, her hand on his arm, guiding him across the gleaming oak floors, between the white walls on which his photos hung. Is beauty to be found in form? Is meaning? She turned, and her hair swung back; she swept it behind her ear with one hand.

  He stared down at her, at the white part in her hair, at her smooth pale face.

  “Intersections,” he said mildly, glancing back to where Caroline lingered by a photo of Norah on the beach, relieved to see her still there. With an effort, he turned back to the professor. “Convergence. That’s what I’m after. I don’t take a theoretical approach. I photograph what moves me.”

  “No one lives outside of theory!” she exclaimed. But she paused in her questions then, eyes narrowing, lightly biting the edge of her lip. He couldn’t see her teeth but he imagined them, straight and white and even. The room swirled around him, voices rose and fell; in an instant of silence he became aware that his heart was pounding, that he still held the envelope Caroli
ne had given him. He glanced across the room again—yes, good, she was still there—and tucked it carefully into his shirt pocket; his hands were trembling faintly.

  Her name was Lee, the dark-haired woman was saying now. She was the visiting critic-in-residence. David nodded, only half listening. Did Caroline live in Pittsburgh, or had she seen the show advertised and come from somewhere else, from Morgantown or Columbus or Philadelphia? She had mailed letters to him from all these places, and then she had stepped forward out of this anonymous audience, looking so much the same yet older, tauter and tougher somehow, the softness of her youth long gone. David, don’t you know me? And he had, even when he hadn’t let that knowledge in.

  He scanned the room for her again and did not see her, and the first threads of panic began, tiny, pervasive, like the filaments of mushrooms hidden in a log. She had come all this way; she had said she would stay; surely she would not leave. Someone passed with a tray of champagne glasses and he took one. The curator was there again, introducing him to the sponsors of the show. David pulled himself together enough to speak intelligently, but he was still thinking of Caroline, hoping to glimpse her at the edge of the room. He had walked away believing that she’d wait, but now, uneasily, he remembered that long-ago morning at the memorial service, Caroline standing on the fringes in her red coat. He remembered the coolness of the new spring air, and the sunny sky, and Paul kicking beneath the blankets in his carrier. He remembered that he’d let her walk away.

  “Excuse me,” he murmured, interrupting the speaker. He walked with purpose across the hardwood floors to the foyer of the main entrance, where he paused and turned back to survey the gallery room, searching the crowd. Surely, having found her after all this time, he couldn’t possibly lose her again.

  But she was gone. Beyond the windows, the lights of the city glittered seductively, scattered like sequins all over the undulating, dramatic hills. Somewhere, here or nearby, Caroline Gill washed dishes, swept the floor, paused to look out a darkened window. Loss and grief: they rushed up through him like a wave, so powerful that he leaned against the wall and bent his head, fighting a deep nausea. They were excessive, his emotions, disproportionate. He’d lived without seeing Caroline Gill for many years, after all. He took a deep breath, running through the periodic table in his mind—silver cadmium indium tin—but he could not seem to still himself.

  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 daughter. 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 to still the rushing world, the flow of events, but of course that had been impossible.

  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, standing 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 traveled to Kentucky and beyond before it poured itself into the Mississippi 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 finally 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 anything, but everyone watched him, knowing what it was; the University 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 beyond 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 scholarship. 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 precisely 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 evening, her fiancé 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.