The Unseen World (34 page)

“I hate him,” said Gregory. “He's a
fucking
idiot.”

Ada saw then that he would cry, and she looked away, embarrassed.

“I thought maybe you were smart,” said Gregory. “But I was wrong. I think you're a fucking idiot too.” He was young, still. Before her eyes, he was transforming, becoming the Gregory she knew from school: the spiteful, petulant child, the small bullied boy who lashed out wildly at his oppressors. He was crying, now, but fighting it; his face was red and bunched.

“Stop it,” said Ada. She stood up from the bed. She wanted him gone, out of her house; she wanted to sleep for a week. She crossed her arms, wrapped them around herself as far as they would go.

“You don't know anything,” said Gregory. He backed away from her as she moved forward. “You're an idiot.”

“Get out,” said Ada, without much force. She pointed weakly out the door, toward the hallway, toward the stairs.

“Or what?” said Gregory.

“This isn't your house,” said Ada. “Get out.”

He smiled then, meanly. “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Whose is it?”

“It's David's,” said Ada, and the invocation of her father's name made her weak. What would David think of her now? She closed her eyes.

“You don't even know your own dad,” said Gregory.

“Yes I do,” said Ada.

“Did you know he's a faggot?” said Gregory quietly. Viciously.

It was a word that was so frequently tossed about the hallways of Queen of Angels that at first it did not shock her. And then, slowly, she registered his accusation. She looked at him.

“He's a homo,” said Gregory. “Everyone knows but you.” He was not used to saying words like these; he was trying them out. They did not easily come to him. He had turned serious; he looked shocked by himself, slightly afraid of his own power. He stared at her. And then he turned and ran.

She was alone.

S
he woke up early. The sun had barely risen. Only a faint gray light filtered through the curtains she had drawn the night before. She had fallen asleep sometime in the early hours of the morning and slept fitfully, startling awake several times, dreaming repeatedly of someone opening the door to her room. Dreaming of David.

She did not remember at first what had happened the night before, and when she did, two emotions overtook her. The first was a deep and profound sadness, at the realization that perhaps what Gregory said had been true. She was not sad about the possibility of its truth—in fact, she had considered the idea herself, without knowing exactly what she was considering—but about what it meant if Gregory knew this about her father and she did not. It was another stone on the pile of David's many half-truths and deceptions. Worse: It meant that David, presumably, had been open with others—with Liston? with everyone at the lab?—but never with her. The gravity of this was too large for her, too overwhelming; she tucked it away.

The second emotion, the more immediate, was a slow, terrible shame. She put her hands to her face. She did not know how she could ever be in the same room as William Liston again. How she could ever look at him. Worst of all, she had no one to tell. Normally, discussions about minor and major romances dominated every lunchtime conversation with Melanie and Theresa and the others. For
the first time, she had something to contribute, and she could never tell a soul. Nor could she tell Liston or David, for obvious reasons, and Gregory already knew and probably hated her for it. Only Lisa Grady remained, but good, virginal Lisa Grady—her equal only yesterday—wouldn't understand it. She would blink severely in Ada's direction, raise her eyebrows, lower the corners of her mouth. She would think less of her.

Ada would tell no one.

She rose and dressed as quietly as she could. It was 6:00 in the morning on a Sunday. The library would not be open that day. She couldn't go back to Liston's. She couldn't stay at David's house; it would be the first place Liston would think to look, when she woke up and found Ada missing. She picked up her blue parka from its place on the floor and put it on. It smelled like William had. She closed her eyes tightly against the moments that replayed in her mind: William's hand, William's mouth, the places he touched. Her stomach hurt. She clenched it.

In the hallway, she passed David's room and considered going to St. Andrew's to see him. But that, too, felt unsafe. She no longer knew who he was. She walked down the stairs and into David's office, and took down from a shelf a small stack of yellow phone books. She flipped through the largest one until she found the entry she was looking for, and wrote down a telephone number and an address. Then she walked out the kitchen door, locking it behind her.

A frost had settled over everything and made the ground hard and unforgiving. Ada walked toward the Savin Hill bridge, her hands in her pockets. She should have dressed more warmly: thick socks and long underwear. David was a firm believer in long underwear.

She thought again of what Gregory had said, and a series of memories presented themselves to her: the first was David's fascination with certain men (though, she reasoned, he had also seemed fascinated by women—Liston, for example; Miss Holmes; several of
their neighbors over the years). The second was the way he spoke about President Pearse, who himself was gay: always with a sort of reverence, respect, for his long-standing relationship with his partner, Jack Greer, another grave and Brahmin Bostonian, an attorney whose career necessitated, in those days, discretion.

It was true: David had never had a girlfriend, never had anything close to a girlfriend. Also true was the fact that he had used a surrogate for Ada. Why had she never considered the reasons for this before?

And why, if he was gay, had he never said a word to her about it?

In 1985, Ada knew what the word
gay
meant—the AIDS epidemic was in the first years of its full deadly swing through the community, and she had read enough in the papers to understand its seriousness—but that had seemed an abstract thing to her. At fourteen, she had the cocky sense of indestructibility that all teenagers have; and until the onset of her father's Alzheimer's, and his subsequent decline, she had somehow assumed David to be surrounded by the same bubble of immortality. Her brushes with religious feeling had leant her the sense that maybe there was a larger plan for her, and if there was it certainly could not include her own death or the death of the person she loved most in the world. She clung to this belief to ward off the worry that, at certain moments, seemed as if it might overtake her completely, might possess and operate her body like a purgatorial soul.

This denial, then—this inability to fully contemplate what she found unsettling—had prevented her from ever fully confronting the question of David's sexuality. And now she berated herself for it: for the look of shock that must have crossed her face when Gregory spat those words at her. She wished, now, that she had had a cool and even reply at the ready.
Of course I knew that
. Or, better,
And?
A single word:
And?
As if to imply that she was bored, already, with the subject.

On Sunday mornings, while the rest of the neighborhood was at church, sometimes David and she had gone to breakfast at a
neighborhood diner on the other side of the bridge, with a waitress David liked named DeeDee, who knew Liston from the neighborhood as well. To kill time, Ada walked there now. She had ten dollars in the little wallet she carried in the inside pocket of her jacket. Since she'd been living with Liston, she had received the same allowance Liston gave her sons, of five dollars a week—“payment for work completed,” Liston always said, “not allowance”—which she very rarely spent.

The diner was surprisingly crowded. It was warm and close inside, and smelled of fat and bread and coffee, and, below that, cigarette smoke, both stale and fresh.

Ada didn't recognize the hostess, and DeeDee was not there. She sat at the counter and ordered David's favorite: the Lumberjack Special, with eggs and bacon and home fries and toast and a short stack of pancakes on the side.

“Hungry, huh?” asked the line cook, teasingly, and Ada agreed that she was.

He put a black coffee in front of her. David drank coffee regularly, always with whole milk, but Ada did not like it. Still, she took a sip of it tentatively, and then a longer one: it felt right, somehow, to drink it. Adult. She thought of William's mouth on hers and closed her eyes tightly against the memory.

It was nice to be out someplace warm and new by herself, away from David's house, away from all of the Listons. She sat at the counter for two hours, reading a newspaper, avoiding the line cook's eye. She ate every bite of her breakfast and asked for another coffee. Finally, she stood up and paid at the counter, and then she consulted the piece of paper on which she had written the address from David's Yellow Pages. She had not wanted to get there too early, but she supposed that 9:30 was a reasonable hour. Then she walked over to Dot Ave and walked south, toward Ashmont.

Ashmont was where Miss Holmes lived. She had told Ada once that she rented an apartment on the top floor of a triple-decker, and
Ada imagined her life there to be quiet and warm and enviable, with potted plants and a little deck outside. She imagined that Miss Holmes made tea for herself and cooked small meals and froze what was left over. Miss Holmes had said nothing that might lead her toward a particular vision of her life at home. But Ada knew that this was the sort of life she could imagine having herself one day, and so she chose to believe it about Miss Holmes.

When she reached Miss Holmes's street, she turned onto it and walked resolutely to number 33. Three bells formed a little stoplight by the door, and before she could be scared, she pushed the top one. And while she waited, it began to snow.

She held her breath and said a prayer, briefly, that Miss Holmes would answer. The library was closed; there were not many other places to go. She could not go back to Liston's. Not yet. She looked up at the white sky and counted slowly to ten, and then she rang the doorbell again.

Above her, a window opened. And from it emerged a face that Ada did not recognize. The face was not unfriendly. It belonged to a young woman of indeterminate age—an adult, Ada thought, but the woman was backlit by the bright bank of clouds behind her, and she couldn't be entirely sure.

“Hello?” said the woman.

“Hi,” said Ada. “I'm looking for—is Miss Holmes there?”

“Yeah,” said the woman.

“Can I talk to her for a second?” said Ada.

“Sure,” said the woman, but she did not move for a moment. And then Miss Holmes herself appeared, leaning out the window alongside the other woman.

“Ada?” she said, surprised. “Is that you?”

Miss Holmes's apartment was not unlike how Ada had pictured it. Oriental carpets crisscrossed one another on top of hardwood floors, and the furniture was mismatched and comfortable. Not surprisingly,
all of the walls were lined with bookshelves, and all of the bookshelves were filled with books. There were no potted plants, but there was a Christmas tree in the corner, already decorated, with little colored lights strung around it in three loops.

“Are you all right?” asked Miss Holmes, upon letting her in. She was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, still; it was funny to see her out of her librarian attire, typically a calf-length skirt and an oversized sweater.

“I'm fine,” said Ada. “I was just in your neighborhood.”

“How did,” Miss Holmes began, but then she shook her head. “Welcome,” she said.

Ada was looking behind Miss Holmes at the other woman in the apartment. She was standing in the corner shyly, a small smile on her face. She was short and plump and brown-haired. She worked the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other.

Miss Holmes followed Ada's gaze.

“This is my daughter,” she said. “Constance. Constance, this is Ada. She's a friend.”

“Hey,” said Constance, holding up one hand. Ada had not known Miss Holmes had had a daughter. Ada had noted long ago, when she was coming in regularly with David, that Miss Holmes wore no wedding ring. But it occurred to her that she had never really asked Miss Holmes anything about herself.

Miss Holmes took Ada's coat and hung it on a rack mounted to the wall and draped with dozens of other coats and scarves and jackets. “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to the sofa. “I'll make us tea.”

Ada sat down. Constance remained standing, avoiding Ada's gaze. She followed her mother with her eyes as Miss Holmes walked into the kitchen. How old was she? It was difficult to tell. She was wearing a red sweat suit; the top was covered with shiny patchwork hearts. Ada had the sudden feeling that Constance was different, somehow; that perhaps she belonged to a group of people who could be described by a word that the students at Queen
of Angels hurled at one another viciously, with a frequency that had startled Ada at first. It was a word she had heard William use, and Theresa, and Janice. It was a word that seemed, to Ada, almost as bad as the words that Gregory had used about her father. Almost, too, as bad as
loser
—the other word to duck, at Queen of Angels, when it was thrown. She had not used any of these words herself. They seemed almost magical in their power to wound: an incantation or a spell.

When the silence became uncomfortable, Ada spoke.

“That's a nice Christmas tree,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Constance. She tucked her hair behind her ear.

“Did you decorate it?”

“We both did,” said Constance.

She sat down then, across from Ada. “Do you have a Christmas tree?” she asked tentatively.

“No,” said Ada. “Not yet.

“I will, though,” she added, to assure herself of this as much as Constance.

“I love Christmas trees,” said Constance. “I can't get enough of them, actually.”