by Liz Moore
“You’d become someone else,” said George.
“Who?” said Harold.
There was a family friend of George’s whom George knew to be like them—a comrade. “Don’t say comrade,” Harold had said.
“An ally, then,” said George. “Someone built like us.”
His name was Robert Pearse. George had known him since he was a child. He was powerful, said George, but secretive: not even George’s estranged parents knew the truth about him. But he and George were still in touch: Pearse had reached out to George when his parents first sent him away, offering him guidance, help, friendship. He had invited George to his town home on Beacon Hill for a weekend: he had introduced him to his partner, Jack Greer; he showed him an alternate way to exist. Since then, they had had a correspondence. “If there’s anything I can do,” Pearse had always said.
“He can help you,” George told Harold.
One weekend, in August of 1950—two months before Tillman and Doherty arrived in his office—George and Harold had gone to New York City.
It was an act of love, on George’s part—he had avoided the city for years, dreading an encounter with his parents, with any friend of the family.
“Well, here we are,” he said, with something like disdain, as they got off the bus.
He took Harold to all the places he had frequented as a child.
“Write this down,” he said. “Memorize it until it’s yours. Then burn it.”
All weekend, George narrated to Harold the story of his life. And Harold took notes, as avidly as a reporter. The name of every school companion; the name of every relative. The family tree. A chronological order of trips that he had taken, places he had been. The places in New York that a family like George’s might frequent.
There was a conflicted pride in George as he showed Harold his old haunts. “Here’s where I went to church,” he said, outside Calvary Episcopal.
“Here’s where I went to school,” he said, outside Trinity.
“Until they packed me off to St. Paul’s,” he said.
“Are you writing this down?” he asked, and Harold assured him that he was.
George had saved his house for last, wanting to wait until it was dark outside to venture there.
Before they walked to Gramercy Park, they had a good dinner together near Union Square, in a sort of little bustling cafeteria, noisy enough to prevent their being heard.
Later in life, he would stop into it, anytime he had an opportunity to go to New York City. He would take his daughter there: he would tell her it had been his favorite place. And from that moment on, it was.
Around them were young men and women who looked like George.
When they finished, George stood up abruptly from his chair and nodded toward the door.
“Are you ready?” he asked Harold.
The house was grander than anything Harold could have imagined.
“There it is,” said George unhappily. “The Sibelius homestead.”
It was dark outside, but the little lamps from Gramercy Park illuminated the area just enough for him to be nervous. He glanced over both shoulders repeatedly.
“Now you know what it looks like,” he said. “It’s even more horrible inside.”
After a pause, they walked away together, the two of them, until they were certain they were out of sight. Then they paused, and George took Harold by the shoulders.
“Do you have any questions?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Harold. “Nothing I can think of right now.”
“It’s yours,” said George. “It’s all yours. I don’t want it anymore.”
He looked tired. He looked like a man who’d been carrying a burden.
Robert Pearse, George’s family friend, was the president of the Boston Institute of Technology.
When they returned from New York, George called him on the phone. Harold, in the background, listened anxiously as he explained their situation.
George fell silent for a long time. When he hung up, he turned to Harold.
“Yes,” he said. “He’ll help.”
For some time they had a plan in place. It remained a hypothetical, an unhatched parachute, for some time after that. It was something, at least: it gave Harold some measure of comfort and control. Some assurance that his professional life would not be over if he was fired.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Harold asked for the thousandth time, and George nodded emphatically.
Every dollar George earned was off the record; his politics demanded it. Already he had invented a way to live outside society, in plain sight, in the middle of Washington, D.C. He intended to keep it that way, he said, for the rest of his life.
“You’re young,” said Harold. “Suppose you change your mind.”
“Oh, Harold,” said George, “don’t patronize me.” But he said it kindly, and Harold saw that he was serious.
“I can find other work,” said Harold. “I can keep my name.”
“Who’ll hire you?” said George. “Without credentials, blacklisted by the United States government. They’ll make sure you don’t get hired anyplace.”
“Then I’ll become a hermit,” said Harold. “A mountain man. I’ll solve math problems in my head from my perch in the woods.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said George.
“A chef,” Harold continued, enjoying himself now. But he knew that he would not be happy. His work made him happy; it was the only thing that ever had.
“You need my name more than I do,” said George.
“Besides,” he added, “I hate it. I can’t wait to be rid of it. And that’s the truth.”
His name was David George Sibelius. He had always gone by his middle name; it was what his parents had called him, for reasons he wasn’t sure of.
Professionally, he was already going by a different name. A brush name, he called it—since pen name didn’t work for a painter.
“I’ll go by David, I think,” said Harold. “As added protection.”
George shrugged. “Whatever you like,” he said.
This, anyway, was what Harold told him. The truth was that George’s first name appealed to him: containing, as it did, an allusion to someone facing odds that seemed unbeatable.
The day after Tillman, Doherty, and Lewey interviewed Harold, he and George put their plan into action.
In the morning, Harold left his apartment. He took a circuitous, rambling walk all around Washington, hoping to lose anyone trailing him. And then he found his way, finally, to the Hamilton Arms. To George’s apartment.
He did not take any of his possessions. This, too, was part of the plan. He left everything intact; months ago he had transferred a little suitcase to George’s apartment, the essentials he would need to start a life in Boston.
“Are you going to call your mother?” asked George, the night before they enacted their plan. Harold had calculated everything: The weight of the car. The acceleration it would take to create tire tracks. He had practiced in a parking lot, in rural Virginia, under cover of night.
“No,” said Harold.
But in the end, he did: he called the house in Kansas. He had not called home in over a year. He closed his eyes. He imagined Susan answering.
It was not his mother, but his father, who answered in the end.
“Hello?” said his father. “Hello? Hello?”
Harold listened to him breathing. He said nothing.
That night, they flipped Harold’s car into the Shenandoah River.
A suicide, the State Department would think. An accident, the paper would report.
Everyone would be satisfied.
George followed Harold in a different car.
After it was done, George was the one who drove him to Boston. They arrived there at 6:00 in the morning. From the glove compartment, George extracted a folder: inside it was his birth certificate, his Social Security card, a long list of biographical facts.
Harol
d looked at it. “When did you write this?” he asked.
“Never mind,” said George.
He handed it all to Harold.
“Whew,” George said, and he mimed the removal of sweat from his brow.
“Happy birthday, David Sibelius. Glad I’m not you anymore,” said George. He looked unburdened. “Happy birthday to me, too, I guess,” he said.
As a parting gift, he gave Harold the key chain from his house keys, the ones that opened the gate to Hamilton Arms: it was a clover, a charm for luck. Its stem was a little drawer, into which, Harold later found, George had put a love note. Harold kept the clover for the rest of his life. He kept the note in his wallet until it disintegrated with age. But by then he had memorized it completely anyway.
He had new paperwork; a new tax code; a new identity. A new age.
He was David Sibelius. He was twenty-five years old. The world opened before him.
Robert Pearse had arranged for David to enroll in the applied mathematics graduate program at the Bit. He personally recommended David to Maurice Steiner. What deal they made, David could not say; but Steiner never asked him much about his past, nor did he require paperwork from Caltech. It existed, of course; but on it was a different name.
His experience as a graduate student was idyllic. Steiner, he learned, was an outstanding person, an outstanding scholar. For the first several years, David worried constantly about being caught. He waited to cross paths with a person who would know his name. The Sibeliuses themselves had long ago disowned George; they, at least, he thought, would not come looking for him. With the exception of President Pearse, who sheltered him, he avoided the rich as well as he could. Occasionally someone would utter Sibelius, and scrutinize him, the way one might utter Carnegie, or Ford. In these moments, he would tense, waiting for the blow; but his use of David instead of George typically prevented further conversation. Still, he always half expected the ringing telephone, the knock at the door, that would signify an end to everything.
It never came.
When Maurice Steiner died, when President Pearse bestowed upon him his own laboratory, when he began to achieve increased fame in his field, he once again expected to be discovered. He avoided photographs. He avoided interviews. He thrust the other members of his lab into the spotlight, feigning camera-shyness.
Nothing happened.
The adoption of George’s identity had subtracted seven years from David’s age, and so he tried to live his life as a younger man; he convinced himself to act more carefree, have more fun. He did well at work; he made money. He had, once more, a set of friends.
Most importantly of all, he had satisfying work—the kind he lived in fear of ever losing again. And so he was taciturn, private. As he acquired colleagues at the lab, he was careful of what he said, and to whom. It took him many years to feel at ease with anyone. Only one—Diana Liston—knew he was gay. He said nothing to the others.
This was not out of shame but self-protection; he wished to distance himself, as much as possible, from Harold Canady. To keep at bay any characteristics that might link him, in the event of an interrogation, to his former self.
He had already looked into the consequences of his actions, and of George’s: for David, ten years, minimum, in prison, for fraud—more if the State Department accused him of espionage or treason. (He had done nothing of the sort; but he imagined that there was a real possibility of their falsifying evidence.) Even worse, at least five for George, who had not only been an accessory to fraud, but had been cheerfully shirking his taxes for a decade. Longer.
He feared putting anyone else at risk: to tell his tale to others meant to make them, too, accessories—unwilling custodians of a story that, legally, they had an obligation to report.
Therefore, he vowed to be careful. To be private. This was his secret, he told himself; he alone would bear the weight of it.
At first, he and George continued to see one another. For a decade, David avoided Washington, fearing that he would be recognized by a former colleague; during this time, George came frequently to visit him in Boston. But eventually the distance became too much. George found another partner, one who lived nearby, and broke the news to David as gently as he could, in a letter that David opened apprehensively, predicting its contents.
I hope we can continue to be friends, said George in the letter, and David decided to take him at his word. But that night, in the dark of his apartment, he felt alone and tired and terrified of perennial solitude, and he allowed himself, uncharacteristically, to weep.
For a time David resigned himself to being alone.
Some years, he was certain he would be caught. 1960, for example, was the year of the Martin and Mitchell case, in which two American intelligence officers defected to the Soviet Union and were subsequently accused of being gay. That year, the paranoia that McCarthy had sparked more than a decade before resurged, and David spent each day terrified of a knock on the door, some reopening of his case, a reinvestigation of the suicide of Harold Canady.
That same year, Robert Pearse received a visit from four federal agents who wished to speak with him about a rumor: someone had reported to them that Pearse was both gay and affiliated with the Communist Party. These dueling rumors, which he denied, in combination with his position as the head of a university that turned out State Department employees in great numbers, had put him on their watch list.
He came to warn David. “You may be next,” he said.
But nothing happened.
For a decade, nothing happened; and David was, at last, lulled into the belief that he was safe.
Only then did he allow himself to acknowledge, to tend to, a kind of yearning that had arisen in him over the years. It surprised him, at first. The idea that he might want a child. In his own childhood, he had sometimes fantasized about one day becoming a father: he imagined creating a different, better version of what he experienced. The idea of building an idyllic childhood for someone else one day had given him a measure of comfort in the middle of his own terrifying younger years. He would create for his child, he imagined, a life full of books and learning and conversation. A life of the mind.
For years, he thought that this would be impossible. He found friendship and solace, once more, at work, and in the evening he returned to his studio in the Theater District and continued to work.
In the late 1960s, he began to plan for ELIXIR—the project he would come to see as his most important work. He wondered, at times, whether the project was his attempt to fill the longing that had arisen within him for an heir, for a successor, someone he could invest with the accumulation of his knowledge. He did not examine the question too deeply.
One day in early 1970, when he was speaking to the young woman who regularly cut his hair, she mentioned a new project she had taken on.
“I’m surrogating myself,” she had said, using the word inventively, placing one small hand proudly on an abdomen that had already begun to protrude.
Her name was Birdie Auerbach. She was twenty-five then, or twenty-six; newly returned to Boston from San Francisco, where she had moved in 1966 just before the peak of the hippie movement. A few years later, she had found everything changed, and so she packed up her things and came back to her birthplace, and was now making ends meet in a variety of ways. At every one of David’s monthly appointments, she had invented a new scheme to supplement her income with other work: once, she decided to make pressed-flower stationery; once, she had decided to become a private investigator.
Now, she said, she had gone into business as a surrogate, for people who couldn’t conceive on their own.
“When there’s something wrong with the mom, I mean,” she added, clarifying.
It was simple, as she described it. A procedure that a friend of hers helped with. “Worked perfectly,” she said.
“Expensive, though,” she added, catching David’s eye in the mirror.
A deal was made.
At the hospital, David wa
s announced as the father. The doctors congratulated him. They called Birdie his wife. She kept the child against her chest for thirty minutes, and then handed her to David.
“Don’t let me hold her again,” she whispered, and for a moment he wondered if he had done the right thing.
But then there she was, tiny thing, against him: a small and perfect specimen, a new addition to the world. He had read, once, that five babies were born every second, and he imagined the other hypothetical four, all taking their first breaths in turn. He imagined her life as it stretched out ahead of her. Of them. He imagined their lives together. For the first time in years, he was happy and still.
He named her after Lady Lovelace: one of his favorite entries in the Encyclopædia Britannica he had almost memorized as a child. A mathematician, like him.
At the hospital, he had one visitor, and only one: it was Diana Liston, his best friend, his colleague, the only person he had told so far about the child.
“She’s incredible, David,” said Liston, expertly cradling the baby in her arms. She was still, then, married to her unpleasant, antisocial husband. She looked up at David somewhat wistfully. “I want another one,” she said. A year later, Gregory would be born; four years later, Matty. Only then would she get a divorce.
To her father, Ada presented a series of problems that he addressed as if they were puzzles. How many hours and minutes between feedings for optimal calmness? How long to let her cry in the night? (Though usually he could not let her cry at all.) On quiet mornings he held her to his chest and breathed with her and called her perfect and a joy. He took a month off work, citing an unspecified medical need, and when he returned he announced to the rest of the lab that he had unexpectedly learned he was a father. He did not elaborate. And they took it in stride: used, perhaps, to thinking of David as eccentric and somewhat secretive. They, too, loved the child.
Ada grew. She was a delight: even in the low and lonely hours of the night, when it was only the two of them; even as he waged a solitary war against first colic and then night terrors and then, briefly, bed-wetting; he was happier, more content, than he had ever been. He contemplated her: her hands, her face. Did she look like him? As she grew, the two of them would hear, frequently, that she did. He contemplated the physical manifestation of the genetic code that had produced her: half his, half Birdie Auerbach’s. (The unlikeliness of the combination made him smile, sometimes.) He sang to her: Christmas carols, hymns from his youth that he hummed, leaving out the words. “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”: his favorite. He felt called to some greater purpose. He felt a kind of familial love he had not felt since Susan had died. He imagined Ada, sometimes, as Susan—in the delirium of another 3:00 a.m. wake-up, the baby mewling, he imagined that it was Susan he was cradling, that it was Susan he was giving a better life. Another chance.