ORPHANS

• 1987–1989 •

On November 22, 1963, I turned seven years old and discovered a major fault line in my character. At approximately 1:15 the school principal, Mrs. Miller, charged into my classroom, crying out that the president had been shot. After a moment of shocked silence, I burst into laughter. Everyone turned to look at me. Then Wendy Feingold began laughing too, and so did Sven Bjornsson, and then Nina London joined in, and soon, like a contagion, all my classmates were convulsed with laughter. I felt exalted and criminal, pyromaniacal. I was notorious for my laugh, loud and honking, truly obnoxious—indeed, I had been sent to Mrs. Miller’s office three times that year because of it—but she and my teacher, Mrs. Carmichael, only looked stunned. School was let out for the afternoon. On the streets, adults were crying everywhere. Even the automobiles appeared dazed, moving at the slow-motion pace of a funeral procession. I saw an old black man in a fedora crying at the wheel of his Oldsmobile, and I wondered if I was still going to have my birthday party later that afternoon. We had invited ten boys in my class and ten of Sarah’s friends over to our apartment, and for weeks I had been anticipating the mayhem and presents, but when I arrived home, my mother was already there, sitting on the steps of our apartment building, rocking back and forth, her eyes bloodshot, a cigarette burning between her fingers. Unable to bear her sadness, I said that maybe it wasn’t really President Kennedy who had been shot. She looked at me quizzically. Maybe, I theorized, it was his twin brother, Tom.

TWENTY-FVE YEARS LATER, I DID it again: I burst out laughing during a bout of emotional vertigo at the most inappropriate moment possible. Molly Quinn, the love of my life, was eight weeks pregnant, and we were meeting with a clergyperson about marrying us. Near the end of the interview, when the Unitarian minister asked me why I loved Molly, I became tongue-tied. Molly gave me an alarmed, disbelieving look, which froze me even more. Finally, unable to bear the silence any longer, I turned to Molly and said, “Excuse me, but can you tell me your name again?” and then exploded into peals of laughter.

WE HAD MET THE YEAR BEFORE, in August 1987. I was in my rent-controlled apartment in Cambridge, watching a Red Sox game, when a woman called me up, introduced herself as Molly Quinn, and told me how much she loved my act after seeing me perform at a local comedy club.

“Really?” I replied. I was a competent comic, not an inspired one. But in the 1980s, comedy clubs were all the rage, and even a mediocre comic like me could get regular bookings. When I was still living in Chicago, I had enrolled in stand-up comedy and improvisation classes at the Second City, mainly as a way to get out of Hyde Park and meet women. I began going to comedy clubs religiously, studying the more polished comics, and getting on stage at amateur nights. I spent three hours every day writing material for a comedy act. I liked how it was so immediately rewarding: I could figure out the structure of a joke or monologue and get a laugh on stage that same night, and it was so easy to reinvent myself this way. By February of 1986, I was earning more money doing stand-up on weekends than I received in my monthly paycheck from Martin Luther King State. In June of that year, Aaron Zelman, my soon-to-be brother-in-law, told me that a friend of his was vacating his rent-controlled apartment in Central Square in Cambridge and it was mine if I wanted it. Yes! Yes! Yes! I replied. My lifelong dream of living in Cambridge would finally come true.

“Do you get many calls like this?” Molly asked.

“Oh, sure, all the time. My phone never stops ringing. One of these days I’m going to get an unpublished number. I’ll just keep it in the drawer with my unpublished novels.”

“You write novels too?”

“No, no, it was just a line. Not a very good one, though, I’m afraid. But I am a writer.”

“What do you write?” she asked.

“Checks. But all of them are fiction.”

Molly laughed politely, then said: “Look, I usually don’t do things like this, but I’d really love to buy you a drink.”

I didn’t say anything for several seconds, as if this were something I really needed to think about, as if I might be better off spending another night alone in my apartment.

“Well, I can understand if you’re not comfortable with this,” Molly said. “You really don’t know anything about me.”

“What do you do?” I asked brightly.

“I’m a lawyer for the state Ways and Means Committee.”

“Ways and Means?”

“Taxes.”

“Oh, right, taxes!” I exclaimed, as if everything were suddenly clear to me.

TWO NIGHTS LATER I MET MOLLY at a bar in Harvard Square. I showed up five minutes late by design, at 7:35, but I didn’t see anyone I thought might be Molly, or anyone I wanted to be Molly. I ordered a beer, wondering what type of woman would be attracted to my hapless comedy persona, especially if she was bold enough to call up a complete stranger and ask him out. I opened my act by telling the audience that just the other day I was standing behind a beautiful woman in line at the bakery. I badly wanted to strike up a conversation with her and rehearsed in my mind all the charming lines I knew, but I just couldn’t get the words out. When she was nearing the cash register, I finally piped up:“Excuse me, but do you mind if I ask for your number?” “Sure,” she said, and handed me the ticket she was holding.

Eight o’clock. My bladder was the size of a Persian melon, but I was afraid to go to the bathroom. What if Molly just happened to show up while I was peeing? She’d think I had given up on her, and we would never meet. Just then I noticed a slightly built woman with a great mane of auburn hair that fared a rich red when it caught the light standing in the doorway. Molly! I was so stunned by her beauty that I could only stare dumbly at her. Seeing me, she crossed her hands over her heart and I waved. As she approached, I extended my hand, but she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

“Oh, Seth, thank God you’re still here. I had a meeting that went on and on and I was afraid you might have given up on me.”

“Really, all this time I was afraid that you had given up on me. I’m so relieved that we have something in common.”

She appeared a little perplexed, as if not sure whether I was trying to be funny or serious. I had to admit, I didn’t always know myself.

After we sat down and ordered drinks, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. The bar adjoined a fancy Middle Eastern restaurant. Approaching the bathroom, I noticed my father and Hortense leaving their table and heading in my direction. I had not seen them in eight years, since Sarah’s graduation from Rutgers. I fed into the bathroom and hid in a stall. Since moving to Cambridge, I never left my apartment without expecting to run into my father— perhaps at a movie theater or a bookstore or maybe just crossing the street in Harvard Square. I was always aware of him, like some tune dimly playing in my head. Sitting on the toilet seat, holding my head in my hands, I thought: The one time I leave the house without expecting to see my father and I run into him. This had to mean something, but I was too flummoxed to figure it out. I stayed in the stall for ten minutes, just to be safe.

When I returned to the table, Molly asked if I was all right.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. “I just saw my father and stepmother, that’s all.”

“Your family lives close by? How nice.”

“No, see, the thing is I haven’t seen them in eight years, so I was hiding in the bathroom.”

Her eyes widened with puzzlement, and I wondered why I simply hadn’t told her a small lie. I wouldn’t even have needed to lie; I could have just smiled and nodded my head.

“It’s complicated,” I explained.

“You didn’t even want to say hello?”

“I’ve always loved my father, but his wife, Hortense, is another matter. She’s the stepmother from hell,” I said, adding an anxious laugh.

She sipped her beer, then looked around the bar, as if an impostor Seth had returned from the bathroom and she was looking for the real one, the Seth she had conjured in her mind when she called me.

“I could tell you one of my cruel stepmother stories, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

So I told her one of my best Hortense stories—about the time at Wellfeet when she refused to give me a clean plate at dinner until I ate all of my leftover jam from breakfast. I’d told this story so many times that it had a lacquered sheen to it, but as she listened, Molly’s eyes had a depth of sympathy that caught me off guard.

“Oh, Seth, that is cruel.”

“Do you know the meanest thing Hortense ever said to me?”

“What?

“She told me I would never have children,” I said, leaving out her theory that I was too much of a child to have my own children. “Can you believe that?”

“Why would she say something like that?”

“Who knows? We were having some dumb argument about money. I mean, I was only twenty years old. Who’s thinking about children at that age?”

“I’m sure you’ll have children,” she said. “You’ll be a wonderful father.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling as if I had won an award I hadn’t applied for. “What about you? Are you close to your parents?”

“I’m an orphan,” she replied, holding open two empty palms, as if to show me that she had nothing to hide, had nothing at all.

“Oh, Molly, I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s all right,” she told me, reaching for my hand, as if I was the one who needed comforting. “We’ve just met. You don’t need to say anything.”

She told me that her mother had died when she was two and her father had died when she was twelve.

“I can’t imagine how difficult that was.”

She squeezed my hand, blinked away a tear, and said, “It still is.” She went on to tell me that she was raised by her aunt and uncle, who lived in the same North Cambridge neighborhood her parents had, and that her aunt and uncle’s household was large and loving. “All my cousins were like sisters to me. I’ve always wanted a big family myself,” she confided. I confessed to her that as a child I’d had fantasies that my true parents—a sane, rich, and loving couple—would show up one day and rescue me.

“Seth, I have a small confession.”

Our knees were pressed together under the table, and we were still holding hands.

“Oh,” I said. It was either going to be a boyfriend or herpes, I thought. With my luck, probably both.

“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that I actually went to see your show three times before I could get up the courage to call you.”

“Three times!” I cried, mortified. “I can’t believe you heard my dumb lines three times.”

“The third time I brought my cousin Nora with me. When you came on stage, I said, ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry someday.’ Nora said, ‘Well, I suggest you call him and let him know.’”

I felt both exposed and absolved. “Is that a proposal?” I asked.

“No, I’m an old-fashioned girl. I expect the man to get down on his knees and propose.”

“What did you think I would be like?”

“What you would be like?”

“After coming to my show three times. What did you think I would be like in real life?”

She looked down at the table for a moment, then gazed into my eyes. “I thought you would be very kind.”

WE KISSED FOR A LONG TIME outside her apartment building. This was always the moment of a date I dreaded—to kiss or not to kiss. If you didn’t kiss, if you looked at the other person knowing you felt absolutely nothing, well, then you went home feeling more unlovable than you did before you left the house. Sometimes I thought it was better just to kiss in order to inoculate yourself against such feelings, to maintain the illusion that, yes, you did have a very good time and maybe you would see each other again. But when Molly and I reached the door of her building, I knew that we would kiss. Oh, and what kisses! Long and lovely kisses.

After ten minutes, Molly had opened all but one button of my shirt and was pressing her lips against my collarbone.

“Maybe you should invite me in?” I said, a little breathlessly.

She looked at my exposed torso and laughed, as if she had just become aware that she was in the process of stripping me in the street. She put her hands inside my shirt and circled my waist with her arms.

“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said in a low voice, “I didn’t expect that I would be this attracted to you.”

“I feel like I’ve just inhaled a canister of nitrous oxide.”

She held me tighter and laid her head against my chest.

“Tell me,” she said. “What did you think I would be like when I called you? Did you think I would be a lunatic or something?”

Was this a test? Give the right answer and I’d get to come in and live happily ever after with her? “I thought the woman I had been waiting for all my life had finally called me,” I said.

She burst out laughing, a deep, soulful laugh enriched with affection, a laugh that could move a heart.

“You don’t believe me?”

“No, but that’s one of the sweetest lines I’ve heard in a long time.”

“Oh,” I said.

After opening my act with the story about standing in line behind the beautiful woman at the bakery, I would tell the audience that I had recently read a magazine article about highly functioning autistic adults. They hold down responsible jobs, appear normal in every way, but they never form any romantic attachments because they are dumbfounded by the subtleties and nuances of courtship. “Maybe that’s my problem,” I would say. “It’s not me! It’s a neurological disorder!”

“Don’t look so concerned, Seth. I’m glad you said it.”

“Does that mean I get to come in?”

She pulled down on the collar of my shirt and gave me an exasperated, what-am-I-going-to-do-with-you look. Then she closed her eyes and kissed me on the mouth, perhaps hoping I would turn into a prince.

“Yes,” she said. “Come in, come in.”

“I HAVEN’T DONE THIS IN A LONG TIME,” she said.

We were lying next to each other on her bed.

“How long?” I asked.

“Two years. Maybe longer.”

“Actually, it’s been a long time for me too,” I admitted.

“How long?”

“November 27, 1984.” That was the night of Rachel’s mother’s funeral.

“You remember the date!”

“I’m strange in that way.”

“I don’t think that’s strange. I think it’s nice.”

She turned out the light to remove her clothes. When I pulled back the sheet to look at her, she covered herself with her forearm and hand, like Botticelli’s Venus, a gesture that stirred me deeply: She was as private as a night-blooming flower, and allowing me into her bed, into her life, I realized, was an act of faith.

Her breath was warm against my ear, and I felt as if every cell in my body had awoken after a long hibernation. As I traced the rim of her ear with my tongue her whole body shuddered. “Oy, oy, oy,” she half sighed, half moaned.

“Oy, oy, oy?” I murmured in her ear. “What happened to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph? Are you converting already?”

“Keep kissing me like that,” she said, “and you’ll have me speaking in tongues.”

“Where do you like to be kissed the most?”

“I don’t think I can say it.”

“Why not?”

“Twelve years of Catholic school.”

“I see,” I replied, not sure if I liked where the conversation was going. “Do you know I have a PhD in divinity from the University of Chicago?”

“Are you serious?”

“Totally.”

“Oh,” she said sullenly.

“You’re not turned on? Women are usually so excited when I tell them that.”

“Do you believe in God?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I believe, to tell you the truth.”

“I don’t believe in God,” she said.

“Any reason why?”

“Twelve years of Catholic school.”

“Do you know how I learned to be such a great kisser?”

“How?”

“Twelve years of Catholic school.”

“Shut up!” she replied, laughing.

“How about if I try to guess where you like to be kissed?”

“Good deal.”

I kissed one breast, then the other, then kissed my way down the rungs of her rib cage and the white downy plain of her midriff.

“Am I getting close?”

“Yes. Very.”

My tongue traveled lower. I eyed her face, but she had covered it with both hands, looking very much as if she were reciting the blessing over Sabbath candles.

“Oh, yes, good guess,” she murmured. “Oh, yes! Good guess. Yes! Very good guess!”

We fell asleep that night in a damp embrace. When I woke in the morning, my hand was still cupping one of her small breasts, light and round as a Rome apple. I spent the next night in her bed too, and the one after that, and the one after that, and every morning we awoke so attached to each other’s bodies, so in love, that I believed some vital ether must have passed between our pores all through the night, binding us together.

HOW SUDDENLY A LIFE CAN CHANGE! One night I was sitting alone and unloved in my apartment, the next night a woman cold-called me, and a month later I was living with her. We settled into a charmed routine: In the mornings I would write material for my act, but true inspiration usually struck later in the afternoon, when I went out and bought flowers, bread, wine, and ingredients for dinner at the pricey West Cambridge shops near Molly’s apartment. Before we met, Molly had always worked late because she didn’t like facing all those hours alone in her apartment, but now she left promptly at five, knowing that I was waiting for her with an abundance of kisses and kindness. At six o’clock, I would station myself by the bedroom window to catch sight of her coming down the street. She always appeared dazed and bereft, her gait slow, her steps small and timid, her arms crossed tightly across her chest. I thought of this as her orphan’s stroll, and in that moment, repeated every day, I understood what had brought us together: we were two foundlings who had found each other; we had created a home that could keep an orphan safe in a world of death and loss.

SUNDAY NIGHTS WE HAD DINNER at her aunt and uncle’s house in North Cambridge along with her cousins, Nora, Bridget, and Franny, and their families—a total of ten adults and seven children. I had never encountered a family more different from my own: Large, loving, close, voluble, immune to slights or arguments, they all joked and kidded without anyone getting offended. Throughout dinner, Molly would hold my hand under the table.

Her uncle John, a retired postal worker, sat at the head of the table, the object of his daughters’ love and adoration. Behind him, on the dining-room wall, a holy triptych looked down on us: portraits of Pope John Paul II, John F. Kennedy, and Tip O’Neill, who had been Uncle John’s childhood neighbor and friend. The first time I came to dinner, he told me a long story about how both their grandfathers had been brought over from Ireland in 1845 by the New England Brick Company. A local politician named Paddy Mullen had met their boat, brought them straight to City Hall, and registered them to vote. “On election day,” John said, “he met them at the polls and handed them each a ballot. Since they couldn’t read or write, he was kind enough to complete the ballot for them before they went in.” No doubt his daughters had all heard this story a hundred times, but everyone in the family paid rapt and affectionate attention.

I wanted in on the storytelling too, wanted in on the adoration, wanted in on the Quinn clan, this family God had seemingly created in the opposite image of my own, but when I said to everyone in the room, “Do you know I turned seven years old on the day JFK was assassinated?” Molly stepped on my foot under the table. The Quinns all appeared a little puzzled, and Nora, who had seen my act and heard my Kennedy assassination story, shot me a look of concern. “That’s why I’ll always remember that day,” I said, “November 22, 1963.” Uncle John and Aunt Jean nodded solemnly.

In my act, I had changed the story so that I burst into tears upon hearing the news of Kennedy’s death. No one in the class knows that I’m really crying because I’m sure my birthday party is going to be cancelled, and the principal and my teacher try to console me. Suddenly I know how it feels to be the most esteemed child in the class, and I let the tears rain down. My grief is contagious. All of my classmates start crying too, twenty-five first graders ululating over our dead president. “I loved President Kennedy,” I cry out, and the other children cry that they loved President Kennedy too. My teacher and principal pat my back. I imagine the glowing report my parents are going to receive about my reaction, and I refuse to be consoled. “Seth, everything is going to be fine,” my teacher says. “No, it’s not!” I shout. “Who’s going to help the Negroes and poor people now?” My classmates wail uncontrollably.

When I told Molly the actual story, she commented that she liked it better. “I think it’s so sweet the way you tried to ease your mother’s sadness. Actually, you’re a lot nicer to your mother in the stories you tell about her than you are to her in real life.” Molly was shocked the first time she heard me talk with my mother over the phone: My tone was impatient and irritable, my voice admonishing. Molly said I sounded like an angry parent.

ONE SATURDAY NIGHT THE QUINN CLAN came to see me perform— nine Quinns sat at a table, laughing more loudly and energetically than any other people in the audience. They all looked at each other when they laughed, as if they couldn’t believe how funny I was, couldn’t believe that they actually knew me. At Molly’s suggestion, I edited out my riff on my childhood reaction to the Kennedy assassination. The day after they came to see me perform, all the Quinns repeated their favorite moments from my routine at Sunday dinner. They kidded Molly’s Uncle John for not getting my PMS line. I had told the audience that I’d always had a problem merging into rotaries until I ordered new vanity license plates that said PMS. Now all the cars yielded to me.

“PMS?” John said bewildered.

“Premenstrual syndrome, Daddy,” Nora explained.

“I still don’t understand,” he said.

“Daddy,” Bridget said, “don’t you remember how we all knew Franny was about to get her period because she had such bad temper tantrums? If anyone looked at her the wrong way, we’d have to retreat for cover under the dining-room table.”

“Watch it, Bridget,” Franny growled, holding her plate like a Frisbee, “or I’ll PMS you!”

Everyone laughed and John’s face turned red as he finally understood. Then he coughed out a laugh and said, “Good one, Seth,” clapping me on the back.

The next Sunday when we arrived for dinner, John couldn’t wait to show me something. He led me, Molly, and his three daughters outside and directed us to look at the back of his car. He had taped a piece of cardboard over his license plate and written PMS on it in bright red Magic Marker. His three daughters and Molly all burst out laughing.

“Good one, Daddy!” Franny shouted.

“Let’s test it out before it gets dark,” John said.

The four women all piled into the backseat of his Buick; I had no choice but to get in the front. He was seventy-three years old, had had cataract surgery less than a year earlier, and his eyes were magnified to the size of silver dollars behind his coke-bottle lenses. Within two minutes we were on the Alewife Parkway, headed for the rotary. Not bothering to slow down, John sped through the rotary at thirty miles an hour. Car horns blasted us. The women were all laughing in the back while I cried, “Jesus!” and “Watch out!” John was tranquil as a Buddha.

“Aren’t you worried about the police?” I asked.

“Daddy knows all the policemen in Cambridge, don’t you Daddy?” Nora said.

“That’s right,” he replied. “Every one of them.”

His daughters thought this was hilarious too, and their peals of laughter almost drowned out the car horns as he drove through the next rotary at full speed. Molly put her hand on his shoulder. “I think Seth is ready to go home, Uncle John.”

“Seth,” John said to me, “these letters work like a charm. I’m calling my friend Tommy Cullen at the DMV tomorrow and ordering new plates.”

That night in bed Molly thanked me for being such a good sport.

“It wasn’t some kind of test?” I asked.

“What type of test?”

“I don’t know. To see how much of a Quinn I can be.”

“Everyone adores you,” she said. “They’re all happy for me.”

We twined our limbs together.

“How come no one says anything to your uncle about his driving?”

“He’s very proud. Besides, he’s the dad. We don’t question our fathers.”

I asked her if she was ever tempted to call her aunt and uncle “Mom” and “Dad.”

“Why do you ask?”

I told her that it struck me as a little sad when I heard her cousins call them “Mom” and “Daddy” while she had to call them something else. “It’s like they have something that you don’t.”

“They do,” she said.

I SPENT SATURDAY AFTERNOONS IN my own apartment. When Aaron had told me about it, I had agreed to rent it sight unseen, but I practically swooned the first time I saw it: a dazzle of gleaming pine floors, sunlight, and built-in bookshelves. It was small—a studio with an alcove study—but rent was stabilized at two hundred and fifty dollars a month. Of all the places I had lived—my claustrophobic, two-bedroom childhood apartment; my graduate-student hovel—this bright and airy Cambridge apartment, close to Harvard Square, minutes from the Charles River, was the first home that I had never wanted to leave.

When I went to my apartment, I told Molly I was polishing lines for my act and visiting Mara, my neighbor and best friend, but really I just wanted to be in my own place, to see my own books and my own prints on the wall, to have lunch by myself at one of the Indian restaurants down the street, then stroll down Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square and spend a couple of hours in the bookstores before walking back home along the Charles, past the roller skaters and scullers, past the slanting sailboats and the view of the golden-domed statehouse and the John Hancock Tower—a view that always provided a jolt of joy because it reminded me that I was no longer in the Midwest—and then napping for another couple of hours before I went to the clubs. I wanted some time to retreat into my routine, retreat into myself, to be reminded that my apartment, this home, was still waiting for me if I needed it.

I had met Mara a week after I had moved into my apartment in 1986. I was returning home from the Bread and Circus down the street when I saw a woman propping herself up against my door and vomiting.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She didn’t answer my question. “I’m Mara Pearl,” she said. “I live on the fourth floor.”

“Seth Shapiro,” I said. “Do you always introduce yourself to your neighbors by puking in front of their doors?”

“No, usually I pee.”

We both laughed, and I invited her in. She had wild, kinky hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a gold wedding band on her finger.

I offered her tea or juice, but she said she was famished. I put together a plate of cheese, crackers, apple slices, and chopped liver. Despite being extremely thin and having just vomited, she practically inhaled the cheese and apples.

“This Bread and Circus chopped liver is excellent,” I said, offering her some on a cracker.

She told me she was vegetarian. Then she asked what I did for a living.

“Stand-up comedy.”

“No kidding! I do stand-up too!”

“For a living?”

“No, it’s more of a hobby, a nostalgic thing. My family owned a small hotel in the Catskills and I always wanted to be a comic.”

“Do you have a day job?”

“I’m a physicist. I teach at MIT.”

“Oh, my,” I said. “That’s what I’d call a serious day job.”

“Well, I probably won’t be doing it for long. I’m coming up for tenure in a year, and my chances don’t look good.”

“Why not?”

“I’m orthodox. I don’t work on Shabbat. I’m going up against colleagues who have barely left the lab in seven years. They’ve put in three hundred and sixty-four more days than I have. I’m a year behind all my competition.”

I asked her what her research was on.

“Absolute time.” She spent about five minutes explaining the theory to me, after which my brain felt like a shriveled frozen pea.

She had eaten all the cheese and apples and was eyeing the chopped liver. “Are you sure you don’t want to try it?”

“Oh, why not?” she said, and slathered some on a cracker. “Oh, this is heavenly!”

I asked Mara what it was like growing up in the Catskills, and she became very animated, telling stories about some of the longtime guests at the hotel her parents owned, and then doing hilarious imitations of them. I complimented her on her great Yiddish accent. “Yes, just another of my many useful skills,” she replied drily, but she was smiling, and I could see that the compliment pleased her. Then she said that she had lived in the town of Bethel, where the Woodstock concert was held.

“Wait a minute!” I said. “Did your mother let a girl named Zelda spend the night during Woodstock?”

Mara’s eyes widened behind her glasses. “No!” she exclaimed. “You’re that Seth?”

“You’re that Mara?”

We both laughed and embraced each other, like long-lost relatives finally reunited.

“Oh, God, I gave that Zelda so much grief,” Mara said. “I lectured her about how the counterculture was just an excuse for being hedonistic and self-centered. I told her all the true revolutionaries were the scientists at NASA. She kept telling me about this boy named Seth she had met on Cape Cod and how the two of us were exactly alike and that we had to meet. She actually gave me your address. Of course I never wrote to you. To think I might have had a real friend when I was a teenager.”

“You wouldn’t have wanted to know me when I was a teenager,” I said. “Did you have any friends when you were a teenager?”

“Not a one!” she said, as if this were a point of pride for her. “But I’m so glad we finally met. Zelda told me that you and I were soul mates, and now you’re here.”

I squeezed her hand, and suddenly she began crying, leaning her forehead against the palm of her free hand.

“Mara, what’s the matter?”

“I’m pregnant,” she said. “I didn’t know for sure until today.”

“You don’t want to be pregnant?”

“No. My husband spends every waking moment in his lab. He’s going to want me to have an abortion because we don’t have the time or money for a baby, but of course I’m not going to get an abortion, and that’s going to strain an already bad marriage.” She used her index finger to clean out the last of the chopped liver from the container.

“Why did you marry your husband?” I asked her.

“I’m very impressed by credentials.”

I told her that I had a PhD from the University of Chicago.

“Are you coming on to me?” she asked.

“Not very seriously.”

“Good,” she said. “I need a friend.”

“Me too,” I told her.

MY FAMILY AND MOLLY’S decided to celebrate Thanksgiving together at Aunt Jean and Uncle John’s house in Cambridge. My mother, Sarah, and Aaron drove up from New Jersey. Seamus declined to come. My mother said it was because he couldn’t eat the food, but I didn’t believe her and called him up.

“This is because Molly isn’t Jewish,” I said to him.

“I am uncomfortable with it, yes,” he said.

“What if we get married? Are you going to refuse to come to the wedding?”

“Have you proposed to her?”

“No, but I might.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re not the most serious person, Seth. I really can’t see you as a married man.”

“You know why you became an Orthodox Jew, don’t you, Seamus?”

“Tell me,” he said.

“Because of your name. Seamus Shapiro. It deeply traumatized you, and your orthodoxy is just a way to normalize your identity.”

He hung up.

As Molly and I drove to her aunt and uncle’s, I asked, “Who are the Pilgrims, and who are the Indians?”

“Relax, Seth. Everything will be fine.”

Molly was meeting my mother for the first time.

“Well, I guess we’ll know a year from now when we see which family dies from smallpox.”

Molly laughed. “That’s bad,” she said. “Really bad.”

“What’s bad? Me or the punch line?”

Despite my anxiety, everyone got along famously, especially my mother and Aunt Jean, who shared a love of cigarettes and books. The day felt very much like an official coming out for Molly and me, the bringing together of our two families. Since Sarah’s and my birthday was so close to Thanksgiving, we celebrated that occasion too, and I was deeply moved that everyone in Molly’s family had bought gifts—not just for me but for Sarah too—and beautiful gifts at that: hardcover books, sweaters, earrings, pottery. It was far and away the best Thanksgiving I ever had. What a bounty of food and love! My mother did pretty well until the end of the meal when, relaxed by three glasses of wine and the graciousness and good humor of the Quinns, she decided to tell the story “Was Anybody Praying?” As soon as she began, I kicked her hard under the table. “Ouch!” she cried. “Why did you kick me?”

Then Sarah chimed in: “Mom, don’t tell that story at the table.”

Our mother took a swig of her fourth glass of wine and gave Sarah a Bronx cheer.

“Sarah is right,” I said. “Now is not the time.” I knew that Molly had told her cousins about the way I treated my mother, but they all looked shocked.

“Oh, stop raining on my parade,” my mother said, and proceeded to tell everyone the story of how Sarah and I were born premature, with our umbilical cords twisted around our necks. All the Quinns smiled politely when my mother included the detail about the doctor sucking a plug of mucus out of my windpipe.

After dinner, we retreated to different areas of the house with our coffee and drinks. My mother claimed Molly and went off in a corner with her. Sarah and I were sitting at the opposite end of the living room.

“God, what do you think Mom is saying to Molly?” I asked.

“Do you want me to see if I can read her lips?” Sarah replied.

“Sure. If you can.”

Sarah studied our mother for a moment, then said, “She’s telling Molly about your first well-formed bowel movement.”

“Shut up,” I said, punching her lightly on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry about Mom. Molly glows around you.”

“Do you think I should marry her?” I asked.

“Of course,” Sarah said. “What are you waiting for?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Everything is so great that I keep expecting something bad is going to happen.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’ll be discovered, found out.”

“What do you think she’s going to discover about you?”

“That I’m not worthy. That I’m too strange for anyone to love me.”

“The feeling never goes away, Seth.”

“You still feel that way? With Aaron?” Aaron was a prince, sane and stable, his whole life devoted to my sister.

“Every day,” she answered.

I found this oddly comforting, a reminder that my sister and I shared more than a similar chromosomal profile.

Later that night, I resolved to propose. Molly and I were in bed, lying in each other’s arms. I wasn’t on my knees, but wasn’t this even better—our bodies bound together in a golden postcoital glow? I was about to pop the question when Molly said, “Seth, your mother said something really strange to me.”

“What?”

“She made me promise not to tell you, but it was so bizarre I have to say something.”

“Yes?”

“She told me to get pregnant so you would have to marry me.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I told her that’s not how I prefer to do things.”

“How did the subject come up?”

“She asked me if we were serious about each other, and I said yes.”

“God, I don’t believe that woman.”

“Seth, promise me you won’t tell her I told you. I promised her I wouldn’t say anything to you.”

“I won’t say anything. Not a word.”

A WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS, I was sitting up in bed on a Sunday morning, reading the paper, sipping coffee, when Molly stepped out of the shower, one small towel turbaned around her head, a larger towel wrapped around her body, and a damp, lemony scent wafting from her. She sat beside me and said, “Seth, honey, I’m late this month.”

“Late?”

“My period.”

I put my cup down on the night table. “Oh, right. Your period. Can you do a pregnancy test or something?”

“I’m doing one right now. I bought the test yesterday. We’ll know in about two minutes.” We exchanged anxious smiles and she went back into the bathroom.

Though I knew it was completely irrational, I immediately imagined that my mother had had something to do with it, as if she were a lonely old woman from a fairy tale who turned out to be a magical helper.

Molly returned from the bathroom. I moved to the end of the bed, and she sat on my lap, holding the test.

“Does this circle look blue to you?” she asked.

“Yes, very blue.”

“It is blue, Seth! I’m sure I’m pregnant. I’ve been nauseous all week. I’m never late. This has to be blue!”

She began laughing and crying simultaneously.

“Does this mean you’re happy about it?” I asked.

“Yes, yes. Very happy . . . and you?”

“Well, it’s certainly a surprise,” I said, but I realized that I really was happy, as if my deepest longings—for a family, for a life with Molly—had their own subterranean life and were suddenly erupting from the ground. “But, yes, I’m happy. Truly happy.”

We embraced, her cheeks damp against my face.

With my lips against her ear, I said, “So, I guess this means we’ll be getting married.”

She pulled back. “Is that a proposal?”

“Yes.”

“Can you do a little better?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” I said, thankful for the prompt. I told Molly to stand up. As her towel fell away, I knelt down and seized her hand. Looking up at her body, white and coppery, positively luminous, I proposed: “Molly, I love you more than words can say. I want to spend my life with you. You are truly, in every way possible, the woman I’ve been waiting for all my life, and that’s no line!”

THE BABY WAS DUE IN LATE SEPTEMBER, and we planned on a May wedding. Of course I was dreading the call to my mother, and of course she let out a cry of joy when I delivered the news that we were engaged. I knew I was going to have to tell her sooner or later that Molly was pregnant, so I decided on sooner.

“By the way, Mom, Molly is pregnant.”

“When did that happen?” she exclaimed.

“When we were having sex.”

“No, I mean when did you know she was pregnant?”

“Two days ago.”

I sensed her doing the math.

“Did Molly say anything to you?”

“About what?”

“Nothing. Is she there? I’d like to congratulate her.”

I put my hand over the receiver and called out to Molly to pick up in the other room.

“Hello?” she said.

“Oh, Molly, sweetheart, I’m so happy for you!”

“Thank you, Ruth. We couldn’t be happier.”

“Seth?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“You can go now. I want to talk to my new daughter-in-law.”

“Bye, Mom,” I said. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and pressed down, then let go of the button.

“Molly?” my mother said conspiratorially.

“Hi, Ruth.”

“You didn’t tell Seth what I said to you at Thanksgiving, did you?”

“No.”

“Well, see, I was right, wasn’t I? He has to marry you because you’re pregnant.”

“I hope he’s doing it because he wants to, not because he has to.”

“Of course, of course. Oh, Molly, honey, I’m so happy I could crow! I want you to know that I consider you more than just a daughter-in-law. I want you to know that you can think of me as your mother.”

Molly didn’t say anything.

“Molly?”

“Yes?”

“Did I say something wrong?”

I could barely keep myself from interrupting and saying, Yes, you said something wrong!

“No, Ruth. Thank you very much.”

“I mean it, darling. You can call me Mother.”

“Ruth.”

“Yes, doll?”

“Seth wants to speak to you.”

Molly called out to me. I depressed the button on the phone and removed my hand from the mouthpiece.

“Hello?”

“Goodbye, Ruth,” Molly said.

“Goodbye, doll. I love you.”

Molly hung up.

“Seth?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“Molly said you wanted me.”

“Oh, right. I just wanted to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye, honey boy. I love you.”

“Bye, Mom.”

I went into the bedroom. Molly was lying under the covers, crying quietly.

“Molly, what’s the matter?” I said. “What did she say to you?”

“Nothing. She didn’t say anything.”

It was the first time we hadn’t been completely honest with each other, and it felt as if a small breach had opened up between us, a sudden coldness, like a draft from a window.

CHRISTMAS REJUVENATED US. The only time we had discussed our different religions was in reference to Christmas. Molly told me she didn’t care about the religion of our children, but Christmas was important to her, and when we were married with children, she wanted to have a Christmas tree and exchange presents on Christmas morning. “Fine with me,” I said. “The tree, the presents, the carols. We’ll do the whole megillah.” We bought a tree together at a local farm stand. I enjoyed the bracing nip in the air, the piney scents, the hot cider. All my life I had experienced Christmas as an outsider, and, I had to admit, it felt nice to be an insider, to be among the tree buying, present-shopping Christian hordes. At home, Molly brought out boxes of Christmas accoutrements: a tree stand, ornaments, stockings. We positioned the tree by the window. Molly put on a tape of Elvis singing Christmas songs, and poured us both mugs of hot cider, and we spent the evening decorating the tree. She told me that most of the ornaments had belonged to her mother; on the top of the tree we placed a wooden angel that had belonged to her mother’s mother.

Christmas morning we exchanged presents. I was overwhelmed by all the presents she had bought for me: a beautiful pale green cashmere sweater (“to match your eyes,” she said), books, Celtics tickets, and my very first compact disc: Marvin Gaye’s Midnight Love. “What am I going to play this on?” I asked, and she handed me another present. Of course I knew it would be a CD player. “Molly, this is too much!” I protested, though in fact I was thrilled at being the recipient of so much generosity.

“Well, it’s really for both of us,” she explained. I handed her my present—a small square box—and said, “This is just for you.”

Immediately her eyes welled up with tears. I hadn’t given her a ring yet, and I knew she had been wondering if I would get around to it. She opened the box and removed a thin gold band with a pear-shaped, many-faceted diamond set in it. Tears coursed down her cheeks. “Seth, this probably cost you a fortune. How could you afford this?”

“I paid for it with my bar mitzvah money,” I replied.

She gave me one of those bemused looks that meant she wasn’t sure whether I was being funny or serious.

“I’m completely serious,” I said. “I haven’t touched that bank account in nearly eighteen years and it was worth more than five thousand dollars.”

Molly plugged in the CD player and put in the disc. Marvin

Gaye’s sexy, silky falsetto sang “Sexual Healing.” She pulled me close, leaned forward on her tiptoes, and began tracing the rim of my ear with her tongue. At that moment, my happiness was so divine that I believed I could feel my soul bursting free of my body.

NOT LONG AFTER THE NEW YEAR, Molly had a proposal for me: She wanted me to quit comedy.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“To have a job with more normal hours once the baby comes. You’re out late every night. I’d rather not be home alone when I’m getting up all night with a new baby.”

“I see,” I said. “I see.”

“Seth, we can’t do anything on weekends because you’re always performing. I’d like to be able to go to a movie on a Saturday night or go away to Vermont for a weekend. I just want our relationship to be more normal.”

Normal? I thought. What are you doing with me if you wanted normal? But wasn’t that what I wanted too? Wasn’t that what I envied about Sarah and Aaron? Wasn’t that the reason Seamus turned Orthodox? Wasn’t that why I had resolved to propose to Molly on Thanksgiving?

“So if I quit comedy, our life will feel more normal to you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m not exactly blazing my way to greatness.”

Molly nodded her head.

“Come on!” I protested. “Didn’t they teach you to tell little lies in Catholic school?”

“We don’t believe in little lies. A lie is a lie.”

“I see,” I said again, as if this might be a potential problem for us. “You don’t like the fact that I’m a comic, do you?”

“Seth, I fell in love with you when I saw you onstage.”

“Remember,” I said, “no little lies. A side of you disapproves of my comedy.”

She looked at me thoughtfully, carefully considering her words.

“You have a PhD from the University of Chicago. I think you can do something more meaningful with your life.”

She had the moral authority to say this, since she could have used her extensive knowledge of the tax code to earn big bucks in the service of a private law firm rather than in the service of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

“So what do you have in mind for me?” I asked. “Become a house husband?”

“No, this.” She showed me a brochure for a private school called Back Bay Academy. She told me that her friend Amy taught at the school and that one of the English teachers there had fallen ill (with AIDS, she added sadly) and the school needed an immediate replacement.

“You want me to teach high school?”

“Look in the back,” she said. “Virtually all the teachers have PhD’s. Amy tells me it’s not much different from teaching at a small liberal arts college.”

I looked at the faculty profiles: Not only did they all have PhD’s, but most of them were from Harvard and Yale. I told Molly that I might be underqualified to teach at this high school.

“You might actually like it,” Molly said. “You have a wonderful capacity for nurturing, Seth. It’s what I love most about you.”

“You mean like John Wayne after he discovers Natalie Wood in The Searchers?”

“Exactly!”

We had recently purchased a VCR, and one of the first movies I rented was The Searchers. I plagiarized all of Raymond’s best lines. John Wayne discovers his capacity for nurturing and love. He becomes a whole person. If Raymond supplied the content, I supplied the context. I told Molly that was the story of our relationship: I was like John Wayne—surly, lonely, unloved, and unlovable—and then I found her and discovered my capacity for nurturing and love. She completed me, helped me become a whole person. Molly had told me that was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to her.

“Sure, why not?” I said.

“Here’s the application.”

The school required a recent writing sample. Since the only things I had written recently were one-liners for my act, I looked through the box where I kept all my old graduate-school and undergraduate papers. I tried rereading my PhD thesis, but it was about as enjoyable to me as eating from a box of cornstarch. I read through some of my graduate-school papers, but got bored after a page or two of each one. Near the bottom of the box, I found a copy of “A Stranger on the Planet.” I was immediately drawn in by the story, feeling as if I were reading the transcript of a dream about my mother and me. After I read the last sentence, I felt a curdling in my heart: This story was the most meaningful thing I had accomplished in my life, and I had kept it closed up in a box for nearly ten years. I had turned my life into a joke. Literally.

Two days after I sent in my application, I received a phone call from the headmaster of Back Bay Academy, Dr. Archibald Merritt. He told me that I was ideal for the position and that it was indeed splendid serendipity that I could begin right away. In my application letter, I had whited out my last two years as a stand-up comic and said that I had been subsisting on a small inheritance in order to write full-time, but that I would need to look for employment in the next month.

“We all thoroughly loved your story,” Dr. Merritt said. “Do you plan on sending it out?”

In the application, I had said that “A Stranger on the Planet” was my most recent story, which, of course, was technically true. “Yes.”

“Where to? The New Yorker? The Atlantic?” “Yes,” I replied. “The New Yorker and the Atlantic.” The next day I showed up for my interview. The school occupied two brownstones of prime real estate in the Back Bay. As I would later learn, everything was made possible by Dr. Merritt’s family fortune, which he had used to found the school in the 1950s. The school didn’t require a uniform, but the students all looked the same anyway: They favored an androgynous look, as if they were trying to efface both their sexuality and their privilege, perhaps attempting to trample on the Brahmin spirits that had once trod up and down the same marble staircases in this beautiful building. During my tour of the school, Dr. Merritt took me to visit a class. The students were all brilliant, all business, eight of them sitting around an oval seminar table discussing the “Box Hill” chapter of Emma. Outside the windows, I could see sailboats moored in their slips along the Charles River. I knew that Dr. Merritt would offer me a job, and as I gazed at the view, my heart exhaled with relief: I would never step on a stage again.

I LOVED TEACHING AT BACK BAY ACADEMY. Molly had been right: The work was far more rewarding than stand-up comedy, and our lives felt blissfully normal and rich. I loved waking up at the same time as Molly every morning, loved sharing the shower with her, loved hearing her purr as I massaged shampoo into her scalp and slowly soaped her body, loved having breakfast together, loved putting on a tie and coat and leaving the house with a briefcase in my hand. I especially loved my commute. I drove my car to the Alewife T stop, where I parked it, and rode the Red Line to Charles Street. Riding the train, I always envisioned myself through my father’s eyes, imagining him, twenty years before, watching a movie about my adult life. He would see me wake up next to Molly, my beautiful wife, would see us leaving the house together in a neighborhood recognizable as West Cambridge. He would see me get on the subway in my coat and tie, a briefcase at my side, blending in with all the other commuters—the professors, administrators, secretaries, and students who would be getting off at Harvard. Would I be getting off at Harvard too? No. I keep riding the train, which, past MIT, becomes crowded with doctors, residents, interns, nurses, and patients getting off at Charles Street. I get off at this stop too and move with the crowd in the direction of Massachusetts General Hospital. Could it be possible? Could I be a doctor? But I head off in a different direction, down Charles Street, then hike up one of the side streets and stroll past the beautiful nineteenth-century homes in Louisburg Square. I enter a brownstone on Commonwealth Avenue, a place that’s clearly recognizable as an exclusive school, and he sees me go into a small classroom with wood-paneled walls and a baroque chandelier. I sit at a seminar table and lead a masterful discussion of The Scarlet Letter with ten very bright and animated students. In the classroom, I am always my best self—smart, amusing, skillful, patient, vibrant, and kind. I’m not a Harvard professor and I’m not a doctor, but he sees, with surprise and pride, that I have an honorable and dependable job, that, despite everything, I have arrived safely at a normal adulthood.

WE SET OUR WEDDING DATE FOR MAY 15 and planned to hold it at the Fruitlands Museum in the town of Harvard, a rural suburb west of Boston. The museum was on the ridge of a hill surrounded by apple orchards. Molly forecast that the white blossoms on the trees would be in full bloom in the middle of May. In March we began shopping around for a clergyperson to marry us. I called some rabbis, but the only ones willing to marry an interfaith couple charged a small fortune. Then a friend told us about a Unitarian minister in Cambridge who would marry just about anybody, and we scheduled an appointment with her.

A day before our appointment I was in my usual position at the bedroom window, waiting for Molly to come home. When I caught sight of her walking down the street, she appeared more bewildered than usual. At one point, about one hundred steps from the house, she stopped completely and let her heavy purse and briefcase fall to the sidewalk. She looked around, disoriented. Then a car pulled to a stop next to her. The driver rolled down his window and said something. Molly smiled and pointed to our building. The car drove away and I raced outside and down the block.

“Molly, sweetie, are you all right?”

Her face was drawn. “I’m all right. Just a little light-headed.”

“Let me help you,” I said, lifting her purse and putting my arm around her waist. “Thank God I just happened to be looking out the window.”

Molly was not feeling well enough to eat dinner and lay down in the bedroom. I pulled some books on pregnancy off the shelf— I think Molly had bought out the entire women’s health section. At the kitchen table, eating the Cajun meatloaf I had prepared, I looked up miscarriage in the index. One-third of all pregnancies end in miscarriages. Eighty-five percent of all miscarriages occur during the first trimester, usually due to a random error in the genetic code. I brought Molly a cup of herbal tea and sat next to her on the side of the bed.

“Do you have any lower back pain?” I asked.

“A little.”

“Any bleeding?”

“Some.”

“Molly, we need to call the doctor.”

“Her office is closed. I don’t want to go to the emergency room.”

“Maybe we ought to cancel our appointment with the minister tomorrow. I think it might be better for you to see your doctor.”

“I don’t want to cancel, Seth.”

“We can always reschedule.”

“I told you I don’t want to cancel. Do you?”

“No,” I relented. “I can’t wait to go.”

THE UNITARIAN MINISTER’S NAME was Lydia Cartwright-Preston. Somewhat zaftig, deeply tanned, with a set of dazzling white teeth, she was attired in stiff blue jeans, an old pair of Earth shoes, a plain red turtleneck, and a gaudy vest of Central American design. The rug on the floor was emblazoned with Navajo motifs, and the bookshelves were crowded with various small totems—an African mask with exaggerated mouth and lips, a carving of a woman with Incan features and a great round belly, and a herd of five or six miniature elephants. Except for a framed print advertising a display of quilts by Mennonite women, I didn’t see any evidence of Christianity, which relaxed me somewhat, but not much.

Lydia Cartwright-Preston offered us coffee, tea, and scones. Molly declined; I accepted a cup of coffee, suppressing an urge to say, What, no cider and blueberry bagels? I thought that was traditional Unitarian fare.

“Congratulations, you two!” Lydia said. “Parenthood is a beautiful journey, but an exhausting one too. I hope you’re both feeling centered.”

“Centered?” I queried her.

“We’re both very happy. Thank you,” Molly said.

Lydia then asked us to tell her a little about ourselves. She turned to me with her blinding, high-voltage smile. I told her I taught English at a private school. Molly told Lydia she was a lawyer.

“A tax lawyer,” I added.

Both women gave me puzzled looks.

“I just thought it was important for you to know how little we have in common.”

Lydia laughed politely; Molly looked straight ahead, as if steeling herself for the dentist’s drill.

“Well, I know you two do come from different faith traditions. I’m comfortable with that, but I do require that you can attest to some belief in a higher power, that you can offer some expression of spirituality.” She turned to me. “Seth?”

“Yes, definitely,” I answered.

“You consider yourself a spiritual person?” she said, trying to get me to refine my answer.

“Deeply spiritual.” I smiled beatifically. I wanted this interview to be over so Molly could call her doctor.

Molly told Lydia that I had a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

“No way!” Lydia exclaimed.

“See, I told you,” I said to Molly. “A total turn-on.”

“Excuse me?” Lydia asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Molly, can you tell me about your relationship with God?” Lydia asked.

Molly blanched. “Well, in all honesty, I don’t believe in God.”

“Yes, I see,” Lydia said, looking thoughtfully concerned, as if Molly had just informed her that she suffered from a chronic and painful ailment.

“But I do have a commitment to social justice,” Molly added.

“That counts, doesn’t it?” I interjected.

“Where does your commitment to social justice come from?” Lydia asked.

“From twelve years of Catholic school,” Molly answered.

I tried to catch Molly’s eye, but she didn’t look my way.

“So you did have a religious upbringing,” Lydia said.

“Yes, I believed very ardently when I was a child.”

Keep going, I messaged Molly telepathically. Tell her about the time you swallowed a relic, a splinter of bone supposedly from a saint, because you thought it would endow you with holiness. Tell her how you went door to door in Cambridge soliciting money for pagan babies in China and Africa. Tell her about the time you climbed Croagh Patrick, a mountain in the west of Ireland climbed by hordes of barefoot pilgrims every July. Tell her you climbed it the summer after your father died, and that your relatives kept their shoes on but that you insisted on climbing it barefoot like a true pilgrim. By the time you came down, your feet were bloodied and blistered.

“What happened to your faith?” Lydia asked, leaning forward.

“Well, for one thing my mother died when I was two. Then my father died when I was twelve. It was difficult for me to believe in God after that.”

“Oh, my, I’m sure that was very difficult for you,” Lydia said.

“It still is,” I interjected.

“Yes, for many people the mourning process is a lifelong journey,” Lydia commented.

“I think,” Molly continued, “the real turning point came for me one day when I was thirteen. I was showing my new fountain pen to the girl next to me in class. Our teacher, Sister Priscilla, asked me if I was bored. I told her, yes, I was. Some of the other children laughed. Sister turned beet red. She demanded I apologize, but I didn’t think I had anything to apologize for. I was only telling the truth. We were taught it was a sin to lie, and I would have been lying if I had said I wasn’t bored. Of course I couldn’t explain any of this, so I just refused to apologize. Sister Priscilla became enraged. She berated me for being insolent and incorrigible. She said that surely my parents had done a poor job of raising me. This went on for about five minutes, until I was crying uncontrollably. Then Sister Pricilla asked me if I was ready to apologize. I told her no. ‘Then why are you crying?’ she asked. ‘Because you’re being unfair to me,’ I said. She asked the class if anyone thought she was treating me unfairly. For a couple of seconds no one said anything. Then Billy Costello stood up. Poor Billy Costello! He had eight brothers and sisters and his father was the school janitor. Sister was always giving him grief for coming to school with holes in his clothing. ‘Molly’s right, Sister,’ Billy said. ‘You were being unfair. Very unfair.’”

Molly’s eyes welled up.

“To this day,” she said, “I think that was one of the kindest and bravest acts I’ve ever witnessed.”

Molly shut her eyes tightly, holding back a food of tears.

“Well, I’m sure your own act of resistance was very empowering for you,” Lydia said.

“Does that mean we pass?” I asked.

“Yes, I would like to work with the two of you.”

“Great!”

“In the time we have left,” Lydia said, “I’d like to hear what you both love and esteem about the other.”

Neither of us said anything. I was imagining Molly as a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, an orphan in a plaid skirt and kneesocks, lips trembling, cheeks shiny with tears, holding true to her beliefs, refusing to bend or bow, and my heart seized with an inchoate love for her. I wanted to save her, wanted to be as brave and true as young Billy Costello, but I was paralyzed with doubt. I was the strange boy who laughed out loud when the president was shot. I was the anti-Billy Costello! Oh, Lord, I was unworthy! Molly was crying quietly, crying, I’m sure, for her mother and father, for Billy Costello, for our baby, for us. What could I possibly say to her at such a moment?

“Seth?” Lydia prompted.

“Love and esteem?” I asked.

“Yes, why do you love Molly?”

ON THE BRIEF RIDE HOME FROM THE CHURCH, I was by turns obnoxious and repentant.

“Did you get a look at that office? What do you think? Was she going for a Cambridge meets Santa Fe style? If you ask me, it looked more like a multicultural theme park than an office.”

Molly gazed out the window. When I pulled up to the building, I turned off the engine and said, “Look, Molly, I apologize. I mean, it was a dating-game question. You know I love you. I love you more than anything. I love you more than words can say.” She kept looking out the window, using a trembling hand to shield the side of her face exposed to me.

Molly stayed in bed the remainder of the day, the bedroom door shut. I told myself it was best to leave her alone. In the early evening, I tried to numb myself by drinking scotch and watching the Home Shopping Channel. I was wondering whether to spend the night on the couch when I heard Molly call out to me from the bathroom. She was standing by the toilet, her head tilted against the wall. She stared at me, Ophelia like—eyes vacant, hair wild, her ghost white nightgown bloody.

“Oh, Molly, my love, are you all right?”

“I can’t clean it up,” she said.

“I can do that,” I said brightly. “I can do that.”

I put my arm around her and guided her back to the bedroom. Then I returned to the bathroom and studied the gore in the toilet bowl until I saw it—a heart-shaped clot of plum-colored tissue. It even had a silky white tail. I didn’t know how to dispose of it—I couldn’t just flush it down the toilet—so I dipped my hand in the water, pinched it out, bound it in toilet paper, and placed it on top of the tank. Then, on my hands and knees, I scoured the toilet bowl until it gleamed. I cleaned like a madman, like a penitent. I would have cleaned every latrine in Calcutta if offered the chance.

Then I cradled the weightless thing in the palm of my hand and went out to our mattress-sized backyard. The moon, white as ice, cast a pale glow. On my knees again, I shoveled away two or three inches of earth with my free hand. Each breath I drew was painful, as if I had a needle in my heart. I laid the pulpy tissue in its shroud of toilet paper in the small trough and stared at it. I felt more ceremony was in order and attempted to say Kaddish—yisgadal veyiskadash—but I stopped, paralyzed with self-consciousness. The words sounded out of place, too remote from anything I was thinking or feeling. Did I believe in anything? Did I have any words that issued straight and true from my heart? I looked up and caught sight of Molly staring down at me from the bedroom window. We watched each other for four or five seconds; her face was unreadable, sphinxlike. I moved the earth back over the mouse-sized corpse and spent a long time patting the mound fat.

Molly was waiting on the couch when I came in. I sat down next to her. My body was oily with perspiration, and I was coated with black soil.

“Thank you,” she finally said, her voice expressionless, a dead weight.

“I tried to say a prayer,” I confessed, my voice splintering. “I tried . . . but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how.”

I began crying and Molly reached for my hand.

“Seth, I know you watch me from the bedroom window. Did you realize that?”

I said I didn’t and apologized if it bothered her.

“I can’t say it bothers me. I just find it strange, like you’re watching yourself have a relationship with me. I’ve had that feeling since the very beginning of our relationship. You’re here, but you’re not really here. I need more than that, Seth. I know you love me, but I need someone who is fully present, someone who is in the relationship and not just watching it.”

“I’ll do better,” I said. “I promise.”

MOLLY AND I WERE MARRIED ON MAY 15, 1988. As she had hoped, the apple trees were blooming with white petals; the day was so clear that we could see the arrowhead summit of Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire on the horizon. We didn’t hire Lydia Cartwright-Preston to officiate, not wanting any reminders of that dreadful day. I had discovered that just about anybody can get licensed to perform weddings in Massachusetts, and so we were married by Mara. She had been right about her tenure— any chance she had disappeared once she was pregnant and gave birth. She was still married to her husband, Jonah, though not very happily, and was spending her days at home caring for her son, Eli, and attending rabbinical classes part-time at Hebrew College in Newton. Mara draped a tallis over her shoulders, bobby-pinned a yarmulke to the top of her head, and, under a purple velvet chuppah embroidered with doves and held up by Molly’s cousins, she performed a service she had written for us. She read some scripture and poetry, told stories about Molly and me that were both hilarious and moving, and then pronounced her final benediction on us: “There is no such thing as absolute time. Our lives on earth go by in a blink of the eye. But what is time when you share your life with the person you love? May the next fifty years for Molly and Seth be an eternity of love and joy.”

Molly and I spent our wedding night at the Charles Hotel. The next day we were going to Ireland for three weeks. We hadn’t had sex since her miscarriage. In the days immediately afterward, Molly had fallen into a depression so deep and paralyzing that she couldn’t get out of bed for many days. Her cousins came over to help attend to her, staying around the clock, sleeping on the couches and the floor of the living room. Her aunt and uncle visited every day. I felt displaced, reminded that all these Quinns were her real family. Molly and I were alone only at night. She lay in a fetal position on her side of the bed, books, magazines, boxes of Kleenex between us. She shuddered if I tried to touch her.

By March I had resumed holding her in my arms every night. I wanted to believe that sleeping next to each other for as many hours as possible would heal us. I wanted to believe that the invisible ether that passed between our pores during the night would restore our love. One night in early April I put my hand on her breast and pressed into her backside. She didn’t say no, but she didn’t respond.

“It’s been a long time,” I said.

“I know,” she replied, “and you’ve been very patient with me. You’ve been very kind, Seth.”

“It’s all I know how to do.”

She squeezed my hand.

“So, is that a no?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, it’s a no?”

“I just can’t, Seth. I’m not ready.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s fine.”

“I know it’s strange, but I want to wait until our wedding night,” she said.

“No, I understand,” I said. “Like a new beginning. Like doing things in the right order this time.”

“Yes,” she replied. “Something like that.” “We can pretend we’re virgins,” I said.

ON OUR WEDDING NIGHT, WE kissed and fondled awkwardly. When I was stiff, Molly lowered herself on top of me. She could see in my eyes that I was wondering about contraception; her own eyes filled with tears. “I want to try again,” she said. “I want to get pregnant tonight.” She rode me with a feral energy, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, her face contorted with pain and rapture, as if trying to outrace the ebbing of blood in my penis, or out-race death. I kept my eyes wide open, feeling mystified and oddly moved, as if I were watching her act out a feverish dream.

Over the next three weeks, we fucked in bed and breakfasts across Ireland, from Dingle to Dublin. We fucked on hillsides, the ground spongy beneath us, and inside ruined abbeys. But her period still came on schedule. I heard her crying behind the bathroom door a couple of days after we had returned. When she came out, her eyes were red. I put my arms around her and said, “I guess we’ll just have to keep having sex.” She smiled wanly, as if that was the last thing she wanted to do.

All throughout the summer we made love every night, and each month I would know her period had come when I heard her crying in the bathroom. For twenty years, except for those three months when she was pregnant, her period had come as regularly as the sunrise, a reminder that she was capable of bearing children. But now, no matter how many times we made love, we couldn’t stop the bleeding.

BY NOVEMBER, WE HAD STOPPED going to bed at the same time. Sex had become joyless, a chore. It numbed our hearts, turned our bodies against each other. Molly had started staying late at the office again, usually not coming home until long after I had eaten and was in my study grading papers and preparing for class. She would help herself to leftovers and read the newspaper at the table. Lying awake and alone at night, I would calculate the number of times we’d had intercourse since our marriage in May. Approximately twenty-seven times a month for six months: one hundred and sixty-two times. I recalled facts from the pregnancy books I had read: A man typically ejaculates three hundred million sperm during intercourse, but the sperm’s four-inch trip up the fallopian tubes is so perilous that only a handful survive. One book I read had compared the odds to those of a person attempting to swim across the Pacific. In a period of six months, I had sent more than forty-eight billion of my sperm jetting blindly through Molly’s reproductive tract, but not one had survived the journey.

FOR CHRISTMAS, WE DECORATED A TREE together, as we had the year before, but Christmas morning we drove to her aunt and uncle’s house to exchange presents there, hiding from each other in the capacious embrace of her extended family. Molly went to midnight Mass with her relatives, and every Sunday after Christmas she continued going to church.

“Does this mean you believe in God now?” I asked her one day as we were driving to her aunt and uncle’s for Sunday dinner. Molly no longer held my hand under the table.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking out the window at the ugly winter landscape, the snowdrifts blackened by car exhaust.

“About God . . . or about us?”

It was the first time either of us had brought up the state of our marriage.

“Both,” she replied after a pause.

“Molly, what’s happened to us?”

“I don’t think you really wanted to get married. The only reason you proposed was because you knocked me up.”

“Molly! That’s not fair!”

“Seth, watch out!” she exclaimed as I nearly plowed into the car in front of me going through the rotary.

“Actually,” I said, “I had planned to propose on Thanksgiving night last year. I was all set to pop the question, and then you told me about how my mother said you should get pregnant so I would have to marry you. It ruined the moment.”

“You had plenty of time to propose after Thanksgiving. You can’t go through life blaming everything on your mother.”

“I was ready! I wanted to marry you before you were pregnant. I was less than five seconds away from proposing to you before you told me about your conversation with my mother!”

“So what are you saying? That things would be different if you had beat me to the punch that night and proposed?”

“Maybe.”

“Seth, you couldn’t even tell me why you loved me in that minister’s office.”

“How about the time we watched The Searchers and I told you that you completed me, that you turned me into a whole person? You said that was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to you.”

“You planned to say that in advance; I could tell.”

“So? I still meant it.”

Molly started crying. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but every time my period comes I feel the loss of our baby all over again.”

We had arrived at John and Jean’s house. I turned the motor off, but we remained in the car, our breath gradually fogging over the windows.

“I know,” I finally said. “I know. I feel like we’ve had to begin our marriage with a death in the family.” But it wasn’t just the death of our baby; I felt her dead parents in bed with us too, as if all that fucking was an attempt to resurrect them.

Molly’s gloved hand reached for my gloved hand. “Yes, that’s how I feel too.”

“Maybe we ought to put the idea of a baby on hold,” I said.

“I’m thirty-five, Seth. I don’t have time to put a baby on hold, especially if I’ve already had one miscarriage.”

“But look what it’s doing to us!”

She began crying again.

The day after her miscarriage, we had gone to her doctor, who had told us that Molly’s age, thirty-five, was probably a factor. Chromosomal abnormalities become more common with age, she had explained. “Yes, we both know that, but does this mean we keep trying?” I had asked. “That’s your decision,” the doctor had replied.

“I just mean,” I continued, “that we became pregnant when we weren’t trying. Maybe if we stop hoping you’ll get pregnant, it might just happen.” But hearing my own words, I knew how impossible that was.

She glared at me. “Are you saying I just need to relax?”

“No—I don’t know . . . I don’t know what I’m saying.”

DURING THE SUNDAY HOURS WHEN Molly was at church, I visited Mara. My name was still on the mailbox by the front door, since I was illegally subletting my rent-controlled apartment.

As Mara let me in the weekend after my argument with Molly, she held a crying, bucking toddler. I sat at her kitchen table, which was covered with open notebooks containing the hieroglyphics of her profession. Despite the fact that she had been denied tenure and was studying to become a rabbi, she still spent hours a day writing out complex and beautiful formulas about time and space.

“Go ahead. I’m paying attention,” she said, as she set her son, Eli, still crying, down in a playpen and studied her notebooks. She knew I wanted to talk about Molly.

“Mara, I think Molly is returning to the church,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because she goes to church every Sunday.”

“Well, then, I would say you’re right.”

“It feels like a rejection of me.”

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. She’s going through a difficult time, and she’s looking for solace, for something to believe in.”

“But I’m not much of a believer.”

“So? Neither is Jonah.”

“Yes, and look at how wonderful your marriage is.”

Mara’s eyes widened with hurt.

“Oh, Mara, I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Well, it’s not exactly a state secret.”

“Do you know if anyone in his lab is working on a cure for foot-in-mouth disease?”

She laughed a little.

“This morning I found this on Molly’s night table,” I said and showed her a card with an image of Jesus on one side. On the other side was written:

May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be Adored, Glorified, Loved, & Preserved throughout the world, now & forever. Sacred Heart of Jesus, please pray for me. Saint Jude, Worker of Miracles, please pray for me. Saint Jude, Helper of the Hopeless, please pray for me. Amen.

“It’s a novena,” Mara said.

“A what?”

“A novena. A prayer of petition.”

“I wonder if I’m one of the Hopeless she’s praying for.”

“Seth, Molly’s going through a hard time. You need to have faith in your marriage.”

“Did you know that a man ejaculates an average of three hundred million sperm into a woman’s reproductive tract? But the sperm’s four-inch journey up the fallopian tubes is so hazardous that the chances at survival are similar to the odds of someone attempting to swim across the Pacific.”

“No, I didn’t know any of that. But it’s very interesting. Thanks for telling me.”

“Faith isn’t one of my strong points. I feel that Molly and I are facing similar odds.”

“But women become pregnant all the time despite the odds. Life is random and mysterious, Seth. It’s not about playing the odds.”

“I guess not.”

“Think of it this way,” she said. “Imagine a bucket in the middle of a huge, empty swimming pool. The pool begins to fill with water, but the bucket remains empty. You keep wondering when the bucket is going to become full, because it’s taking forever for the water to rise. But you just need to remind yourself that at some point it’s going to happen; you just don’t know when. That’s what faith is like. Someday your bucket is going to be full. You just have to have faith and patience.”

I looked down at the table so that she wouldn’t see how moved I was.

“You know,” I said, “I think you’re going to be very successful in the rabbi business.”

The next night, I waited until Molly came home so that we could have dinner together. Afterward, I told her that I had something for her and handed her an envelope. Inside was a postcard of Croagh Patrick.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Turn it over,” I urged. On the back I had written out a novena:

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us! O sweet Virgin Mary. Amen.

“Oh, Seth, thank you. This is beautiful.”

“It’s a Novena for Impossible Requests,” I explained.

“I know.”

She appeared both touched and embarrassed, and in her expression—and in my gesture—I recognized how distant we had become, how I would have said anything, attestested to any belief, to become close to her again.

“What’s your impossible request?” she asked.

“That we can be as happy as we were before we wanted a baby and still have a baby.”

“That’s pretty impossible.”

“Molly, I know I’m not a religious person, but I’ve been thinking a lot about faith. I think it’s like looking at a bucket in the middle of a huge, empty swimming pool. The pool begins to fill with water but the bucket remains empty. You keep wondering when the bucket is going to become full, but you just need to remind yourself that it’s going to happen.”

Her eyes welled up.

“Someday our bucket is going to be full again, Molly. I know it is.”

She held me tightly. “Oh, Seth, sweetie, I hope so too.”

That night we went to bed at the same time. We held and kissed each other cautiously. I moved her nightgown up and kissed her belly, then her panties. She arched her hips so I could remove them and I felt the coarse spring of her pubic hair against my lips. Tracing my tongue over her complex inner terrain, I imagined that I was sending her a message in Braille, my own prayer of petition: Stay with me. Stay with me. I looked up to see if she had placed her hands over her face in a posture of prayer, but she put them along the side of my head, pulling me up. “Love me, Seth. Love me,” she said.

The next month her period came again.

ON THE MORNING of our first wedding anniversary, Molly and I were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, reading the paper, when I turned to the obituary page and let out a cry.

“Oh, my God! I don’t believe this.”

Molly came out from behind the business page. “What? What is it, Seth?”

“Hortense died.”

“Who?”

“Hortense. My cruel stepmother.”

“No!”

“Yes!” I replied, and showed her the obituary of the woman who had been married to my father for more than twenty-five years. I had always hoped Hortense would die before my father, but I had never really expected it to happen. At that point in my life, I was shocked when anything I hoped for actually came true.

Molly retreated back behind the business page.

“It says she died after a long illness,” I said. “Do you think that means cancer?”

“Probably. . . . Why is her obituary in The New York Times anyway?”

“She was a coauthor on most of my father’s papers.”

“Seth, why do you read the obituary page so carefully every morning?”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Most people read the sports page first, or the op-ed page, but you immediately turn to the obituaries.”

“Are you saying I’m gay?”

She snorted with disgust and returned to the paper.

“Do you think I ought to send my father a note of condolence?”

She looked up and regarded me with a modicum of sympathy. “What do you hope to get out of it?” she asked.

“Nothing. I just think it might be a nice thing to do.”

“Seth, you always have a motive.”

“That’s not fair.”

She turned back to the paper, as if I was not worth her time unless I could be completely honest.

“All right, fine,” I confessed. “I’m hoping that he’ll call me right up and tell me he’s always loved me and wants to be close in the years he has left.”

“I wouldn’t count on that happening.”

“Why not?”

“Because people don’t change that much.”

“I disagree. People change all the time.”

“Whatever you say,” she replied.

I studied Hortense’s obituary like a tract of the Talmud. It had appeared in the paper exactly a year to the day after Molly and I were married. Surely this had to mean something!

“You know what really gets me? She died without knowing I had children.” I was unexpectedly flooded with emotion and heard my voice catch.

Molly put down the paper and cast me an angry look. “You don’t have any children, Seth. Remember?”

“Oh, right! I’ll try to remember that.”

She glared at me, then began to tidy up various sections of the paper. I wanted to remind her of the time Hortense had told me I would never have children. I wasn’t trying to be funny; I was recalling the cruelest thing Hortense had ever said to me.

“Well, you know what they could have said about her?” I said. “She’s the woman who put the bitch in obituary!”

I nearly fell off my chair laughing as Molly pushed away from the table.

Then the phone rang, jolting my heart. Could it be my father calling to tell me about Hortense? No. It was my mother, calling to wish me happy anniversary. She asked to speak to Molly, but I lied and told her that she had just missed her.

“Do you have plans for tonight?” she asked.

I lied again, telling her we were going to the Rialto in the Charles Hotel.

“All right, doll. I love you both.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Five minutes later, right after Molly left for the statehouse, I called Sarah. I hadn’t tried to imitate our father for years, but when she answered the phone, I said, “Hello, Sarah,” in a dead-on Elliot Shapiro voice.

“Dad?” she replied.

“Can you tell me what two plus two is?”

“Jesus, Seth. You asshole.”

“Look at the obituary page in this morning’s Times.”

“I was just reading it when you called. That’s why you caught me off guard. For a moment I thought it was Dad calling to tell me about Hortense.”

“Are you going to send him a note?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. The obituary says she died after a long illness. If he wanted our sympathy, he could have contacted us.”

“Do you know what the paper could have said about Hortense?”

“What?”

“She’s the woman who put the bitch in obituary.”

“You’re bad,” she said, laughing.

“I know.”

“I bet you’re going to repeat that line about ten more times before the end of the day.”

“Probably,” I replied. “But what can I do? I’m just so very bad.”

I drove to the Alewife T stop as usual. I knew my father was probably at home, grieving, mourning. On the ten-minute ride between Alewife and Harvard, I wondered if I ought to get off the train at Harvard and go to his house. I could try to console him, tell him that I was in bad shape myself. We were father and son, after all, both of us bereft and mourning in our ways. But when the train pulled in to the Harvard stop, I kept my seat as the car disgorged passengers and then loaded up with new ones. As the train approached Charles Street, I found myself sitting across from a man about my age, but his skeletal face was splotched with lesions and he shivered occasionally, though he was wearing an overcoat that fit him like a king-sized blanket. I kept reminding myself not to stare, but I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t keep from imagining that he was the teacher I had replaced. He eventually caught my eye and smiled wanly at me.

Usually the classroom was my refuge, but that day it was a place where my sadness only seemed to ripen. We were discussing Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog,” and I prayed that I would be able to hold it together. The students began by discussing why we sympathize with Gurov even though he is an adulterer, a womanizer, a liar.

“Because Anna loves him, and she’s so pure,” said one of the students, Skylar Raab. Her long hair was twisted into a braid that reached the middle of her back; she wore an oversized button-down shirt (unironed, of course), jeans, and a hemp choker.

“But is she really so pure?” I replied. “After all, she’s committing adultery too. She lies to her husband so she can meet Gurov.”

“Well, it’s more like she’s innocent,” said Jason LaForge. He had bangs that fell over his granny glasses, sheepdog style, and he was wearing a T-shirt with a whale on it that said “Save the Humans.”

“Good,” I said. “I think innocent is a better word, but, still, how can she be innocent considering she’s committing adultery with Gurov?”

“Well, she’s innocent because her love for him is so pure,” Skylar said. “She loves him despite all his faults.”

“Yes,” I said. “Very good.”

Sonal Mukerjhee put her hand up. “But why? I really don’t understand what she sees in him. He’s like twenty years older than her. He lies about everything. He’s a serial adulterer.” Sonal was also dressed casually, in a rugby jersey, khaki slacks, and red high-top sneakers, but she permitted herself the vanity—or was it an ethnic statement?—of highlighting her beautiful hazel eyes with kohl.

Many of the students nodded in agreement.

“Well, maybe that’s the point of the story,” I said, my voice overly urgent, almost desperate. “They love each other despite who they are. They’re not pure, but their love is!”

Some nodded, but some looked at me strangely, puzzled by the burst of feeling I had let out.

“I think we need to go to the text,” I said, and directed them to the last page. Then I read:

“Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and intimate, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both.”

I contorted my face to keep from crying, but the tears poured down anyway. The students all stared at me, curious and compassionate.

WHEN I ARRIVED HOME FROM SCHOOL, I sat down at the table and wrote my father a note:

Dear Dad,

I was very sorry to read about your loss. I’m married to a wonderful woman and we’re expecting a baby. I’m sorry too that we’ve never been able to reconcile our differences, but I want you to know that I’ve always loved you.

Love,

Seth

I placed it an envelope and went out to mail it. Then I shopped for dinner in the stores along Huron Avenue. I bought two Rock Cornish hens, a baguette, haricots verts, an expensive bottle of wine, and flowers. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both. All afternoon, I repeated those words in my head, until I almost believed I was Gurov and Molly was Anna and we’d forgive everything in our past and forgive everything in our present.

I didn’t know if Molly would return home at dinnertime, and my heart sped up when I heard her come in at six. She looked over the mail and played the messages on the machine before coming into the kitchen. Then she stared at the table I had set: the two golden hens, flowers in the center, an open bottle of wine, the loaf of crusty bread.

“What’s all this about?” she said.

“It’s our anniversary—and my way of apologizing for this morning.”

She sat down with her coat still on. I sat too. She poured herself a glass of wine and gulped down most of it, and I knew that we were still Seth and Molly, not Anna and Gurov.

“Can you explain this?” she asked, and placed on the table a letter from the real estate management company for my apartment. It had come the day before, but I hadn’t bothered to open it yet. I read the letter: The company was terminating my lease because I had been illegally subletting my rent-controlled apartment.

“I was subletting my old apartment,” I said, understanding why she had been so angry with me that morning.

“I can’t believe you would do something like that!”

“It’s rent controlled,” I explained.

“Seth,” she cried in exasperation, “when people get married, they don’t hold on to their old apartments.”

“All right. I can see why you’re upset, but you’re acting like I betrayed you.”

“You have betrayed me. That’s exactly what this feels like, a betrayal! Someday our bucket is going to be full again, Molly. If you really believed that, if you really had faith in us, if you really wanted to be with me, you wouldn’t have kept your old apartment.”

We stared at each other. Of all my transgressions—laughing out loud when the president was shot, not proposing until Molly was pregnant, becoming tongue-tied in the minister’s office— this, I realized, was the most serious. I had always been too cautious to embrace what I most wanted; I had always played the odds in life.

“Why did you open my mail?” I asked. My question was more forensic than accusatory.

“I wondered why you were getting a letter from a real estate company. It was bothering me, so I opened it.”

“I see,” I said. “I see.”

“Seth, I can’t do this anymore.”

“This?”

“This!” she exclaimed. “You! Me! Hoping I’m going to have a baby! Hoping we might be happy again! Everything!”

I looked at the beautiful table I had prepared.

“We can be happy again,” I replied, but I could hear how empty my words sounded.

“Seth, stop telling me things you don’t believe.”

“So? Now what?”

“I need to live by myself.”

“Here?”

She nodded.

“You want me to move out?”

“Yes . . . do you think you could stay with Mara?”

“Probably. . . . Molly, I’m sorry I behaved so badly.”

She backhanded her tears away. “Seth, don’t blame yourself. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Why do couples always say that?”

“Say what?” she asked, her eyes damp.

“‘It’s nobody’s fault.’ Of course this is my fault.”

She stared at me, red eyed, then reached for my hand.

“I mean,” I continued, “maybe that’s the attraction of conspiracy theories. They provide sensible explanations for random things. Think about the Kennedy assassination. We watch the same film over and over, see Kennedy’s scalp sheared off by Oswald’s bullet for the hundredth time, but we don’t want to believe that everyone’s life suddenly changed because of something so senseless and random. So we invent theories and fictions to explain the unexplainable.”

She smiled sadly, sympathetically. “That sounds like something you would say to one of your classes.”

“It is,” I confessed. “Word for word.”

ON NOVEMBER 22, 1989, I was walking through Harvard Yard when I saw my father approaching from the opposite direction. I stopped when he was about ten feet away. He kept coming, head down. I didn’t know if he was trying to ignore me or if he simply didn’t recognize me. “Dad,” I said. He stopped. For several seconds we just stared at each other, as if we were both encountering a warped image of ourselves. All of my childhood hopes immediately welled up: We were both alone, and he was finally free to love me.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said, the word slicing like a blade. I waited for him to ask me how I was, but he didn’t say anything more.

“Do you know what today is?” I asked him.

“No.”

“The twenty-sixth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.”

“Happy anniversary.”

“My baby died and my wife left me,” I said.

He pressed his lips together and nodded his head vaguely. He might have been signaling, Yes, I know. It happens to us all.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

“Did you get my letter about Hortense?” He had never written back.

“A letter? You wrote two sentences. I thought you wanted to be a writer. That was the best you could do? Two sentences?”

“Actually, I think it was three sentences.”

“Two, three. It’s all the same.”

“But I wrote to you,” I replied. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“Two sentences,” he repeated, as if this were the most damning evidence against my character. “Two sentences.”

“What more did you want me to say? Recall the many wonderful experiences we shared?”

He bent his head and closed his eyes, as if receiving bad news. “Do you know what your problem is?” he said. “You remember everything that’s unimportant.”

“You know, you’re right. You’re absolutely right!”

He gave me a small, appreciative laugh, and I could see his small, tobacco-stained teeth.

“I remember everything that’s unimportant,” I said. “That is so true. So many years of therapy, and you’ve had the answer all this time!”

He broke into peals of high-pitched laughter. I took it as a sign of affection, if not approval.

“Twenty-six years ago today I was in Mrs. Carmichael’s first-grade class at the Stillman Elementary School. I burst out laughing when Mrs. Miller, the principal, told us that the president had been shot. I remember the morning you left us. We were all sitting at the table, and my mother was hitting you with a box of Raisin Bran, crying and pleading with you not to go. You were fending her off with one arm as you continued to eat. You were in your undershirt. I remember that you always waited to put on your shirt and tie until just before you left the house. You use Dunhill aftershave. You used to keep Johnny Cash tapes in your car because you loved his music but Hortense wouldn’t let you play it in the house.”

His eyes widened with emotion behind his glasses, and he put a hand against my cheek. Then he continued on his way.

ON APRIL 25, 2004, I was strolling up Concord Avenue with Grace, my four-year-old goddaughter, riding high on my shoulders, when I recognized Molly at about thirty yards. We hadn’t seen each other since 1989, but her gait—timid and dazed—was immediately familiar to me. I waved to her but she didn’t respond; she probably thought I was waving to someone behind her.

“Molly, hello. It’s me. Seth.”

“Oh, my God. Seth. I didn’t recognize you.”

We didn’t embrace, though we were close enough to touch. Besides, my hands were holding on to Grace’s ankles, and Molly’s slender finger was banded with a gold ring.

“Is this your daughter?” Molly asked.

“No, my goddaughter.” Then, to clarify my answer even more, I added, “She’s the love of my life.”

Grace was the daughter of my close friends and neighbors, Bea and Ken Simon. After I had moved out of Molly’s house, I spent a month sleeping on Mara’s futon before I found a place to rent— the four-room attic apartment of Bea and Ken’s Victorian house in Porter Square. Bea and Ken, recently married, were rehabing the house themselves. He was an architect, she a photographer, and they had designed their dream home. After a month of hearing banging and laughter in the evenings and on weekends, hearing the sounds of two people joyfully building a life together rising up to my attic apartment, I volunteered to help out. Surprised, they offered to lower my rent, but I refused, explaining that they would be saving me thousands of dollars in therapy bills. Bea and Ken laughed, but they knew I was going through a divorce and was in bad shape emotionally. “Think of it as occupational therapy for me,” I said. For more than a year, I helped them reconstruct their house, knocking down walls, stripping linoleum, installing Sheet-rock, and sanding floors. During the months when their bathroom and kitchen were gutted, they showered in my apartment and shared meals with me at my table. By the time the project was completed, Bea and Ken had become like a second family to me.

“I’m happy for you, Seth. You look just like each other.”

“Thank you,” I said proudly, not bothering to correct her misunderstanding about my relationship to Grace. “Gracie, my love, can you say hello to my friend Molly?” I said.

Grace bent down with her arms crossed angrily and said, “I’m not Grace!” To punctuate the point, she straightened the rounded brim of her yellow hat.

“Oh, excuse me. Madeline.”

“Madeline?” Molly asked.

“You know, Madeline. ‘In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. The smallest one was Madeline.’”

“Oh, yes, of course I know about Madeline. Well, it’s nice to meet you, Madeline.”

“Are you Madeline’s Mommy?” Grace asked, staring at Molly’s hair.

Molly paled, as if Grace had said something shockingly adult.

“Your hair,” I explained. “Madeline has red hair.”

“Oh, my hair, yes,” Molly said, relieved. Then she asked Grace if she would like to touch it. Grace smiled shyly and nodded. Molly leaned toward us, and I could see how extensively her rich auburn hair was threaded with gray. Her skin was more porous and textured than the last time I had seen her; deep lines ran between her nose and her mouth.

“I can see you’re married,” I said.

“Yes. Eight years. . . . And you?”

“No. Not married. . . . Any children?” I asked, though I was sure I knew the answer, had known it the moment I recognized her orphan’s stroll from so far away.

“No.”

“Uncle Seth. I’m bored!” Grace shouted. “You said we were going to buy my present.”

“We are, we are,” I assured her. “Tomorrow is Grace’s—I mean, Madeline’s—birthday. We’re going to Henry Bear’s Park so she can show me what she wants me to buy her.”

“Well, happy birthday, Madeline,” Molly said.

“Thank you,” Grace replied.

“Molly’s birthday is coming up soon too. May 2,” I said.

Molly stepped back, placing her hand over her heart. “Seth, I cannot believe you remember my birthday!”

“Well . . . I was married to you,” I stammered, suddenly self-conscious that my words had registered so powerfully. “I ought to remember your birthday.”

“Hold on,” Grace said. “You two were married?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Did you get divorced?” Grace asked, continuing to cross-examine me.

“Yes.”

Then she asked Molly if she had any kids. Molly told her she didn’t.

“It’s against the law to get divorced if you have children,” Grace declared.

“That’s right,” I told her.

Molly smiled at me, perhaps understanding a child’s need to invent a world in which parents don’t fall out of love or die.

“We’re adopting,” she said. “From China.”

“I’m adopting!” Grace exclaimed.

“You’re adopted,” I corrected.

“I know that,” she replied.

“Well, I didn’t,” Molly said, casting me a reproachful look through her smile.

Bea and Ken had adopted Grace four years ago. I knew so many couples with adopted children that I had come to think of Cambridge as a refuge for foundlings.

“Would you like to see a picture of my baby?” Molly asked me.

“Yes, of course!” I said.

“I have to prepare you, Seth. She’s extremely beautiful.”

“Of course she is.”

“No, I really mean it. Shockingly beautiful.”

When she showed me the photo, I nearly let out a cry. Molly hadn’t been exaggerating. The baby had a high, round moonscape of a forehead. Her eyes, a pair of shiny black pearls, stared directly back into the camera, directly into the soul of anyone who held the photograph. I had friends who had daughters adopted from China, and I knew that all the children had been abandoned. Looking at the photograph, I wondered how this baby’s mother could have gazed into those eyes one last time and then left her at a bus stop or a police station, or wherever she had abandoned her. How could anyone bear such a loss? I thought of the eight years Molly had probably spent trying to get pregnant, recalling the emotional and physical trial it had been for Bea and Ken when they were trying to conceive. I wondered how many more miscarriages she had suffered. How had she endured it?

“Oh, Molly, she is beautiful. Congratulations.”

I gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“You’re divorced!” a voice admonished me from above. “That’s against the law!”

Molly and I both laughed, but we didn’t stop staring at the photograph. Perhaps my kiss had awoken a long-dormant feeling between us: our arms were pressed against each other, our heads tilted together, our whole beings, it seemed, enveloped in a numinous aura, as if we were gazing at a photograph of the child we had always wanted, as if we had finally completed each other. Then Molly looked up at me with an enigmatic smile. Was she seeing the Seth that she remembered? Or the person she was hoping I might be when she called a complete stranger one night more than fifteen years earlier?