ONE

In the Fifties, Nick still had family. His father worked steadily in the mills, making enough to go down to South Street every Friday night and get himself good and blitzed and play some back-room poker. There were always guys he knew who were more than willing to take his money, to accept the makeshift IOUs he scribbled on the greasy napkins. He almost always lost everything. Money. His black cowboy boots with the red lizard dappling the sides, the watch his wife had engraved for him for their wedding day, “Helen loves Tom.” He stayed in the games until he was kicked out, and then he would slowly wind his way home, feverish, drunkenly roaring out all the geographic songs he could think of, singing to all the places that called to him. Ok-la-ho-ma. San Francisco had his heart, Georgia throbbed in his mind. By the time he flopped back into the heady warmth of his house, his head was reeling.

Helen, waiting up for him, was always angry. He’d scoop her up, making her do a clumsy kind of waltz step with him across the kitchen floor. He’d murmur stories about France to her, how the three of them could live on bread and cheese and all those lights, how they’d have wine with every meal, even Nick. “No wine,” Helen said, but he dipped her down low, making her hair flicker under the cheap lamp, and when she tugged away, her face still stubborn, he eased her back, kissing her. “I know you,” he said. “You want the ocean. Orange groves. My California baby.” He whispered into her hair. “You’re drunk, Tom Austen,” she said, and he rubbed her back, soothing her until she gave in, resting her head against his shoulder. “You’ll wake Nick,” she said.

But Nick was almost always awake, standing silently in the hall, his parents dancing so close to him they could almost have touched him. Apart, they paid attention to him. His father taught him how to find the Big Dipper, how to read a Texas road map and find north by the smell in the air. His mother took him to the movies and read his fortune from the tea leaves in a cup. She bought him the Davy Crockett hat he wore everywhere. But when his parents were together, they seemed to see no one else, their hearts became finite. He’d interrupt them sometimes, courting them with his own songs, but Helen just laughed, and Tom continued to sway her against him.

Once, when Nick was really young, when he was feeling most lonely, he had walked into the kitchen the way he had sometimes seen Tom come home, his body jelly-limbed, his mouth open. Tom’s face had twisted. Helen had stopped what she was doing, all right, her wood stir spoon lifted, and then she’d taken two swift steps toward him and slapped his face. He pulled back, wounded. He went outside and sat in the high grasses where the grasshoppers bred and buzzed, and when he came back indoors, miserable, they both acted as if nothing were wrong.

They didn’t treat him the way his friends’ parents treated them. He wasn’t called angrily in to supper. He could come in when he wanted. If dinner was too cold, he could make himself peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, he could eat the rest of the eggs. He decided what he wanted to eat, and if it was in the house, then he could have it. They didn’t worry. He was ten. He was responsible. Tom had made sure Nick could recite his name and address and phone number from the time he could talk. There wasn’t much money in the family for choices, but what choices there were, Tom made sure Nick took advantage of. He was always allowed to pick out his own clothing. He favored orange pants in kindergarten, so bright, the other children stared; he went through a phase of bowling shirts; and once, for two months, he wore a baseball uniform he and Helen found at a resale store. He also decided on his punishments: When he drew on the walls, Nick denied himself the snowy picture of the TV; when he was caught ringing doorbells and running, he wouldn’t let himself read any of the library books he had taken out. It made him feel strong and proud; it made him adore his parents.

He had one friend, Chuck Raymond, who loved to hang out at Nick’s because of the way the house was run. He could go into the bread box for day-old doughnuts the same way Nick did; he could lie on any of the beds and just read. “In my house, every man is king,” Tom told him solemnly. “In my house, it’s my father,” Chuck said.

Chuck lived right across the street. His father was convinced the cold war was about to escalate any second. He didn’t trust Eisenhower; president or not, he was sure Ike was just another Communist, many of which, he hinted, were right in the neighborhood. He spent every free moment methodically digging up his driveway, trying to turn it into a fallout shelter. He showed Nick the plans he had drawn up, where the bedrooms would be, how the steel door would be so heavy that no one from the neighborhood would even think of breaking in. Nick and Chuck helped him dig sometimes, and all the while Nick dug, he searched for dinosaur fossils, for evidence of alien spacecraft, but he kept his opinions against his chest, he nodded when Chuck’s father waved and pointed at the blueprints.

Chuck’s father didn’t approve of Nick’s parents, and he kept telling Nick that he ought to persuade them to work on a shelter of their own. “I know you’re Chuck’s pal, but there’s just so much room in the shelter,” he said apologetically. “And Pittsburgh…well, we got your steel, we got your iron—we’ll be the first place blasted.”

When Nick told that to Tom one evening, when the two of them were watching the sky, Tom laughed. “I can’t think of a place more deserving,” he said. He hated Pittsburgh. He was always talking about getting out, winning enough money to go someplace quiet and green and pretty. The Pittsburgh Plan, he called it.

When Helen had been pregnant with Nick, she’d stayed cooped up in their hotbox of a house because she had it in her head that the Pittsburgh air would hurt her baby. She had paced the rooms, prowling the house until Tom came home, and then her mouth would wobble and go all runny, and she’d be crying.

“You ought to get out,” he said. “Ten minutes never hurt anyone.”

But she was a coward. She waited, and then, one cool day, she went out and bought herself a surgical mask. She still stayed inside. She said she was too embarrassed to go outside looking like a scrub nurse, and anyway, who knew what a mask really kept out? When Nick was born, she used the mask on him, covering his bright little face, letting him toddle about in the scrubby backyard. She took him on the bus with her like that, ignoring the frank stares of the other people. But she always took the mask off when Tom came in. He’d tell her she was just giving credence to the bad air; that if she didn’t think so hard about it, it wouldn’t exist. And then, of course, Nick was old enough to tug the mask off himself, to be hot and embarrassed by it. Even then he had a mind of his own. A mind like Tom’s.

It was something Tom had planned. Nick had grown up on Tom’s stories. His first books were the colorful travel brochures Tom used to filch from the agencies. Nick would stand up in front of his class, just a small boy with uncombable black hair, in clothing too big for him, the colors mismatched, and tell the class when the best time to go to the beaches in France was, why the summer festivals in Venice were better than those in Spain. He had no idea who Humpty-Dumpty was; he had never read Peter Rabbit, not when Tom was giving him dimes for every foreign fact he could recite, nickels for every capital he could pick out on the frayed map they kept in the kitchen.

And the stars—oh, the stars. Tom would wake Nick up sometimes just to show him Jupiter. He’d walk him about the neighborhood at three in the morning, when it was so clear and cold you could see your breath, and he’d do it just to remind him that everyone else may be sleeping behind locked doors, alarms carefully set, but they two were alive. It intoxicated Nick. He’d be so wired, he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. He’d hear Tom snoring and then he’d get up and get his jacket and he’d walk around the neighborhood himself, just once, before he came back inside to lie down in his bed, to listen to his heart, how hard and fast it was beating, a Morse code he somehow understood.

Every Sunday, Tom went to the library to read the help wanteds in the California papers and the New York Times. He applied for everything—clericals, messengers, once even as an animal groomer in San Jose. He made up references, he lied about experience. But for the one position he actually thought he had a shot at—as a foreman in an automotive plant in California—he didn’t lie at all.

He wanted that job so badly he couldn’t talk about it, not even to Helen, who shared all his secrets. Guilty, he bought her chocolates. For Nick, he found a stray yellow cat. Nick was eleven then, and although he really wanted a dog, any pet was something, and this one, being a stray, had a certain wild romance to it. But when he tried to hug it, the cat swiped at him with needled paws. He had pinprick scratches on both arms, but he thought they looked kind of like tattoos, and he rolled up his sleeves to show them off. He named the cat immediately, trying to make it more his. Shelter, he called it, after the driveway shelter Chuck’s father had abruptly abandoned, leaving it inexplicably in rubble for the boys to play war in.

The cat kept out of everyone’s way at first. Nick kept trying to make it sleep on his bed, but the only person in the family the cat liked was Tom. Nights, when Tom would sit out on the front porch, watching the stars and worrying, the cat would suddenly settle into his lap. At dinner, it was Tom the cat sat by, washing itself and purring, spreading out to sleep. Nick mashed up his food against the sides of his plate; he thrust pieces of chicken at the cat, who, uninterested, pulled away.

It was a strange animal. It was really more like the dog Nick had wanted. Now, when Tom got up to walk, the cat followed, and when he stopped, the cat stopped, too. He’d test it, walking farther and farther away every night, seeing just when the cat would turn and skulk away. The cat was with him the night he picked up the letter from California, asking him to come out and interview for the foreman position, his expenses paid.

He was delirious. He ran back to the house, the cat lagging behind him, and when he told Helen he had an interview, she started to cry. “California!” he shouted. “Grass! Beaches! A whole brand-new sky!” He looked over at Nick, who was standing, amazed, by the kitchen stove. “I’ll show you stars like you’ve never seen in your whole life.”

He worried, though. He was convinced the right suit would get him the job, the right haircut. He spent hours prowling the cut-rate stores, making Nick come with him to pick out something right. Man to man, he said. He got superstitious. He kept thinking, if only he could win a little money, he could take his family with him for the interview. It would be like a vote of confidence in the future he had to have, and then maybe things would work out—he’d get the job and they’d never have to come back to Pittsburgh ever again. He could get someone from the plant to pack up the stuff here. Or they could just leave it for vandals, for anyone. What did he care?

He began gambling more and more, losing what money he had saved for another haircut, for a new pair of shoes, getting more and more frustrated. One night, he was starting off for Wobbly Joe’s when the cat started following him. He was sure it would turn back, but it came all the way to the bar, and when he went inside, why, the cat came in, too, prowling about the corners, disdaining the hands that reached down to stroke his fur. Tom went to the back for the poker game, the cat beside him, and while he played, the cat twitched and fished through his legs.

He liked having the cat there—it relaxed him, made him play bold. And that night, Tom had his first win. Two hundred and eighty dollars. Enough to take his family with him for the interview. He scooped up the money in one hand, the cat in the other, and the two of them went home.

He didn’t say anything to Helen or Nick when he and the cat came in, his face all lit up and secretive. He poured the cat some milk into a blue dish. “Hey, that’s my good dish,” Helen said, but he stopped her, digging into his pockets, bringing up all that cash, crumpled, as green as sprouted grass. “The cat brought me luck,” he said. “We’re all getting out of here, we’re all going. Like a vacation that won’t ever end on us.” He looked down at the cat. “You, too,” he said, and the cat licked at the edge of the bowl, toppling it, empty.

Chuck’s father was retarring the driveway because neighbors had complained, sure the kids would pick up pieces of rubble and put one another’s eyes out with it. Nick sat with Chuck on his front steps.

“You’ll forget me,” Chuck said. “I just know it.”

“Will not,” Nick said, but even then he felt himself moving away. He couldn’t stop thinking about California. He could be doing perfectly normal things—brushing his teeth, pulling on a striped blue jersey that was too big for him—and he’d think, I could be doing this in California, and suddenly every motion would seem charged, somehow different and wonderful. He practiced what it might be like. He filled the bathtub with cold water and salted it with Morton’s, and then got in with his underwear, because he didn’t have a bathing suit. He shut his eyes and imagined he heard gulls. When he came out of the tub, his skin flushed, his eyes glittering, he stared at himself in Helen’s mirror, imagining that even his features were miraculously changing. He put on all the lights in his room, sitting under his desk lamp as close as he could, imagining he was tanning, until Helen came in and scolded him about wasting electricity.

Oh, she was caught up in the trip, too. He saw how she put a big map of California on the kitchen door, how she stared at it while she fished the soapy dishes out of the sink, while she patted hamburger meat into a loaf for supper, giving generous pinches of it to the cat. She couldn’t stop talking about the sun there. She had always been the sort who ticked off the months on the kitchen calendar until summer. In December she would go through Tom’s travel folders until she found the ones for the tropics, and those she would tack up on all the cabinets. She never minded not being able to afford fans for the house. She said there were loads of cool breezes and she would just open up her house to encourage them in. Pulling open the windows, the doors, letting the sweltering heat enter, clamp down, and stick. Nick got used to swatting June bugs in the house, to seeing a bumblebee angrily circling in his bedroom, popping against the glass panes. He stepped on the garden ants that scouted kitchen sugar; he picked up the frogs and shooed them outside.

In summer, Helen always seemed in a trance. There was really never enough money, but in winter she managed to stretch out the cheap cuts of meat, adding flour to fill things out. Summers were different. Who could eat in this weather? she said. She insisted it was healthier to eat less. She stashed away the money she would have spent for milk, for bread, and on nights when Tom was gambling, she took Nick over to one of the dance halls. She sat him down in a corner and he watched while she wound her way from stranger to stranger, dipping and swooning on the music, laughing. He liked how she became. He felt as if she were letting him in on some secret. She left with her hair damp, her dress pasted along her back. There would be this patina of dream about her that wouldn’t fade. She’d smile at Tom when he came in, his money gone, maybe his socks, too, but she wouldn’t grouse at him, she wouldn’t tell him about her evening, either. And when she looked at Nick, she winked.

It was snowing the day they were leaving, just two days after Nick’s twelfth birthday. They had packed more than they needed because Tom said they weren’t coming back. Nick had a pile of books, some schoolwork Tom had promised Nick’s teachers he would do, work Nick already planned to flutter out the window onto the highway. The only thing the school knew about the trip was that it was some kind of family emergency, and when Helen fussed, Tom said that it really wasn’t a lie.

“It’s your fault,” Tom said to Nick. Meaning the cat, the careless way Nick hadn’t slammed the door shut, hadn’t felt the cat slip out through his legs. Tom wouldn’t think of leaving without the cat. As far as he was concerned, the whole trip was the cat’s doing, and to leave without it would be folly. He insisted that Helen climb into the car with him and drive around and around the neighborhood, calling out cat siren songs. Helen laughed. She had on dime store sunglasses so dark that you couldn’t see she hadn’t slept, that her eyes were shadowed, restless with excitement.

“You stay here and watch for Shelter,” Tom told Nick. “You call him every once in a while.” He rubbed at his eyes until Helen pulled his hand free. “You want to get wrinkles?” she said. She buttoned up her coat, bundled a scarf about her hair. “Let’s get this show on the road,” she said.

Nick watched the car leave. Helen had the window rolled down an inch or two and was blowing on her hands. Nick stayed by the front door until the car was out of sight, then went into the kitchen to get himself something to eat. There was peanut butter, and he took the jar and a butter knife and sat down in front of the television and avidly watched some cowboy movie about a rustler and his partner, who happened to be a woman. It was pretty good. Every few minutes he got up and checked the door. He left it open so he could hear the cat, and, more important, so he could hear his parents’ car, so he could dash back out and pretend he had been watching all the time.

He fell asleep in the middle of the movie, waking only when he heard someone rapping against the glass of the front door. He jerked up. He had a funny metallic taste in his mouth from the peanut butter; his eyes felt itchy and red. He scrambled to his feet. He had been in the bathroom—he could always say that. He had had a stomachache. Helen was always sympathetic to ailments; Tom’s certain fury would fade. He walked into the living room, rubbing at his belly, his head down, and when he looked up, he saw the two policemen, waiting, watching him steadily through the glass.

It was just a kid. Sixteen years old, driving his brother’s jeep, speeding. He didn’t know how fast. Not that fast, not murderous. He was blasting the radio, bebopping the tune on the steering wheel. Then he saw a dog, he thought, or maybe a cat, dancing right into the path of his car, and when he swerved to avoid hitting it, he lost control. He was skidding, careening crazily straight for the other side of the road, right where Nick’s parents were standing. They were thrown. They might have made it if they had hit the soft bank of snow, but their own car was so close, the metal so relentlessly impassable.

It kept playing in Nick’s mind as he moved through a paralyzed haze, as he let the cops lead him right into the back seat of his car. They didn’t rush him; they let him go into the bathroom first, where he locked the door and sat on the tub, thinking, This is my bathroom, that green toothbrush is my father’s, the red one belongs to my mother. There was the heater where the cat used to love to sleep nights. Sometimes he’d step on it by mistake, the cat tensing beneath him. He heard the sudden sharp drone of a bee and he looked around, half expecting to see it buzzing by the sink, and then he realized that it was just the heater kicking on, and he thought how unnatural it all seemed, how everything was suddenly not quite right.

“Do you have family?” the cops asked. “An aunt, an uncle you can stay with?”

Nick, speechless, stared at them.

“Friends?” one cop said. “What about friends?” And then, sighing, he patted Nick on the back. He started to lift Nick’s California suitcase, to get it out of the way, and Nick flinched back, as if he had been struck.

Later, he’d remember only outlines. There was Miss Harry, the caseworker assigned to him, a rabbity-looking woman who kept asking him about his family, about his friends, who later told him she had found Helen’s address book in the house and had taken it upon herself to call each and every number to see if Nick could be taken in. “They all had such wonderful things to say about you,” she said, while Nick sat there, shamed. “But these times…” She lifted her hands helplessly.

He remembered two silent days at a youth shelter, where he lay stiffly across his bed, not eating, not washing his face, his hair grown so tangled he couldn’t even get his fingers through it. He wouldn’t unlace his shoes. He refused to sleep under the blanket. When Miss Harry came to take him to the funeral, he refused to go. He heard her talking outside in the corridor, saying, well, he was just a boy, she wasn’t so sure it was smart to force him; it had been…and then both voices softened, pulling away from him.

He would never go to the cemetery, he would never think about it. He told himself his parents weren’t dead. He hadn’t seen any bodies, and even if he went to the funeral, there was no reason why someone couldn’t have just buried a box. His parents had amnesia, knocked into a kind of sleep by the blow from the car. They were living in a totally different city by now, working, wondering what it was they were missing. Soon, suddenly, he would prickle back into their memory and they would come and get him. Maybe they would go on Walter Cronkite and hold up his picture, not knowing where he was, not remembering the city they had both wanted to forget. “Do you know this boy?” He rolled over onto his back, watching the ceiling, pinching his own flesh, running his hands over his legs, his belly, cupping his hands over his face so he could feel his own breath. His parents would find him.

He remembered his court appearance, in a jacket, his hair slicked back with oil because Miss Harry had insisted. The judge, a man no older than his father, kept watching him, frowning, kept asking him why he didn’t want a foster home, why he kept insisting he had a home, had parents. And when the judge told him he was a ward of the state, and as such would be put into the care of the Pittsburgh Home for Boys, Nick suddenly couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move his hand to tell anyone he was dying. Everything shimmered, floating by him. Miss Harry touched him then, and he folded right over, almost falling, until his head was against the cool wood of the table, and then fiercely, for the first time, he cried.

His last memory was of driving with Miss Harry, on the way to the home. She kept the radio on low—“Easy Listening”—and when she drove past his neighborhood, he asked her to stop. She didn’t say anything, but stopped where he had asked and didn’t try to keep him from going up the chipped flagstone walk to his house. He tried the door, but it was locked. He wrenched at it, he kicked. It was his house. There was his room inside. He knew where the burns were in the rug from Tom’s cigars, he knew where Helen kept her pictures of beaches, stashed under the cards in the den, hidden under a kitchen towel, little fixes that warmed the chill of the long winter months. He tugged at the door and then started pounding at the glass, over and over, and then Miss Harry was racing up the flagstone, her heels clicking, grabbing hold of him and forcing him toward her. He had let her touch him then. He had felt her hands moving over his hair, along his spine, but then, when he had felt her heart, he had panicked, pulling himself free. She had said something to him, her face earnest, pleading, but he hadn’t heard any of the words; he had felt only her voice washing over him like a wave, when he was already drowning.

It was funny. All his life he had lived in Pittsburgh, but he had never been this far east, this near the edge of town. He couldn’t remember seeing this big red brick building, the gated scrubby yard.

The director of the home was a tall, bony man named Mr. Rice. He spoke privately with Miss Harry for a while, and then Miss Harry spoke with Nick. She told him she would come to see him, she’d make sure he was all right. There were bills, she explained, but the sale of the house should cover them, and if there was money left over, she’d put it in trust for him; he could get it when he turned eighteen.

“Come on, I’ll show you the dorm,” Mr. Rice said. He took Nick up two flights to a large white room. Twelve beds in a row, the same brown wood dresser beside each one. There were a few posters hanging up over each bed. Rock stars. Movie stars. A few calendars with days X’d off. “Ah, here we go,” said Mr. Rice. “Yours.”

Nick settled tentatively on the bed.

“Oh, don’t look like that,” Mr. Rice said. “This isn’t a prison. We think of ourselves as a kind of extended family, I suppose, with rewards and punishments like everywhere else. Demerits, you know—no radio at night, no going out nights, things like that. I have a little booklet I can give you. Come on, cheer up. You’ll see how it is. You’re going to be just fine.”

Just fine. Nick pinched himself, bright spotty bruises, trying to jolt things right. He wasn’t sleeping. When he did, he dreamed of his parents. Tom pulling the stars out of the sky and juggling them; Helen dancing, a white transistor clapped against one ear. The alarm would wake him, and he’d burrow into the sheets, waiting for the familiar smell of Helen’s perfume as she bent to shake him awake, waiting for the heavy dark odor of Tom’s coffee. And then, after a while, other smells would filter in. Ammonia. Urine. Dirty socks. And then he’d hear strange voices, and he’d open his eyes. He’d see the room, the other boys watching him, waiting. What was happening to his life? He’d feel himself falling, falling, and then he’d jerk up and race to the bathroom, turning on the shower as hot as it would go, standing under it so the sting of the water would burn away his terror.

He saw bow it was. Everything was firmly scheduled. You had to get to breakfast by eight if you wanted the gluey oatmeal, the plate of soggy toast. You had to sit at the row table and eat whatever they had that morning or go hungry until lunch. You had to be at the home’s school until four, and you had to sign up for at least one activity—a sport, a club. There was even a therapist on staff who called you in once a month to talk, who always wanted to discuss some comment a teacher made about you. Weekends were your own; so was the time between classes and after dinner until eleven, when you had to be in bed with the lights clicked dark. They didn’t care what you did as long as you signed in and out, and if you did chores if you swept the front stoop or washed a floor, you could earn more time.

He kept to himself. A few boys approached him, impressed that he had actually had parents, wanting to know what it was like. “It’s like nothing,” Nick said. He wouldn’t socialize with any of them; he wouldn’t for one moment let himself think this life was real. And when, rebuffed enough times, the other boys kept their distance, when he overheard one tell another that he was weird, he felt a hard, raw flush of satisfaction, and then a yearning despair.

He told himself he would run away; he plotted where he would go, places Tom had told him about. When he was outside on free time, he’d start walking and walking, and then he would panic a little. Where could he go with two dollars in his back pocket? What kind of work could he get? How would he live? He’d come back to the home furious with himself. He’d try to go to sleep, half-certain that if he slept deeply enough, he’d wake up from the dream, back in his parents’ home.

The other kids thought about escape, too, but it was always adoption. The babies always left almost as quickly as they arrived, and the smaller boys could usually find homes. But the older you got, the more difficult it became, and everyone knew it. As soon as a couple walked in, boys would be spitting into their palms, slicking back their hair, straightening up and smiling, but the couple almost always left promised a newborn.

The home tried to help. Every month they put someone’s picture into the Sunday Press, with a small blurb detailing how smart that particular boy was, how well behaved, and why you should think seriously about adopting him. The paper never said how a boy burned tattoos into his arm, how a boy wet his bed so many times a night he had to keep clean linen on a chair next to the bed. It was all vaguely humiliating, and only one boy in three years had ever been adopted because of the picture. But always, always, when it came time for volunteers, there were all these restless hands shooting up, uncontrollable as weeds.

A few boys got foster homes, sending postcards back to the home that were tacked up on the bulletin board in the dining room. “Have my own room,” the cards said. “Have my own dog.” One or two of the boys always came back, stiff and silent, curled about their time outside as if it were a wound.

Nick wrote postcards, too, and letters. Every trip outside the home, he stopped at a pay phone and tried to find the address of someone who had known his family, someone who had known and liked him. There weren’t many names. His parents hadn’t really made room for anyone in their lives except each other and him. Still, he kept thinking, maybe people didn’t realize what had happened to him; maybe they had just assumed he had aunts and uncles like everyone else. He’d do it right, he thought. He wouldn’t just show up on someone’s doorstep, embarrassing them. He’d write a letter that showed how intelligent he was, how well bred.

He wrote to Tom’s boss, promising to work in the mills for free if he was taken in. He wrote to Helen’s one friend, telling her that he knew how to cook macaroni and cheese, that he could scrub a kitchen floor so shiny you could see yourself reflected in the gloss. He wrote to his last teacher because she had taken him aside one day and told him what promise she thought he had. And then he wrote to Chuck, a simple plea.

He mailed his letters and then he waited. No one at the home ever got any mail. All letters went right to Mr. Rice, and so every time Nick passed him, he looked at the director anxiously. When he passed a phone, he thought about nonchalantly calling some of the people, asking casually. “Oh, did you get my letter?” His fear, small and dark within him, took hold.

It took another week, and then a few responses trickled in. Mr. Rice gave him five envelopes, smiling, not asking him one question, and Nick raced with them into the bathroom, leaning along the tiled wall, his hands shaking as he ripped open the letters.

There was a note from Helen’s friend, polite and sad, telling him how much she missed Helen, how she knew Nick would grow up to be a credit, and then her signature. There were listless responses from neighbors who said that if Nick was in the neighborhood he should call—he was welcome to potluck dinner anytime. And there was a letter from Chuck. Chuck said his father had left as soon as the driveway had been repaved, without a word of explanation. They thought he had gone someplace south, because he had taken only his summer shirts. His mother was waiting tables over at Tiffany’s, and he himself was thinking of going over to Giant Eagle supermarket and trying to get work as a boxboy, to earn at least some of his keep. “If anyone needs rescue, it’s me,” Chuck wrote.

Nick stopped writing letters, stopped thinking about taking the bus to his side of town to look for familiar faces. When he walked, he hunched over, keeping his face in shadows. Once, when he was outside reading, he looked up and saw an old gambling buddy of Tom’s. He was walking, a paper trapped under one arm, and he whistled. He wasn’t even one of the people Nick had written to. Nick felt his breath chip. He got his hand up in a kind of frantic half-salute, and then he remembered all those letters, how they had come back to him, and he jerked his hand down, furious, burning with need.

Nick would turn fifteen in the home. He kept trying to keep himself as apart from the home as he could. He wouldn’t wear the clothing the home provided—the hand-me-downs from churches and Goodwill, the donations from the Girl Scout groups and ladies’ clubs that came to the home on holidays, grinning, carrying themselves like saints. He wouldn’t go when Mr. Rice herded ten boys over to the cut-rate stores to shop. He knew how it must look, one man with all those boys politely calling him mister, fingering the chinos everyone wanted, but Mr. Rice said were too faddy. The kids all got the same kinds of stuff, cheaply made, with colors that bled in the wash, pinking your underwear and your socks.

Nick began doing chores, taking what money he could earn and saving it for clothing. He also got permission to work two afternoons a week at the Cluck-a-Buck, a chicken place in Shadyside, where he served family after family, mopping up the messes they made, getting them extra fries, extra water, extra everything for the meager tips they doled out. He had to wear a yellow hat shaped like a big chicken comb, a yellow shirt that said “Cluck” across it, but he didn’t care. It all had a purpose. After a month, he walked right onto the main floor of Kaufmann’s and bought himself chinos and loafers and a pale blue shirt. Every night he carefully swabbed out the bathroom sink and handwashed his shirt, hanging it in the shower to dry.

He paid for his own haircuts. He hated the crew cuts the home provided, and although the barber promised to do whatever Nick wanted, Nick didn’t think he could give a cut that didn’t have an institutional look to it. He began taking two buses over to the Wilfred Beauty School, where for only two dollars one of the students would cut your hair. The only catch was that you had to give them carte blanche—you had to trust them. Nick didn’t mind. The students were friendly girls, in white uniforms and nurses’ shoes, their names on blue name tags. Dot. Amy. And they talked to him while they fussed with his hair; they treated him as if he were just an ordinary kid coming to get his hair cut.

He had startling cuts. Ducktails, bangs, once something called a Whiffle Ball, a cut that bristled up about his head. He couldn’t recognize himself in the mirror.

“You hate it,” the girl working on him said. She kept rubbing her hands along her uniform, as if they were wet. She glanced toward the supervisor, who was shouting at another student for having left some peroxide on far too long.

“No, no, it’s great,” Nick said, and then, as soon as he left, he went to the five-and-dime and bought himself a golf hat to tug over it. The other kids in the home made fun of him, but he didn’t care. He studied his reflection in the mirror, and he thought no one would ever mistake him for an orphan.

When he was sixteen, Miss Harry suddenly stopped coming. He had a new social worker, a thin young woman, fresh out of school, who took him out for burgers and fries, who said she wanted to be his friend and kept glancing at her watch. She told him Miss Harry had gotten fed up with the pressure and had moved to Florida.

Florida. It made Nick think about travel. It rekindled memories of Tom and his brochures, his road maps. Nick began to hang around the travel agencies in town. Like father, like son, he thought, and it was a kind of comfort. He crammed brochures into his jacket when no one was looking. He stared so long at the posters that once an agent gave him one, telling him to come back again when he was with his parents, and she would give them a deal. At night he lay across his bed, the brochures spread about him, waiting for it to be nine, the time he had overheard that the Pan Am flight took off for Spain.

He hung his poster—a brilliant African sunset over the veld—over his bed. He began to plan what he would do when he got out. He knew a lot of the kids here stayed in town. Fine for them, he thought. They could wake up to the pollution reports; they could wash their hair every day because it was so grimy. But he—he was going to be different.

He began to study a little harder in classes, trying to get better grades so he could get a scholarship to some college. Because of his hard work, he was given more free time away from the home. He fed his loneliness at the cafeterias, at the cafés that were just springing up. He nursed the bitter espressos, tried to look cool and important, and talked to whoever would listen to him. At first it was simply housewives, older women who were always comparing him to their sons, inviting him over to their houses, and almost always thinking he was a few years younger than he really was, because he was so small and skinny. He liked talking to the women, but he didn’t want them pitying him, so he made things up about himself. He was Teddy, he was Bill, and once, for a week or so, he was Simpson, Jr., the son of a famous surgeon. Some of the women got to recognize him and he liked that, although it was awkward when they called him by last week’s name. He had to pretend to have two names then, a middle and a first.

He began to look for kids his own age. He wandered around, trying to figure out where the high-school hangouts were, the places outsiders might go. Musicians. Poets. And girls. He wanted to meet girls. Their hair clean and long, wearing velvet or suede, looking at him like he was some secret they had to discover.

He found one place after a while, a café called Marks, owned by two University of Pittsburgh students who weren’t even there half the time. You could get a huge platter of blueberry pancakes for a dollar. Or you could sit at one of the splintered wood tables for hours and not order one thing and no one would care, no one would slap down a menu unless you were impatient enough to ask. It was rumored that the café would close down any second, that there were all these shady matters of unpaid taxes and unpaid bills.

Nick believed it. The lights flickered on and off, the heat never worked, and no one ever counted the money Nick gave them for his bills. Sometimes no one even gave him a bill at all, and when he asked for it, he was told to do the tally himself; he was trusted. Most everyone in the place was his age or a little older. He saw sleeping bags shoved into corners, he saw girls helping themselves to muffins and coffee, and he saw a few guys getting up to wash a dish or two before they sat down again.

Nick loved Marks. He would go there and sit at one of the tables and fool with the chessboard until someone would sit down beside him and want to play. He became a decent enough player because of all the people offering to teach; and it was at Marks, too, that he learned to smoke cigarettes.

He thought it looked really cool—that long, easy drag on a cigarette, the tapping ashes dusting onto the floor as you leaned toward some girl, talking to her in a low, soothing kind of voice, getting her to lean just a bit closer. He’d wanted to try smoking, but was too proud to admit he didn’t know how, too ashamed to let anyone see him fumble. So he waited until it was time for him to rush out for the last bus back to the home, and then he casually bummed a cigarette, shaking his head at the proffered light, saying he’d use his lighter, and then dashing out before someone could ask to use it, too. Outside, instead of asking a stranger for a light, he went into a cheap diner and filched a pack of matches. Then he made his way onto a deserted side street and huddled in the darkness.

He let the cigarette hang between his fingers. He took slow, careful draws at first, doubling into his coughs, forcing himself past the nausea. He goaded himself into puff after puff, trying to smooth it out, to gain a little finesse. He reeled home, greenish, swaying a little, and curled up into a tight ball on his bed, trying not to look at anything. Above his head, the poster of the African veld spun.

The finer points of smoking he took care of in the early morning, an hour before anyone else was up. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror, a pencil stub between his fingers, practicing different methods of holding the cigarette. It took him weeks to get really proficient, and by then, smoking had become a craving. He had to sneak his packs of Luckies into the home, and in the middle of the night he’d go into one of the toilet stalls and surreptitiously smoke. He thought of his addiction as a kind of victory.

He smoked at Marks constantly, watching the couples, hiding his yearnings behind a veil of smoke. There was always some guy with a crummy Sears guitar, strumming “Five Hundred Miles” or “If I Had a Hammer,” trying to get everyone to sing along. Some people did, but Nick, who couldn’t carry a tune, looked away. Someone else was reciting from a book of beat poets, pounding the table as if it were a bongo drum.

Everybody seemed to know everybody else, but they were still friendly enough to Nick. They bummed smokes and borrowed chairs from his table, and then conversations would start. Nick kept up an air of mystery. He wouldn’t talk about his school or his parents, and when prodded, he’d get up and go for more coffee, waiting for the conversation to turn before he came back. It just made them all the more curious about him. Finally, he said he went to a special place for gifted kids. He said his parents might just as well not exist. He said this darkly, with his lids lowered.

He studied the girls, anxious, afraid. He didn’t want to catch any girl’s eye, because he was terrified of seeing disapproval or, worse, amusement. He was suddenly hypersensitive about his looks. When he sat, he cupped his hands about his ears so they wouldn’t look too big. He tried to sit most of the time so you couldn’t tell he was small. He began wearing his hair longer because he saw the girls gravitated to shaggy-headed boys.

He lay awake nights, twisting in the sweaty sheets, listening to the helpless syncopation of his heart. How could he ask a girl out when he had a curfew? How could he compare with guys who had cars and records and homes? If he dared to tell a girl the truth, she’d tell the others, wouldn’t she? And that would infect his mystery with pity, make everyone polite and distant to him.

There was this one girl, though, who actually seemed to like him. Her name was Desmond Dickens. She was sixteen and she went to Allegheny High with most of the others. She was small and had red curly hair, and when she was beside Nick, he felt his breath clamping up inside of him. He couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying; he had to hunch his body forward to hide his desire. She wanted him to come to some party she was having. She smiled at him, and he suddenly stood up. “I can’t make it,” he said. He never gave explanations—no one at Marks ever expected one. But still, when he saw how her face was folding up, how it was losing some of its light, he felt ruined.

He began lying. He started idly telling everyone about his girl, Betty, who lived in a big white beach house in Florida and was always begging him to visit. When he talked to Desmond, he asked her what kind of a gift he should get Betty for her birthday. “Oh,” Desmond said, picking at a nail, and he hated himself, he wanted to lean across the table and grab her and smash her against him. “I like bracelets,” she said. He looked at her wrist, thin and cool and white, and thought of encircling it with his fingers, and then she stood up, excusing herself, and went to another table, leaving him helpless and confused.

He worried her in his mind, he played out scenarios, and then one day she waltzed into Marks on the arm of Freddy Johansen, a guitar player with a local band. They sat at a table and held hands, they nuzzled while Nick sat there, queasy, and when Desmond came over to say hello, he was curt. The whole bus ride back to the home, he thought about her hair. Her eyes. The heat from her body. The way her voice was. And when he was finally dropped off in front of the home, he felt as if something important had been taken from him.

By Nick’s last year at the home, he was one of Marks’ regulars. He knew everyone by name, although he had never been to anyone’s home, had never really socialized. It was a year when everyone was applying to colleges, talking about Harvard or Yale or the University of Texas. Nick slunk off by himself those uneasy nights. He walked the streets, miserable, unsure.

He had applied to twenty different schools, all for scholarships, and although he had been accepted at Berkeley, there was no money, and he hadn’t saved enough to buy books for one year, let alone tuition. He told himself it didn’t matter. He’d go to New York—he had money enough to get there—and he’d find a job, take classes at night.

He swaggered into Marks, almost defying anyone to tell him good news. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder and he whipped around. Desmond.

“Say hey,” she said, smiling. She sat down, pushing at the sleeves of her sweater. “So guess what?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Nick said, tapping cigarette ash on the floor. “What?”

“I was accepted at Oberlin.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and lighted another. “Great,” he said.

“Urn, yeah, it is,” she said. She started fiddling with her sweater cuff. “So, if you get out that way, I hope you’ll come and visit.”

He looked over at her.

“Well, will you?’ she said. She rummaged in her purse until she fished out a pen, a scrap of paper, and then she scribbled out her address and handed it to him. “I don’t know what dorm I’ll be in yet or anything, but that’s my school address.” She laughed, her nose bunched up so that all he could think about was what it would be like to kiss it. “My school!” she said. She leaned toward him. “Would you come out that way, do you think? I know it’s Ohio and all”—she made a face—“but really, it’s the coolest school. Big in the arts and stuff.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’ll come out.”

He took her address and put it into his back pocket and then he looked at her again.

“Well,” she said, “is the offer reciprocal?”

“Reciprocal?”

“Yeah, I mean, am I invited to come and visit you?”

He hesitated, and then he took the paper and pen and wrote out Nick Borden, 141 West 22nd Street, New York, New York. He had no idea what the zip was, so he scribbled in 14772, hoping it was at least close, hoping she wouldn’t really know either. He handed it back to her.

“God, New York,” she said, impressed. “You’re going to school there, you lucky duck.”

He shrugged.

“You know Donald Ditwild? He’s going to Columbia.”

“NYU,” said Nick.

“You’d show me around if I came up that way? I’ve always wanted to see New York.”

“Sure. Sure I would.”

She shook her head. She said she couldn’t get over it. New York.

She said she might have known he wouldn’t be living in a dorm like everyone else, not the way he was about his privacy and everything, but how did he ever find a place he could afford?

“Oh,” he said, “you know….” And he suddenly began worrying about just how much a place might cost him, just how much it might be to live in a city like New York for even six months. He had his savings, the little he put aside every month in a local bank; and, too, he would find a job.

She grinned. “I knew you wouldn’t tell me.” She suddenly reached over and took his cigarette, taking a slow, easy drag from it before passing it back to him. His fingers felt charged when he touched the cigarette. He was afraid to put it back to his mouth, and when he looked at her, she flushed.

“Listen,” she said. She looked at her hands, at the glimmery rings across her fingers. “Listen, the thing is, I’ve… I’ve always kind of loved you.”

She stood up, not looking at him. “I’m not seeing Freddy anymore,” she said, and then someone called her name, and she turned, just long enough for his panic to propel him outside.

He didn’t know what to do. He stuttered back and forth in front of the door. He could see her still in there, leaning across a table, talking to some girl in a red bandanna. She was laughing, and when she glanced up toward the table where he had been, he sprinted ahead.

He was sweating. He’d call her, he’d make some apology. He’d wait a month or so. No. He wouldn’t. She’d think he had been making fun of her. She’d think he was pathetic. He looked back at the café. “Baby, I Need You.” That was the song the five-hundred-miles guy had been singing before. He turned away, and then he started the long, lonely walk home.

He never went back to Marks. He did write Desmond one letter, telling her the truth, pouring it across the pages, but he couldn’t quite seal the envelope; he kept reopening it to stare in abject terror and mortification at his words. In the end, the stamp wore off the envelope, the address smeared in the rain, and he threw it out.

He concocted scenarios. How she’d write and write to the address he had given her, her letters bouncing back, stamped “addressee unknown.” Frustrated, she might write to that jerk she knew at Columbia; she might sweetly plead with him to hand-deliver her letter, promising to take him to dinner, maybe even hinting that she might take him to bed. Her friend might take a subway over to the address, the whole time thinking about the white flash of her legs, the swell of her breasts. He might buzz the number, might wake some poor old man who might buzz him up thinking he was the grocery boy. Desmond’s friend might puff his way up five flights just to find out there was no Nick there—had never been a Nick.

Or maybe there wasn’t even an apartment at that address, maybe there was a Chicken-a-Go-Go, an establishment the owner would hotly insist had been there a good forty years. Desmond would hear the news by phone. She’d gently get out of her promise of a movie, a dinner, a night that already had him itching, and when she hung up, she would take the letter she had been writing to Nick and carefully fold it into a drawer. He’d be in her blood then, a mystery she had never solved.

And Nick…well, he’d remember her. He wished he had a photo of her, something he could look at and think about, a reminder that a girl had loved him, that she had wanted the connection.

Nick took care of the details. He put what money he had managed to save into traveler’s checks; he spent ten minutes making the bank teller reexplain how to use them. He reserved a room at the “Y” in New York City, then went to the library and wrote to colleges for their schedules of evening classes.

Everyone knew he was leaving the home, but no one made any fuss about it. Boys left as soon as they were eighteen. No one told him to write, no one said they would miss what they never really had known. Some boys had parties thrown for them when they left; everyone herded into the rec room for cake and vanilla ice cream, the one flavor Nick hated. Some boys left with jobs, with schools to go to. Some left with nothing—and always returned to the home a month or so later. Just to visit, they said, but they never wanted to leave. The cook had once been one of the home’s boys, and he joked about it, admitted he couldn’t leave. He was thirty-six and he had a girl who came to pick him up evenings, a skinny blonde with a gummy smile.

On Nick’s last day, one of the boys came over to him, Denny Chernoff, a boy who had more friends than anyone. He said he bet Nick was scared shitless.

“No way,” Nick said.

“They think I’m fifteen,” Denny said. “They don’t know shit. My aunt wasn’t real swift with dates, and luckily there wasn’t any birth certificate.”

He squinted at Nick. “You think I’m fifteen? I’m sixteen. Maybe eighteen. I can’t be sure. What am I going to do outside? I’m not that smart. But I don’t like working with my hands, and there aren’t any girls with money lusting to take care of me. What am I going to do, commit some crime so I can get put into jail?”

He saw suddenly how Nick was watching him, dumbfounded. “You tell and you die,” Denny said.

“What did you tell me for, then?” Nick said.

Denny shrugged. “I had to tell someone,” he said. “And I knew you’d keep your mouth shut about it.”

Nick nodded. “I want to leave here,” he said.

“Sure,” Denny said. “You would. You could get your birth certificate forged—you could say the other was a fake. You could get sick. They aren’t about to make someone sick leave.” Nick laughed. Denny grinned, but his eyes were serious. “I’ll see you,” he said, and, turning, he fanned his fingers in a wave. One, two, three, fist closed.

Mr. Rice called Nick into his office to shake his hand and give him a twenty-five-dollar savings bond. He couldn’t understand why Nick wanted to leave Pittsburgh; he said there wasn’t one place worldwide that was prettier. Not with Point State Park, not with the fountains and Squirrel Hill. “Well, I hope you’ll always think of us as family,” Mr. Rice said.

“You think of me as your son?” Nick asked.

Startled, Mr. Rice laughed. “Don’t you?” he said, opening the door for Nick, patting him goodbye on the back.

At first, Nick was so busy in New York, he didn’t have time to be lonely. He had his room at the “Y,” he had a string of terrible part-time jobs—washing dishes, cleaning out other people’s cramped, gritty apartments—and in his spare time he took classes at Queens College. He watched the women in his classes, but he didn’t have the time or money to flirt. He couldn’t buy himself a pretzel on the street, let alone treat someone else—and anyway, he was always mad-dashing from job to job to school to job. He had to stay up half the night nursing black coffee he warmed up on a contraband hot plate, popping Stop Sleep tablets, just so he could get his studying done.

New York astounded him. It was hard to stay inside and crouch over his books, hard to soap up greasy dishes in the steamy back room of a restaurant, when he knew there were marvels going on outside. He tried to walk everywhere because every street seemed dappled with miracles, with vendors selling books and jewelry and strange foods, with girls in lots of beads and high leather boots, with dogs in beaver coats. He saw a man walking a llama one day, and Nick seemed to be the only person turning around to gawk.

Sometimes, he looked for Desmond. He imagined her up here visiting her friend at Columbia. He tried to study in the places he thought she might go to—the coffeehouses in the Village, the grassy parts of Washington Square Park, where there were always people playing folk music on their guitars. He didn’t start to feel lonely until it was time to get up, time to go back home.

It would take Nick over five years to get his degree. The whole time, he knew he should have been studying something more practical, something he might make some money with. He sat in on a few business classes, some prelaw, but he was restless, he couldn’t concentrate, and in the end he took class after class in literature and anthropology, in zoology and botany. It didn’t matter. He was less than one month out of school when he found a job. A salesman for a children’s book company. Brooksider Books.

He couldn’t explain it, but he somehow began feeling real. He had this job. He had this tiny studio apartment over on Thirtieth Street and Tenth Avenue. He had had to bribe the super for it. It was a six-flight walk-up with a slanting, rotted floor and a dark, dangerous shower that he sometimes entered with rubbers flapping on his feet. The neighborhod wasn’t so great either; he had to pick his way over the winos and around the steady, insinuating hiss of the dealers. But he had three big windows and lots of light; he had so few roaches he never even bothered to buy boric acid, let alone sprinkle it in the corners; and he could walk everywhere.

He loved coming home. He’d open his door and just beam because the place was his, because he didn’t have to share it or clean it or hide one thing in it. At first he didn’t want anyone stepping into his place except him. He didn’t mind talking to the other tenants as he passed them in the hall—the young mother on four, the old Spanish lady who had three parrots that could swear in Chinese. He liked the sense of community.

But it was different when the old woman knocked on his door and wanted to come inside just to visit; or when the young mother asked to borrow sugar and ended up spending an hour and a half sitting on his sofa bed asking him over and over if he thought the landlord was going to start evicting people. He felt itchy having people in his place. He felt as though they had somehow taken hold of something that was his, as if they were taking that part away with them, away from him. He began creeping up the stairs when he came in, rushing his key in the lock. He played his radio loudly enough so he wouldn’t hear the knocks, and even when he did, he ignored them.

He wasn’t home that much. He had his job, which he loved because it let him travel. Oh, not to anyplace exotic, but he did get to Boston, he did get to Washington, D.C., and at every place he bought postcards and T-shirts, he bought processed snapshots of the city sights. The clients loved him because he was so enthusiastic about their cities, because he actually wanted to see what sights there were. And, too, he was honest, he was an unpushy salesman.

He liked to walk around their shops first. He’d pick up the books and see which ones had jam stains on the pages, which ones had the spines starting to crack, because those were the books the kids loved—he didn’t care what the sales said. Sales were what grandmothers thought their grandkids should want. The whole trick was to promote the books the kids themselves loved, to set them right out front, to lie and say they were the best-sellers if that was the only way to get them into a kid’s hands. He had personal opinions on every book that he showed them; and despite what his company told him about “creative” selling, he had read every one.

His clients began to know him by name. He had a boss who shared an occasional beer or two with him. And in hotels, it didn’t matter that he was alone, that he had one glass of wine in the bar alone, that he went upstairs early, because it was all part of working, all part of who he was now.

The only snags in Nick’s life were the holidays, the times when he was most reminded that he had no family. The city seemed to empty out. He’d go buy himself Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant filled with old people and loners, with gay couples who preferred love to family confrontation. He went to all-night movies on Forty-second Street, and he got up at six in the morning to go to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, just so he could be a part of the crowd. It was bone-chillingly cold that day, and by noon it was snowing, white confetti on the black tarry street, but he stayed until the parade was over, taking his leave with the last of the stragglers.

When he came back to his apartment building, he knocked on the Spanish woman’s door. She wasn’t so terrible. He thought he’d take her out for coffee, maybe treat her to a dessert. But when the door opened, he was startled to see two women in there, two single beds jammed into the corner spaces. “Ah, the stranger,” she said, smiling. She told him her sister was living with her now, but she didn’t introduce him, she didn’t invite him in, and neither she nor her sister seemed the least bit interested in how he would spend his night.

He walked around the city. He tried to flirt with some of the women, but he must have looked too needy, he must have been sending out the wrong kind of radar, because no one even smiled. He decided to be more aggressive. On subsequent outings, he began talking to women in movie lines, at the poetry readings he went to in the Village where everyone was in black sweaters and boots.

He had a few dates, but none of the relationships lasted. He told himself, okay, okay, it was all experience and he would keep on trying. He went back home and pulled out his sofa bed and stretched out across it and then he imagined that there was another body next to his. He shut his eyes—he swore he could hear another heart beating, yearning toward his own.