As she did once or twice a month, Alice visited Dillard in his Greenwich Village apartment. She told him about her conversation with Geraldine, how she’d asked if she was a bad mother and seemed on the verge of tears. “Just because a person is old, do we have to rewrite history?”
“We all rewrite history,” he said.
A stained-glass angel suncatcher hung from his living room window, and the houseplants on the sill were vibrant despite the cool fall weather. The radiator clanked as afternoon shadows lay across the parquet floors like fallen bodies.
“I don’t think I do,” said Alice. “Do I?”
Dillard smiled. “You tell me.”
Often, their visits turned into truth-telling sessions, which is how Alice learned all about Nick, and how Dillard found out that Alice used to follow gap-toothed men, thinking that they might be her father.
“Are you asking if I ever lied about anything?” she asked.
“Not lied, exactly. You were kind of perfect. Did you ever do anything that was less than perfect?”
“You know I did,” said Alice. “That time you found me wandering down the street without a purse, I’d ended up in a bar with one of those gap-toothed men and had a beer.”
“Is that the worst of it?”
“Mmm, well, I also followed you to the Swan a couple of times.”
Dillard ran his hand over his mouth. “Yeah, I used to sneak over there, just to look at the boys. Nothing more, I swear. You must have known about me before your mother did.”
Alice said she hadn’t wanted to think that until Carolyn met him. “She couldn’t get over how handsome you were. She wondered if you liked men and said there was something about your manner that made her think that was so. I said, no, that couldn’t be, but in the back of my mind I remembered finding that picture of you and Nick at the lake and how mad you got when I asked you about it.”
“I was scared, that’s all. She was smart, Carolyn. Are you still in touch with her?”
“Oh sure, we talk all the time and I see her about once a month. She’s a fashion editor at Vogue, not something either of us could have predicted. Now, there’s someone who probably never rewrote her own history. She always seems to live her truth.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” said Dillard.
Dillard had spent the past three and a half years in the orchestra pit playing the flute eight times a week for Annie. It was numbing work; he didn’t even call it music anymore. He was so bored he’d read books or do crossword puzzles during times the score didn’t call for flute. He considered Annie his penance. Penance for what? For leaving Emilia Mae? Abandoning Alice? Loving Nick? Liking men? Here he was in New York City in 1981, where gay men unabashedly advertised themselves by the clothes they wore, the way they walked, where they went: the clubs, the baths, the bars, the shows, the Pines. Wasn’t this why he’d come to New York City, to live his truth?
Yes, but not that way. It was no one’s business what he was or who he loved. He wore a black suit and white shirt to work every day, and that became his uniform. Now at the beginning of his fifties, he kept his hair long enough so it curled at his collar. His blue eyes hadn’t lost their blaze, and he was still fit and handsome enough to be called “pretty boy.” Sure, he had lovers here and there. Mostly closeted gay men—a math professor at Rutgers, a young man who’d subbed for the trombone player at Annie. Occasionally he’d go to one of those clubs and end up leaving with some man whose last name he never knew. While those one-night stands satisfied an immediate urge, they left him feeling hungry—hungry for Nick, hungry for love, hungry for home. Sometimes the memories of those people and places were so palpable, he thought that if he would just dig a little deeper, he could crawl back into them. Visits with Alice were a high point; they brought him back to family and belonging. Greedily, he’d question her about her mother, her grandmother, the bakery, New Rochelle. He hadn’t been there since the breakup, nor had he been back to Skyville since he’d sold his father’s cabin.
When Alice visited him in early April, Dillard took her jacket as she plopped down on the couch and arched her stomach in his direction. “Look at this, a belly full of baby. It’s a girl, we know for sure.”
“That’s wonderful. Do you know what you’re going to call her?”
“I have no idea, though you want to hear something weird? You know how Aloysius always comes up with these strange things? Twice, out of nowhere, he’s suggested I name the baby Linden. It’s an odd name, but he thinks it’s beautiful. Why does he care so much about what I name this baby?”
Dillard remembered the walk he’d taken with Aloysius right before he left New Rochelle. Dillard guessed that by wanting Alice to name her daughter Linden, he still hadn’t told Cora.
“I have no idea,” he said. “But I think we should celebrate your girl.” He went into the kitchen, which, like everything else in his apartment, was immaculate. Plates were stacked up on the open shelves according to color, glasses lined up according to size. He brought out two yellow mugs and a plate full of sticky buns, Alice’s favorite, and laid them out on the red dinette table in the nook off the living room.
The sun shot a rainbow through the stained-glass angel. The smell of cinnamon filled the apartment, and Dillard smiled as Alice licked her fingers and reached for another. She’d cut her hair into one of those Dorothy Hamill wedges, which Dillard thought accentuated her wide brown eyes and dazzling smile. Her gold hoop earrings played well against her high cheekbones.
“You still have a little Carolyn left in you, don’t you?” asked Dillard.
“Oh yeah, the Carolyn in me will live forever. And speaking of Carolyn, she’s giving me a shower two weeks from Saturday. I’d love it if you came and brought your flute.”
Dillard took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. She could hear the exhaustion in his sigh and see it in the dark rings around his eyes.
“But if it’s too much, you don’t have to…”
He smiled at her and stroked her chin. “You’re more beautiful now than ever.”
“I’ll take that as a yes?”
“Of course, I’ll be there.”
This was life as he wished it. “You know, Aloysius and Cora think of you as their own. Linden’s a pretty name. Why not? What does Carl think?”
Alice shook her head. “Carl says we can name her after a tampon company for all he cares, he’s just so happy it’s a girl.”
They talked more about the baby, due in early June. Alice brought him up to date on Emilia Mae. “She’s seeing this man who owns a shoe store in town. We’ve only just met him; he seems nice enough.”
Dillard brightened. “That’s great. She deserves the best.”