I pushed to my feet. “That
I
kept a secret . . .” I stopped and took a deep breath. “Is that why you slept with Owen? Because you were angry at me?”
She slammed her mug down on the counter and took a step toward me. “I slept with Owen because my father had just died, and you weren’t there.”
“So it was my fault?”
“No, it was mine, and Owen’s, too, by the way.” Her voice trembled. “But it was one mistake.” She jabbed a finger at the floor. “One mistake.”
“It was a pretty big mistake.”
“My father had died. Do you understand how that felt?” I was about to say I did, when she spoke again. “Don’t you dare say you do, because you don’t.”
“I lost Oliver,” I said.
“He wasn’t your father!” she shouted. She looked alarmed at the sound of her own raised voice. She pressed her hand to her mouth, shushing herself, and cast a worried glance toward the front of the house. “My mother’s asleep,” she said.
“So what?” I said. “Why do we have to be careful of her? What are you even doing here with her? The woman’s still shouting math problems at you.”
She stared at me a moment. Then she said, “I’d tell you if I really thought you cared.”
“What makes you think I don’t?”
“You don’t want to be my friend,” she said. “You can’t even forgive me.”
“Do you have any idea how it felt to have you betray me, like our friendship meant nothing?”
“Do I have any idea? The last I saw of you was the back of your car. And now you come here saying I should leave my mother, who’s the only parent I’ve got left. What if Oliver had gotten senile and started cursing at you and wetting himself? How long would you have stuck around then?”
“I would have.”
“If he hadn’t died I bet you would’ve left him, too.”
“That’s not true,” I said, though suddenly it seemed like it was. I seemed to have a memory of driving away, Oliver waving at me from the window, each of us watching the other disappear.
“You would’ve said, Oh, just pop into the bathroom, Oliver, I’ll be right out here waiting. And then you would’ve left him there, alone in a big cloud of dust.”
“That’s not true,” I said, my voice rising.
“He would’ve tried to go after your car, but he wouldn’t have been fast enough. And then he’d have been all alone. Because you’d have left him behind like garbage, like nothing between you ever mattered at all.”
“That’s not true!” I shouted.
“It is true!” she shouted back, shocking me into silence. “You left me alone!”
She looked furious, but her eyes were bright with tears, and the hurt and anger in her voice made me feel again what an awful thing I had done. I imagined Sonia waiting on that curb at the gas station, sure I would relent and come back. How long had she waited before she called her mother? How many hours more had she waited for her mother to arrive? I thought of the long drive home, Sonia staring out the window at the flat, brown land rolling by while her mother’s voice, tight with fury, told her all the things that were wrong with her.
She stared at me now, breathing hard, her face flushed. She wasn’t over anything, not the sight of her mother standing over her with a chain, not the sight of me driving away. Oliver was right—it was all still with her, her hurt and her anger and her guilt. We were together in that.
She sat down at the table, closed her eyes, and pressed her finger and thumb hard against the lids. “I’m not going to do this,” she said. “I can’t do this right now.” She opened her eyes and grabbed the package. “I’ll open this, and you can go,” she said. She tore the paper off before I could protest. I didn’t want her to open it. I no longer wanted to see what was inside.
From the box, Sonia lifted out several sheets of folded paper. Even from the back I recognized Oliver’s spiky hand. She read the first few lines and then dropped the letter back inside. “This is really for you,” she said. She seemed exhausted, drained of energy by opening the package, by screaming at me, maybe by the struggle it had taken not to cry. She pushed the box across the table toward me. “I’m going to check on my mother,” she said. She rose from her chair as if she were as fragile as Oliver. As she left the kitchen she wavered and put her hand on the doorframe for support. I listened to her footsteps as she made her slow way up the stairs.
I sat down and lifted out the letter, my pulse thrumming in my throat. Beneath it was a picture in a frame. A young woman sat on a lawn, leaning back on her hands and smiling at the photographer like he’d just made her laugh. She wore a white dress, and her wavy dark hair tumbled over her shoulders. She was Billie, the girl I’d visited so often in the attic, the one now closed up in a box in the trunk of my car, which I’d left in the LaGuardia Airport parking lot. Only in this picture she didn’t look sad. I heard again Oliver’s voice as he said, “I did what you have done. I left her behind.” I swallowed over the lump in my throat.
I sat for a few minutes with the letter still folded in my hand. It contained the end of the story, the last thing Oliver would ever say to me. Finally I unfolded it.
Dearest Cameron,
Here, at long last, are my memoirs, the first truthful accounting I’ve given of my life in nearly sixty years. You may do with this document what you will. If you’d like to pull back the curtain on my life, I wouldn’t blame you for it. I myself would be unable to resist. Of course the truth might be embarrassing for Ruth, but perhaps you won’t consider that a detriment.
My name is not Oliver Doucet, and I am not, by birth, a southerner. I was born Sid Murphy, in 1911, in a little town in upstate New York.
I imagine you understand now why I was such a recalcitrant subject. I wish I could see your face. There are certain drawbacks to a posthumous surprise.
I told the truth when I said my mother was a cold woman, my father a philanderer. There’s not much more I wish to say about them, or about my early life in general. I did nothing to distinguish myself. I was, among other ignominious things, a shoe salesman. The only bright spot in those years was Billie, beautiful Billie with her movie-star name. We were friendly from childhood, but for one reason or another, mostly owing to my inability to believe she’d want me, we didn’t become a couple until 1939. She was comforting me about a girl who’d recently left me for another man, and I blurted out that I didn’t care because she, Billie, was the one I loved. Then I looked at her with such trepidation she laughed. Certain she was mocking me, I fled the room, but she pursued me. “You idiot,” she said. “I’ve been in love you since I was fifteen.”
I proposed not long afterward, but then I joined the service, and though she wanted to get married right away, I insisted we wait. I didn’t want my first act on marrying her to be departure. How foolish that seems to me now.
I met the original Oliver Doucet in 1943 in Colorado. We had both been made official historians—he because he had actually been a history major in college, and I because among my jobs there had been a brief stint as a copywriter for an advertising agency. We had the same birthday. This was one of the first things we learned about each other, and then Oliver said, in his way of talking, which was almost always serious and mocking at once, that we were destined to be friends.
His parents were dead. His mother had belonged to a wealthy Oxford family—they’d been mayors, judges, famous hostesses—but there was only an aunt left now. His parents had left Oxford for a tiny town in Mississippi, where they’d joined a strange church—Oliver didn’t much like to talk about that—so he’d seen this aunt only a handful of times, but he’d always had the feeling they understood each other, and he was to be her heir.
He died, not in combat, of course, but in a jeep wreck, in a compromising position with a young man from town. He’d left a letter for me, saying that if anything happened to him he’d like me to go see his aunt, and so after the war was over and I was discharged, I did. I had the same sense of duty, the desire to complete one stage of life before beginning another, that I trust has brought you to Sonia with this. I planned to see his aunt first, and then go home to Billie. The choice seemed small, but it changed my life. If I’d gone back to Billie right away I would have stayed.
All the way there on the train I prepared lies about him. I was going to make his death more heroic than it was—I was going to say he’d swerved to avoid a child playing in the road. I wasn’t going to mention that he’d been drunk, leaving a bar with a questionable reputation, and certainly I wasn’t going to say a word about his young man. But his aunt—my aunt, as I can’t help but think of her—didn’t believe my story. Perhaps I hadn’t yet learned to lie with conviction. When she asked me for the truth, I told her. She said, “It’s a shame.” She shook her head. I waited for something more, and after a few moments I suppose my face displayed my surprise that nothing more was forthcoming. She shrugged. “I liked the boy,” she said. “But I didn’t know him very well.” She sighed. “Still, I’ll miss him. I refuse to leave this house to the Lamars”—the Lamars were distant cousins of hers. Then she looked me up and down and asked me to stay a few days.
I didn’t realize it at first, but this was an interview. Every day, she quizzed me about my thoughts on society, art, government, and my upbringing and general lack of accomplishment. She told me stories about the town, the house, the family, watching me closely for signs of disinterest. I gave her none, because I liked her. I felt, as the original Oliver had, that we understood each other. When she asked me if I’d like to become Oliver Doucet, live with her and be her heir, I have to say I wasn’t particularly surprised. I was ready for it. There was nothing in my old life, except Billie, that I had any wish to return to. As for my aunt, she was lonely. She wanted some family of her own. She took to me, my dear, exactly as I took to you.
I researched the family until I no doubt knew more about them than the original Oliver Doucet ever did. I think this, not my time in the military, is what sparked my interest in history. It didn’t take long for me to believe I was Oliver Doucet. I belonged with my aunt, in that house. I was a historian, and when I started writing my books it became even clearer to me that I’d finally begun living the life I was meant for all along. Ruth’s mother, my wife, was one of the Lamars—my aunt grumbled about this, but I think she was as pleased as I was that I was now related to my new family after all, if only by marriage, and later that Ruth was related to them by blood.
I never had any contact with anyone from my original life again—not my parents, not my friends, not Billie. I left them behind more thoroughly than even you’ve been able to. At first I meant to contact Billie, once I was settled in, but the more I became Oliver Doucet the harder it was to imagine reintroducing myself to her. What would she make of my new name, the accent I’d worked to acquire, my lies? If I brought her here, would she inadvertently expose me? It became more and more impossible to reach over the gulf between us. I hoped she wasn’t still waiting. I hoped she thought I’d died. What a coward I was. Even on my wedding day I was haunted by the sight of Billie’s face, the last time I saw her, when she looked at me with such sorrow at my leaving, such hope for my return. I tried to find her, after my wife died, but I had no success. She left town about a year after the war—a year, I imagine, that she spent waiting for my return—and after that I lost the trail. I don’t know what became of her, if her life was happy or sad. Even now she appears to me, exactly as she was sixty years ago, and she asks, “Didn’t you love me after all?” And the answer is, I did. I loved her like I’ve never loved anyone else in my life, and I spent much of my life lonely because I’d left that love behind. (In the end I wasn’t lonely. I was never lonely with you.)
I suppose there are many lessons you could take from this story. I’m tempted to enumerate them, having always felt that in some way it was my duty to pass on wisdom to you. You could say this story tells you that there is no absolute truth about a life. You merely choose the story you want to tell, and keep telling it. To many a historian’s despair, sheer repetition often serves to make a story true. I want you to see how many truths there are, that even the contradictory ones don’t cancel each other out.
Or perhaps all I want you to know is this—I lied to you when I said the ring I gave you belonged to my aunt. I bought it for Billie, when I still intended to return to her. It was her you reminded me of.
Do you see why I sent you to Sonia, why I wanted you to learn these things in her company? Please don’t choose loneliness, my dear Cameron, thinking it will protect you from grief. It will spare you nothing. I’ve left you now, and before that I lied to you every time I answered to my name. Do you not understand, even so, how much I loved you?
Oliver
Shock
is not a strong enough word for what I felt when I finished reading. I felt like someone had put a bag over my head, rushed me off into the night, yanked the bag off in a foreign country, where even the light looked different, and told me this was my life. It was impossible to believe what I’d just read, that Oliver was somehow not himself. I turned the last page over to see if he’d written on the other side that he was joking, but all I saw was a blank.
Oliver had had no right to put my name on his family tree, which, after all, wasn’t even his. He’d told me to make my own history—wasn’t that a meaningless endeavor if that history was a lie? I’d thought that while I was with Oliver I was rooted somehow, but his claim to that house in Oxford, the rich past in the attic, had been as tenuous as mine. We’d just been two wanderers clinging to each other, pretending it was possible to stop running, pretending we belonged. I didn’t know a Sid Murphy. I didn’t want to. Even the idea of Oliver had abandoned me, and this was worse, in the end, than when his physical self had died.