He was a quick but often recalcitrant learner, occasionally insisting that Ada was incorrect on a point that she knew to be true, or asking her questions she could not answer and then triumphantly crowing that he had stumped her.
As she got to know him better, it occurred to her why he had such difficulty at school. There was a certain amount of arbitrariness to his persecution, yes; he had been designated early on as the lowest-ranking member of his class, and that was a difficult role to escape. Yet Ada, although her tenure at Queen of Angels had been short, had already learned certain truths that seemed to perpetually elude him. One was that simple words were better. She concealed her vocabulary most of the time, but Gregory, when spoken to or yelled at in the hallway, responded in words and sentences that were at times positively Shakespearean. Coward, he would mutter, or fool, or imbecile. Once he called one of his tormentors a callow dog. The idea, especially for boys, was either to pretend you hadn’t heard what was shouted at you or to retaliate with strong, unexpected physical force. These were the only good options. But Gregory chose neither of them, and so was punished for it. In turn, he often acted unpleasantly, which further fueled his oppressors, and allowed them to justify their behavior toward him. Had he been in the Upper School with William, his brother’s presence might have leant him some respect or protection; but to the eighth-graders at the Lower School, William Liston seemed very far away, and only served as a reminder of everything that Gregory lacked—presumably even to Gregory himself. Therefore he slunk through the hallways with his head down, looking up only to snarl back a response to someone who had lobbed an insult at him.
His unpleasantness often extended even toward Ada. “Ha-ha,” he said to her sometimes, pointing a small finger in her direction. He did this when she was wrong on any point. It was maddening, and Ada often had the urge to walk away from him, to leave him once more to his own devices. But she never did; for in certain ways her interactions with Gregory brought back to her a piece of her former self, and this, to Ada, was invaluable.
She began to let Gregory come with her to the Fields Corner library after school, where she had been working, with Miss Holmes’s guidance, on going through their collection of the New York Times on microfilm—specifically the society pages from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s—in the hope of finding more information on the Sibelius family, and why and how David might have connected himself to them.
But the society pages, thus far, had yielded nothing. Ron Loughner, thought Ada, was mistaken. There were plenty of Astors and Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Whitneys and Morgans at every party; and although certain branches of the Sibelius family turned up here and there, J. Fairfax and Isabelle were nowhere to be found. Nor was the real David Sibelius—whom she had begun to think of as “other-David” in her mind, being unable to imagine her own father being called anything else. Certainly not Harold—a name that did not, she thought, fit him in the least. She scanned hundreds, and then thousands, of newspaper pages, looking for any image of the same fair-haired young man with a mole on his cheek that Ellen Palmer had claimed was David Sibelius. Ada would believe it, she decided, when she saw a picture of him, printed in an official source, with a caption beneath. Together she and Gregory made headway through a decade of society pages.
On the opposing front, Miss Holmes had not yet heard back from the librarian in Olathe, though she had called once, after two weeks, to check in again, and had left a message.
Gregory always left earlier than Ada, so that they would not return to the house at the same time. And one day, as she was walking home just after dusk, Ada saw Mrs. O’Keeffe, their neighbor, on her porch. It was an unusual sighting: it was early December, and typically she went inside for the winter in late October and did not emerge again until May. But it was unusually warm that day, and the first snow had not yet fallen. One brave cricket croaked its song nearby. Mrs. O’Keeffe was still wearing her dark glasses, though the sun was down, and sitting in a rocking chair. She was wearing a blanket that covered her lap, and a puffy pink jacket that Ada had never seen before: perhaps a gift from her daughter Mary, who was a regular presence at the house.
Suddenly Ada was inspired.
She approached the porch, calling out to Mrs. O’Keeffe loudly so that she would not be startled. But Mrs. O’Keeffe seemed almost as if she had been expecting someone.
“It’s Ada,” she said, when she reached the top step of the porch, and Mrs. O’Keeffe rocked slowly in her chair and nodded.
“Yes,” she said, “I know who you are.”
“Nice out,” said Ada, who was having trouble beginning.
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe. And then: “How’s your father, dear? I haven’t seen him in so long.”
“He’s fine,” said Ada quickly. She could not tell how much the neighbors knew about their situation. Many of them, including Mrs. O’Keeffe, had seen him the day the firemen were called, covered in a blanket like a child on the front lawn. Furthermore, Liston was social, and loved gossip; but she was also intensely loyal when it came to both Ada and David. Ada could not decide which of these two characteristics might influence Liston more.
“Actually, I was wondering,” said Ada. “I mean, I had a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“I was wondering if you knew his parents,” said Ada. “When you worked in New York.”
“The Sibeliuses?” said Mrs. O’Keeffe, and Ada nodded, and then said, “Yes,” in case Mrs. O’Keeffe hadn’t seen her. Her head was turned vaguely in the wrong direction, five or ten degrees off from where Ada was standing.
“I knew of them,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe. “Of course, I left New York in 1923, just a few years after they were married, I suppose. Before your father would have been born. I worked for a family called Baker. Their house was on Gramercy Park, not far from the Sibeliuses, and it’s fair to say we all gossiped among ourselves. The staff, I mean.”
“What were they like? His parents,” asked Ada.
Mrs. O’Keeffe paused.
“What were they meant to be like, you mean?” There was still a very faint trace of an Irish accent in her voice, which, David had pointed out, presented itself more obviously when she was speaking about her former life.
“I guess so.”
“Oh, now, I really couldn’t say. I didn’t know them personally, you see.”
Ada was disappointed. “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
Mrs. O’Keeffe turned her head ever so slightly to the left, so that she was looking more directly at Ada.
“Why do you ask, dear?” she said.
“I’m just,” said Ada. “I’m just trying to find out more about his history.
“He’s not doing well,” she added.
And this seemed to do the trick.
“Well,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe, lowering her voice, “if you want to know what I heard—don’t tell your father I told you—but there was a sort of scandal.”
“A scandal?” said Ada.
“Yes, dear. Before your father was born, of course. Something to do with a lady and Mr. Sibelius.”