Some years, he was certain he would be caught. 1960, for example, was the year of the Martin and Mitchell case, in which two American intelligence officers defected to the Soviet Union and were subsequently accused of being gay. That year, the paranoia that McCarthy had sparked more than a decade before resurged, and David spent each day terrified of a knock on the door, some reopening of his case, a reinvestigation of the suicide of Harold Canady.
That same year, Robert Pearse received a visit from four federal agents who wished to speak with him about a rumor: someone had reported to them that Pearse was both gay and affiliated with the Communist Party. These dueling rumors, which he denied, in combination with his position as the head of a university that turned out State Department employees in great numbers, had put him on their watch list.
He came to warn David. “You may be next,” he said.
But nothing happened.
For a decade, nothing happened; and David was, at last, lulled into the belief that he was safe.
Only then did he allow himself to acknowledge, to tend to, a kind of yearning that had arisen in him over the years. It surprised him, at first. The idea that he might want a child. In his own childhood, he had sometimes fantasized about one day becoming a father: he imagined creating a different, better version of what he experienced. The idea of building an idyllic childhood for someone else one day had given him a measure of comfort in the middle of his own terrifying younger years. He would create for his child, he imagined, a life full of books and learning and conversation. A life of the mind.
For years, he thought that this would be impossible. He found friendship and solace, once more, at work, and in the evening he returned to his studio in the Theater District and continued to work.
In the late 1960s, he began to plan for ELIXIR—the project he would come to see as his most important work. He wondered, at times, whether the project was his attempt to fill the longing that had arisen within him for an heir, for a successor, someone he could invest with the accumulation of his knowledge. He did not examine the question too deeply.
One day in early 1970, when he was speaking to the young woman who regularly cut his hair, she mentioned a new project she had taken on.
“I’m surrogating myself,” she had said, using the word inventively, placing one small hand proudly on an abdomen that had already begun to protrude.
Her name was Birdie Auerbach. She was twenty-five then, or twenty-six; newly returned to Boston from San Francisco, where she had moved in 1966 just before the peak of the hippie movement. A few years later, she had found everything changed, and so she packed up her things and came back to her birthplace, and was now making ends meet in a variety of ways. At every one of David’s monthly appointments, she had invented a new scheme to supplement her income with other work: once, she decided to make pressed-flower stationery; once, she had decided to become a private investigator.
Now, she said, she had gone into business as a surrogate, for people who couldn’t conceive on their own.
“When there’s something wrong with the mom, I mean,” she added, clarifying.
It was simple, as she described it. A procedure that a friend of hers helped with. “Worked perfectly,” she said.
“Expensive, though,” she added, catching David’s eye in the mirror.
A deal was made.
At the hospital, David was announced as the father. The doctors congratulated him. They called Birdie his wife. She kept the child against her chest for thirty minutes, and then handed her to David.
“Don’t let me hold her again,” she whispered, and for a moment he wondered if he had done the right thing.
But then there she was, tiny thing, against him: a small and perfect specimen, a new addition to the world. He had read, once, that five babies were born every second, and he imagined the other hypothetical four, all taking their first breaths in turn. He imagined her life as it stretched out ahead of her. Of them. He imagined their lives together. For the first time in years, he was happy and still.
He named her after Lady Lovelace: one of his favorite entries in the Encyclop?dia Britannica he had almost memorized as a child. A mathematician, like him.
At the hospital, he had one visitor, and only one: it was Diana Liston, his best friend, his colleague, the only person he had told so far about the child.
“She’s incredible, David,” said Liston, expertly cradling the baby in her arms. She was still, then, married to her unpleasant, antisocial husband. She looked up at David somewhat wistfully. “I want another one,” she said. A year later, Gregory would be born; four years later, Matty. Only then would she get a divorce.
To her father, Ada presented a series of problems that he addressed as if they were puzzles. How many hours and minutes between feedings for optimal calmness? How long to let her cry in the night? (Though usually he could not let her cry at all.) On quiet mornings he held her to his chest and breathed with her and called her perfect and a joy. He took a month off work, citing an unspecified medical need, and when he returned he announced to the rest of the lab that he had unexpectedly learned he was a father. He did not elaborate. And they took it in stride: used, perhaps, to thinking of David as eccentric and somewhat secretive. They, too, loved the child.
Ada grew. She was a delight: even in the low and lonely hours of the night, when it was only the two of them; even as he waged a solitary war against first colic and then night terrors and then, briefly, bed-wetting; he was happier, more content, than he had ever been. He contemplated her: her hands, her face. Did she look like him? As she grew, the two of them would hear, frequently, that she did. He contemplated the physical manifestation of the genetic code that had produced her: half his, half Birdie Auerbach’s. (The unlikeliness of the combination made him smile, sometimes.) He sang to her: Christmas carols, hymns from his youth that he hummed, leaving out the words. “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”: his favorite. He felt called to some greater purpose. He felt a kind of familial love he had not felt since Susan had died. He imagined Ada, sometimes, as Susan—in the delirium of another 3:00 a.m. wake-up, the baby mewling, he imagined that it was Susan he was cradling, that it was Susan he was giving a better life. Another chance.
He wrote to George to let him know what he had done.
A wonderful idea, said George. I’d like to meet her.
And so three times he had taken Ada to meet the original David George Sibelius, who was going by George Wright exclusively, the name under which he’d always made art.