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don’t know, maybe he was a porter or something. Once I even called the railroad union but they didn’t have anything.”
    “No?”
    “No.”
    “That’s the kind of job I guess you might not keep forever.” I was just talking. I talked too much then. I guess I’d meant how the railroad lines dwindled in our lifetimes from something that startedgrand, with tablecloths and chandeliers, observation cars for the night sky. Now the trains went practically like buses. It was less an idea than just something to say.
    “He’s Jamaican,” she repeated, as if that explained something. “I imagine he was a porter or a conductor. Or maybe a cook.”
    I thought of the white gloves and brass shined buttons and I knew she had pictured them too until it was worn out for her, and she could get no more from it. “Are you married?”
    “I’m a widow.”
    “Do you have any kids?”
    She paused as if I were asking too much and I was, I knew I was, but then she said, “One son. I have one son. Look, I’d like to find him too because my mother’s dead and there’s nobody else there, but, I’ve been through a lot of therapy and after that it doesn’t seem so important anymore. When somebody does that to you, it makes you feel worthless. When they leave you. And when you understand that you’re not worthless, then it doesn’t matter so much anymore.”
    “I know,” I said and I sort of did know too. “I mean our fathers are probably not swell guys.”
    “No, I don’t think so. They’re not.” Her voice lifted a little.
    I took the phone and moved off my chair. I sat on the floor. That felt better, my back against the heater.
    “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s hard to find somebody. I even called people with his same name in the phone book.”
    I stopped. That had never happened to me. I never found the same name.
    “Did you learn anything?”
    “Nothing. I don’t know what to tell you. I suggest you go to a therapist. I gave up. But it took me five years. And a lot of therapy. Lot of hard work with a therapist.”
    “Is it an unusual name?”
    “No, it’s a common name.”
    She told me. Though I’d given her no reason to, not really. Her name was Venise King. She didn’t ask me my name at all, and I hadn’t told her, so even calling the FBI there would be no record, unless they kept track through the phones. And I doubted that. To do that would cost too much money.
    She was black. Her father had been a porter or a conductor or maybe a cook. He’d worked on the trains. Was I somehow pullingrank when I said I didn’t think mine would end up at the Salvation Army? Or did she pity me my scrap of vanity?
    But mine was not a common name. I felt guilty and relieved, as if we’d both opened our folded lottery papers at the same time and hers was the one with the X.
    H ER FATHER might have had reasons. My family was not even disadvantaged. My mother’s family was regular middle class, upright, self-supporting, with savings in the bank and a cellar full of canned goods. She grew up with matching sweater sets and a red ukulele. I’d always been told my father’s family was royal over there, one of the nine richest in Egypt. I was poor but that was because my mother bought too many dresses.
    My father had never been in any war, either ours or over there. According to the encyclopedia, they had military coups every couple of years during the fifties and sixties. But none of the upheavals seemed to deprive my father of anything but money or even once, that we knew of, to see him into uniform. We escaped the world’s public trouble. But then, far away from everything in Wisconsin, we made our own.
    Once I met a man who was Indian and had grown up in boarding schools. People were too busy to raise their own children, he said. They were building the new nation. But I doubted that my father saw himself as any part of the New Egypt.
    And my mother paid no attention to public life whatsoever. She had never even