The
characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or
cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in
early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers
an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a
vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed
dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the
casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern
California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of
1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as
the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love
triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage
crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity;
as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of
peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box