Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  I said nothing to your grandfather about the fact that I already knew you intimately. But I can never describe the incredible joy that washed over me upon seeing you again, and knowing that you were, after all, going to be part of my life, part of Mannville. I felt as though you were my own flesh and blood. Your grandpa left you with me for a brief time to go buy some supplies, and as soon as he was gone I rang upstairs for my wife. She came down in a flash, and together we held you and cried tears of love and joy. We were barely able to contain ourselves. There was no sign of Eliza, so we knew that she’d abandoned you. It was—and I would not say this lightly—one of the defining moments of my life. My wife and I have always loved you beyond any reason, because we’ve felt that you are ours, and you’ll never know how hard it’s been not to show it more than we have. But we promised each other then and there that we would never tell your grandfather, or you, until you were old enough, the real story of your birth.

  Now for the hard part. You may be angry with me just now for not telling you the whole story sooner. I beg you to remember that my wife and I are reasonable, intelligent people, and that we always have good reasons for the things we do. I’m not bragging—I’m explaining. There were several mitigating factors that caused us to make our decision. First of all, Eliza had wanted her identity to be kept secret, and for all the anger we felt toward her just then for abandoning you, we had to admit we didn’t know the whole story. There may very well have been a good reason for you not to know more about her. Therefore, since we weren’t capable of making an informed decision, we decided on secrecy. I still feel we made the right decision.

  Secondly, we didn’t want to interfere in any way with the bond forming between you and your grandfather, for the fact was, we knew you much better than he did at that time, and to behave otherwise would have created confusion. Later on, as you got older, things resolved themselves naturally, until it was simply too late to come out with the truth. We felt it was important for you to live your life with him and not be influenced by outside factors. Your grandfather was a very sad man, and to see him made happy again was deeply satisfying to both of us. He felt you were his, that God had brought you to him to save the Manns from disappearing altogether, and we didn’t want to take away any of his joy by expressing our own.

  Perhaps these reasons seem silly to you, but consider finally the fact that I am a doctor. My decision was made also for professional reasons, and ultimately I was bound by law not to reveal anything of Eliza’s identity. That was the deciding factor.

  But I’m dead now, to state the fact bluntly, and therefore no longer obligated to follow the laws dictated to me by the state. Where I am going, no lawyers are admitted, and I have no fear of prosecution.

  You once asked me if I knew who your mother was. If you can recall the words of our conversation, you will remember that I neither admitted nor denied knowledge. I did say I didn’t know her, and that was the truth; I knew almost nothing about her. But these are technicalities, and I admit I am splitting hairs to assuage my own conscience. I deliberately concealed from you the information I had concerning your mother, and that has, from time to time, caused me some guilt. But I ask you to trust that I had good reasons. What I told you that day was that you needed to concern yourself with what was now, and to focus on who you were. The truth, I knew, would come to you with time, and I wanted to wait until you were ready before I gave out all the facts. You’re ready now. Very soon, I feel, you will be leaving Mannville and setting out on the sort of quest that most young people undertake at one time or another—to find out who you are, what sort of material you’re made of. In your case, the question of who you are is a very literal one. To tell you earlier what I knew about your mother would have created endless problems of confusion and restlessness, and I didn’t want to do that to you. You were always a happy child, despite the fact that you were raised in strange and unusual circumstances. I didn’t want that happiness to disappear.

  One of the few facts I was able to establish about your mother was that she was from the southwest. One could tell just by looking at her that she wasn’t an easterner: her skin had a healthy tan glow to it, and her eyes—how do I say this?—were used to a bigger sky. She could see farther than most of us can. I have no idea what I mean by that, I’m sorry to say, but if you ever meet her, if she’s still alive, you’ll understand. She mentioned in passing certain places she had been through, some of which you’ll recognize, perhaps: Santa Fe, Denver, Needles, Jackson Hole, Missoula. I looked these places up on a map; they are all out west. She was somewhat of a wanderer, I gathered, but there was nothing about her that suggested vagrancy. She was clean, free of disease, she had some money, she seemed mentally alert and stable and even happy, considering the circumstances. She was a captivating person, too, intelligent and quick-witted, and that made it all the more frustrating for my wife and myself, because she was the kind of person one would wish to know better no matter how well one knew her already.

  I have no idea how she met your father. She would have been a year or two older than he, but there is nothing unusual in that. What struck me as really odd was the difference in their situations. Your father was the all-American type, clean-cut and dutiful and proud to serve his country unquestioningly. That sort of person generally didn’t associate with hippies. You could say that they were from completely different camps, that they stood, at least on the surface, for completely different ideals. But it was easy to understand why any man would have been attracted to Eliza, and it isn’t hard either to see how she would have been attracted to Eddie. Her description of him was perfect. It was almost as if he was simply an actor playing a part in life—one that he believed in, of course, but one that didn’t limit him either. His role, his identity, was not all of who he was. He went much deeper than just being a football player, or a pilot. In speaking to him, I often had the feeling that I was really talking with someone who was much older than I, who understood much more than a small-town boy ought to. He was, in short, an oddity, an anomaly, and he knew it. Instead of becoming disenfranchised, however, he turned his situation around and used it as a way of elevating himself above the rest of us. Everything he did and said hinted at an awareness of something higher, of whatever it is that lay behind everything and gave it meaning. I have no doubt it was this quality in him Eliza was referring to when she said his soul was “old,” for this is the sort of behavior you might expect from someone of great age and wisdom, not from a small-town football jock. They were a perfect match for each other, and I’m sorry it didn’t work out for them to be together.

  No doubt soon you will be ready to begin looking for her. I’ve told you as much as I can about how to find her. If I were you, I would look out west, perhaps in one of the places she mentioned having been through in the course of her journeys. Look for a tall woman, light brown hair, gray eyes, a Roman nose, a soft, husky voice. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.

  And in closing I would like also to say that

  The letter ended there.

  Connor had been writing at his desk when the final stroke, the one for which he’d been looking over his shoulder the last six months, finally came for him, just as he’d predicted. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Connor had known exactly when death was coming; it appeared, by the almost-finished state of the letter, that he had pretty nearly timed the end of his life to within a few minutes. Telling me about my mother was that last item of unfinished business he was referring to. He couldn’t leave until this one final account had been closed.

  I racked my brains trying to figure out what he might have been about to write in the last paragraph, but it was no good—you can’t read the minds of the dead. I gave it up as fruitless. At least, I thought, he’d gotten the important parts down.

  Mrs. Connor told me in a note that she took the letter from his cold hands, sealed it up, and had it delivered it to me the day after I returned from Montreal. I never got the chance to discuss the events of my birth
with her. She was five years older than Doctor Connor—it appeared that he, like me, had a penchant for older women—and they’d been married for nearly fifty years, so it came as no surprise to anyone when she died peacefully in her sleep only a few days after Connor himself, in perfect health and with twenty years left in her, if she’d wanted to live them. Apparently, however, she hadn’t. She’d chosen instead to rejoin her husband.

  “Who could blame her, poor dear?” said Mildred. “Who would want to live alone after being happily married all that time?” And she put her birdy little hand on top of Grandpa’s large hairy one, as they rocked side by side in their rocking chairs. Grandpa had made her a chair in his carriage-house workshop. An ornate carved eagle adorned the headrest. He’d turned the spindles himself on a lathe.

  “Well, I missed this round,” Grandpa said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “This round of three. Death always comes in threes. Simpson, Connor, his wife. It’s a fact.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Of course it’s ridiculous,” he said. “And it’s infuriating. But it’s the way it is. It always happens.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” I said.

  “It’s an old superstition, but it’s true. And you’re too young to have experienced much of it. Watch and see. The older you get, the more people you know start to kick off. And they go in threes. Anyway, what was in that letter?”

  “News,” I said. It was then that I realized Connor had never told Grandpa any of what I now knew. He had just as much a right to know as I did, so I let him read the letter. He read through it twice, right there in the living room. I expected perhaps that he would get angry, or emotional, or at least excited, but he only rubbed his forehead thoughtfully and said, “I want you to finish high school first.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before you go traipsing off,” he said. “You absolutely have to finish high school.”

  “What makes you think I’m going traipsing off?” I said, but before the words were out of my mouth I knew he was right. Once again, Grandpa had proved he knew me almost better than I knew myself. I hadn’t had time to think it through yet, but once I had, there would be only one possible course of action. I would have to go west and find my mother, and I wanted to get started immediately.

  “That’ll take forever!” I protested.

  “It will take exactly one and a half years,” he corrected me calmly. “After that, you can do whatever you want. But if you leave now you’ll be screwed. You can’t do anything these days without a diploma from high school at least. And you ought to plan on college, too.”

  “College, shmollege,” I said. “I’m going to be a writer.”

  “Writers go to college too,” he told me. “They even have special writers’ colleges.”

  “So what? That doesn’t mean I have to go to one. It’s experience that counts for writers anyway. Not some dumb piece of paper.”

  “You don’t have to go right away,” he said. “See a little of the world first.”

  “You never went to college,” I pointed out.

  “That,” said Grandpa, “is precisely the reason you ought to go. There will never be any manuals written about how to live life according to the Thomas Mann school of thought. My mother wanted me to go to Harvard. I should have at least gone to the community college. Taken some courses in business or something.” In previous times, he would have added, “so I would have known better than to buy those damn ostriches.” But since he’d stopped drinking, he’d also stopped beating himself up over the Ostrich Fiasco.

  “This Eliza person,” I said. “Does she sound familiar? Ever see her?”

  “No,” said Grandpa. “I can’t figure out where Eddie would have met someone like that. He didn’t hang around with hippies.”

  “But he might have if he’d met one,” I pointed out. “And obviously he did meet at least one. He wouldn’t have been the type to look down his nose at people just because they had long hair. Would he?”

  “No,” Grandpa admitted. “No, he wouldn’t. What Connor wrote was true. Everybody connected with Eddie, and not just on the surface. It was a deep thing. He had a way of looking right into people.”

  “Maybe she was the same way,” I said.

  “It sounds like she was,” said Grandpa. And I could see he was thinking hard, trying to remember back to the days when Eddie was home last. “He would have to have met her while he was home on leave for the last time,” he said. “Which was for a month, in November of sixty-nine.”

  “Did he stick around Mannville the whole time he was on leave?”

  “No, he went to Buffalo twice,” said Grandpa. “To visit friends. He had an Air Force buddy there who was on leave at the same time. Huh. I’ll try and remember his name. Maybe he would have met your—this Eliza person.” Neither of us could quite bring ourselves to refer to Eliza as my mother yet. After all these years of not knowing who she was, it seemed strange to have a name to put to her, and a physical description. The idea would take some getting used to.

  “Yes,” I said. “Try.”

  There was something else nagging at me, which I chose not to share with Grandpa. It was the note my mother had left on my basket. Why had she referred to me as a bastard? If she was so carefree and easygoing, why did she hate me? It seemed to me that if she was really a hippie—as far as I knew, hippies stood for peace and love and going with the flow of things—she would have kept me with her no matter what. But not only did she give me up; she called me names. It hurt me to think that if I sought her out she might still not want to see me, even after all this time. She might have another family, one with a husband and legitimate children who would despise me for being illegitimate. What if she was rich now? She’d think I was trying to get at her money. And if she was poor, maybe she’d think—as had Elsie Orfenbacher—that millions of dollars don’t just disappear overnight, that there must be something left she could get her hands on. “It’s me,” I could hear myself saying, “Eddie’s bastard—the one you didn’t keep.” And then—what? Tears of welcome? Shouts of accusation? Guilt? Happiness? Remorse?

  “This is not so simple,” I said. “There’s a good chance she won’t want to see me again, isn’t there?” Maybe she was just trying to distance herself from me, I thought. Maybe she had to call me names so she wouldn’t love me so much.

  “Well, it’s a big risk. You never know how these things are going to turn out.”

  “Do you think she thinks about me?”

  “I’m sure of it,” said Mildred. “Especially if you were her first baby.”

  “If she’s still alive, that is,” added Grandpa. “You have to consider every possibility.”

  “Your grandfather’s right. She might have been sick, dying or something,” said Mildred. “I can’t imagine how she could keep a baby for six weeks and then give it up. Maybe she wanted to keep you but had a good reason why she couldn’t.”

  “She could have been a criminal,” I said.

  “Now I really don’t think so,” said Grandpa.

  “But there was that lady in the news who helped rob a bank almost twenty years ago—she was a hippie, wasn’t she? She got married and had a family, and nobody suspected a thing. She had kids and everything. She was even on the PTA. Then the Feds came and busted her. Maybe my mother was on the lam.”

  “I don’t think she was on the lam,” said Mildred.

  But regardless of whether she was on the lam or not, it was beginning to sink in that it was my mother we were talking about—my actual biological mother, about whom I’d never known enough even to speculate. Now she had a name, and a face, and I had several details I could put together. Over the next few weeks these details became bones, and I added flesh in little bits here and there until I had a real live mother in my head, one who walked and talked and was from a distant and mysterious place out west. I drew pictures of her based on Connor’s description. Soon the walls of m
y room were papered with drawings of a young hippie woman with soft brown hair and a Roman nose. I discovered that I was a terrible artist, but it didn’t matter. What did matter was that I finally had a clue about where to begin looking.

  I alternated between soaring to new heights of elation and grumbling and grousing over my delay in leaving Mannville. I was ecstatic over Connor’s revelation, furious at Grandpa. It was, in fact, the only time I could remember that Grandpa had ever expressly forbidden me to do anything. He’d never been much of a disciplinarian. I blamed that on his drinking. His recent sense that right and wrong must be enforced I blamed on his newfound sobriety. But when school began again in January I was resigned to it, and gradually I realized, to my immense annoyance, that Grandpa was once again right. I was at least comforted by the fact that my immediate future was laid out for me; even if I had no idea of where to begin looking for my mother, at least I had something to do when I graduated.

  This seemed to put me in a class by myself among my friends at school. Nobody else my age seemed to have a clear idea of what they would take up when they graduated. Some of them wanted to go to college but didn’t know what they would study. Others knew already that they wouldn’t go to college but would go to work in garages or retail stores or the grain mill outside of town. Others didn’t seem to care what happened to them; these were the ones who floated through life carelessly, getting what they could out of things without having to work too hard.

  Privately, all three groups of people alternately amused and bored me. I didn’t seem to belong to any of them. Neither had my father. And now that I knew something about her, I was sure my mother hadn’t either. There always seemed to be another path than the most obvious one, and that was the one my people took. That was because we were Manns. Even my mother, although she must have had a different last name, was one of us in spirit. And we weren’t normal people, for better or for worse. Normal things didn’t happen to us.