by Bill Bernico
“Dad’s sixty-two years old and in pretty good health,” I told him.
“Sixty-two?” Nicholas said. “I just turned eighty. He’s young enough to be my son.”
“Grandpa Matt and Grandma Amy didn’t have Dad until Grandpa was nearly forty,” I explained. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to tell Dad what we’ve learned and ask if he’d like to meet you. That is, if that’s all right with you.” I found that I was just as nervous as Nicholas and hadn’t realized that I’d been repeating myself.
“Oh, yes,” Nicholas said.
“Nicholas,” I said.
“Yes?” Nicholas said.
“Oh, no,” I said, waving my hand in front of me, “I was just thinking out loud. “Nicholas was Grandpa Matt’s father’s name. Could it be just a coincidence or did your mother perhaps know Grandpa’s dad?”
“It’s no coincidence,” Nicholas said. “Mom knew your family very well. She’d had dinner at Matt’s house many times. She told me how much she liked Matt’s mother. She never got to meet Matt’s father, though. I had heard that Nicholas Cooper died just a few years before Mom met your grandfather.”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “Great Grandpa Nick was killed when Grandpa Matt was just a teenager. Someone shot Nick after he witnessed the murder of a geologist who was looking into the possibility that there was oil beneath one of Nick’s neighbor’s houses. They never found his murderer.”
“I wish I could have known him,” Nicholas said. “Your great-grandfather, that is, not the murderer.”
“Well, it sounds like you were named after Great Grandpa Nick, all right,” I said.
Nicholas pressed a button on a small box connected by a cable to the chair. It slowly rose, lifting him to a standing position. Gloria and I started to get up but Nicholas held a hand up. “Please, stay seated,” he said. “I just want to get something to show you.” He slowly shuffled to a door on the other side of the living room. When he came out again he was carrying a small box with a lid on it. He set the box on the coffee table and returned his chair to a sitting position.
Nicholas leaned over the coffee table, removed the cover from his box and pulled it onto his lap. He shuffled through a few items before he found what he was looking for. He pulled an old photo from the box, looked at it nostalgically and passed it over to me.
I stared down at the photo of a young man, perhaps twenty or so, and then back at Nicholas. “Is that you?” I said. Gloria leaned over my shoulder to get a look at the photo.
Nicholas shook his head. “That’s my dad, Matt Cooper,” he said.
I took another close look at the photo, which looked to be from the Prohibition Era. I saw an old, square-looking car in the background of this slightly faded black and white photo. Standing in front of the car, one foot up on the running board, was a young man who looked genuinely happy. That was my grandfather, Matt. There was no mistaking that face, once I knew who it was. He was the spitting image of my own father, Clay Cooper.
Nicholas leaned toward me, pointing at the picture. “Mother told me that was taken the day she met Dad.”
I was still having trouble following the train of thought whenever Nicholas spoke of his dad. I took a second or two for me to realize that he was also talking about my grandfather.
“That was dad’s first car,” Nicholas said. “A three-year-old 1928 Ford Model A. Mom told me that Dad was so proud of that car. It was the car that he took mother to her first dance in. Apparently I was conceived in the back seat.” Nicholas took another look at the photo and smiled warmly before he tucked it back into the box and put the lid back on it.
“Didn’t Grandpa Matt ever know about you?” I said.
Nicholas shook his head. “Mom never told him,” Nicholas said. “She was too ashamed and embarrassed. Back in those days, good girls didn’t have babies without a husband. As soon as her mother found out she was pregnant, she sent mom out of town to live with her aunt. Later on, when mom brought me home again, grandma just told everyone who asked that mom’s husband had been run over by a bakery truck and no one ever questioned it. Mom even wore grandma’s wedding ring for the rest of her life.”
“So your mother never married?” Gloria said.
Nicholas shook his head. “No she didn’t,” he said. “It was just her and me until I left for the Korean War when I was eighteen.”
“Didn’t she ever want to contact Matt?” Gloria said.
“Oh, she had the phone in her hand many times,” Nicholas said, “but never could bring herself to make the call. Then when I was about four she’d learned that Dad had left Chicago and had moved out here somewhere. She was depressed for a week after that.”
I stood and Gloria followed my lead. I looked down at Nicholas. “Please, don’t get up, Mr. Sawyer,” I said. “Gloria and I have to get back to Hollywood. If you don’t mind, I’d like to keep in touch with you. I want to tell my father about all of this and maybe you two can get together for a talk or something.”
“I’d like that,” Nicholas said, shaking the hand that I’d extended to him.
Gloria bent over and gave Nicholas a kiss on the cheek. “It was really nice to meet you, sir,” she said. “I hope we can do this again real soon.”
Nicholas smiled and rubbed his cheek. “Me, too,” he said. “Thank you both for coming to see me.”
Before we left, I picked up the letter and the plastic bag and inserted the letter into it. “Would it be all right if I gave Dad your phone number?” I said.
Nicholas nodded, wrote his number on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to me. “Tell him he can call any time at all,” Nicholas said.
Gloria and I got back into her car and as if on cue, we both let out a deep sigh and then looked at each other. She leaned into me.
“How cool was that?” Gloria said.
“Seems like a nice old man,” I said. “It’s too bad Grandpa Matt never got to meet him.”
“What about Clay?” Gloria said. “How do you suppose he’ll take the news of finding out he has a half-brother?”
“There only one way to find out,” I said. “Drive.”
While Gloria drove back toward Hollywood, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Dad’s home number. No one answered and the call went to Dad’s voice mail. “Dad, it’s Elliott,” I said and then glanced at my watch and remembered. “Never mind, I just remembered that you’re at your doctor’s appointment. I’ll try again in an hour.” I closed my phone and slipped it back into my shirt pocket.
“Sounds like the good news will have to wait,” Gloria said. “Let me run an idea by you.”
“Shoot,” I said.
“While we’re waiting for Clay to get home again,” Gloria said, “How about if we drop by the office and look Nicholas Sawyer up on the court records site just to see what comes up? I mean, up until twenty minutes ago we didn’t know anything about the guy. It couldn’t hurt.”
I shrugged. “Why not?” I said.
Back in our office I hung up my jacket and Gloria went directly to her desk, clicking on the desktop icon for the court records site. When their home page came up she entered Nicholas Sawyer into the name fields and hit Enter. An hourglass icon tumbled over and over until the screen filled with case information regarding Nicholas Sawyer.
“I got some hits,” Gloria said.
I stepped over to her desk and looked over her shoulder at the computer screen. Gloria scanned the third column that contained information about the person’s date of birth. We knew from talking to Sawyer that he was born in 1932. Several of the entries had dates from the sixties and seventies. Obviously Nicholas Sawyer was a common name that was shared by at least seven other Nicholas Sawyers. After eliminating all those entries with the wrong birth date, it left us with just one entry. Gloria clicked on the link and a new screen opened. There at the top of the screen it identified the person as our Nicholas Sawyer. The entry noted that Nicholas Sawyer was the executor for the will of the late Mrs. Nicholas
(Bess) Sawyer. It showed her date of birth as 1935 and her date of death as 2011.
“Nicholas is a widower,” Gloria said. “How sad.” She closed the screen and turned off her monitor.
“Well,” I said, “Maybe we came along at the right time. Maybe we can be his family now so he won’t have to be alone anymore.”
Twenty-five minutes later I tried Dad’s home phone again. This time he picked up on the second ring. I asked if I could stop by and talk to him and he said I didn’t even have to ask.
I asked Gloria if she wanted to come along but she waved me off. “Might be better if it was just you and Clay,” she said. “I’m not really family and he might not open up with his feelings if I’m sitting there listening. Why don’t you just go? I’ll hold down the office.”
“Granted,” I said. “You’re not family yet, but one day soon you will be.”
She smiled at me and waved as I left the office. Fifteen minutes later I was standing on Dad’s porch knocking on the door. I could hear him from the kitchen, yelling for me to let myself in. I came in and closed the door, hanging my jacket on the coat hook near the door.
Dad came out from the kitchen carrying a bottle of beer and a can of Pepsi. He handed me the Pepsi. “Have a seat and tell me what’s on your mind,” he said.
I sat and started right in with what happened this morning at the post office. I handed him the plastic bag and he slipped the old envelope out and retrieved the single sheet letter. I sipped my soda while he read the entire letter twice. He set the let on the coffee table and then looked up at me.
“A brother?” he said.
“Half-brother, actually,” I said. “But, yeah, that’s quite a jolt out of nowhere, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say,” Dad replied. “Now what?”
“Let me finish my story and then ask me again,” I said, continuing where I’d left off and ending with our meeting with Nicholas Sawyer. I waited in silence for the new information to sink in. It took Dad a few moments before he could think of anything to say.
“Hmmmp,” was all he could think of. “Did he say he’d like to meet me?” Dad asked.
“He’d like that very much,” I assured him, handing him the scrap of paper with Nicholas’s phone number. “He said you could call him any time you like. He was recently widowed and he’s living all alone in that house in Inglewood. That can’t be too much fun living that close to the airport. It’s got to be noisy as all hell.”
“I don’t know what I’d say on the phone,” Dad said. “Maybe I should just drive over there and see him. Would you like to come along?”
“Dad,” I said, “Maybe it would be best if it was just the two of you, you know, brother to brother.”
“Half-brother to half-brother,” Dad said, smiling. “I think I will go see him. Thanks for letting me know about him. Gees, what he must have been thinking all these years. I wish Dad would have gotten that letter and had a chance to meet Nicholas himself.”
“Call me the minute you get back,” I said. “I want to know everything. Better yet, stop by the office. That way I won’t have to re-tell the story to Gloria later.”
Clay drove south to Inglewood and pulled up in front of Nicholas’s house. He paused momentarily, wondering what he’d say and how Nicholas would react. He soon realized that he’d never find out by sitting in his car at the curb. Clay walked up the sidewalk and had not even stepped up onto the porch when the front door opened and he saw Nicholas standing there smiling. Clay smiled back and stepped all the way up onto the porch.
“You must be Clay,” Nicholas said. “I can see Dad in your eyes.”
Clay found it strange to hear another man talking about Matt as his father, too. He looked back at Nicholas. “I can see some of him in your face, as well,” Clay said.
Nicholas invited Clay in and the two sat speechless for a moment, not sure what to say or who should say it. Clay broke the silence as he held up the sixty-six year-old letter. “Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘snail mail’, doesn’t it?”
Nicholas smiled broadly and nodded. “Yes it does,” he said. “I wonder what the record is for the longest time it took for a letter to get to where it was supposed to go.”
“I haven’t got a clue,” Clay said, and then fell silent again.
They both started to speak at the same time and both stopped, waiting for the other to continue. “Go ahead,” Nicholas said.
“What did you think when you saw the letter again?” Clay said.
“I was both disappointed and relieved,” Nicholas answered. “Disappointed that Dad never got to read it, and relieved that it wasn’t a case of him reading it and ignoring it.”
Clay nodded. “That had to be a something of a shock to see what you wrote after all that time,” he said.
“When I saw it again,” Nicholas explained, “it was as if I was fourteen again. It’s funny how some of the same old feelings come back to you after that much time. I could picture exactly where I was sitting and what I was thinking when I wrote it. My mother had recently died and all I could think about was that I had a father out there somewhere and how much I wanted to meet him. Mother told me that he had died when I was young, but I expect she was just trying to spare me any more pain.”
“She sounds like she was a wonderful woman,” Clay said. “I’m sorry I never got a chance to meet her. Tell me, Nicholas, do you have any other siblings?”
“None, I’m sorry to say,” Nicholas told him. “Mother never did get married and it was just the two of us for the longest time.”
Clay laid his hand on Nicholas’s knee. “Well,” he said, “you’ve got one now, like it or not.”
Clay?” Nicholas said. “Your son and that girl were delightful this morning.”
“Thank you, Nicholas,” Clay said. “He’s a great kid. I’m really proud of him.”
“I forgot to ask him when he was here,” Nicholas said. “What do you do for a living, if I may ask?”
“You may indeed,” I said. “I’m a private investigator, like Dad before me. My son and Gloria are also private eyes. Elliott is the third generation in the business that my dad, I mean our dad started here back in the mid-forties.”
“So that’s what Dad did,” Nicholas said. “I always wondered. Mother said she thought he was a policeman. She was close.”
“She was also correct,” Clay said. “Dad was a policeman before he became a private eye—first with the Chicago police and then later on after he moved out here, with the Los Angeles police. He didn’t become a private eye until after he’d left the L.A. department. I joined him when I turned twenty-one and stayed with it for more than forty years. I just retired this year, as a matter of fact. Elliott took over the business after I retired. We’re still operating out of the same office that Dad first used.”
“Sounds fascinating,” Nicholas said.
“Would you like to see where Dad worked one of these days?” Clay said.
“Oh, yes,” Nicholas said. “Very much, thank you.”
“Listen,” Clay said. “We’re both retired and probably don’t have to check any schedule in order to do anything. How would you like to see it right now?”
“Could we?” Nicholas said. “That would be splendid.”
Clay rose from the chair and pulled Nicholas to his feet. “Just one quick question,” Clay said. “What did people call you—Nicholas or Nick?”
“Most people called me Nick,” he said. “I wish you would, too, Clay.”
“Let’s go, Nick,” Clay said, helping Nick on with his jacket and walking him out to the car. “I’ll drive you home when we’re done.”
On the ride back to Hollywood, Nick pointed out the window at a boarded up building. “I used to work there when I was younger,” Nick said. “Back then it was a night club called The Jazz Club. That was, oh, probably 1955 or ’56.”
“Really?” Clay said. “Were you a bartender?”
Nick laughed. “Lord, no. I played the
re. I was a musician. I started playing piano when I was ten and I still play a little bit these days. And you know, after seventy-five years I still can’t read a note of music. I’ve always played by ear. I guess I just had a natural knack for it.”
“That’s amazing,” Clay said. “I dabble with the guitar a little, but I’m sure I’m not in your league, by any stretch of the imagination. It was just a hobby for me. But you, my goodness, you say you made a living playing?”
“Fifty-three years,” Nick said. “I played my last public job when I was sixty-eight. That was twelve years ago.”
“Do you miss it?” Clay said.
“Sometimes,” Nick said. “But I’m sure that’s just because I remember all the good times. There were probably a few bad times, but somehow you tend to forget those and remember only the good times. That’s the way it was with me.”
Twenty minutes later Clay pulled his car into the parking lot behind his building. “Well,” he said, turning off the ignition, “This is it—third floor in front. It ain’t much, but it’s home. Come on, I’ll give you the fifty cents tour.
Clay showed Nick the front lobby and then rode to the elevator to the third floor. He walked Nick to the end of the hall and opened the door. Nick’s face brightened when he saw the Cooper name on the outer office door. He perked up again when Clay opened the inner office door and he saw Elliott and Gloria again.
“Hello again, Mr. Sawyer,” Gloria said, rising from her desk.
“What brings you here, Mr. Sawyer?” I said.
“Okay,” Nick said. “I let it slide at my house because we’d just met, but now that we know each other, it’s Nick, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “What brings you here, Nick?”
“I told him you were working out of Dad’s original office and Nick wanted to see it,” Clay said, offering Nick a seat.
Nick waved him off. “Could I just look around for a little while first?” he said.
“Sure,” Clay said. “Take your time.”
Nick walked around the office, looking at every little detail and studying every framed photo on the walls. He stopped in front of a photo of Grandpa Matt and Dad holding a wooden sign that read Cooper and Son with letters that had been routed into the wood. Nick turned to Clay. “Is that you and Dad?” he said.