The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  “Well, I don’t think it’s impossible,” she said. “But I don’t know that I would tell Mum.”

  The three of us met at a Chinese restaurant that Saturday night. It was a busy spot. Armies of servers whizzed between tables with giant platters above their heads. We huddled over bowls of rice and kung pao chicken and I started at the beginning. I explained that Dennis had a Y that belonged to a European haplogroup and that he had 350 exact matches.

  “Wow, 350?” my father said, with a tinge of envy.

  Yes, I said, but this was also a problem, because one of those 350 men was named Meek.

  My father raised his eyebrows.

  “It might not mean anything,” I said. “It could be sheer coincidence, because those twelve markers of his are just so common in Europeans, that Dennis’s Y just happens to match the Y of a man named Meek. But there is also a chance that it isn’t a fluke. He had no matches with anyone named Crooks. There’s a chance that the match exists because Dennis actually is a Meek, and at some point there was … an infidelity …”

  The word hung over the table like a plume of steam. My father got a faraway look in his eyes. “Do you know the name Earnest Meek?” he asked.

  It sounded familiar, but beyond that the name meant nothing to me or my sister.

  Earnest was the younger brother of Nana Bridget, Dad said. He had never married, and for a while he lived with Nana Gladys and Papa Freddie in their home outside Bombay.

  “When would that have been?” I asked.

  Dad didn’t know the dates but said my mother was small at the time. “Earnest was the handyman, you see.”

  “The handyman?” Christine and I groaned.

  “Yes. He did things around the house while Papa was working,” Dad said. “Nana was quite fond of him.”

  Fond. Oh my.

  It absorbed us, what to do next. For the rest of dinner we discussed and debated through pots of tea and fortune cookies. (Mine said, “Time heals all wounds.” Sure, I thought, until DNA splits them open.) Should I test more markers on Dennis’s Y chromosome and see if he still matched with this Meek fellow? But then I would have to contact this Mr. Meek to see if he’d be willing to have more markers tested as well. I should reach out to him anyway and ask about his background.

  Should I simply collect DNA from another Crooks uncle and see what it showed? If they didn’t match the implications would be profound and potentially catastrophic—for Dennis and for both his sons, my cousins. And how would I explain wanting another sample from another uncle? Mum’s other brothers already knew that Dennis had given me his DNA. See, I’m just not completely convinced that Dennis is a Crooks, Uncle, so if you don’t mind just sticking this in your mouth.…

  We worried about my mother, whether she would be angry and hurt, horrified at the mere suggestion her mother had been unfaithful to her father. Or maybe Mum would know something to extinguish the suspicions. I remembered a story she had once told me about Nana Gladys’s mother, Josephine DaSilva, actually giving away one of her children to a sister who was unable to have children of her own. Josephine had ten, and it was her fifth child, a son, whom she gave to her sister Louie. If that son had ever had his DNA tested, he would have learned that he did not carry the Y chromosome of the father who had raised him. Tragically, the boy ended up dying of a mysterious infection at the age of five, Mum said, leaving her Great-Aunty Louie childless once again. I wondered if such a story might explain the Meek match. Had my grandparents quietly adopted the son of a Meek relative? But then, if my mother knew about something like that, she would never have sent me to Dennis to collect a sample of Crooks DNA.

  In the days that followed the arrival of Dennis’s DNA results, memories of my grandmother haunted me. I had the strange sensation that she was listening to the internal dialogue running through my head.

  I had not envisioned hauling this kind of skeleton out of the genetic closet. I imagined the waves of posthumous judgement that would attach to her memory, accusations she could never counter. And what right would anyone have to judge? My grandmother was just seventeen when she married my grandfather. He was twenty-four, a railway guard, introduced to her by an older sister. She called him Mr. Crooks all the while he courted her, even on their wedding night. Who knew the circumstances at play in the most private relationships of her life? At the same time I felt guilty for thinking her capable of it. She was my grandmother, the one who smothered me in her roundness and slept beside me in her bed, even when I was covered with measles.

  One afternoon I was typing at the computer, trying to capture this swell of emotions, and the letter O suddenly went berserk. On its own, as though it were being depressed by a stubborn accusatory finger, row upon row of Os appeared on my screen—hundreds of them, filling the page. I changed the battery in the keyboard. Stephen changed the keyboard. Nothing helped. I called my sister, a purveyor of custom software and the family’s twenty-four-hour technical assistance provider, and asked if she’d ever heard of this kind of glitch—rampant wilful O syndrome. She hadn’t ever. The letter O behaved when I wrote emails, I told her, but each time I returned to this chapter, ruminating on Nana’s possible tryst with Earnest Meek, oooooooooooooooooooooooooff it would go again.

  Science reporters are not supposed to believe in ghosts. Faith in anything that can’t be measured or weighed or poured into a test tube, grown in a petri dish or swished about in a centrifuge is generally considered to fall on the pseudo side of science. But having grown up in the deep woods of superstition, I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about their existence. Of course the brain is a powerful machine, full of quirks that can fool you and make you feel things that aren’t there, a dazzling CPU that can draw rapid-fire connections between a smell and a memory—or a computer malfunction and the supernatural. So maybe it was inevitable that as I meddled in the affairs of the dead I would collide with one phantom of the mind or another. Even my pragmatic father had his own eerie confrontation, when his camera jammed as he tried to photograph his grandfather’s records in Coonoor.

  But my grandmother had been a true believer. Bridget Meek’s spirit-stalking used to upset Nana Gladys, not because she thought it was nonsense but because she was worried her mother-in-law’s next-world communing would invite some long-lost soul to take up residence in their house. After my grandfather died, Nana Gladys was so convinced that his spirit lived on in their house in England that when I stayed with her as a child, she used to tell me that Papa was up there in his study. It was a small room with a hardwood floor, a desk, a chair and a bookshelf. It hadn’t been touched since his death, and Nana swore that sometimes she could hear him creaking about, looking for this or that. I crept in there once and stood in the centre of the room, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did before fear eventually got the better of me and I ran out.

  Thirty years later, I think I understood what my grandmother meant. She simply felt his presence—and she felt it powerfully, just as I was feeling hers.

  10

  THE TROUBLE

  WITH BEING EARNEST

  In the fall of 2006 I flew to Houston, Texas, where Family Tree DNA was holding a conference for people running genetic ancestry projects. It was designed to help family historians interpret DNA test results, unveil the latest discoveries and provide a forum for people to share their experiences. For that reason alone I was keen to get there. If the false paternity rates run as high as 10 percent in the general population, I assumed I would find someone else who had stepped into a dilemma like mine, someone with insights or advice to offer.

  I finally asked my mother about my uncle’s test result a couple of weeks after she returned from Mexico. I had stopped in for a visit and she was telling me about her trip, describing the sixteenth-century shrine in Guadalupe where Roman Catholics gather in the millions, and the church built where roses had bloomed in the middle of winter.

  I said, “So, did Dad tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “D
ennis’s results came back.”

  “Yes. Dad said there was some confusion.”

  “Yeah, it’s confusing.”

  I laid it all out in detail: that Dennis carried a very common European signature on his Y chromosome, so common that he had 350 exact matches right off the bat. None of those men were named Crooks, I told her, yet here was this perfect twelve-marker match with a man named Meek. “So the question is, did Dennis really inherit his Y chromosome from a Crooks man? Or was it from a Meek man?” I said. “Do you know what I mean?”

  Of course she did. My mother got that same distant look in her eyes that my father had when I first told him. “Who is this Meek that he matches?” she finally asked.

  “His name is Kenneth Meek and he lives in the U.S.,” I said. “His online profile says his ancestors came from Scotland.” I told her I wasn’t sure if I should contact him to find out more, since it wasn’t my aim to find out if Dennis matched a Meek, only whether the Y chromosome I was testing actually belonged to the Crooks line. “It may just be a coincidence, but it’s an uncanny one when there were Meeks on one side of our family,” I said.

  My mother said nothing after that, and I filled the silence with statistics, describing the research I had done on false paternities and how surprisingly common they are. But then I realized that was probably no comfort at all, and so, for a while, neither of us said anything.

  There was a picture of my grandmother over the living room chair where my mother sat, a large family portrait. It was taken a few years before Nana died. She’s sitting in the middle of the front row, looking every bit the snow-haired matriarch, surrounded by three generations. She’s wearing a blue dress and an unusually broad smile—my grandmother had often censored her smiles after she got her dentures. I had an absurd urge to walk around the room to see if her eyes followed me. But then my mother started thinking out loud.

  “We had a big house in the railway colony,” she said, “and Earnest Meek came to stay with us.”

  “Earnest?” I had deliberately not mentioned the name to my mother, but there it was at the tip of her thoughts, just as it had been for my father.

  “Yes, Earnest was Nana Bridget’s younger brother. We were small. We were living in Sholapur,” she continued. “Earnest had a top job in the railway but he came to live with us after he retired.”

  “Why? Was he broke?” I asked.

  “No, he had pots of money. He was just very frugal, and we had the space and he was very fond of Nana. He was a big help to Nana.”

  “But he wasn’t so fond of Papa?”

  “Papa never liked him.”

  “Never liked him.… Why?”

  “I don’t know. There was coldness between them—I don’t know why, really, but I sensed it. And Uncle Earnest never seemed to give Papa much credit for anything.”

  My mother thought it might have had something to do with the Captain. Somewhere between moves to different railway colonies, Papa had lost the papers confirming his father’s royal commendation, and Uncle Earnest held a grudge over it. “Those papers would have helped to repatriate the family to England, and Earnest thought Papa had just been careless with all that.”

  “Was Earnest married?”

  “No. All sorts of relatives had tried to match him up, but he never married.”

  “He must have been much older than Nana.”

  “Yes, but he was very fit, very stylish. ‘Eat a lot of garlic,’ he used to say. ‘It will keep your skin pink.’ In fact he used to tell me off for not wearing nice slippers in the house. You know, with the hot weather I didn’t wear anything on my feet.”

  “Dad said he was a bit of a handyman.”

  “Well, he just used to be around the house because he really admired Nana. He had a lot of compliments for her: how she took care of all of us, then still found time to put on her white shorts and go off to play tennis. He used to help her out sometimes, give her money to outfit the boys.”

  “Do you think Nana had an affair with him?” There, I’d said it.

  “No, of course not!” Mum shot back. But her conviction faded as suddenly as it appeared. “Well, I don’t know.… I was a child. Funny, everyone has always said Dennis is so much like the Meek side—his features and even his ways. That day they were all here, Basil and Charles were teasing him about it.”

  “Well, he carries Meek genes no matter what,” I offered. “Papa’s mother was a Meek, so maybe he inherited a big dose of her genes. Just look how much my DNA seemed so much more like Dad’s than yours when we did that first test.”

  Mum was far away again. “Nana loved to go out when she was young. She loved to dance. She organized so many of the railway dances,” she said. “Papa never liked to dance.”

  There didn’t seem much to say after that. My mother may as well have told me Uncle Earnest was a first-class foxtrotter.

  “Well, that’s the bottom line then, isn’t it,” I said. “I can’t assume this is the Captain’s Y chromosome. I have to test another Crooks male, or it may be that I’m not researching the Crooks history at all. If that Y matches with Dennis, then we can be confident that it is the Crooks chromosome. If it doesn’t … Well, let’s not think about that right now.”

  “Go to Basil,” my mother said. “Basil said he would do it. Just tell him you need it.”

  I didn’t have a chance to meet up with Basil before I left for Houston. But there would be no pushing the matter out of mind. As soon as I checked in at the airport hotel hosting the conference, I noticed the name of the restaurant just off the lobby: Basil’s Tavern. Just what I needed—another weird coincidence.

  I’ve been to many science conferences over the years: massive events devoted to AIDS, small workshops on cancer, microbiology meetings predicting the comeback of measles and plague, gatherings of fertility doctors exploring better ways to make babies in a lab. But I had no idea what to expect of this one, or whom to expect. The seats had sold out like tickets to a rock concert. More than two hundred people had signed up, most the self-appointed heads of surname projects—gathering and comparing the Y chromosomes of men with the same or similar surnames to see how, or if, they are related.

  The delegates milled about the registration desk the first morning, picking up their tote bags and nametags as they do at any conference. Except the tags at this one carried not only the name of the delegate but every surname that delegate was researching. This meant people spent more than a polite moment staring at each other’s chests looking for a familiar handle.

  Many were seniors, several wore hearing aids and at least two had brought their knitting. The only people much younger than me were technicians at the lab where the samples are processed—and they are processed by the thousands. Max Blankfeld, Family Tree DNA’s head of marketing and operations, told the crowd that when the firm launched in 2000, about ten DNA kits a month used to trickle in. Now, six years later, it was at least three thousand a month, and some months it was double that. Together with the Genographic Project, the company had processed 220,000 DNA samples, and that very week, the Y-chromosome database was expected to hit 81,000 entries. About 5,000 were anonymous research samples, but more than 75,000 had arrived by post, from people just like us sitting in the audience.

  Mine was no solitary march into the genetic past. It was a pilgrimage—thousands flocking to the shrine of science, just like the faithful to Guadalupe, looking for … what? Answers? Peace? Did we all have mysteries to solve? The most devout could toss out highly technical terms with the ease of an expert, debate the relative mutation rates of short tandem repeats versus single nucleotide polymorphisms, and speak in knowing terms about the Y’s tricky palindromic arms. They were an impressive bunch.

  It may be that retirement had fuelled their hobby, as it did with my father. It may be that age heightens the desire to confirm one’s place in the human continuum, to be cast in the larger pageant of life on the planet. But it was Bennett Greenspan who warned everyone that DNA can write a s
cript full of plot twists. I had spoken to Bennett on the phone at least three times by then, but I’d never seen him in person until that morning, bounding onto the stage, bald, glasses, a wiry fifty-four-year-old firecracker in jeans and a purple tie, arms fluttering up from behind the podium as he spoke.

  “Like you,” he said, “I’m a genealogist, interested in bridging the gap between anthropology and genealogy.” The crowd loved him. Applause nearly drowned out his words. He talked broadly about the ethical challenges of DNA testing, having people agree to be tested, the issues related to privacy—not just when someone publishes test results online, but also when a test inadvertently reveals someone’s identity. The Y-chromosome database had grown so large, he said, that a fifteen-year-old American boy was able to track down his anonymous sperm-donor father with nothing more than a swab and the Internet.

  Bennett talked about the power of genetics to match people with their families, but also, he said, “the discomfort of finding that two people who should match don’t match.” Or, I thought, finding that two people who shouldn’t match do. Either way, it suddenly seemed as if Bennett was speaking directly to me, letting me know that the whole What did my Nana do? phenomenon was par for the genetic course. In fact he estimated that events of mistaken paternity run as high as 1.5 percent per generation. Then he offered the story of Buford, from Arkansas.

  “People from Arkansas and Texas don’t typically need genetic tests,” he joked, “because they all have the same DNA.” But Buford, in his eighties, was curious. Traditional sources of genealogy had already revealed to him that his paternal grandfather was born out of wedlock back in 1859, followed by a brother in 1865 and two other children. Then Buford decided to give DNA testing a whirl and discovered that, while the male descendants of his grandfather’s brothers had matching Y chromosomes, his Y was a mismatch. Instead, Buford found that his male chromosome matched perfectly with a perfect stranger—at thirty-seven markers. When Buford looked for that man’s surname in 1850s census records, he found that it belonged to a nineteen-year-old male who had lived near his great-grandmother when she was also nineteen. This man, who later died in the Civil War, had apparently fathered Buford’s grandfather. The test result shook Buford to the core, Bennett said, “to find out, at that stage of his life, that he is not who he thought he was.”