by A M Homes
At the lawyer’s office, I present myself to the receptionist. A man comes through the interior door. Is this the lawyer, my father, or just someone who works there? Anyone could be him, he could be anyone—this is what it’s like when you don’t know who you are.
I am reminded of the children’s book Are You My Mother?—in which a baby bird goes around asking various other animals and objects, “Are you my mother?”
“Are you Norman?”
“Yes,” he says, surprised that I don’t already know. He shakes my hand nervously and leads me into a large conference room. We sit on opposite sides of a wide table.
“My God,” he says, looking at me. “My God.”
“I cut my cornea,” I say, pointing to the patch on my eye.
“Reading a review of your book?”
“No, the obituaries,” I say honestly.
“Fine thing. Would you like a Pepsi?” On the table in front of him is a Pepsi bottle, sweating.
I shake my head.
The father is a big, pink-faced man, in a fancy suit, collar pin, tie. His hair is white, thin, slicked back.
We stare at each other across the table. “Fine thing,” he keeps saying. He is smiling. He has dimples.
Having grown up without the refracted reflections of biology, I have no idea whether he looks like me or not. I’ve brought my camera, a Polaroid.
“Do you mind if I take a picture of you?” I ask.
I take two and he just sits there flushed, embarrassed.
“Could I have one of you?” he asks and I allow him to take a picture.
It’s as though we’re making a perverse Polaroid commercial right there in the lawyer’s office—a reunion played out as a photo session. We come around the table and stand side by side, watching our images appear. It’s easier to really look at someone in a photograph than in real life—no discomfort at meeting the other person’s eye, no fear of being caught staring. Later, when I show friends the pictures, it is obvious to everyone that he’s my father—“Just look at the face, look at the hands, the ears, they’re the same as yours.”
Are they?
Norman hands me a copy of my book to sign. I autograph it for him and suddenly wonder what kind of a meeting we are having. I feel like a foreign diplomat exchanging official gifts.
“Tell me a little bit about you,” I say.
“I’m not circumcised.”
Okay, maybe it wasn’t the first thing he said, but it was certainly the second. “My grandmother was a strict Catholic, she had me baptized. I’m not circumcised.”
It is strange information to have about your father. We’ve just met and he’s telling me about his dick. What he’s really telling me, I guess, is that he’s distanced himself from his Jewish half and that he’s obsessed with his penis. He goes on to tell tales of his great-grandmother, a nineteenth-century East Prussian princess, and other relatives, who were plantation owners on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—slaveholders. He tells me I’m eligible for the Daughters of the American Revolution. He says that a family member, a British admiral, came over on either the Arc or the Dove and that there’s also a connection to Helmuth von Moltke, who according to Norman said, “We will leave them with only their eyes to cry with,” when leading Prussian soldiers into France in 1870. Then he goes on about our connections to the Nazis and the Death’s Head Troops, as though they are something to be proud of.
“And the Dragon Lady isn’t Jewish either. She likes to think she is, but she went to Catholic school.” They are both half Catholic, half Jewish. He identifies as one and she as the other.
He tells me how beautiful Ellen was when she came to work in his store. When I mention the age difference between them—she was in her mid-teens, he was thirty-two—he gets defensive, saying, “She was a slut who knew more than her years—things a young girl shouldn’t know.” He blames her for his lack of self-control. I ask if it ever occurred to him that something might be going on in her mother’s house, something with the stepfather. He shrugs it off, and then, when pressed, says, yes, she tried to tell him something, but he didn’t really know what she was talking about, and yes, maybe there was something going on at home and he probably should have tried to find out.
I ask him about their relationship: How often did he see her? Did he ever really think he might leave his wife?
He is sweating, stuffed into his good suit.
His wife knew about the affair. Ellen has told me that. Ellen has also told me that Norman sometimes brought his oldest child along when they went out. She met the younger ones too but never knew them very well.
Did Norman think he was such a big guy that he could have it all? I picture the affluence of the early sixties, highball glasses and aqua blue party dresses, Cadillac convertibles, big hair, Ellen doing a kind of demented Audrey Hepburn girl thing, Norman the swaggering football hero and veteran, the guy with a gleam in his eye, a wife at home, a young girl on the side, thinking he’s got the good life.
“And what did you do for fun?” I ask, and he just looks at me. The answer is evident. Sex. The relationship was about sex, at least for him. I am the product of a sex life, not a relationship.
“She had a problem,” he says. “She was a nymphomaniac. She went out with other men, lots of men.”
Here I believe Ellen. How much of a nymphomaniac could a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl be? She was clever, crafty, probably trained by an expert—her mother. (I have a mental picture of Ellen’s mother as Shelley Winters playing Charlotte Haze in the film version of Lolita.) But what Ellen looked for in Norman was comfort.
It is clear that Norman is still taken with Ellen. He asks me about her in great detail. I feel like the child of divorced parents—except that I have no idea who these people are. I have no idea what they are talking about. And what they are most interested in is talking about each other.
He tells me that he and his wife wanted to adopt me, and that Ellen wouldn’t allow it. “I wanted to take care of you,” he says. “After it happened, after she’d given birth, I heard that you were a boy.” He looks at me as if there’s something to be said.
“I’m not,” I say.
“I guess it’s good we didn’t adopt you. My wife might have taken it out on you, she might have treated you badly.”
“Yes, it’s good.”
“She told me she was pregnant the day my mother died.”
Later, I ask Ellen about these things and she is furious. “He was never going to adopt you. He never even suggested it. I made the arrangements myself and never told him what I was going to do.”
“Did you tell him you were pregnant the day his mother died?”
“Yes,” she says, and there is the defiant flick of a lighter, the suck of a cigarette.
I change the subject. “Ellen told me about her father,” I say to Norman. “She was very close to him and he died of a heart attack.”
“He didn’t die of a heart attack,” Norman says, indignantly. “He was the White House bookie and he died in a shoot-out with another bookie.” It makes sense. It explains a part of the story that Ellen couldn’t really explain, something about men carrying her father into the house, him dying upstairs, and the family having to stay at a fancy hotel for a while.
I remember an early school field trip to Ford’s Theatre—the image of Abe Lincoln being shot and then carried across the street to Petersen’s Boarding House to die.
I am relieved that Ellen’s father didn’t have a heart attack. There are criminals in my past, but at least their hearts are strong.
“Tell me about your people,” Norman says. He asks about “my people” as though I was raised by wolves. Clearly, my people are not the same as “his people.”
“My people,” I tell him, “are lovely. You couldn’t ask for better.” I owe him nothing. My people are Jews, Marxists, socialists, homosexuals. There is nothing about me, about my life, that he would understand.
We are winding down. I am exhausted.
“Would you consider a blood test? You wouldn’t have to pay for it.” It’s the “You wouldn’t have to pay for it” that throws me. Is this what I get as my big reward, the reparation for the wrongs of the past—a DNA test? And what’s behind Door Number Three? Insulting as this is, on some level I can’t blame him. Throwing it to science might be a good idea—it might make fact out of what feels like fiction.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
“Fine thing.”
In the middle of July 1993, I agree to the DNA test. Norman and I make a plan to meet at a lab. I take the train to D.C.
It is less a lab and more a collection center, a bureaucratic black hole, the most generic office ever made. The fluorescent lighting works like an X-ray throwing everything into relief.
Norman is there waiting—the only white man in the room. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the lawyer’s office. We sit next to each other, the metal chairs are linked together—forced closeness.
We wait.
They call Norman’s name. He tries to give them a personal check, but they won’t take it. There are signs everywhere detailing how payment is to be made: all checks must be certified. He offers to get them the cash, but they can’t accept cash, only certified checks. He goes to the bank downstairs and for some reason is unable to get one. He returns, flustered, humiliated. He insists that the technician make a call, that he try to get an exception, but it is all to no avail. The check and the blood must be sent together. Because this test is often part of a lawsuit, the lab insists on being paid in advance to avoid the complication of collection. This is the stuff of murders, rapes, proof. Are you or are you not my father?
The next morning we try again.
“Long time no see,” I say.
“What if we get in there and the nurse is the Dragon Lady? She’ll come at us with a square, blunt-tipped needle,” Norman jokes nervously. I laugh but it is not funny. We have a tacit agreement not to tell Ellen what we are doing. What we are doing is insulting to her.
The technician calls in a small child who is ahead of us. The little boy screams when they take him.
“You’re not going to do that, are you?” Norman asks.
Worse, I’m thinking, far, far worse.
As Norman walks up to the counter, I notice that his butt looks familiar; I am watching him and I’m thinking: There goes my ass. That’s my ass walking away. His blue sport coat covers it halfway, but I can see it broken into sections, departments of ass, high and low just like mine. I notice his thighs—chubby, thick, not a pretty thing. This is the first time I have seen anyone else in my body.
I stare as he turns and comes back to me. I look down at his shoes, white loafers, country-club shoes, stretched out, fading. Inside the shoe, his feet are wide and short. I look up; his hands are the same as mine, square like paws. He is an exact replica, the male version of me.
“Fine thing,” Norman says, seeing me stare.
I go first. I roll up my sleeve. The technician pulls on his gloves, assembles his tubes, and ties the rubber tourniquet around my arm. I make a fist. Norman is watching.
The needle goes in, a sharp metal prick.
I look at Norman. It feels strange. I am giving blood for this man, I am letting my flesh be punctured to prove that I am of him. It is beyond sexual.
“Let go of the fist,” the technician says and I relax my hand.
The blood is drawn, tubes and tubes of it, and then there is cotton on my wound and a Band-Aid over it.
I have allowed this because I understand the need for proof, for some true measure of our relationship, and also because I have a fantasy that there is something in it for me, that Norman will keep his word, that he will take me into his family, that I will suddenly have three brothers and a sister—a new and improved spare family.
“Please sign here.” The technician hands me the tubes, one at a time.
“What?”
“You have to sign the tubes.”
They are warm in my palm, filled with the chemical sum of who and what I am. I sign quickly, hoping not to faint. I am holding myself in my hands.
Norman is next. He takes off his jacket, revealing short shirt sleeves, sad-old-guy style. His arms are plump, pale, almost fluffy. There is something so white about him, so soft, so exposed that it is perverse. He lays out his arm. The technician ties it off, swabs it, and I look away unable to watch this strange genetic striptease.
I am sickened by it all. I wait in the hall. I do not watch him holding his blood, signing his tubes. He comes out of the room, puts his jacket back on, and we are out the door.
“I would have liked to take you for a nice lunch if you’d worn something better,” he says when we are in the hallway.
I am dressed perfectly well—in linen pants and a blouse. DNA testing is not a black-tie occasion. I am tempted to say, That’s okay—I would have liked you to be my father if you weren’t such a jerk. But I am so stunned that I become stupidly apologetic. I am not wearing what he wanted; I am not wearing a dress. I am not meeting his fantasy of his daughter.
We go to a less-than-mediocre restaurant down the block. People seem to know him there. He introduces me to the maître d’ as though that means something. We sit down. The tablecloths are green, the napkins polyester.
“You don’t wear jewelry,” Norman says.
I am single, I live in New York City, I am not wearing a dress. I know exactly what he is thinking.
I say nothing. Later, I’ll wish that I’d said something, I’ll wish that I’d told him the truth. I have no jewelry, but if you want to throw me some diamonds I’d be glad to wear them. I come from a family that doesn’t do that sort of thing. I grew up boycotting grapes and iceberg lettuce because they weren’t picked by union workers.
What kind of father makes his child travel to another city to prove that she is his child and then criticizes her for not wearing the right clothes to the blood test, for not wearing jewelry she doesn’t own to the lunch she didn’t know she was having?
“How will you feel if the test comes back and I’m not your father?”
You’re my father, I think. I wasn’t positive before, but now, seeing you, seeing your ass, my ass—I’m sure.
The heat is stupefying. I am being twisted like pulled taffy. I walk as though I have been hit with something, blasted. I have become a stranger to myself.
To be adopted is to be adapted, to be amputated and sewn back together again. Whether or not you regain full function, there will always be scar tissue.
Back at the house, my mother wants to do something to make it better. She takes me on a picnic. We go to Candy Cane City—the park of my childhood—and sit at a table under the trees looking out at the merry-go-round, the swing set, the aluminum slide. All of it empty now, deserted in this scorching heat wave. I put my hand on the slide, the metal is searingly hot—it feels good.
My mother unwraps a bologna sandwich. This is proof of how hard she is trying. In our house there is no bologna, no white bread. This is my favorite sandwich from childhood, the one I got only for field trips and special occasions. She pulls a bag of potato chips and a cold Coke out of the bag, replicating my earliest idea of the sublime. We look out at the tennis courts, the basketball hoops, the water fountain, all of it indelibly etched in my memory. I could come to this park in my sleep, just as I have come to it often in my fiction.
“Take me for a ride,” I say.
“Tomorrow,” she says. “Tomorrow I’ll take the day off work and we’ll go somewhere.”
In the morning we leave. The motion of the car is soothing—it makes up for my inability to move myself, it fulfills my need for someone else to move me, to carry me. The road unfolds.
I don’t
tell my mother what happened when I went for the blood test, I do not tell her how truly depressed I am. I don’t say anything because anything I say will make her anxious, angry, and then I will have to deal with her feelings. And at the moment I am struggling to understand my own.
I wish I had a video of Norman, of his ass walking away. I wish I had him on tape saying, You’re not dressed right. I wish I had Ellen on audio, her misplaced projections, her odd habit of seeming to confuse me with her dead mother, accusing me of not paying enough attention to her, not doing enough for her.
I wish I had it all in such a way that it could be labeled and laid out on a long table—as evidence.
My mother is driving us into the past, to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, a dark, dank old town. This is where George Washington went when he wanted to take a soak; home of the oldest mineral bath in the country—my grandparents used to take us here.
This is a place from my past that feels familiar, untouchable, unchanged. I am glad to be returned to something that predates me. The bathhouse is divided into ladies’ and men’s; everyone there is a million years old, dating directly back to George Washington. I imagine it is like a Swedish sanitarium; there is something deeply medicinal about it—we have come for a cure.
Soaking in the holy antique waters is cleansing—lying on the slab of a table while an old woman kneads my flesh is equal to the moment I am in. It is the perfect escape.
We have our treatments and then we go to the old hotel for club sandwiches and head home.
On the phone, Norman tells me he has something for me, something he wants to give me; first he tells me he will send it to me and then he says he will wait and give it to me in person. I am thinking it is a family heirloom, something of his, of his mother’s, something that came on the Arc or the Dove, something that the Nazi brought back, something that his father gave his mother, something that he wanted to give Ellen. Whatever it is, he never gives it to me, he never mentions it again.