by A M Homes
When did you realize you were in love with Ms. Ballman?
So, were you or were you not in love with Ms. Ballman?
Did she believe you were in love with her?
On more than one occasion did you propose marriage?
Even though you were already married, Mr. Hecht, you proposed to Ms. Ballman when she was seventeen—you called her mother and asked for permission to marry her?
How did you think you would explain that to your wife?
Do you believe in polygamy, Mr. Hecht?
How and when did your wife find out that you and Ms. Ballman were having a relationship?
Did your wife know how old Ms. Ballman was?
And what did you say to your wife? Again I’d like to remind you that you are under oath and your wife will be answering the same question.
Did your wife contemplate divorcing you?
Is divorce in opposition to her faith?
Are you and your wife of the same faith?
Is adultery in opposition to your faith?
Are you a religious man, Mr. Hecht?
Do you believe in heaven, Mr. Hecht?
What was your nickname for Ms. Ballman?
Was “the Dragon Lady” one of them?
Where did that come from? Was it from something you shared?
Did Ms. Ballman have you arrested for deserting her?
When Ms. Ballman was pregnant, you sent her to Florida to live and said you’d be joining her there—but you never showed up?
And your wife was pregnant at the same time as Ms. Ballman?
You must have felt like an exceptionally fertile man?
Later in the pregnancy did you visit Ms. Ballman at her mother’s home?
Did you offer to take her shopping and buy things for the baby?
Did you have Ms. Ballman meet with you and your lawyer and together discuss the fact that “there are only so many slices of the pie”?
Did you ask either Ms. Ballman or your wife to consider an abortion?
Can you swim, Mr. Hecht?
I’m just wondering if at some point during all this you felt like you were going under. Drowning.
When was the last time you saw Ms. Ballman pregnant? What month was that?
How did you hear about the birth of your child with Ms. Ballman?
Were you ever asked to sign any legal documents relating to the child?
How long did your relationship with Ms. Ballman last?
Did Ms. Ballman ever marry?
Are you proud of your daughter, Mr. Hecht?
Are you proud of Ms. Homes?
Have you read her work?
Did you ask your daughter to meet you in hotels?
Why not coffee shops?
What is the nature of your thoughts about your daughter?
Did your wife know when and where you were meeting your daughter?
If you had been meeting one of your other children, would she have known?
Are you circumcised?
Is this common knowledge?
Does your other daughter know?
Why was this information that you shared with Ms. Homes?
How did your other children find out that they had a sister?
And what was their reaction to discovering that information?
Do you think of yourself as a good father?
Let’s backtrack a little bit…
In May of 1993 you read a review of Ms. Homes’s book in the Washington Post and called her in New York City?
What prompted you to call her on that day?
If Ms. Homes were not a successful, well-known figure, would you have ever called her?
You made a plan to meet in Washington several days later?
Was anyone else at the meeting? Was the meeting taped or otherwise recorded or monitored by anyone?
What was your reaction to meeting Ms. Homes?
When you met her, were you surprised by the degree to which she looks like you?
Does she look more like you than your other children?
Despite the physical similarity at that meeting, you asked Ms. Homes if she would consent to a paternity test—saying that you had no question as to the likelihood that she was your child, but that your wife was insisting, and that you would need that in order to be able to take her into your family. Is that correct?
What made you question Ms. Homes’s paternity?
After the blood was drawn, as you were walking out with Ms. Homes you told her you had something you wanted to give her—and yet you didn’t give her anything?
What did you want to give her?
Was it something of your mother’s? A family heirloom?
Several months later, you phoned Ms. Homes to say you had the results of the test, and you asked Ms. Homes to once again meet you in a hotel in Maryland?
At that meeting you told Ms. Homes that you were in fact her father—that the DNA test said it was 99.9 percent likely—and you asked, “What are my responsibilities?”
What did you envision as your responsibilities?
What were your intentions toward Ms. Homes when you asked her to submit to the test?
Did you follow through by “taking her into your family”?
Before you discussed the results with Ms. Homes, did you discuss them with anyone else?
Did you discuss them with your wife?
Why did you not offer Ms. Homes a copy of the test result?
What did you do with the test result?
When did you give a copy to your lawyer?
Did you keep a copy for yourself?
Do you typically give the one and only copy of an important document to your attorney?
Did you not put it in your safe deposit box because you didn’t want your wife to discover it?
But didn’t you tell Ms. Homes that it was your wife who insisted on Ms. Homes’s having the paternity test before you could “take her into your family”?
Was the reason your wife wanted Ms. Homes to have the DNA test that you had portrayed Ms. Ballman to your wife as a floozy to make it seem like you were Ms. Ballman’s victim?
You arranged for your eldest son to meet Ms. Homes?
How did that meeting go?
Was your son happy to have more information about something that had only been a dim memory from his childhood—the time he spent with Ms. Ballman?
Was there a lot of tension in your home when your eldest son was a boy?
What was the occasion of your wife meeting Ms. Homes?
Is there a reason why your wife wouldn’t like Ms. Homes?
Why did you say to Ms. Homes later that she and your wife didn’t hit it off?
Did Ms. Homes ever ask you for anything?
Do you have concerns about Ms. Homes making a claim on your estate?
Did she ever in any way indicate that she had any interest in your estate?
Did you have her take the paternity test in order that you might by name exclude her from your estate?
When did you last speak to Ms. Ballman?
And what was the substance of that call?
Did you see Ms. Ballman in the months before she died?
Did your wife know you were meeting her?
How did she look? Was she still attractive?
Did Ms. Ballman ask you to ask Ms. Homes if she would give her a kidney?
And what did you tell Ms. Ballman?
Did you later tell Ms. Ballman that in fact you had asked Ms. Homes and that she said no?
Did it occur to you that Ms. Homes did not know about Ms. Ballman’s condition, nor did she have a chance to say good-bye?
Did you go to your own personal doctor and inquire about donating a kidney to Ms. Ballman?
Did you tell Ms. Homes that you had done that?
And what would your wife have thought about that—would you have had the surgery without telling her?
Did you know that Ms. Ballman was going to die?
How did you feel when you heard that
Ms. Ballman had passed?
And your last phone call with Ms. Homes—several months after Ms. Ballman’s death—how did that go?
How did it end? Did you say, “Call me anytime. Call me in my car. My wife’s not usually in the car”?
Why would Ms. Homes need to call you in the car as opposed to in your home?
Is anyone harming you, confining you, not allowing you to make and receive calls and/or mail?
Are you angry with Ms. Homes?
When Ms. Homes’s New York lawyer called you—the same man who called you to tell you that Ms. Ballman had passed—and asked you for a copy of the DNA test, you told him never to call you again and referred him to your lawyer.
Mr. Glick called your lawyer and was told by your lawyer that the DNA document had been misplaced and that you would not sign an affidavit of paternity.
Did you know that Mr. Smith had misplaced the test results?
Are you concerned that other important documents may have been misplaced or mishandled?
Does it not seem a little too convenient that Ms. Homes is asking for this document, and now it is missing?
You have children and now grandchildren? Do they look like you, Mr. Hecht?
You have adopted grandchildren as well. Do they look like you also?
Do they have a right to know who they are—where they came from?
What is your understanding of why Ms. Homes wants this document?
If Ms. Homes is your biological relative, why should she not be treated in the same way as your other equally biological children are treated? Why should she have different, less than equal, rights?
Does that seem fair? Are you a fair man? A just man?
Could you please repeat for the record your name?
And Mr. Hecht, could you please for the record state the names of all your children?
My Grandmother’s Table
Jon Homes, Jewel Rosenberg, and A.M. Homes
Jewel Rosenberg, my grandmother, my adoptive mother’s mother, graceful, grandiloquent, profound. She is in some ways why or how this book exists. I am not sure that I would have become a writer if it weren’t for her, nor would I have gone to such lengths to become a mother. Without Jewel Spitzer Rosenberg there would likely be no Juliet Spencer Homes—a girl who is now almost three, with no biological relation to my grandmother yet bearing a striking physical relation to her.
When the events charted in this book began to unfold, my grandmother was too old to make good sense of them and my mother elected not to tell her about the return of my biological parents. That decision bothered all of us—my grandmother was the ruler of the family, the queen bee; she was the one we went to about everything, the one with good advice, the one who was remarkable.
She was born in June of 1900, the turn of the twentieth century, in North Adams, Massachusetts. At fifteen she got glasses, looked up at the sky, and saw it wasn’t all black—for the first time she realized there were stars. At sixteen, enrolled at North Adams Normal School (Massachusetts State College) and studying to be a teacher, she was called into the president’s office and told she would never get a teaching job because she was a Jew. She didn’t tell anyone about the incident—except her brother Charlie.
In my grandmother’s house there was a table built in the year of my birth by the Japanese-American artisan George Nakashima from wood my grandmother selected at his shop in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The table is seven feet long, lush—French walnut. It is subtle, not announcing itself as something special until you spend time with it, until you get a feel for it. Then its significance becomes clear.
This was the family seat. This was where we gathered, where my grandmother, our matriarch, held court, where her brothers and sisters and their children and their children’s children came to celebrate, to discuss, to mourn.
There have been great multigenerational political and philosophical debates at this table, especially when my grandmother’s brothers Charlie and Harold would visit—the family radicals. They put themselves through college, changed their name from Spitzer to Spencer, ostensibly to protect the family from their radical reputations, but conveniently also hiding their Jewishness. They both studied law but never practiced. Charlie went to work in a Chicago steel mill and became a union organizer, and Harold married the dancer Elfrede Mahler and went to Cuba, where he taught English and she became the head of Cuba’s modern dance movement. When they came to town, we would spend hours at the table, debating everything from the current political situation to the lyrics of songs they made up as children.
This table was where my grandmother fed us. She had long ago taught herself to prepare the traditional French cuisine that my grandfather had grown up with—and had long ago progressed from a Massachusetts farm girl to a seriously sophisticated intellectual.
As a writer I think of narratives—family stories. Growing up, I was never sure about whether or not I could or should absorb the family history. At family gatherings great-aunts and-uncles from around the world would pull their chairs in close and tell stories about life on my great-grandparents’ farm in North Adams, Massachusetts. I fell in love with these stories, felt attached to them, but also was made uncomfortable—this agreed-upon narrative was not my narrative. “It’s not my history, not my family,” I would whisper to my mother. “We are your family, believe me,” my mother would say. I wanted to believe, but something felt off, inorganic.
Growing up, I had two adopted cousins who were black—they lived in upstate New York and we didn’t see them all that often. Once when we were all at a relative’s house for dinner—the adults downstairs, the three of us playing in the upstairs bedroom—I said, “I’m adopted too,” trying to make a connection. The cousins looked at me blankly—“No you’re not.” “Yes I am.” I was insulted that they didn’t believe me—it didn’t occur to me then that because I was white like my parents they thought I couldn’t possibly be adopted. “Mom, am I adopted?” I yelled downstairs. “What are you children doing up there?” was the answer.
When she was in her late nineties I would visit my grandmother at her home outside of Washington every couple of weeks. We sat at the table and drank tea and talked. While we talked, she rubbed the table, her hand unconsciously moving in circles as if polishing the wood, repetitiously stroking it like a talisman, for comfort, for the giving and getting of wisdom.
We each sat in her familiar place, my grandmother at the head, I just to the left.
At her age, she was perhaps now even older than the tree the table had come from—in my mind they are inexorably bound.
“We went up to the old farm,” I said very loudly.
“You did? And you were able to find it?”
“Yes.”
The weekend before, my cousin (also a writer) and I had driven up and down the hills of North Adams on an impromptu pilgrimage to find the farm where my grandmother grew up. The dirt driveway had long ago dissolved; the only way in was by foot. We climbed quickly, ascending into the mythology of the farm.
The original buildings remained, crumbling, collapsed, but still identifiable. I conjured images of my grandmother as a child, one of nine born to Lithuanian immigrants at the turn of the century on this Massachusetts dairy farm. I imagined her walking down the dirt road to a one-room schoolhouse, picking wild blueberries, helping my great-grandfather milk the cows and tend the chickens. I remembered her telling me the Mohawk Trail was just out the back door, and in my mind she was outside playing a real-life version of cowboys and Indians, substituting farmers for cowboys, cows and plows for horses and guns.
My cousin went on an ersatz archaeological dig, using a knife to poke in the dirt near one of the buildings. After a few minutes, he pulled out an old bottle.
“This must mean something,” he said.
I nodded. We each took a couple of slate shingles from the crumbling roof and made our way back to the car.
“Tell me about the farm. How was it?” she asked, as if half expecting there
was still someone there leading the cows out to pasture in the morning and back home again at night.
“Interesting.” I told her about the landscape. She closed her eyes. I told her about the rolling hills, the tall trees, Mount Greylock in the distance.
“Just as I remembered it,” she said.
She looked at her table. I imagined this table echoing something, some other great long farm table in my great-grandmother’s country kitchen. I see my grandmother’s nine brothers and sisters as children underfoot in their mother’s kitchen. I see my great-uncles as teenagers in the summer selling buckets of water to overheated cars on the Mohawk Trail. I feel their grief when their fourteen-year-old sister, Helen, dies of diphtheria in 1912. I see their brother Maurice staying in North Adams—becoming the town doctor, delivering over twelve hundred babies.
My grandmother rubbed her finger along the grain of the wood.
Again, her hand circled the wood. “Tell me about you,” my grandmother said.
“I’m fine, I’ve been working hard, I’ve been thinking about buying a little house out on Long Island, a cabin where I can go and write.”
She nodded. “It’s important to have a house of your own,” she said.
“Tell me about you,” I said back to her.
“I’ve got nothing to tell,” she said. “I’m bored.”
She had worked her entire life—full-time until she was eighty-six. In 1918, two years before women won the right to vote, she came to Washington by herself, got a job in the War Department, and soon brought her brothers and sisters down from the farm. In 1922 she met my grandfather, the Romanian-French hatmaker, during a summer visit home when he happened to be working at his uncle’s hat shop in nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In the mid-1920s my grandfather sent for his younger brothers Julian and Maurice, hoping they would stay in America. The boys came for a summer but didn’t like it—they couldn’t get girlfriends because they didn’t speak English. They returned to Paris and in the 1940s were deported from Paris to concentration camps—Julian to Drancy and then Auschwitz, and Maurice to Auschwitz. Neither survived.