by Amanda Cross
Reed had, of course, undertaken many conversations with lawyers, criminals, and students, and had no difficulty with opening remarks or with asking for what he wanted. Still, these skirmishes—one could hardly call them conversations; there were occasionally altercations—had not taken place in such elegant surroundings nor on a subject concerning his wife. Jay guessed at the reasons for Reed’s hesitation, his head buried in the menu.
“I know what I want to eat,” Jay said, “and I suspect I know what you want to talk about: my intentions toward your wife. Am I right?”
“Not exactly,” Reed said, deciding on his meal. The waiter appeared to take their orders and reclaim their menus. Jay broke open a roll and buttered it. Then he put it down and reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. He handed the folded paper to Reed.
“That’s my résumé,” he said. “From 1950 on, all my jobs more or less, though I haven’t gone into details. In fact, I can’t remember all the names exactly. Also, there are a few lacunae when I was in between jobs or between temporary ones, but on the whole it’s a pretty complete picture. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”
Reed unfolded the sheet of paper and examined it. “Fortunately you’re not a lawyer,” he said. “When one is admitted to the bar, it is necessary to list every job one has ever had, including summer and temporary ones.”
“It’s different with architecture. Either you’re working at it, or at something else until you can work at it again.”
“I gather it’s a rather volatile profession.”
“Exactly like the stock market, which is a good barometer of architecture’s fortunes. When times are good, people build or, in my case, restore. When there’s a recession, building and restoration are among the first things to be postponed.”
As their drinks arrived, followed by their food, Reed continued to glance at the paper. “Do you mind if I ask a few questions as I read along?” he asked.
“Not at all.” Jay began on his salad and then chuckled. Reed looked up. “I was thinking of my wife,” Jay said. “She used to ask me what men talked about when they were alone. She seemed to think we spent our time together telling male jokes and slandering women. I was hard put to convince her that the men I knew usually had something particular to discuss and simply got on with it.”
“No doubt there are other kinds of male conversations.”
“Of course. But my wife seemed to think there was only one kind, portrayed on television by men in bars. I need hardly add that she was nothing like Kate.”
“Or Kate’s mother?”
“The resemblance was closer there, but not very close. My wife didn’t have a profession nor want one.”
Reed nodded and went on with his reading. “When did you leave Kate’s mother?” he asked, putting the paper temporarily aside.
“Not long after Kate was born; a few months later. I urged her to come away with me, bringing our baby, but she refused. Fansler had indicated no doubts about Kate’s paternity. She wanted to stay with him.”
“So you went west,” Reed said, glancing at the résumé, now at the side of his plate.
“Yes. I was avoiding the temptation to return to her, to visit. Three thousand miles seemed a sensible distance at the time; anyway, it was the farthest away I could get.”
“Did you help to decide on the baby’s, on Kate’s name?”
“Oh, yes. It was Shakespeare’s favorite woman’s name. Rosalind was, and is, my favorite woman character in Shakespeare, but Louise would not agree on Rosalind, so Kate it was. Louise wanted Katherine, but I stood my ground.”
“Fansler had nothing to say on the matter?”
“No. He had named the sons; he considered the daughter’s name her mother’s choice.”
“An old-fashioned, conventional family.”
“Surely,” Jay smiled, “ ‘There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this.’ To tell you, that is.”
“Kate shares your passion for Shakespeare.”
“But it’s not what she teaches.”
“Not since her first teaching days.” Reed refused to let the conversation revert to Kate. “Did you know you would work as an architect when you went west? That seems to have come later.”
“I was studying architecture when I met Louise. I returned to it some years later.”
“So I see; you studied architecture at Yale.”
“Yes. But I eventually met up with a chap from Columbia, and we started our firm.”
“But not in New York.”
“No. I never returned to New York to work, except for the occasional project. By the time the west woke up to the fact that they ought to preserve a few of their older buildings—and by this time the bulldozers had knocked most of them down—there was a good bit of work for us out there.”
“You came back to New Haven, but you never visited the Fanslers or Louise or Kate.”
“No. I had promised not to; I kept my promise until a few weeks ago. Everyone who might have given a damn was dead.”
“What about your adopted sons?”
“We don’t meet often. I may tell them one of these days. I suspect they’ll be glad to hear I was such a randy fellow in my youth.”
“I never knew Kate’s parents,” Reed said. “They were dead before I met her; they both died on the young side.”
Reed had, more than once, heard from Kate how conventional her mother was, insisting that Kate go to dancing school and behave in a manner appropriate to the mother’s ideas of ladylike behavior. Reed had often wondered what would have happened if Louise had lived past sixty, long enough to face the fact that Kate was determined to be a professional, a feminist and a far from ladylike woman. Louise had become ill some years before her death, and had not challenged Kate, nor disputed with her. Reed wondered now if perhaps it was not her illness, but her memories of Kate’s father that explained her tolerance of Kate’s decisions.
He did not mention this. “What sort of temporary work did you undertake when you weren’t being an architect?” he asked.
“Subcontracting, usually, or just working as a builder. I liked learning how one put up buildings, or how to renovate them; it was work I could almost always get. In good times, workers with experience were needed; in bad times, workers who came cheap were desired. That was how it went, during most of the between periods.”
Reed could think of nothing else to ask. In fact, he could think of much else to ask, but this hardly seemed the time or place for such questions; some of them could never be asked. As to the résumé, he needed to study it more closely, and perhaps make a few inquiries.
“You’ve been most agreeable about all this,” he said to Jay. “You might well have told me to stuff it.”
“I’m glad you wanted to know more about me. I’m glad Kate’s married to someone who cared to find out more about her father.”
“I wouldn’t have even met with you unless Kate agreed,” Reed said.
“I took that for granted.”
Reed smiled, and reached for his wallet.
“Do let me pay,” Jay said. “I’ve been the cause of all this inquiry.”
“Another time,” Reed said.
CHAPTER SIX
Do you not know I am a woman?
When I think I must speak.
Reed handed Jay’s résumé to Kate.
“He gave it to you?” she asked, glancing at it. “It’s all typed up. You mean he brought it to you unasked?”
“All of those,” Reed said. “He’s no fool; he guessed why I wanted to see him. This was to show me how he’d spent his life and that he was as open as anyone could be.”
“A busy life,” Kate said, reading the résumé. “He worked as an architect or builder most of the time; just as he told us. Is his architecture firm still in existence?”
“Oh, yes. See, he gives the address, the phone numbers, the name of his partner who now runs it. All clean and above board.”
“Why d
o I catch a note of skepticism? I take it the lunch did nothing to assuage your doubts about him.”
“Look at that résumé more carefully.”
Kate studied it in detail, pausing over each entry. “There are lacunae, of course. And whatever it was he was doing seems a little vague after he went west, but is that so unexpected? And doesn’t everyone have gaps unless they’re trying to be appointed as a judge or attorney general?”
“He explained the gaps to some extent. In between jobs in restoration he worked temporarily as a subcontractor, a carpenter, a bricklayer possibly. That’s not what’s troubling me. Look at the years between 1970 and 1975.”
“I see,” Kate said. “Nothing much there. Perhaps we are to assume that it was temporary jobs again.”
“Why not say so?”
Kate smiled. “I don’t remember you being this serious before, this doubtful. Is there something about Jay that’s getting to you? Aside from the fact that he’s my father.”
“That’s rather a bigger aside than usual. Perhaps I’m jealous of this new man in your life; perhaps I’m just naturally a mean, suspicious person. I can’t really tell you why, but I sense something not quite right. It need not be something to his discredit; it may merely be something he’d rather not disclose. If you don’t want me to snoop, just say so.”
“Of course you must snoop as you choose, provided you keep me informed of all you uncover.” Kate grinned at him. “But as you keep telling me, whatever he had to offer me in the way of a paternal inheritance he’s already done. Nothing we can find out will change that.”
“Kate,” Reed said, answering the undertone rather than her words. “If you have the slightest hesitation about my looking further into the life of Jay Ebenezer Smith, just say so. As you so wisely point out, there’s nothing to be learned that could affect you in any way.”
“Do you think the name is made up too? It does sound a bit unlikely.”
“Only because Smith is so common a name that, if we suspect someone of dishonesty who says his name is Smith, we tend to assume he’s lying.”
“That is not a logical sentence,” Kate said.
“No, but it’s a logical thought which, as usual, I trust you to disentangle from my sorry syntax.”
They were again in Reed’s study, where Kate had found him on her return from the university. She fully extended his lounge chair and lay in it quietly for some minutes. Reed, behind his desk where he had been working, watched her. One of his most prized qualities, in Kate’s view, was that he could look at her and wait to hear her response, not, as with so many of the males she encountered, waiting to speak themselves, or retreating into their own private musings.
“I can’t decide if I want to know more about him or not,” she eventually said, having tried to sort out her thoughts. “I want to go on seeing him from time to time, to stay in touch. I’ll certainly be interested, not to say engrossed, in anything I learn about him. But whether or not I think we, you, ought to dig into his past is a different question. We both realize, I hope, that those missing years will turn out to have been a series of jobs so repetitive and dull that he saw no point in reporting them; probably he couldn’t even remember them all.”
“Probably,” Reed said.
“But if I agree, you’d still like to dig a little?”
“I think so.”
“Well,” Kate said, pulling herself and the lounge chair into an upright position, “I can’t imagine how you’d even begin, but if begin you must, you have my agreement, if not quite my blessing. I’ve never investigated the past, exactly. I’ll learn a lot watching how you do it.”
“You’re already beginning to discourage me,” Reed said. “But not definitively.”
The next day, a Friday, Kate went in the afternoon to talk with her friend Leslie Stewart, who was a painter and could be found in her studio, happy—if her guest was both expected and welcome—to put down her brush and relax. Between her and Kate there was likely to be brisk and enjoyable conversation. They went into the kitchen where, as was their habit, they drank tea, which Kate never did anywhere else, and nibbled on ginger cookies.
“I take it that acquiring a father this late in life is having disruptive effects?” Leslie said. “I don’t wonder. Finding out in one’s later middle years, as I did, that one is in love with a woman is certainly an astonishing experience, but this is even more noteworthy. And to think that without DNA he could have claimed fatherhood till the cows came home, and you would hardly have believed him. At least, you would never have known for sure and could have sent him packing.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Kate said. “He was clever enough to prove he was my father before suggesting that we meet. One shudders to think what the world will be like in future years with all our genes mapped and if necessary altered, to say nothing of giving away the secrets of the marriage bed.”
“Or the hurly-burly of the chaise longue, as Shaw or someone put it. Did you want to discuss genes or your father?” Leslie asked. “I’m ready for either, though at the moment I find the latter more challenging.”
“That’s just it,” Kate said. “I can’t decide whether I think his turning up is challenging or, after the first shock, simply another fact to be calmly accepted. It’s a romantic story, all right, and certainly casts my mother in a new light; but all that’s the past. Does the fact of this man have any bearing on my future, or my peace of mind?”
“Maybe it depends what you think about fathers generally. They, after all, particularly for our generation and the women before us, are the carriers of the patriarchy, the male world, the sense of men as human beings and women as an interesting, if usually annoying, appendage. Does it matter who carries the disease?”
“It may matter whether the carrier—to continue your metaphor—is infecting one purposely, accidentally, or not at all.”
“Good point, Kate. But surely whatever effect either father might have had, or did have on you, is hardly significant now. It’s not as though some other woman had turned out to be your mother.”
“That, I’m relieved to say, would have been impossible. After all, my brothers would have noticed if there had been a substitution.”
“Anyway, of what importance were mothers in our day? If it comes to that, what is there to be said about the relationship between mothers and daughters at any time—speaking honestly, of course.”
“I didn’t have much of a relationship with my mother,” Kate said. “But I did come to realize some years ago that she had permitted me, without hysterical confrontations or without confessing it, to live the life I wanted, or to prepare for the life I wanted. She died before she had to witness the results of her tolerance. And it was a tolerance cleverly camouflaged by her insistence on conventionality. Now that I know she had a lover, she returns to me in a new light, or at least from a new perspective. Perhaps that’s the most important result of Jay’s materializing at this late date.”
“Your mother’s dead; you can afford to be sentimental and ooze gratitude,” Leslie said, pouring more tea. “Dead mothers are one thing. Living mothers—and remember, I’m one, as well as a daughter and an observant woman—are at best necessary supplements to life whom we tolerate, if we are kind, with courtesy and generosity. Remember, that’s at best. More often than not there’s a residue of resentment on both sides, and civility is barely maintained.”
“Leslie, motherhood has never been your long suit in the game of life,” Kate said, relishing the idiom or cliché, though she hadn’t a clue what card game was providing the metaphor. “Anyway, I’ve acquired a father, not a mother.”
“I will say for you, Kate, that you’ve never gone on about the emptiness in your life because you don’t have children. I try to convince childless women of the advantages of their condition, but they just say since I have children I haven’t a right to speak on the subject. That seems to me an idiotic objection there’s no way out of. The truth is, Kate, you get more pleasure
from your present and past graduate students, to say nothing of your niece and nephew, than most people, myself included, get from their children.”
“I get pleasure only from some graduate students, and only from two of my many nieces and nephews,” Kate said defensively. “And don’t forget Benedict’s defense: ‘The world must be peopled.’ ”
“Not these days. With all this genetic work curing and preventing diseases, everyone will live forever, and we had better find a way not to people the world, and soon.”
“Genes, again. You see, they do keep turning up. Now could we get back to my father?”
“Right,” Leslie said. “Why not just enjoy it. Let all the ramifications of your genetic heritage whirl about in your brain, follow each supposition to its illogical but fascinating conclusion, and then just look on him as a new friend. That’s my advice. You did come for my advice, didn’t you.”
“I came for the tea. Reed is suspicious of Jay. Not of his motives in turning up, but of his past, which Reed seems to suspect of being murky.”
“Well, there’s murky and murky. Promise not to spare me a single detail.”
“What I can’t decide,” Kate said, “and I know I keep returning to this, is what difference it makes who was one’s father. I mean, half a century later, what can Jay’s appearance possibly mean?”
“Now that’s an easy one. It obviously provides a simple, irrefutable explanation of why you aren’t a standard Fansler. No one else in the family turned out even remotely interesting; I bet they all voted for George W. Bush in 2000.”
“No doubt. But am I really ready to believe—which I never had to do before—that it is only spermatozoa that made me what I am today.”
“Probably. And yesterday, and all the days before that. Is the truth of your paternal heritage so disturbing, and if so, why?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said.
“I do. You have long prided yourself, with justification, on breaking away from every opportunity to be a self-satisfied, conventional, right-wing, wealthy, socially established Fansler. Now it turns out, you don’t get any credit, or not much. It all goes to Jay—whom I insist upon meeting in the very near future.”