by Mary Cable
“Quite right,” Lydia said. “Or like the houses in Providence that belonged to our ancestors. All of them are still in the hands of descendants. Even the house where Deck and I lived when we were first married we sold to a cousin.”
“However,” Bishy said, and I saw her hands grip the arms of her chair, “However! Only recently - about a year ago, I guess - I learned something that no one else knows except David.” And she paused dramatically. “There is a male heir.”
I looked back at her steadily, waiting.
“David had a son out of wedlock. That child was adopted and must now be about nineteen.”
This came as such a shock to me that I could not help but show it. Finally, I said, as calmly as possible, “How do you know?”
“Last year David was away and I simply had to find some papers in his file. So while I was looking through, I came upon the adoption papers. They showed that “Baby Boy,” born in Venice, Italy, had been adopted by Sergeant Frank Costanza and wife, of New Haven, Connecticut. They’d named the child Vincent.”
I said, “But that doesn’t say anything about David.”
“No, the names of the real parents had been cut out. But when David got home I showed him the papers, and he said yes, the baby was his.”
Lydia chimed in, “And he won’t say who the mother was. Italian, I suppose. Deck says it’s very gentlemanly of David not to tell, but I must say I’d like to know. Maybe he’ll tell us later.”
“I doubt that,” I said.
“Well, I think he will, because we’re going to bring that boy to New Mexico and if Deck and I like him, we’ve decided to leave the property to our sons, in trust for this grandson.”
I could think of nothing appropriate to say, and Lydia went on, “It’s amazing to me to have a grandson with an Italian name because, of course, when I was growing up in Providence there was nothing lower than wops. But, of course, he’s not really one, and he’ll take the name of Smithson. I certainly don’t care for that name Vincent. Doesn’t sound like us, and I’ll suggest a change. Anyway, Bishy’s hired a detective and now we know where the boy is: right in New Haven, Connecticut.”
“Thanks for telling me, and I’ll let Oz know,” I said, rising to leave. “I really don’t need to hear anymore.”
“I’m afraid,” Bishy said, “that you’ll have to hear more. Because we want you to go and find him. Get him and bring him here.”
“Nonsense,” I said quickly. “That’s for you and Lydia to do, since it’s your idea.”
“I can’t go anywhere,” Lydia said. “I’m too old and tired. So is Deck. As for Bishy - well, I really don’t think we can ask her to look for her husband’s bastard. I mean, that would be the ultimate cruelty. I know - and you must know, too, Alex, dear - that Oz would never do it. So it has to be you.”
“Why not David?”
“Absolutely not. He says he’ll have nothing to do with it.”
“Neither will I. It’s absurd.”
“Do it for Oz,” Bishy put in suddenly. “You know he loves this place. Do it to get rid of the Glorious Lighters.”
I had to admit to myself that she had made a telling point. I liked to please Oz, because pleasing him alleviated the guilt I felt toward him. I also wanted to safeguard the property. I told Lydia and Bishy that I’d be willing to give the subject more thought and get back to them later. Then I walked back to our house.
I found myself surprised to find it still there, with a stew I’d left on the stove peacefully simmering; because I felt as if a tornado had come along and that nothing was ever going to be the same.
* * *
It was a sultry late-May afternoon in New Haven, the sun somewhere up there behind the smog. The new summer leaves were already dusty, I waited in a rented car on a street that had never been fashionable and wasn’t now, near a classroom building at the University of New Haven.
Bishy’s detective, Mr. Ryan, had told me exactly where to find Vincent Costanza, and he’d given me a snapshot of him, plus a written description:
Six feet tall, husky build, a little overweight
Blue eyes
Medium blond curly hair
Smiles a lot, Good teeth
Probably will be wearing jeans and a T-shirt, maybe with “University of New Haven” on it, or a duck, with “The duck stops here”
Owns a navy-blue knapsack
May be wearing blue running shoes.
In addition, Mr. Ryan had told me that Vincent usually left the college shortly after three o’clock and would be walking home along this street. He lived three blocks away.
A strange emotional state had come over me, much like the one I had lived through in Venice. It was a kind of spiritual numbness and shock, which allowed me to drive the car and get to the right place at the right time, but not to comprehend what was truly happening. I was about to meet a young stranger in whom elements of myself and of David had been living, intermingled, for two decades. The blue eyes (David’s) and the blond hair (mine) would be obvious, but I knew that if there were qualities, mannerisms, interests, personality traits that I would recognize, I would be grateful for this numb feeling. I was determined that he would see me as a messenger and nothing more. At least, for the present.
I sat in the car, with the air-conditioning on, and very soon after three, the almost deserted sidewalk began to be busy with young people. On this side of the street, there were tennis courts and a parking lot. Opposite stood a long line of venerable three-deckers, built for working-class people at the turn of the century. To arrive here, I had passed through street after street of the same sort of houses. Some had carefully tended yards, with statues of gnomes or the Virgin Mary, beds of canna, and rose-of-Sharon bushes. Some had vegetable gardens. Some were taken up by children’s wading pools of blue plastic, barbecue equipment, tether-ball poles.
According to Mr. Ryan, the Costanzas had lived in this neighborhood ever since Frank Costanza had left the Army soon after the adoption, so this would be the only home Vincent would remember. Ryan had given me the street and number of his parents’ house, but advised me to contact Vincent directly. In many cases such as this, he said, the adoptive parents would manage to sabotage any contact between child and biological parent.
“You never know,” he had said. “Some of them are real defensive. They figure it’s their kid, their property. Some of them don’t even tell a child he’s adopted, but, according to my sources, the Costanzas did. Vincent knows, and so do all their family and friends.”
It was strange indeed for me to sit there, looking for my son whom nobody knew was my son. It seemed to me that I felt no intimations of mother love for the pleasant, slightly overweight (like my father) boy in the snapshot. And I hoped I wouldn’t.
There were soon many young people walking by, and I stepped out of the car for fear of missing Vincent, but he was unmistakable. Curly hair, blue knapsack, dirty blue running shoes, a duck on his T-shirt.
“Vincent Costanza?” I asked, and he nodded, looking startled. “My name is Alexandra Smithson. I’m a - friend - of friends of yours and I need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
He looked at me with, yes, David’s blue eyes, but with a guileless stare in them. Unsophisticated, I thought - which would never have been a word I’d have used for David. I got the impression of a young man who had led an uneventful life.
“Sure,” he said. “What’s going on?”
I had pondered for some time about what to say at this point and I had it prepared.
“Why don’t we go and have a milk shake? That way we’ll be more comfortable.”
He looked even more surprised, but again said, “Sure.”
At the end of the block was a Burger King. When we were settled with milk shakes, I forged ahead with my mission. “I know this will be a shock to you,” I said, “but I hope not a bad shock. I am representing your biological family and they have asked me to get in touch with you.”
For half a minute he
was speechless, staring at me wide-eyed. I began to fear that he had never been told he was adopted, but he finally said, “You mean the people who had me. Wow! Have you talked to my mom and dad?”
“Well, you are grown up,” I pointed out - though he scarcely seemed so, “and free to make your own decisions. We thought it would be better to approach you privately to see what you might feel like doing.”
“Like doing what? Are you saying I could meet my - you know, other mom?”
“Actually, it’s your grandmother who is anxious to see you. And your grandfather.”
“Not my other mom?” A slight strain came into his voice. “Is she dead?”
This was the hard part. “Vincent, I’m sorry, but we don’t know where she is. Your father is alive, but - well, he may not be available. But your grandparents have been wanting for years to see you. They just waited until you were grown up.”
But he seemed to be getting even less grown-up. Like a child, he kept banging his shoe against the table leg and winding a finger through his curly hair.
“Where are these people?” he asked. “I’m broke. I can’t go very far.”
“Don’t worry about that. They’ll buy your plane ticket. To New Mexico.”
He began to seem more interested. “Cool,” he said.
There was a silence, during which he noisily sucked up the last of his milk shake.
“Do people call you Vincent? Or a nickname?” I asked.
“Vincent - or Vince, sometimes.”
“Your mother was born in Genoa, is that right?”
“How did you know?”
I wanted to tell him as few lies and as much of the truth as possible. “Your birth family hired a detective to find you. We already knew that you had been adopted by Frank Costanza and his wife, Teresa, in New Haven.”
“Yeah. Dad was stationed in Italy right after the War and he and Mom met at a dance. Dad was born right here in New Haven.” He smiled, a smile that was something like David’s, except that his face was so much rounder. “And what about my - you know, father? What’s he like?”
A hard question. “He looks something like you,” I said. “But, Vincent, I have to remind you that it’s your grandparents - his father and mother - who want to see you. You see, there is a problem about an inheritance.”
“What kind of problem?” he asked quickly, now beginning to look very interested.
I thought, maybe he’s not so childish after all.
“Your grandparents will tell you about it,” I said. “It’s not up to me. I’m only - only a sort of messenger.”
“Are you related to me?”
“I’m married to your father’s brother.”
“Were my father and mother married?”
“No.”
He scowled. “My mom and dad told me they were, only they were too poor to keep me.”
“Adoptive parents often say things like that, so the child won’t be wondering where his biological parents are.”
“They said I was born in Italy. So, was my mother Italian?”
That was painful for me to deal with. “It’s a possibility, isn’t it?” I finally said.
Suddenly, all this seemed a lot for him to take. He swallowed, bent his head, seemed almost on the verge of tears.
I said, “I know it’s a lot to lay on you all at once.”
He shook his head slowly. “At least my - those two people - didn’t get an abortion. I don’t believe in that. Imagine, if that lady had, I wouldn’t be here!”
“Right! Terrible thought!” And we both managed a laugh.
“So, what do you want to do, Vincent? Will you come and see your birth grandparents?”
It came over me that this whole thing was very hard on me and I began to hope he might say no. But I had done my job all too well.
“Well, yeah, I guess,” he said. “But right now, I’m about to have exams.”
“Yes, but we have Memorial Day weekend coming up. We could leave tomorrow and have you back Tuesday.”
“Okay. Except”-he looked anxious-”I’ll have to ask Mom and Dad.”
“Ask them, of course, tell them everything, but don’t forget - you’re of age. You make your own decisions now, don’t you?”
“Yeah, sometimes. They may not mind, anyway. They know I love them.”
I gave him the telephone number of the motel where I was staying. “Call me this evening,” I said, “and we’ll arrange all the details for the trip.”
As we left Burger King, he asked, “Where did you say these folks live?”
“In New Mexico.”
“Are they Mexicans?”
“New Mexico, Vince.” He looked blank and I added, “It’s one of the fifty states.”
“Oh, that’s right,” he said.
“By the way, how is the University of New Haven?” I asked.
“It’s okay.”
I didn’t go into asking what his favorite subjects were. Not geography, it seemed.
When we reached my car, I said goodbye. I could have offered him a lift, but I hated the idea of even catching a fleeting glimpse of the Costanzas.
“See you tomorrow, Vincent,” I said.
“Cool,” he said.
When I got back into the car, I couldn’t drive. I tried putting the key into the ignition, but my hand was shaking too much. I sat with the window down, a hot, smoggy breeze ruffling my hair. It seemed hard to believe that I had just been sitting across a table from my son, the product of so much love and grief and inevitably a central factor in my life. I asked myself whether I felt maternal, but I could get no answer.
Vincent and I arrived in Albuquerque on the eve of the holiday weekend and fought our way through dense airport crowds to my car, which I had left parked in the parking lot. Vincent had been craning his neck to see all he could from the plane window. The vastness of the United States seemed to take him by surprise, as did the speed of the airplane. If he had been a child, I would have taken pleasure in telling him things (“That’s the Mississippi River, the longest river in America”; “Now we are over Oklahoma, the Sooner State. They called it Sooner because . . .”) I like talking to children that way, but not to a tall, bumbling fellow of nineteen. I sighed when I remembered that David had been twenty-three when I first laid eyes on him, that savvy, unflappable Harvard man. And yet I couldn’t say that Vincent was unintelligent. He observed, was curious, put two and two together. The concept of Environment vs. Heredity came to my mind and I promised myself to find out what the latest theories were.
The day was clear, hot, and sunny. From 1-25, we could see the faraway peak of Mount Taylor. I told Vincent that it was a sacred mountain of the Navajos, and that the Americans had named it Mount Taylor after Zachary Taylor, General in the Mexican War and later President. But there were too many items in that sentence of which Vincent had obviously never heard, and I wisely let it drop. Instead, he looked around at the barren range country we were driving through, and asked, “Did you have a drought or something?”
“No, it just always looks like this. Sometimes greener, sometimes dryer, but basically this is high desert.”
“Needs water.”
“Some people think it’s very beautiful.”
“They do?” He considered this idea, then shook his head. “I like, you know, green trees, green grass.”
We drove on in silence.
Presently he said, “How come you were the one that came to look for me?”
“You see, it was your grandmother’s idea to send for you, and she’s really too old to be running around the country by herself. She’s going on eighty.”
“My nonna from Genoa came to see us, and she’s eighty-five. She helped us make like a grotto in our yard with the, you know, Virgin Mary in it. And she strung colored lights around it.”
“Grandmothers differ,” I said.
“But where is my - uh, father?” He could never get that word out easily, and he had not mentioned his biological mother since
he’d asked me about her in New Haven.
“He’s out of town. As I told you, I don’t think you’ll be meeting him.”
“What’s the matter? He doesn’t like me?”
“He doesn’t know you, so how could he not like you? He lives in another part of the state, and I guess maybe it’s hard for him to get away. He’s got a cattle ranch.”
“Do you have a picture of him?”
“No.” I saw that this was a blow, so I added, “I’m sure your grandparents have one.”
“And one of my - uh, mother?”
“No. None of her.”
He was silent a while, and then fell to reading the license plates of passing cars.
“Wow, Montana! Did you see Montana? There goes California, too.” Then, tiring of that, he burst out, “I sure hope I like this grandmother. I’m kind of, you know, scared.”
“Don’t be, Vincent. Just mind your manners. Stand up when she comes into the room, keep your mouth closed when you chew. That kind of thing.”
“You sound like my mom. What’ll I talk to her about?”
“Just be natural. Talk about whatever you like to talk about.”
“Ice hockey? Hunting?”
I thought, oh God, hunting. “You might talk to your Uncle Oz about hunting, but not your grandmother. She hates it.”
He made a face, then scrunched down in the seat, disconsolate.
“Don’t worry, Vincent. She’ll do the talking, no doubt. And if you have any problems, come to me.” I reached over and touched his pudgy hand, and wondered whether or not I was feeling like a mother.
Lydia did not permit anyone but Decatur to be present at her first interview with Vincent; I think he passed, but not with flying colors. Oz and I were invited to dinner afterward. David, it seemed, had flown to California on a voice-over assignment, and Bishy, not wanting to see David’s love child until she had to, had gone somewhere to visit friends.
Lydia had made an effort to stay reasonably sober and she looked very handsome in a caftan made out of a gold-and-plum-colored sari. Vincent, in the same not-fresh Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans he had worn on the plane, had possibly washed his face. His hair was shimmery with some kind of gel he had put on it to subdue its curls. My curls. I could have told him the best way to manage them: frequent shampoos and a short haircut. I thought, if his mom were here I’m sure she would have made him take a bath. He had a sweaty smell about him. But that mother wasn’t there; nor, in effect, was the other one.