The Ancestor

by Danielle Trussoni

  “Special?” I said, suspicious. “Special how?”

  Enzo took a sip of his drink, swirled the ice, and took another. “What I’m trying to say is that your inheritance is not simply a matter of cash. It is comprised of quite a few other . . . elements.”

  “The letter mentioned a list of assets,” I said. “A property in Nevenero.”

  “Yes, there is that, of course. But I’m not referring to Montebianco Castle,” he said, finishing off his drink and putting it on the coffee table. “The Montebianco family is an old one. There are very few families like it in the world. Your first noble ancestor was born in the thirteenth century. You are the twenty-ninth generation to inherit the family title.”

  “Wow,” I said, trying to imagine it. “I guess everyone has to come from somewhere.”

  Enzo laughed. “Yes,” he said. “They do. That is certain. And you come from a very particular somewhere. The estate would like to speak with you to discuss your position. To offer guidance. The sooner the better.”

  “It can’t hurt to get more information,” Luca said, and, if I hadn’t known him better, I’d have said he was warming to the idea of the Montebianco fortune.

  “Okay,” I said. Maybe he was right. Nothing wrong with more information. “I’d like to speak with them.”

  “Perfect,” Enzo said, looking relieved.

  “What’s the time difference in Italy?” I asked. “Is it too late to call now? Or we could do it tomorrow?”

  “It is too late, as a matter of fact. And besides,” he added, giving me a serious look, “the estate will need to speak with you in person. Everything has been arranged. The estate is waiting for us in Turin. Transportation has been scheduled. We can go whenever you’re ready.”

  “What? Now?” I said, startled. “As in right this minute? There’s no way I can go now.”

  “Why not?” Enzo asked. “Luca, you are more than welcome to join us, of course. Clearly, this inheritance affects you both. The two of you can spend Christmas in Turin. There is a lovely hotel in the old part of the city. The estate will arrange everything.”

  “I don’t even have a passport,” I said. Luca and I had been meaning to travel abroad for years, but the time had never seemed right. “Neither of us do.”

  “Not a problem,” Enzo said. “We anticipated that and found a solution.”

  I glanced at my husband. For the first time in our marriage, Luca was at a loss. Once, a surprise trip to Italy for Christmas might have thrilled him. Now, as we were navigating our separation, it was a minefield.

  “I’d love to,” Luca said at last. “But New Year’s Eve is our busiest night of the year. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go, Bert. Actually, it might be good for you to get away from here for a week or two. It will help get your mind off things.”

  “You don’t think this is totally crazy?” I asked. It was all happening so fast. I relied upon Luca to be reasonable, but he didn’t seem to think it was such a bad idea.

  “Sure, it’s a little out there,” Luca said, giving me a smile. “But it hasn’t been the easiest year for you. Maybe this is what you need to get back on track.”

  I turned to Enzo Roberts, perched at the edge of the couch, watching us with a cool, sharp gaze. I wanted to trust him, but couldn’t quite yet.

  “Lawyers are used to dealing with false claims,” I said, eyeing the briefcase. “I can’t imagine you came all this way without some kind of evidence.”

  Enzo bit his lip, considering my request. Then he pulled out his briefcase, slid it onto the coffee table, and flipped it open. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I do have something.” He pulled out a piece of paper and handed it across the table. “Do you know what this is?”

  It took me a full minute before I understood the charts and numbers on the paper in my hands. But once I got it, things began to fall into place. There was a genetic profile of my ancestry, the kind of basic breakdown Mrs. Thomas had shown me. On a separate page, I found columns of numbers and symbols, a bunch of terms I didn’t understand. The words “DNA Test Report” were written across the top of the page. The Montebianco family estate had used my DNA to find me.

  Just then, as my eyes jumped down the ladder of data, a memory opened in my mind. I was a child, not even five years old. It was winter, and I was walking with my grandfather on the snow-covered land behind his house. I tried to keep up with him, but he moved at a pace that seemed impossible to me. At last, he stopped at a pond, frozen over and dusted with snow. He took off his boots, first one, then the other, until his large, wide feet were bare. He nodded to my boots and told me to take them off. It’s too cold, I said. Where I come from, this is not cold, he replied. I didn’t want to take off my boots, but I did anyway, one at a time, then my socks, until my bare feet stung in the snow. We walked on the pond, slipping over the ice until my feet burned with a white-hot fire, then went numb.

  In my living room over two decades later, reading the document that changed my life, I felt the same white-hot fire in my body. I was frozen but burning up.

  “How in the world did you get this report?”

  “Apparently, it was quite easy,” Enzo said. “When you sent in your saliva sample, you checked a box allowing your information to be released to the company’s DNA specialists, so that they might include you in their so-called DNA Family Tree. This allowed your DNA to be analyzed and recorded in a database. A private genetic research company pays to access this database. To be fair, the research team we hired acquires genetic information from multiple online sources. There are a few major databases, but online ancestry companies are the most efficient. And streamlined.”

  “Is that even legal?” I asked, trying to remember the release I had signed. It was just some form online, endless legalese with a box to check at the bottom. I hadn’t even read it, just clicked through. At the time, it had seemed innocuous enough.

  “Very much so,” Enzo said.

  “And so according to these results, my DNA matches . . .”

  “The Montebianco family.” Enzo pulled out a second report. “This shows your relationship to your now-deceased great-uncle Guillaume Montebianco. The match is indisputable.”

  I stared at the papers. I couldn’t argue with a DNA report, but I didn’t quite trust it either. It was like watching a magic act. You know it’s all sleight of hand, but the trick is so smooth you accept it as real. I finished my drink, all of it, in one gulp.

  “You okay, Bert?” Luca asked, touching my hand.

  “It’s just a lot to take in,” I said, wanting, suddenly, to go back in time to that morning in the kitchen, when the premonition of danger had been so vivid, and dump the envelope in the recycling bin.

  “I’m sure this is all quite disorienting,” Enzo said, taking the DNA reports and sliding them back into his briefcase. “But it doesn’t have to be. The estate will go over everything with you in Turin. I assure you, there is nothing to worry about. It will all be clear soon enough.”

  He snapped his briefcase shut and stood to go.

  “I can’t believe my family kept so many secrets,” I said quietly, speaking more to myself than to Luca or Enzo.

  “Every family has its secrets,” Enzo said. “But nothing reveals the truth like DNA.”

  Five

  We flew to Italy that night.

  Enzo Roberts went to get dinner in town, giving me time to talk Luca into coming with me. I explained about my grandfather’s suicide and what I had learned at the Vital Records office. He must have sensed how much I needed him, but he also must have realized that if ever there would be a moment of reconciliation between us, this was it. When he presented the trip in this light to his father, Bob was more than happy to cover at the bar, as it meant giving us time to work things out. We packed a few essentials—pajamas, a few changes of clothes, toothbrushes—turned down the heat, locked the front door, and left everything behind.

  At Teterboro Airport, a chartered plane waited on the tarmac. It w
as impossible to mask my astonishment at the whole thing—the car that ferried us out onto the airfield, the sleek, shining jet, the simplicity and ease of it all. It took all of ten minutes to board. We didn’t have to go through security. We didn’t wait in lines. There was no taking off of shoes and jackets. No uncomfortable pat-downs. We just showed up, walked up some steps into the plane, and that was that. This, I realized, was the world in which certain people lived, a place where those with money were exempt from the rules.

  Once in my seat, a uniformed air hostess poured us each a glass of champagne—the Cristal 2008 label peeking out from behind her fingers—gave us each a bowl of cashews, and assured us that dinner would be served as soon as we were in the air. “But of course, if you’d like anything before then, please let me know.”

  I leaned back into my huge leather reclining chair, wishing my mother were there. She would have loved the fancy champagne. My father had died in a car accident when I was nineteen, and while his death had been a painful shock, losing my mother had been harder. She had been diagnosed with throat and lung cancer when I was twenty-one, and had lived four more years, each year filled with a Ferris wheel of progress and reversals—she would climb to a state of remission only to fall back into the illness, as if taken down by a sinister gravity. The end was terrible, for her as well as for me. I raised my glass and, pushing aside my feelings about Rebecca and John, and everything else that had been left unsaid, made a silent toast to her.

  I was on my second glass of champagne when a TSA agent stepped on board.

  “What does he want?” I whispered to Luca, feeling my stomach sink. Surely, they were going to tell me that Enzo was a criminal, had entered the country illegally, and this would all be over.

  “Passport control,” Enzo replied as he stood and headed to the front of the plane. “Let me take care of it.”

  I watched Enzo, my face growing hot, sure we would be escorted off the plane any minute. But when the TSA agent asked for our passports, Enzo handed him three maroon booklets. The agent opened them up, glanced at me, then at the passport. I watched this interaction with my stomach in my throat, sick with the tension. But he didn’t seem to be finding anything wrong with the situation. He even asked Enzo what the weather was like in Turin.

  “Have a nice trip,” the TSA agent said at last, giving the passports back to Enzo. Then he turned around and left.

  “What just happened?” I asked, as Enzo sat across from me and picked up his glass of champagne. He handed me one of the passports. I opened it. My photograph stared back at me, and the name Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco was typed out clearly on the page.

  “Is this a fake?” I whispered.

  “No, it is not a fake,” Enzo said, smiling slightly.

  “But this is me,” I said, turning the passport to get a closer look at my picture. It definitely was me.

  Nome: Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco

  Sesso: Donna

  Luogo di nascita: Poughkeepsie, New York (USA)

  Data di nascita: 20 Marzo 1988

  Cittadinanza: Italiana

  “Because of your ancestry, the Italian government recognizes you as an Italian citizen. We began the paperwork after we learned of your identity. The estate has some connections that proved useful to speed things up.” He gave Luca a passport. “We got a spousal citizenship for you.”

  “Wow,” I said. And because I could hold the passport in my hand, see my photo, and read my name on the laminated page, for the first time since learning of my inheritance, I believed that all this life-changing business, this Alberta the countess stuff, was really happening.

  We landed in Turin the next day. I knew nothing about Torino, and so Enzo explained that it was a northern industrial city in the Piedmont region, famous for the Fiat 500 and the ancient House of Savoy, of which I was (as it turned out) a distant relation.

  A car picked us up at the airport and delivered us to a boutique hotel at the historic center of the city, where we were ushered up a wide marble staircase to a spacious, elegant suite. There was a king-sized bed, a plush carpet, a bathroom with more marble than a monument, and a balcony overlooking a narrow street filled with shops and cafés. I fell into a deep sleep the minute I climbed into bed, a bottomless, disoriented sleep without geography, and woke to fresh flowers on my night table, a bouquet of white roses that filled the air with a rarified fragrance, one that I would thereafter associate with privilege. Tucked into the flowers was a card from the manager: Welcome, Countess Montebianco. Please call my personal number if you should need anything at all.

  I doubted we would. The place was incredible, so large I almost forgot that Luca was there, sleeping on the couch across the room. I told myself that I shouldn’t get too excited. We would meet the legal team, hear them out, and be on our way back home in a day or two. Even then, after having seen the DNA report, I was sure that there was a catch, something that would prove the whole thing to be a mistake.

  I was still in my pajamas later that afternoon when a knock came at the door. Enzo Roberts, handsome and composed as ever, stood in the hallway. I stepped aside as he breezed into our room, all efficiency. He carried his briefcase, as usual, but in his other hand he had a fistful of shopping bags.

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I stopped by a boutique down the way,” he said, gesturing to the bags. “Neither of you had time to pack properly. Try them on and let me know if they are acceptable.”

  I peered into the bags and saw stacks of new clothes. It was true that we hadn’t packed much, only carry-on suitcases. There was a black silk dress, a pair of black suede boots, some brown wool trousers, a white silk blouse, and a charcoal suit jacket. I glanced at the price tags and almost choked. The dress alone cost more than my mortgage payment. And the charcoal suit jacket? It could have paid a good portion of my college tuition. Later, after I saw Italians walking in the streets near the hotel, I understood that the clothes were a necessary gift. What we had brought—a few sweaters, jeans, and tennis shoes—would be wildly out of place. If we were to go out wearing such attire, we would be visibly foreign. Enzo had bought the clothes in an effort to help us feel comfortable.

  “This is beautiful,” I said, pulling the black silk dress from the first bag. I held the dress out at arm’s length. It was silk crepe with a low V in the front. The tag read size 46, the Italian equivalent to size 10. “Looks like it will fit.”

  He looked me over with an appreciative gaze. “I have an eye for beautiful things.”

  I gave him a sidelong glance. Could it be that Enzo Roberts was flirting with me? I glanced at Luca, who was too busy looking at a new leather jacket and some dress shirts to notice.

  “Thank you,” I said, folding the dress carefully and setting it on the edge of the bed. I picked up the trousers. “I’ll wear these at the meeting. The estate won’t know what hit them.”

  Enzo walked to the center of the room, stopping under the chandelier.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked. He met my eye a moment too long, and I wondered if he knew that Luca had slept on the couch. I had no idea how aware he was about our marital problems. “Are you happy with the room?”

  I looked around at the ridiculous opulence of my suite. It was hard to believe he was serious. He’d seen my lackluster living room and my sad Christmas tree. This hotel was nicer than any I’d ever seen; the sheets were thick buttery cotton, almost liquid against my skin. “Everything is perfect. Beyond perfect.”

  He looked relieved. “Wonderful,” he said, as he set his briefcase on a table and opened it. “Because you will be here for the next few days. The estate would like to set the meeting for tomorrow afternoon.” He pulled a leather pouch from his briefcase and handed it to me. “Which gives you a little time to rest and see the city. If you are up for it, of course.”

  I unzipped the pouch and found a phone, a room key, and a wad of euro bills. I kept the phone—my phone had died and I didn’t have an adapter f
or the charger—and handed the pouch to Luca. He looked inside, his eyes wide with surprise at the sight of all that cash.

  “I’ve programmed my number, as well as the number of the hotel, into the phone. There is no passcode—you can create one if you want, of course. I’ve also added a list of places you might want to visit—the Egyptian Museum is amusing—as well as some of my favorite restaurants. It might snow, which will be a treat, as we rarely get snow at Christmas. I’ve downloaded the Google Translate app, in case you get stuck ordering dinner. I’ve called already, and they are aware that you might drop in. Just mention my name and they will take care of you.”

  That evening, the manager sent up a complimentary bottle of wine—a dry prosecco that smelled of apricots and ice. We drank it on the balcony, watching the people below: an elegant woman in high heels and a tight, tailored overcoat; an old man reading the Corriere della Sera under the light of the bus stop; a child walking with her grandmother. Everyone was as elegant as Enzo Roberts. It was my first time away from home, and perhaps I was easily impressed, but I could have spent the whole night like that, watching the passersby on the street.

  It had been dark for an hour when it began to snow, flakes drifting down over us and melting on the wrought-iron balcony. Luca slipped his arms around me, and it seemed, suddenly, that I had been summoned home.

  I glanced at my watch. Twelve o’clock. For a moment, I was confused—was it dark at noon? Or could it be midnight already?

  “We lost six hours,” Luca said, noting my confusion. “It’s lunchtime for us, dinner here.”

  “You hungry?” I asked.

  “Let’s go out and do something fun,” Luca said. “Something totally new.”

  “It feels like forever since we did that,” I replied.

  “Well, it’s been forever since we’ve been happy,” he said, which was an understatement.

  “I’m happy now,” I said, pulling him closer, taking in his scent.