36
DUNCAN’S FATHER was waiting for him at the airport, hugging him in greeting, holding it longer than any hug Duncan could remember the two of them exchanging. Max Riley was just past sixty, with thinning gray hair and a thick gray beard. Nobody ever pegged them as father and son on sight; Duncan himself couldn’t really see it.
He had agreed to stay at his father’s house for the few days he would be back in Michigan. Duncan hadn’t really wanted to, would’ve preferred a hotel, but he could tell it was important to his dad. It seemed forced, Max wanting to be there for him now. They weren’t really close; since his parents’ divorce, Duncan had never spent more than a long weekend in his father’s house.
It was impossible for him to say whether race had anything to do with it, not in any clear way, anyway. But his father lived in an almost completely black neighborhood in Detroit, and even as a child Duncan had been aware that he stood out there. There’d been one bad incident, back when Duncan was twelve or so. He’d gone to a corner store by himself in the middle of the afternoon, a group of neighborhood kids surrounding him, calling him honky (the only time Duncan could remember actually hearing that word used as a racial insult), a few hard punches thrown before they’d taken his money, leaving Duncan bleeding from his nose and mouth.
Duncan had been old enough to understand why it’d happened, but neither his father, when Duncan returned to the house, nor his mother, when she heard the story upon coming to pick him up the next night, ever acknowledged that he’d been beaten up and robbed because he was a white-looking kid in a black neighborhood.
He’d been left to think it through on his own. He didn’t blame the kids, really. He hadn’t been seriously hurt—though it was the only time in his life that he’d been beaten up—and he understood that they considered the neighborhood theirs and him an interloper. But that was just it: the clear message was that he didn’t belong. When people looked at him they saw a white person, and so a white person was what he was. America simply didn’t have biracial people, not really: your skin put you on one side of the racial line or another.
Neither of his parents had ever been inclined to explain themselves to Duncan, so his understanding of how they’d come to be together was as fuzzy as his understanding of how they’d come apart. Nor did he understand why his mother would go from an interracial Detroit marriage to raising her biracial son in Troy, a small city whose population was virtually entirely white. Given that both his parents had essentially retreated to their separate racial corners after divorcing, Duncan had often wondered if their relationship had been based on some leftover sixties idealism that they’d carried through the seventies but couldn’t ultimately sustain.
Duncan had never thought of what he did growing up as passing: he’d never lied about his racial background, and anybody he’d ever been close to knew about it. But growing up in a white neighborhood and being raised by a white woman, Duncan felt his identity was in many respects no different from that of any other white person.
It still hadn’t really sunk in that his mother was dead, and he had no idea when it would. The woman who raised him—that phrase kept floating through his mind. His mother never remarried, his father had been distant, and so she’d pretty much done it all herself.
And yet in so many ways she was still a mystery. On the one hand was the bleeding-heart social worker who’d married across the color line; on the other was Duncan’s bland and provincial suburban upbringing, his mother’s apparent indifference to Duncan’s own inchoate ambitions.
Her death had come without warning: a stroke. As far as Duncan knew, she’d been perfectly healthy right up until it happened. He wished it hadn’t been something so out of the blue, that he’d had a chance to prepare, to say good-bye, to achieve whatever kind of closure was possible with your mother at the end of her life. But every way death happened probably seemed like the wrong way, and you never ended up saying everything you wished.
He and his father barely spoke on the drive from the airport, Duncan staring out the window. All the familiar Michigan scenery seemed different now. It was such a strange feeling, Duncan thought, to see a place that had once been home.
It wasn’t home anymore, hadn’t been for some time. It wasn’t just that he’d moved; it was that the world he now occupied was so different from the one in which he’d been raised. Ever since the day he’d gotten the acceptance letter from Harvard Law, Duncan had known that his adult life was going to have scant resemblance to his upbringing.
It’d been a bumpy transition: Duncan had felt less like he’d been accepted to Harvard and more like he’d infiltrated it. He remembered when he’d first started there, trying to explain to his mother what it was like, the hothouse atmosphere full of privileged overachievers. But it’d proven impossible to really put into words.
Duncan had gone to law school with some vague idea of doing good. But at the same time, neither of his parents was exactly inspiring in that regard. Harvard had a subculture of public-interest types bent on using the law to change the world, and it had taken Duncan a while to realize that the vast majority of them had one thing in common: family money. It hadn’t been easy to figure out; at Harvard, hiding your money had become more fashionable than flaunting it.
But he’d eventually realized that the more self-righteous a classmate was about using their law degree to help the disadvantaged, the more likely that do-gooder streak was subsidized by inherited wealth. Unlike those trust-fund Marxists, Duncan didn’t think he could afford the luxury of using a Harvard law degree to earn forty thousand dollars a year in some quixotic effort to change the world. He had never been able to tell if his joining a corporate law firm had been a disappointment to his mother. But he’d seen what a life on the front lines had done to her, and that wasn’t the life he wanted.
His father’s house was small and tidy, the neighborhood mostly residential, a once middle-class neighborhood fighting a losing battle to stay that way. With each passing year there were more houses with plywood in the windows, and each vacant house dragged the neighborhood down a little farther. The city had simply shrunk too much for outer neighborhoods like Conant Gardens to make much sense; most of Detroit’s middle class had left the city limits some time ago.
Duncan followed his father inside, hearing noises coming from the kitchen. Beverly, his stepmother, called out a greeting before stepping into the living room, wiping her hands on a dish towel before enfolding Duncan in a hug.
Feeling suffocated by all this solicitude, Duncan wished again that he was checking into a hotel, getting room service and watching TV. He and Beverly had never been comfortable with each other. As with everything else to do with his family, Duncan was never able to be sure what role race played in it—whether Beverly simply wished her husband didn’t have a son from a previous marriage, or if it was that Max had a Caucasian-looking son that was the problem.
Beverly was followed out by Kaleena, the youngest of their two children, a full decade younger than Duncan. He was closer to her than any of them, probably, or at least somehow it had always been simpler with Kaleena.
“So sorry about your mom,” Kaleena said as they embraced.
“Is Antoine around?” Duncan, referring to Kaleena’s older brother. As soon as he said it he felt Kaleena wilt beside him, then caught the sharp look from Beverly to his father.
“Antoine’s back in the system,” Max said after a moment.
“Shit,” Duncan said, though his surprise was more that nobody’d told him than that it’d happened. His half brother had been in trouble on and off since he was a teenager, culminating in the felony plea. “What happened?”
“He had this parole officer who was all on his back,” Kaleena said. “Kept threatening to violate him for one thing after another, finally did a couple of weeks ago.”
Duncan turned to his father. “And you didn’t tell me?”
Max’s face was grim. “I hadn’t talked to you since it happened, other than to tell you about your mom. That didn’t seem like the right time. Besides, there’s nothing you could’ve done.”
Duncan couldn’t quite get his head around it. Antoine had been raised by good people in a stable home, yet somehow he’d ended up in thrall to the thug life, carrying himself like he’d been raised in inner-city Detroit. Whenever Duncan wondered how different his own life would be if his skin had come out a darker shade, his thoughts always went to Antoine, with his GED, his rap sheet, and his stunted future.
Duncan’s emotional state was already on the verge of collapse, and this news threatened to sink him entirely. He felt tears coming, though he couldn’t really say if they were for Antoine. Making matters worse, they’d put him in his half brother’s old room. Antoine hadn’t lived here for years, and it’d been redone into a guest room, little trace of Duncan’s half brother remaining. Duncan remembered the huge Tupac poster that had hung on a wall, how the room had always smelled faintly of weed.
Duncan unpacked his bags as much as he needed to, then lay down on the bed. He was staying through the weekend, longer than he wanted to be back, but there was much to do.
His mother would be buried tomorrow afternoon. It was still impossible for him to believe. Duncan had to call his aunt Marie tonight. They were supposed to meet up at his mother’s house first thing in the morning. It would be put up for sale once they’d cleared everything out. Marie had already started organizing things there, but she needed Duncan to say what he wanted to keep. He planned to donate most of what was in there; he didn’t think there was much he’d hold on to.
He somehow fell into something like sleep, woken by his father when dinner was ready. Duncan felt groggy, even more ill at ease. Conversation lagged, Duncan deciding the circumstances freed him from making any effort. After eating, Kaleena went out to meet a friend and Beverly retreated to her bedroom, leaving Duncan alone with his father.
They ended up in the living room, his dad fetching a couple of beers. The moment felt stage-managed to Duncan, self-conscious, more obligatory than anything else. They simply weren’t close in a way that allowed for this.
“I really am very sorry about your mom,” Max said. “Sylvia was a good woman.”
“We don’t need to do a whole thing about that,” Duncan said. “I’m well aware of how long it’s been since you two got along.”
“You’re old enough to know it’s not that simple,” his father protested. “We couldn’t make it work for the long haul, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t still care for her a great deal. When you’ve loved someone for years, made a child with them, that never goes away.”
“You two always seemed to have done a good job burying it,” Duncan said. “I mean, I’m sure you loved each other at some point, but it’s not something I have any memory of.”
His father studied him for a moment, Duncan not sure what he was looking for. Duncan wasn’t trying to start a fight, wasn’t angry, really, but if he and his dad were going to talk about this, he was going to be honest. “We were in love when we had you,” Max said.
“But you didn’t mean to have me,” Duncan replied, the words out before he’d realized what he was about to say. His mother had been five months pregnant when his parents had wed. He hadn’t said anything about this since he was a teenager, thought it was something he was long past. “It’s okay, Dad. There’s no shame in it, and I’m glad you guys decided to keep me.”
Max looked like he was struggling to keep his own composure. “We made a decision to have you,” he said after a moment, speaking slowly. “And we were always glad we did, even in the tough times. And look what you’ve become, Duncan.”
Duncan laughed harshly, the feel of it like chalk in the back of his throat. “What is it exactly I’ve become? I help the rich get richer—hell, that’s what I do on a good day. Mostly I help them get away with it. I don’t think that’s exactly what Mom had in mind for me.”
Max shook his head. “Your mother was proud of you becoming a lawyer, getting into Harvard. We gave you opportunities that we didn’t have, and that’s your best goal as a parent.”
“I know you did. It’s just … what am I doing, really? I’m making money, which is nice, but then after that?”
Max looked pained, the conversation clearly not going as he’d anticipated. He took a long sip of his beer, then peeled the edge of the label off. “I didn’t know you were unhappy with your job,” he said.
“I’m not saying I am,” Duncan said. “But if you’d asked me fifteen years ago what I was going to do with my life, this certainly wouldn’t have been what I’d have said.”
“I remember you when you were a teenager,” Max said. “If I were you I wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in what you thought back then.”
Duncan managed a smile. “I wanted to be the lead guitarist in a band, so yeah, I’m not saying that was the right answer. But I thought I’d be doing something that felt more meaningful than this.”
“What, like represent a union? You know how f*cked we are? We’re on a sinking ship, and everybody knows it, yet we can’t make any concessions because we’re too afraid of looking weak. I spend most of my time fighting over people GM wants to fire, but they have to go through me to get rid of them. Some of these people—I mean, it’s probably dangerous to have them in the plant, yet I’ve got to fight to keep them on. They show up drunk at nine in the morning, they steal things, but they’re in the union, so we protect them.”
Duncan had never heard his father be so open about the downside of his job, though as he’d risen through the union ranks to shop steward, Duncan had gotten the sense of a growing cynicism. “Mom never really felt that way about what she did, far as I could tell. I mean, look at the horrible shit she had to deal with all day—beaten-up kids, lying parents—and she just kept at it.”
“You know why your mother never stopped being a street-level social worker? Because she was such a pain in the ass with everyone she worked with. She got in fights with her bosses all the time, going all the way back to when she started there. You just never saw that side of her. It’s one thing you inherited from me, Duncan, your ability to work within a system.”
“That can be a mixed blessing.”
“No doubt,” Max said. “But not having it was part of why your mother could never get ahead. Though she made her peace with that a long time ago, I suppose. She cared about helping people. You do too, Duncan. Isn’t that why you became a lawyer?”
“I became a lawyer without the slightest idea of what being a lawyer actually was,” Duncan replied.
“You might not see through your own cynicism, Duncan, but I do,” his father said. “You’re more your mother’s son than you think.”