Looking back, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise to hear his father deny something that had so clearly happened. His dad did that kind of thing. He selected from a range of plausible realities the version of events he preferred to believe in. He did it with Neil’s mother when he said she left him because she fell in love with Carl, her Jazzercise instructor, as if he’d forgotten that they’d been fighting like crazy since before the town even had a gym. He did it when he had a fight with the Bureau of Land Management people over whose land the trees at the end of Pop’s back pasture were on, and he did it in a big way when it came to certain facts about Neil’s grandmother. Neil’s dad made such a habit of choosing what to believe, of course he’d found just the right story for himself when it came to Becca Gallegos.
So Neil knew exactly what Professor Piot was talking about when he warned Neil and the other research assistants against getting personally attached to a particular version of history. Too much emotional involvement could lead even a conscientious historian to bias, or worse. It was something they ran into a lot with the documents about Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. The official histories were often written by people overly invested in the church, and they included all kinds of inaccuracies: The church was said to have been originally founded as the first in the name of Saint Anne long before her cult even appeared in France, for example. It was perfectly understandable that a priest or a monk who had devoted his whole life to serving in that particular church might embellish its importance, but it did not make good history. “Fall too much in love with your subject, and you’ll find only the answers you already know,” Professor Piot said.
It sounded better in French, but it fit Neil’s father perfectly. The last time he and his father had talked, back in January, Neil had tried to point this out, and the conversation had not gone well. They hadn’t been talking about Becca Gallegos or anything like that—at least, not directly. The subject had been Neil’s grandmother, and though that particular topic always made Neil uncomfortable, it might have been anything.
It had been Neil’s birthday, and he was honestly surprised to get a call from his father. Neil’s mom had sent him a package of brownies and an e-card to see first thing when he woke up, but his dad wasn’t the type to remember birthdays, and he usually sent Neil a check a week or two late. It wasn’t that his father didn’t care, he just wasn’t very good with dates.
But as it turned out, his father hadn’t remembered Neil’s birthday. His dad said hello and started right in on small talk in a way that made Neil sure there was something else he was waiting to bring up. He asked Neil about the weather there in London—which was cold, it was January, it had just stopped raining and Neil was trying to avoid the half-frozen puddles as he walked to class. It was cold back home too, his father said. The pipes in the old well-house had frozen, the forecast called for more snow. His father asked about school; Neil said it was fine. His father wondered whether Neil had had a chance to pick up the Christmas presents from his friend’s daughter in Swindon; Neil said not yet, but definitely next weekend.
Neil kept waiting for his dad to ask him if he had any plans for his birthday, which in fact he did—Veejay had bought a bottle of something green that was supposed to be absinthe and the girls across the hall were coming over to watch the match against Chelsea. But instead his father said, “So. There’s a new book out about Grandma,” and Neil realized that this was the real reason for his father’s call. Grandma was not Nan, but Neil’s biological grandmother, Inga. As in Inga Beart, that Inga Beart, whose books were an unavoidable obstacle to passing tenth grade English. Though his father had never met her, he insisted on calling her Grandma when he talked to Neil, as if she had been somebody he and Neil actually knew.
“Oh yeah?” Neil said. The book had gotten a good review in the Guardian, but Neil decided not to mention it.
“By a fellow named Bristol,” his father said. “A real hack job. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they write these days.”
“Uh-huh,” Neil said. He knew what part of the book his father didn’t like. It said what all the others said: Inga Beart had a baby, left it, and never gave Neil’s dad a second thought.
Neil’s father cleared his throat. “And, well, I was thinking. If I could finally find some proof—”
Since they were talking on the phone, Neil was free to roll his eyes. Having a famous grandmother was embarrassing, and Neil had started lying on the first day of each new class when the professor called his name and then said, “Don’t suppose you’re related to . . .?” But he hadn’t meant to start an argument when he pointed out that his father sounded a little obsessive, that the guy who’d written the book was actually a well-regarded professor at Oxford, and that maybe now was the time for his father to deal with his abandonment issues in ways that didn’t involve trying to poke holes in the research of real scholars, who ought to have a pretty good idea of what had and had not happened in the life of a woman his father had never even met.
In retrospect, it was kind of a shitty thing to say. Neil had never challenged his father on his Inga Beart theories before. But it was his birthday, and his father was too caught up in rewriting the details of fifty years ago to remember that today Neil was twenty years old.
So maybe that was why, when his father started talking about how as a baby he’d somehow seen and remembered a certain pair of shoes Inga Beart wore—the same story Neil had heard a thousand times before—Neil pointed out how it obviously couldn’t be true. Neil’s dad was silent for a little while and then said, “Well. I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up,” sounding like he’d had his feelings hurt.
“Be reasonable, Dad,” Neil said. He felt bad, but his father was trying to twist the facts of his mother’s life in a way that would make him feel better, and that was exactly the kind of thing Professor Piot warned against.
“I am being reasonable. She came to see us out at the ranch. I was under the table, all I could see was her feet. How could I have seen her feet if she wasn’t there?”
“Maybe you didn’t really see them,” Neil said. “Memories are wrong all the time. People believe what they want to believe. I mean, it can happen.” He was pretty sure neither of them wanted to get into the issue of truths and untruths and which ones his father chose to tell.
“I was there, wasn’t I? For Christ’s sake. I remember.” Neil could tell by his voice that his father was getting worked up, and he wished he’d just let him leave a message. He had some reading he needed to get done before class.