“I don’t understand,” Harry said.
“Don’t you see,” Eleanor said. “The Wolinskis’ claim makes no sense unless it’s true. Why would Ms. Wolinski pick him as the father? How would she have settled on him unless she knew him? She’s not a scam artist.”
“How could he have abandoned them?” Harry asked. “He was an orphan. How could he leave them fatherless?”
“That makes it more likely, don’t you see?” Eleanor said, wondering at Harry’s slowness. He was usually so quick to see things. “Dad gave them a mother and provided her with the wherewithal to stick around and raise them. I don’t think he ever thought of himself as fatherless, only motherless. All his life, men have looked out for him. Reverend Falkes. Dean Rostow. Granddad.”
Harry thought about this. “But why should he leave us so much? We have so much. They have nothing.”
“Not nothing. No inheritance. Whoever paid the support cut it off when the younger son turned twenty-three. He launched them. That seems like something Dad might do.”
Harry looked sharply at his mother. For the first time in his life, he saw her as a person, and not his overly fond mother. He found himself growing angry.
“You didn’t know about them until they appeared, is that right?” he asked.
“The Wolinskis? No.”
“You’ve been thinking about this for a while, is that true?”
“Yes.”
“You believe her, don’t you?” He was the lawyer now, cross-examining a hostile witness.
“No,” she said. “Maybe. Vera knew your father. He’s the man in the photo.” Eleanor cleared her throat.
Harry sat quietly for a few moments.
“Dad was a bigamist. Our family life was a lie,” he said. He turned on his mother. “Two years, two children. You had to…” He stopped.
Harry put off calling Sam for ten days. He had been too rattled by the conversation with his mother to talk about it. All his life, he had trusted his instincts. The question he had asked Eleanor had come to him in a flash, a sudden, staggering insight, penetrating to the heart of the mystery that was his mother. He waited for the shock of recognition to pass between them.
Eleanor’s response was white anger. He saw it in her tight mouth and narrowed eyes, the dagger look, not seen since Gran had died.
“Another woman may have had two children with your father,” she said. “I don’t know more than that.” She cleared her throat.
Harry sat back in his chair, jolted by the unexpected response. Looking up at the ceiling to avoid her eyes, he replayed the scene in his head. She was not telling the truth, not the whole truth. How could she not have known? Why else would she be bringing up the Wolinskis now? He lowered his eyes to meet hers, then looked sideways, out the window. She wants to throttle me, he thought. She had never hit him, or any of them.
Eleanor reached in her bag for her wallet. “I’m thinking of setting up a trust for the Wolinski boys,” she said. “I’ve talked to the lawyers at Maynard. They haven’t figured out how I can do it without reopening the Surrogate’s case, but they will. They don’t approve. Not their business.”
She rose from the table. He turned his head to look at her. “You need to stop thinking you’re always the smartest person in the room,” she said. She put down a wad of twenties and left. Harry went home and took a Xanax.
When he finally talked to Sam, Harry stopped short of her parting remark.
Sam was enraged. “Do you know what you did? You accused Mom of covering up for Dad, of allowing herself to be humiliated by him.”
Harry felt his temper rise; he had been on a quest for the truth. “I didn’t make an accusation, I made an observation, an obvious observation.” He paused. “And she cleared her throat, twice.”
“What about Dad? Why aren’t you mad at him?” Sam asked.
“He’s dead,” Harry said. “I can’t tell him what I think.”
“What is it you think?” Sam said.
“He betrayed us,” Harry said.
“No,” Sam said. “If he betrayed anyone, it was our mother. How are you the injured party?”
“He didn’t care for us. He was never there,” Harry said.
“That’s a lie,” Sam said. “He was there, in his way, and he loved us, in his way.” Sam wanted to punch Harry, something he hadn’t done in thirty years. “And we all loved him.”
“An affair is one thing,” Harry said, “but another family? And not one son, but two. That’s unacceptable.”
“Where is this anger coming from?” Sam said. “Why weren’t you angry when the Wolinskis were suing us?”
“I thought they were cheats, frauds,” Harry said. “I didn’t believe them. I thought of it as a kind of joke. Ha-ha-ha, Dad’s secret life.”
“We still don’t know,” Sam said. Harry didn’t say anything.
“Oh, I get it,” Sam said. “Your masculine intuition.”
“It makes sense, if you’d let yourself think about it,” Harry said. “Why did she clean out the apartment and get rid of all Dad’s stuff, making it impossible to test their DNA? Why wasn’t she upset when they sued? Why does she want to pay them off? It’s all clear now. Mom made fools of us in Surrogate’s Court. She played a very deep game.”
“You can’t believe that,” Sam said. “Have you ever seen Mom upset?”
“Why isn’t anyone else angry, or at least upset? Dad was a bigamist.”
“More like Schr?dinger’s father,” Sam said. “With us and with Mrs. Wolinski at the same time.”
“Always clever, Sam,” Harry said. “No heart.”
“You’re all heart, Harry,” Sam said. “Have you discussed this with your wife? What does Lea say?” His question was met with silence. He waited.
“I haven’t said anything to Lea,” Harry said.
“Have you spoken to Mom since then?” Sam asked. Silence again.
“No,” Harry said.
“You’ve never gotten Mom right,” Sam said. “You’ve always gotten her wrong.”
“What if I am right?” Harry said.
“What if you’re right? Should Mom have left him when she found out?” Sam asked. “If you keep on, you’ll wreck the family. I won’t forgive you.”
“It has a life of its own,” Harry said.
“Snuff it out,” Sam said.
—
Harry couldn’t keep his counsel, even when it was in his interest. Will called him “the Blurter.” Jack was a blurter too, but his blurts seemed more in keeping with his genial egoism. He attached no value to secrets or confidences, no matter how painful or humiliating. “Who cares who knows?” Jack would say. He told his fourth-grade class that his grandmother had dropped dead sitting on the toilet. When Mrs. Mortimer, his teacher, reported this to Eleanor, Eleanor didn’t blink.
“I thought Jack’s third-grade teacher had spoken to you,” Eleanor said. “You should get ready for more of the same. He’s tactless, guileless. He says whatever comes into his head. I found it almost endearing when he was younger. There’s no cure yet. He doesn’t care what other people think except the musicians he admires.”