“And if I’m not your brother?” Hugh said.
“We think our father knew your mother,” Harry said. “We think there was some kind of relationship.”
“I don’t see what’s in it for Iain and me,” Hugh said.
“There’s family money,” Sam said.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t care. It’s too late. A father might have been useful when we were younger. But whoever took care of us financially—we called him Daddy Warbucks—took care of us well enough. Vera sent us to Catholic schools. Good places, Catholic schools. They make you read one Shakespeare play a year. They teach you to write sentences. Then we both went to the Coast Guard Academy. We love being on the water. We like our work. We like our lives.” Hugh stopped, then added shyly, “I’m getting married in June.” He laughed. “I think I’m the first person in the family in three generations to marry.”
“Congratulations,” Sam said.
“Money is useful,” Harry said.
“It was our mother’s idea to sue your father’s estate. We didn’t want to. She insisted. It was humiliating, I’ll say that outright. I find this conversation humiliating.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said. “We want to do right by you.”
“If your father fathered us, he did right enough by us. I have no interest in becoming officially the bastard son of a rich man. I’d rather be the bastard son of no one. Our mother might have had children with half a dozen pricks who wouldn’t have supported her or us. After Iain was born, she had her tubes tied.”
“I want to make sure you know what you’re giving up,” Sam said.
“If we got any money from your father’s estate, we’d give it to Vera. You want to do us good, start sending her money, like before.”
“We can do that,” Sam said.
“No, no, I’m just talking. Iain and I, we don’t want your money. Listen. You seem like decent guys. I liked your mother. She made me think your father, if he was our father, wasn’t a complete shit. You’ll pardon me. Our mother is something. Vera. The name means ‘truth.’ She wasn’t a bad mother; she may even love us in her way, but she couldn’t tell the truth if her life depended on it. Or mine. Or Iain’s. You five get all the money. I’m OK with that. Iain too. Men cycled through our house. ‘Uncles,’ we called them. One, Stefan, looked out for us when we were young. Vera almost married him. Three times. She couldn’t do it. She said she liked her freedom. There was talk that Vera was pregnant long before us, back in the mid-’50s, when she was seventeen. The story had many endings. Everyone told different versions, none agreeing. She got pregnant by a fireman who bought her a ring. He was a Baptist; she couldn’t marry him. She got pregnant by a young GI who was going off to Korea the next day; he died on a secret mission there. She married an old Pole, Koslowski, who beat her, forcing her to give birth prematurely. She was sent away to a home for wayward girls and gave the baby up for adoption. She miscarried. She had an abortion. The baby was stillborn. The baby died at three months, stopped breathing, crib death. She sold the baby to a rich Westchester family. The baby was a boy, the baby was a girl, the baby was two babies. Who knew what was true and what wasn’t? She liked being the heroine-slash-victim of everyone’s stories. It made her feel like a celebrity. She never cried over that baby, if there was a baby, not to us, and, I’ll give her this, she never cried for herself. She said our father was Scottish, a gentleman. But we’re not even sure we’re full brothers. You might test the wrong brother.” He stopped to make sure he’d made his point. “We never heard of Rupert Falkes growing up. The first time we heard his name, our grandmother showed us a picture from the New York Times, his obituary. I don’t know how she got it. It was months after he died. ‘Isn’t that Robert Fairchild?’ she said to Vera. Vera got a lawyer the next day.”
Hugh stood up and reached for his wallet. “We don’t need any more family, Iain and me. We’re fine the way we are.” He put down a twenty. “I’d like to treat you guys.”
Sam reported the conversation with Hugh to his mother. “Dad-like,” Eleanor said. “Dad never wanted to find his parents. He dreaded them finding him.”
“Did he know anything about them?” Sam said.
“When he was twenty, Father Falkes told him he had come from a ‘good’ family. He stood out from the other St. Pancras foundlings. He was plump, healthy, clean; his clothes were nicely made and unpatched.” Eleanor paused. “I’ve no doubt his looks and appearance attracted Father Falkes’s interest and attachment, and Father Falkes only meant to be kind, but the story hardened Dad against his parents. He could have understood better a poor family abandoning a child.”
“What are you going to do?” Sam asked. Eleanor said nothing.
“Are you still going to give them money?”
“Stop it, Sam,” she said. “He was my husband.”
—
Eleanor decided to fire Maynard, Tandy. They kept throwing up roadblocks to her plan to give money to the Wolinskis and then blaming the roadblocks when they did nothing. Jack used to do that as a small boy. He would never do anything he didn’t want to do if there was any way of not doing it. In the early years, until he became fully himself, self-interest looked a lot like self-sabotage. When he was nine, he tore up a homework assignment and then told his mother he couldn’t do the work because the assignment was torn up. Eleanor surveyed the crime scene.
“You’ll have to tape it together if you want to go to your trumpet lesson on Tuesday,” she said.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said. “It was a mistake.”
“Of course,” she said, “but you still need to tape it together.”
“It will take too long, it’s in too many pieces,” he said.
“Better get to work then,” she said.
Jack looked down at the floor, covered with bits of torn paper. He started to cry. Eleanor handed him a tissue. “The tape’s on my desk,” she said.
By the time he was thirteen, Jack had stopped tearing up his homework assignments. He did what he wanted to do, to hell with everyone and everything else. Eleanor held out stoutly against his iron will, buckling no more than half the time. He’d steal from her, if he needed to, to pay his trumpet teacher. It was addict’s behavior but admirable, she knew, in its way. “It’s my life,” he told her.