Maynard’s lawyers swung into action, accusing the Wolinskis of fraud and threatening to countersue. They were ferocious in their attack, bombarding the petitioners with discovery requests for interrogatories, depositions, mental examinations, tangible evidence. Eleanor began to feel sorry for Vera. She was so dogged in her pursuit of what she considered her sons’ rightful inheritance. The young men were ready to withdraw. They found the experience humiliating. It was plain they were only doing it for their mother. Rupert’s sons would feel that way, Eleanor thought.
Eleanor’s sons were at first astonished, then bemused, then upset. They couldn’t believe their father could have had a mistress and a second family. He was so correct, so reserved, so devoted to them all. The money wasn’t an issue for them. They all had Phipps trust funds—Eleanor’s father had invested in McDonald’s too—and whether they got one-fifth or one-seventh of their father’s estate didn’t matter to any of them; there was enough money for a slew of heirs. The blow was to the family amour propre, their idea of the five brothers. They saw it too as a betrayal of their mother, except for Jack, who thought it was cool. “Who knew Dad was a Romeo?” Will punched him hard in the arm. “What was that for?” Jack said. “What did I say wrong?” Harry saw a resemblance to his father in the older boy, in his blondness and high coloring. Sam didn’t know what to think. “Could they be his?” he asked Harry. “I don’t know,” his older brother said. “They’re more like him than any of us. We’re a gaggle of mama’s boys.” He paused. “Maybe we’re not his, and they are. Kidding. Sort of.”
—
Vera asked for DNA testing. “Just give us a piece of his clothing, a sweater that hasn’t been cleaned, a coat he wore, and we’ll prove it,” Vera said. The Maynard lawyers were outraged the way only a Wall Street firm can be. There was no justification at all for this request, they argued. There was not one iota of proof of a relationship. Eleanor asked her oldest: “Should we give them some money? I feel like a bully, even though they could be complete frauds.”
“I’m not suggesting we oblige them,” Harry said, “but just out of curiosity: is there anything of Dad’s left to test?” He knew the answer. He had watched his mother, with awe and dismay, as she had obliterated all physical traces of his father from the apartment.
Eleanor shook her head.
The Surrogate denied the request. “I will not have the Falkeses’ apartment turned into a crime scene.”
Vera next asked for one of the sons to provide DNA.
The Maynard lawyers were dead against it, arguing once again with ringing indignation that there was no evidence, not one jot, to justify the request. Harry, the criminal lawyer, had an additional reason to turn them down—“You don’t want that information in the wrong hands. And there are no right hands”—but he held off a decision, asking Sam to do some research on the likelihood of a definitive result. A colleague at the hospital provided a short answer: “Without your father’s DNA, the results would be inconclusive: a matching Y-chromosome test would establish if the young men were half-siblings of the brother tested, but it would not establish your father’s paternity, only that of a ‘common ancestor.’?” Jack—“Always Jack,” Will said—had been willing to give “bodily fluids” for a DNA test. “What the hell,” he’d said, “they sound like nice kids”—but he went along with his brothers when they insisted it would be insulting to their mother and the memory of their father to undergo a test that might impugn the integrity of their parents’ marriage.
“You realize, of course,” Sam said to Harry, “that none of us can prove that Dad was our biological dad.”
“Ah, the vexing problem of paternity,” Harry said, as if he were teaching a class. “It’s interesting what science has wrought.” Harry paused to collect his thoughts; Sam without sighing settled in for the tutorial. “It used to be that maternity was never in question and paternity always was.” Harry looked to see that Sam was listening. “Now paternity can be settled with DNA testing, if the dad is around, but maternity can’t. With mothers, DNA doesn’t get you to second base. Who’s the ‘real’ mother: the woman who provides the egg, the woman who gives birth, the woman who paid for the egg and ‘hired’ the surrogate, the wife of the sperm donor? Some very nice issues in family law.”
“God,” Sam said, “you lawyers are ruthless. These are people’s lives. I’ll bet DNA testing has blown a lot of marriages apart.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know if your children weren’t yours?” Harry asked.
“No, I wouldn’t,” Sam said. “Why would I want to break my heart? They’re here; they’re mine.”
“You’re not a father,” Harry said, “and you probably won’t be. You might think differently if you had children.”
The Surrogate denied the request: “Without the father’s DNA, there can be no conclusive results.”
Vera came back a third time, asking for Rupert’s blood type. It was a straw-grasp, a last gasp.
Harry and Sam took their mother to lunch. They talked genetics with her. Sam told her that a blood test might rule out Rupert as a father, but it could never establish paternity. Harry’s advice was to give it to them. “If we let them know his blood type, and there’s no possibility of a match, we might be able to get rid of them, once and for all. Anyway, hundreds of people already have access to that information.” Rupert, Eleanor, and the boys were all type O.
The Wolinskis gave a report of their blood types. Vera’s was A, Hugh was O, Iain was A. Against the advice of the Maynard lawyers, Harry, with his mother’s permission, released a medical report to the Wolinskis with his father’s blood type.
Vera asked the family doctor to analyze the results. He told her what any tenth-grade biology text would have told them: the results were inconclusive. At the next hearing, Vera turned on Eleanor. “You’ve cheated us,” she said. “Look at my boys. Anyone can see the resemblance. He’s their father.” Her sons folded her into their arms and took her home. On April 25, 2002, the Surrogate dismissed the Wolinskis’ petition, eighteen months after it was filed, two years after Rupert’s death. Mourning can resume, Eleanor thought.
—
Eleanor couldn’t put the Wolinskis out of her mind. She brought the subject up with Harry two months later over lunch at Café Luxembourg.
“I feel I should do something for them,” she said to him. “What do you think?”
“Do you know something?” he asked. “Something you’re not telling us?”
“I don’t know if your father is their father, if that’s your question, but I think there was some link between him and Vera Wolinski.” She paused. “I can’t figure it out.”
Harry looked more alert. “Is that why you stripped the apartment?” he asked. It was still a raw subject for all the boys, though they hadn’t been altogether surprised. With the Phippses, mourning was purging.
“No,” Eleanor replied, a hint of irritation in her voice. “I didn’t know about them.”
“Why weren’t they in the will?” Harry asked. “Wouldn’t Dad have looked out for them in some way if he had wanted to? A trust, a permanent Cayman account? He’d have known how.”
“Yes, yes, if he had wanted to, but he didn’t.” She stopped.