The Sweeney Sisters

by Lian Dolan

  After a long shower, Serena spent an hour reading all the social media tributes on #WilliamSweeney, everyone from the president, who had awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to noted writers and editors recalling their first encounter with Sweeney’s work, to college kids discovering him for the first time. She had to drag herself away from the computer to get lunch in the village—a turkey sandwich, oatmeal cookie, and a Diet Coke, her usual. After a walk down to the harbor and back, Serena’s head was clearer, her mind sharper. It was a strange sensation, walking through town now, past the houses of family friends—the Wyndhams, the Sills, the Vankirks—knowing that she’d grown up here with half an identity and was now whole. It mattered to her. Would it matter to anyone else?

  She looked around the hotel bar for a familiar face, but Southport had changed some since her childhood. It wasn’t the type of people attracted to the town who had changed—traditional, well-educated, bound to both commuting into New York City but preferring life in the suburbs—but the actual people. Many of Serena’s parents’ generation had sold their big waterfront homes and moved to tasteful condos or warmer climates. As Serena peered around the bar, she thought, The faces are different, but the fashion’s the same. Long live the navy-blue blazer on both men and women. She flagged down the bartender to order a bowl of chowder. That would put her back in business, she thought. But what business exactly?

  Since discovering her connection to the Sweeney family six months ago, Serena had questioned about 98 percent of the decisions she’d made in her life, including the one to redeem the DNA testing gift certificate that she’d won at the office holiday party. That night was a high point for Straight Up. The launch had gone well, the reviews were favorable, the money was flowing in a way that younger journalists weren’t accustomed to and seasoned journalists hadn’t experienced in a while. “It’s like the old days, when people actually read newspapers,” one veteran reporter had said, ironically toasting their good fortune to land at Straight Up, the next hot website, at the right time.

  The journalists there were committed to speaking truth to power across the spectrum—from politics to business to sports to the creative arts. They were a smart, connected bunch with edge. The site had been funded by an anonymous source, but it was an open secret that biotech golden girl Katie McFarland held the purse strings; that is, until her miracle medical testing method was proven to be a fraud, and now she was under federal indictment. Unless Straight Up found a buyer, the site would be gone by Labor Day and all the journalists who believed in the mission and had left their steady gigs at more established outlets would be out of work, including Serena.

  But that night, at the party at the company HQ in DC’s trendy Shaw neighborhood, all was right in Serena’s world. The new job was a dream, the man she’d been seeing for a few months was someone she really liked and who seemed to really like her in return, even though he was in the middle of a messy divorce. Plus, she’d finally found a decent hairdresser in DC who truly understood long layers, tough to find in the home of the conservative blunt cut. When she won the raffle prize, her editor Jonah, a brilliant journalist from Brooklyn who’d risen from the City College of New York to run a respected news organization, had joked that Serena would finally have proof she was really 100 percent WASP. Serena had laughed a bit too loud and too long, because there were mojitos involved and she’d had a crush on Jonah since they’d worked together at the Post.

  Serena’s pedigree did seem unimpeachable. She was the only child of Mitchell and Rebecca “Birdie” Tucker, formerly of Southport, Connecticut, now of Hobe Sound, Florida. Her father, a Williams man, owned a small insurance empire that his grandfather had started at the turn of the twentieth century, and her mother, Birdie, a Vassar girl, chaired the board of the venerated Pequot Library and had won the club championships in tennis for most of the 1980s and ’90s, her dominant run stopped only by a rotator cuff injury that even Tommy John surgery couldn’t fix. Mitchell collected electric trains and had turned their attic into his sanctuary, constructing a massive Alpine Village, complete with tracks, Swiss chalets, and cows grazing in meadows. Birdie was more than happy to never bother him when he was playing with his trains. Mitchell and Birdie interacted when necessary and with extreme politeness, making them the perfect couple.

  Serena did as she was told without much fuss. Valedictorian at Green Farms Academy, a comp lit major at Vassar, masters at Columbia School of Journalism. She played tennis and vacationed in Nantucket the first two weeks of August every summer without any pushback, even though it could be deadly boring with the same people doing the same things every year. Serena’s mother always referred to her as “a serious girl,” probably because she spent more time listening to NPR and watching the news than chasing down the best party or the cutest guy. She’d never be social enough for her mother, who was disappointed Serena didn’t want to be a debutante, opting to do a study abroad program in Prague instead.

  After grad school, Serena was primed for a life as a network morning show producer, the sort of idealized New York City rom-com career that her mother, a former associate producer at NBC News, had envisioned for herself but abandoned after marriage and motherhood. Birdie was determined that her daughter would have the career she didn’t, orchestrating an entrée through a contact. Her college roommate’s daughter was a producer at the Today show and Birdie arranged a dinner in the city for the two girls, convinced Serena would make an impression that would set her up for a life that included a tasteful Chelsea loft during the week and summer weekends in Southport. After working for a few years and securing a producer spot, Serena would be ready for a husband and child, all while maintaining a solid forehand and enviable fitness. Birdie could see her daughter’s future and it was respectable.

  But Serena surprised her parents by taking a less glamorous job in DC after grad school as a beat reporter. Bitten by the political bug in college and fascinated by the changing global landscape post-9/11, Serena settled in at the Washington Post as a national security reporter covering the Pentagon with the intent to inform and educate the American public, causing Birdie to tell anyone who asked, “She’s working for that liberal rag. She won’t last six months.” Fifteen years later, Serena had carved out a career as a solid journalist, spending several years at the Hague bureau, reporting on international justice, before jumping to Slate, where she had reported on the State Department. The Washington scene suited Serena, somehow both global and clubby at the same time. She never felt out of her comfort zone.

  At Straight Up, she focused on the intersection of diplomacy, national security, and human rights, a beat that was both professionally ambitious and personally satisfying. She’d become a regular on some political podcasts, providing a measured, well-reported point of view to counter-balance the hosts’ outrage.

  For Birdie, who had doubted that writing for a website was a legitimate career move, the podcast appearances sealed her impression that Serena’s career had stalled mid-level. (As Birdie told her bridge club, “She used to be a journalist, but now she’s what they call a blogger and a podcaster. All that education . . .”) Serena’s personal life had disappointed her mother almost more than her professional life.

  For eight years, as she was building her career, Serena lived with another reporter named Ben Cohen in a renovated Georgetown row house near Dumbarton Oaks that she bought thanks to the trust fund her paternal grandmother had set up for her. (It was one thing to work as a journalist; it was another thing to live like one. Serena kept her private life very private from most of her colleagues, but it involved quality cashmere, French wine, and top-tier vacations, plus board positions on several charities normally out of reach for members of the press.) With Ben, it was no ring, no commitment, no kids, not even a cat, and Serena was fine with the arrangement. Ben made her laugh and didn’t put any pressure on Serena to return the favor. Ben liked Serena for her integrity and her focus, not exactly the sort of qualities that might stand out in an
OkCupid profile. In short, Serena felt secure with Ben. They talked about work and Washington and work again, eating takeout from neighborhood restaurants and watching CNN and Frontline.

  Ben being Jewish wasn’t exactly a big hit in the Tucker family, so it was hard to imagine a scenario that ended with a tasteful family wedding in the Tucker backyard under a green-and-white-striped tent with a Lester Lanin band playing. Still, Birdie managed to be on her best behavior the few times Ben came to Southport for the weekend, and her father, now retired, had basically checked out of any conversation that didn’t involve trains, insurance, or his hero George Will, so his input was minimum. Some of the weekends felt like months.

  When Ben moved out, shocking Serena by saying that it was time he found a nice Jewish girl he could marry and start a family with, she was thirty-five. She honestly thought he was kidding as he packed up his record collection, which was heavy on jazz and light on anything hummable, but a trip home to Scarsdale for his grandmother’s ninetieth birthday had convinced Ben that he needed to get serious about his future with a woman who was less blond, more nurturing. “I think I need someone who is . . . more familiar with my background,” Ben explained, without making eye contact once with Serena. His wedding announcement was in the New York Times a year later, to a woman named Tamar, twenty-seven, who was the director of fundraising at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC and a Duke graduate. (According to the announcement, they had met in a Jewish Singles Ski Club, which infuriated Serena because for years she had tried to get Ben to ski out west with her and he had always refused, saying, “My people are doctors, not skiers.”)

  “Well, you’re a done deal now,” her mother pronounced that Thanksgiving, after a few glasses of wine. She told Serena that they were selling the house in Southport and moving to Florida full time, adding, “Why stay in the Northeast if there will be no grandchildren?” It was a harsh assessment, even for her mother, who specialized in cutting rebukes. Serena’s mother hadn’t seemed to enjoy motherhood that much; she was surprised that Birdie wanted grandchildren at all. When Serena commented as much, Birdie responded, “It’s what’s expected. What else are we to do for the next ten years?”

  Serena had no reply.

  She was relieved, not that Ben was gone, but that her parents would be. She needed space. In the immediate aftermath of Ben’s wedding announcement, she applied to and was accepted at Stanford for a Knight Journalism Fellowship. The year in Palo Alto surrounded by smart strangers who knew nothing of Ben or her parents served as the perfect palate cleanser for her personal life and a boost to her professional life. The job at Straight Up was a leap for her on all levels, and she took it with confidence when she returned to DC. She wasn’t a done deal, she knew that.

  The DNA test kit was sitting there on her mantel. It was New Year’s Eve and, in the two weeks since the office party, she’d discovered that Dean, the great guy she’d met in a bar at Reagan Airport one foggy night, was actually happily married and not in the middle of a messy divorce as he’d said. Feeling down, she’d waved off every invitation from her single colleagues to attend overpriced prix fixe dinners at restaurants and all the invitations to small get-togethers hosted by her married-with-children friends who were going to ring in the New Year at nine, instead of midnight, a phenomenon Serena thought was too precious to indulge. She was leaving for an obligatory three days in Hobe Sound the next morning. The DNA kit seemed like a positive, slightly provocative way to start the new year. Maybe she’d get a story out of it, at least, a personal essay she would submit to the Times or a magazine.

  Six weeks later, when the email arrived in Serena’s inbox about her possible genetic matches, she actually laughed at the subject line: Want to meet more Tuckers? They’re out there. No thanks, she didn’t want to meet any more Tuckers. Her parents were enough Tuckers in her life, she thought. When she clicked the link and spotted that she had matched with a Sweeney from Southport, she sat frozen at her desk, hoping her colleagues didn’t notice. Almost paralyzed, like she’d been shot with a tranquilizer dart. As the feeling returned to her body, it spread like a warm wave of relief. Serena had felt like a fake inside her own skin for as long as she could remember. Even though she had inherited her mother’s coloring and took after her father in terms of disposition, she felt disconnected from Birdie and Mitchell Tucker in a way she couldn’t describe until now. She grabbed her stuff and fled the office, needing to walk off the chaos surging through her veins.

  If Serena had a husband or a tight group of girlfriends, she would have texted them: WTF, William Sweeney is my father. But she had no one close enough to share her monumental secret, so she whispered it to herself as she walked in a frantic pace to the National Mall to work out the panic in her head.

  The fact that she was William Sweeney’s daughter and not Mitchell Tucker’s daughter explained so much to her. The loneliness of her childhood, the restlessness of her college years, and the joy she found in a newsroom, being part of a team working to uncover the truth. When Serena discovered writing during high school, she felt like she’d unlocked a secret door that her parents didn’t even try to understand. (“If I were you, I’d take a few accounting classes along with all the literature,” Mitch Tucker had warned as they dropped her off at Vassar.) Now writing, her secret door, connected her to William Sweeney, the William Sweeney.

  As Serena walked to the Washington Monument and back to the Lincoln Memorial, she tried to come to grips with the revelations: that her mother had had an affair, that her parents had lied to her for decades, that maybe her father had no idea that Serena wasn’t his, that she had an entire family out there who didn’t know she existed. And what if the results couldn’t be trusted? Then again, what were the chances that her neighbor’s name from Southport would pop up? Serena had only used her Washington, DC, address. The company would never have known that she’d been neighbors with the Sweeneys. Serena decided to approach this revelation like she would any story—do the research, formulate the questions, track down the key interviews, and then write the story as truthfully as possible.

  For the next two months, Serena worked at Straight Up by day and at night at home on what she started to call Project Prodigal. Once she satisfied her skepticism that the DNA test might be bogus (it wasn’t), she read everything she could by and about Bill Sweeney, including his memoir My Maeve, which gave her insight into what was really happening on Willow Lane during the years when the gardens went untended and the nursing care came around the clock. It was clear from the title and the text that William Sweeney had little idea about what Liza, Maggie, and Tricia were going through during and after their mother’s death. She felt sorry for them, for her sisters.

  She searched for any reference, in his fiction or memoir, to Birdie Tucker, finding only one reference in Million Zillion, his least successful novel, published in 1998, that a Kirkus review described as “a wan Wall Street satire that recycles the cynicism of Bitter Fruit without any of the humanity.” (Bill Sweeney wouldn’t write another book for seven years after the lackluster reception and sales.) In Million Zillion, the protagonist, a corrupt but dynamic banker who turns himself in to the FBI, is married to a character named Wren, described as “an Amazonian blonde, a slender cypher who exists on gin and tonics and vitriol and the belief that appearances must be maintained at all costs.” Ultimately, Wren abandons her sexy jailbird husband for a quiet and serene life on the Maine coast remarried to an accountant. Serena recognized Wren was Birdie Tucker. Brutal. He sounds like a jilted lover, she thought, finding it impossible to believe that anyone of William Sweeney’s stature had ever felt that way about Birdie Tucker, Club Champion.

  Serena weighed whether the conversation with her mother should be in person or over the phone. The only benefit to an in-person confrontation, and she was sure it would be a confrontation, was to have the satisfaction of having the upper hand, if even for an instant, but having to make conversation with her father afterward negated any upside. Instead
, she took the approach she often used with interview subjects she needed for background, an email first to set up a time including only vague information about the intention of the conversation, followed by a taped phone call on the record. Serena found this softened up potential subjects, so when she came at them with specifics, they caved quickly, not expecting the directness. She needed her mother to be honest and quick, because the last thing she wanted was details. Serena and her mother didn’t have that kind of relationship and they never would.

  After months of research and theories and daydreams of what her life might have been like had she known the truth for thirty-eight years instead of only the last five months, the conversation with her mother was short and simple, without apology or surprise. When the day arrived to make the call, Serena, who had interviewed dictators and drug lords, was terrified of her mother, scared to say the words out loud and make the accusation. But she found her voice: “I did a DNA test. It appears that Mitchell Tucker is not my biological father. Does that surprise you?”

  It was like Birdie had been waiting for the moment; her voice was measured and calm. “I’ve come to believe that William Sweeney is your father. I never had any other children, so I assumed that your father couldn’t. But I never knew for sure until now and I’ve never told anyone. Including your father. Mitchell. Dad.” Then, Birdie added, “It wasn’t my finest moment, Serena, and I’d appreciate it if we kept this between us. But, of course, that’s up to you. I understand that you can do what you wish with the information.”