“Why now?”
Danny seemed not to have expected this. “My, uh, mother died recently,” she said. True though it was, her statement sounded concocted. I was momentarily embarrassed for her, then disconcerted by my own embarrassment, all of which I felt Judy observing.
“Ah,” she said. “So you’re doing the ‘roots’ thing.”
“I guess you could put it that way.”
Judy stood and walked to a window several yards away. Turning to face us, her body silhouetted, she looked suddenly imposing: someone not to be pushed around. She’d hold her own.
“You need to know something,” she said. “I’m not a fan of your mother’s. I only met her once, but I heard about her from Billy. Your mother had him exactly where she wanted him.”
Well, I thought, there it is. Judgment rendered, case closed.
Judy wasn’t finished, however. “My kid brother never knew how to protect his own interests. In high school the girls all liked his standoffish ways. He was a loner, and that made him romantic in their eyes. They guessed he was the smart kind of loner, but actually he was the dumbest kind. Just a gullible guy. An easy mark for someone like your mother, a few years later.”
She’d begun and ended her speech by addressing Danny, although at one point—when she’d said “and that made him romantic”—she’d glanced at me. Perhaps she’d thought that I, being older, would understand better than Danny could.
Danny was nodding equably, as though Judy had just stated something interesting but without much significance. “You’re right,” she said. “Eve did know what she wanted. She wanted a baby, and she didn’t want a husband. Just a sperm donor.” Danny’s speech quickened a little. Either the coffee or something else (impatience, anxiety?) was kicking in now. “What kind of an understanding did Eve and Billy have? Did they have a deal? Like, did my mother tell him he could have visiting rights? Or did she say all along there was no way she’d let him near the baby? Or was that left up in the air?”
Now it was Judy who seemed not to have anticipated such a line of questioning. Her eyes narrowed as though Danny had asked her to peer at something she found difficult to make out.
“He never spoke with me about any of that,” she said. After a pause she continued, her voice firm, in charge. “You want to know what Billy was like? He was a not-very-smart, not-very-exciting, average-looking guy without many friends. Very good with plants and flowers. I guess that’s how he and your mother met, at the greenhouse. . . . People generally ignored him or teased him. I was always trying to get him to stand up for himself. Especially with his—”
She halted as though she’d suddenly come upon a hole in the ground.
“With his . . . ?” Danny prodded.
Judy was not to be baited. “Billy made a huge mistake is all,” she said finally. “He signed your birth certificate thinking he was your father, but he wasn’t.”
“What?” Danny’s tone was incredulous. “What are you saying?”
Judy turned to face her. “Listen to me,” she said, her voice steely now. “You can believe whatever you want to believe, but Billy wasn’t anyone’s father. I don’t know who got your mother pregnant, but it wasn’t my brother.”
Danny’s surprise was rapidly curdling. I could see her heading toward anger. Judy saw it, too.
“Like I said, you can go ahead and believe whatever you like. But I’m certain my brother didn’t father you. He didn’t give Eve a usable donation”—Judy uttered the words in distaste—“and after you were born, he had nothing to do with you. Not because he didn’t want to—he did—but because your mother told him to leave her alone. She’d got what she needed from him. His signature. That’s all.”
She paused, made two fists, and put them together before her, side by side. “Eve broke him,” she finished, making a sudden snapping movement with her fists.
“I doubt that,” I said.
Both Danny and Judy gave me startled looks, as though they’d forgotten I could talk.
“Something else happened,” I gambled. “He couldn’t resist Eve because he had no resistance in him—for anything. You said as much yourself. Billy couldn’t protect his own interests.”
Judy flushed, then regained her hold. Moving to one of the kitchen’s counters, she opened a drawer and extracted an 8 x 10 photograph of a young man. The aqua-colored drapery that served as the backdrop for the portrait lent it a typical mid-Seventies look.
“Here,” Judy said, handing the picture to Danny. “Billy in high school, senior year. He met your mother four years later. Take a good look. Do you think you resemble this man in the least?”
I moved to Danny’s side. Billy Deveare was red complexioned, his face nearly round, forehead low, eyebrows thin, hair flaxen. He was smiling, but his smile communicated neither humor nor happiness. Though he clearly wasn’t tall, he appeared trim. Judy had described him accurately: this was a not-bad-looking, not-good-looking, unmemorable young man. His face expressed nothing of his inner life.
“It’s not just about physical resemblance,” said Danny. She spoke slowly, holding herself in check. “I don’t have to look like him to be his daughter, Judy. Legally, I am his daughter. And if I weren’t his biological daughter, why on earth would he sign my birth certificate? You make it sound like my mother could get your brother to do anything she wanted. What could she possibly have had on him that’d make him declare paternity when he wasn’t the father of her baby?”
Judy gave a little snort. “What did she have on him? How about the fact that he was nuts about her? He was in his early twenties, and here was this good-looking woman in her thirties, fixing her sights on him . . .”
“I’m sure she twisted his arm,” said Danny. “But Billy made his own choice. She pressured him, and he decided to help her conceive. When she got pregnant, he took responsibility for his part.”
“Nope,” said Judy. “Eve twisted his arm, but Billy’s sperm was useless.”
“Useless?”
Judy’s smile twisted with frustration. “You don’t know how he died.”
Danny shook her head. “No, not exactly,” she said uneasily. “Mom told me he died of a sudden infection.”
“That’s right. He underwent surgery and got an infection afterward. It was incredibly virulent, and it took him down in less than twenty-four hours. A total fluke.”
“Her mother died very fast, too,” I said, gesturing again toward Danny. “Eve got bacterial meningitis. Her blood was poisoned. It all happened in a few days.”
“So you understand what such surprises are like. Want to know what Billy’s surgery was for?”
I said nothing. “Yes,” answered Danny.
“It was for a blocked ejaculatory duct. He’d had a cyst for some time. It’d been diagnosed when he was fifteen, and the doctors had recommended surgery then. But our father was opposed; he said it’d clear up on its own. Billy went along with that.”
She stopped, her face suddenly, darkly alive. We were in her actual presence now, the stripped, exposed pith of her; she was no longer striving for composure. Her voice remained calm, however, as she continued: “Then he started having pain, and his doctor admitted him to the hospital. They ran a bunch of tests, and then they operated. An infection set in, and somehow went out of control . . . After Billy’s death, the surgeons said they’d found antisperm antibodies in his semen. Which meant he’d had some sort of autoimmune problem. Probably as a result of a chronic infection in the testes.”
She moved back to the kitchen stool, whose height put her eye to eye with Danny. “When I asked the doctors if my brother had ever had fertile sperm, they said no. At least not since he was fifteen, when they’d first found the cyst.”
Danny frowned in evident disbelief. Judy ran the tips of her fingers across the top of Billy’s photo. “So is this the man you can claim as your father?”
Danny went to the sink, rinsed her coffee mug, and poured herself a cup of water, which she chugged. She refilled
the mug. After draining it for the second time, she rinsed it out and placed it in the sink. As she turned to face Judy and me, her lips still wet, I saw she was primed: gloves off, prepared to fight.
“How would my mother know your brother was infertile,” she asked Judy slowly, “if he had no idea he was?”
“Your mother didn’t know. She didn’t need to—it didn’t matter to her one way or the other, because she didn’t intend to use Billy’s sperm in any case. She wanted his signature, not his sperm. I’ve told you about his infertility just so you’d understand you couldn’t have been his daughter. However Eve got pregnant, it wasn’t Billy’s doing.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this right. You’re telling me Eve asked Billy to give her a sperm sample, then substituted someone else’s instead? Or Eve was already pregnant?”
“I don’t see how she could already have been pregnant. They’d tested her.”
“So you’re saying she must’ve swapped the samples. And Billy signed the birth certificate, thinking I was his kid.”
“That’s right.”
Danny’s laughter was a short, loud grunt. “Leaving aside the technical, uh, improbabilities—”
“Oh, I investigated those myself. It wouldn’t have been tricky for Eve to do. The sperm she planned to use would have been banked somewhere; all she had to do was get her doctor to request that it be sent to him. Then she could just pick it up, take it to the hospital, and substitute it for Billy’s.”
“Wouldn’t Billy have been there, too?” I asked. “I mean, didn’t he have to donate his sperm at the hospital?”
“Sure, but so what? They’d go there together, and she’d take his donation to the ladies’ room and switch her little vial for his. Not difficult. No one would know.”
Danny picked up her backpack, which she’d dropped on the floor by her feet. “Do you have any idea,” she said, “how ridiculous this sounds?”
“Do you have any idea,” Judy retorted, “what absurd things people will do when they’re desperate?”
The backpack went over Danny’s shoulder. “I get the sense you thought very little of your brother.”
“I was referring to your mother,” said Judy. “As for my brother, he was a lost cause. He worshipped your mother, and before that he adored my father. Wouldn’t hear it from me—kept insisting it’d all work out, Daddy would come to respect him, Eve would come to love him—I had it all wrong, I was too hard on people . . .”
Tears glinted in her lashes, held in check; she would not cry now. She’d released whatever needed releasing. There’d be no more words.
“Let’s go,” I said to Danny. “Thank you, Judy.”
She gave a little nod. Danny and I walked in silence to the front door, which I closed carefully behind us.
DANNY SAID nothing during the half-hour drive back to our motel. We pulled into a parking space, and Danny switched off the Volvo’s engine. It was five o’clock. The late-afternoon sun cast long, low shadows; distorted car images bent their way across the gray macadam of the parking lot. No people were present.
“Hungry?” Danny asked after a moment. “We’ve barely eaten all day. I need a real meal.”
I thought of Judy’s daughter’s muffins, their sweet insubstantiality: our lunch. Was Judy preparing a meal for her husband right now, browning chicken pieces or shaping hamburgers, the kitchen radio on low volume? I couldn’t imagine her doing anything other than staring into space, recalling her dead brother and his putative daughter. And me—the person who’d no doubt encouraged this needless memory-churning encounter.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”
“Need anything here?”
“Nope.”
IN A few minutes we were installed in a booth in a pub called The Cheerful Swan and had ordered hamburgers and beers. Danny broached the visit first.
“So what do you think? Was she lying?”
“About what?”
She let out an annoyed tsk.
“I just want to answer the right question.”
“Do you think she was lying about Billy’s being infertile?”
“Impossible to say,” I replied, shrugging. “The story hangs together, but it could be a total fabrication. Obviously Judy doesn’t want to acknowledge you as a member of the family. Though she knows she can’t fight the fact legally. Not that there’s anything hanging over her. I mean, Billy’s dead—”
“Yeah, and this isn’t about legalities. Judy recognizes that her brother is my father, on paper. And she thinks he thought he was my father. In fact, at the time of my birth, she must’ve believed the same thing, too, right? Even though she’d met Mom and concluded she didn’t give a shit about Billy.”
“Well, Judy could’ve been wrong about that,” I said. “She might have read Eve wrong. Eve might’ve truly liked Billy.”
“Yeah.” Danny paused. “That’s one big unknown. And the other is, who might my father have been, if not Billy?”
“Are you inclined to believe Judy on that one?”
“No more than I’m inclined to disbelieve her.”
“I know what you mean.”
She leaned back to accommodate the large platters our waitress was placing before us: cheeseburgers enshrined by fries and pickles. “Man,” she said, rolling her eyes. She pushed a few french fries into a small hill on her plate, salt-and-ketchuped them, speared them, and dispatched them in one big bite. Then she locked me in her gaze. As she began to speak, I could hear her working to sound calm.
“I can’t shake this sense that you’re sitting on something, Cam. Since Mom died, you’ve been concerned about my feelings, but you’ve hardly said a thing about your own. So I have no idea what’s going on with you. Which isn’t what I’m used to. Normally you pony up.”
She paused to eat some hamburger. Her attention was fully on me, though she was doing a good job of making it look like her food was her sole preoccupation.
“Nice to see your appetite’s back,” I said.
Interrupting her assembly of her next mouthful of fries, she frowned at me. “Are we switching the subject, by any chance?”
“No,” I answered, “merely commenting. As for what you just said, I’m not surprised—I’m finding it hard to tell what I’m feeling, too. Other people are experiencing the same thing. It comes with the territory, I guess.”
“You’re very consistent, Cam, I’ll give you that. You keep end-running my questions.” Her tone sharpened. “‘Eve? Billy? Oh, well, I really wouldn’t know about any of that. Your mother and I just happened to grow up under the same roof . . .’”
Abruptly she pushed away her plate. Making a nest of her forearms, she lay her head down and turned her face to one side. We sat in silence. Finally, laying a hand lightly on her head, I asked, “Has it occurred to you I’ve been worried about you? And not just a little?”
She tilted her chin upward to glance at me. “Yes, Cam,” she replied. Then her head turned sideways, and she spoke into her crooked elbow. “I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“I’m not saying you were,” I broke in. “It’s just that your mother’s death has put me in a different position than it’s put anyone else.”
She lifted her head and sat up. “Did you love Eve?” she asked.
RETURNING HER frank stare, I felt it might be possible at last to answer her unguardedly. The impulse brought both relief and unease. What if it was simply a selfish need for unburdening? A wish for openness enacted at Danny’s expense?
“Just tell me,” she said. “Quit weighing everything, for Christ’s sake! What’s with you? Fuck, Cam!”
“Okay,” I said, wrapping both of my hands around one of hers, which was tightly fisted. “Okay.”
“So answer my question!” She pulled her hand out from under mine.
“Yes, I loved her.” I’d never said it aloud to anyone; certainly not to Eve. “But without knowing who she was. Which was scary.”
“How do you mean?”
>
“I mean . . . in the family apartment, everyone concealed themselves, hid what was going on inside. Especially Eve. That made me afraid of her in a way I wasn’t of anyone else.”
“Including Dan?”
I shook my head. “I never liked Dan much, but he didn’t scare me. Neither did Sarah. She and I weren’t—of course I felt affection for her, and gratitude, but there was a gap between us, right from the start. We never had a mother-daughter type of bond. Eve I loved. Eve, and my father . . . I was constantly afraid they’d cut themselves off from me.”
“How did Mom treat you when you were young?”
“Treat me?” I leaned back in my seat. “She knew I needed her company. She’d let me tag along, watch her do things. Like, I’d sit in her room with her while she got dressed or listened to music. Sometimes she’d groom me—you know, fix my hair, let me try on her makeup and perfume . . .”
On a shelf near the window of Eve’s bedroom sat a cluster of miniature glass bottles, unadorned vials with hand-lettered white labels. Although the vessels were plain, the fragrances they contained were complicated. Each one hinted at a strange admixture of pleasure and disturbance. Sitting on the floor, I’d watch Eve dab my father’s perfume everywhere: on her earlobes, the insides of her elbows, the nape of her neck, the backs of her knees, along her inner thighs, between her full breasts, across her navel. Her body astonished me. As yet I had none of my own, only (as I experienced it) parts: arms and legs, neck and stomach, head and feet, hands. Eve’s was whole, a bewitchment.
“Did she talk with you?”
The question tugged my memory in another direction. Now I was hearing the easy, cool authority of Eve’s voice. “Your mother was the only real talker in our household. Jordan never said much to anyone. Dan talked, but mainly with Sarah. Sarah’s voice was soft—you had to strain to hear her—and she never spoke at length. Eve was different. She had a strong voice, a good laugh.”
Thirty-three Swoons Page 17
