Undone

by John Colapinto

  “With this new Bannister, just to shake things up, I’d like to try something new,” he said. “I’m thinking of writing alternate chapters from the perspective of the bad guy.” Every previous Bannister had been written solely from the blind detective’s point of view.

  Pauline blinked, to signal that she liked the sound of this.

  “I’m thinking of making him really bad,” he continued. “A total sociopath. Let’s face it, the bad guys are always more interesting—at least in fiction. Give me Iago over Othello any day.”

  As he spoke, he absently dug around in the pile of mail in front of him, dislodging a lingerie catalog that slid into view on the tabletop. It featured, on its cover, a trio of nearly naked models, all bronzed, blemish-free skin and cascading locks. Demonstrating the latest in lacy bras and thongs, they looked boldly out at him with just a hint of a smile and an expression of dulcet invitation. He felt an involuntary jolt through his nervous system, a reaction wholly divorced from his rational mind. Almost simultaneously, he felt a spasm of regretful frustration, of self-castigation, at this bodily reflex—a reminder of that one aspect of his marriage missing ever since the stroke. A reminder that, for all the love, fellow feeling, regard, respect and closeness that he still shared with Pauline, gone was that central element: the physical.

  He pushed the catalog under the pile, pushed it from his mind.

  “Dad!” Maddy’s voice reached him from her bedroom down the hall. “I’m ready! Bring Mom!”

  “Coming,” he called.

  When Jasper’s father built the house, forty years ago, he did so with the foresight typical of a man obsessed with long-range planning, instructing the architect to put all the rooms on a single story, in anticipation of the day (decades off, it was hoped and assumed) when he and Jasper’s mother would be too old to manage stairs. Thus Jasper had been able to bring Pauline home from the hospital to an already wheelchair-accessible house.

  He maneuvered Pauline’s wheelchair into the bedroom and parked it by the foot of the bed. Maddy was already under the covers. He kissed the child’s forehead and whispered, “See you in half an hour.” He turned off the bedside light, tiptoed over to Pauline and kissed her cheek. She blinked in response, and he slipped out.

  3

  Back in the kitchen, he stood over the pile of mail on the table and struggled with himself. Perhaps it would be best after all if he were simply to surrender to biology, grab the cursed catalog and slink off to the bathroom to deal with what was becoming an increasingly disruptive urge. He reached under the pile and in doing so uncovered the mystery envelope—the one he’d signed for. Perhaps it contained some information (an offer, an invitation) that would provide a distraction from the silly lust stirred in him by those Photoshopped models. Or at least briefly delay the inevitable.

  The return address read: “Department of Children and Families, Office of Child Support, Newport, Vermont.” An appeal for a donation, he assumed. He almost put it aside for later consideration, but the letter’s origin in Vermont sparked his curiosity. He had spent a summer teaching tennis there, in the lakeside town of New Halcyon, almost twenty years ago, after graduating with his BA from Columbia and before starting his master’s at Yale. That was four years before he met Pauline and six months before his parents’ deaths. He had felt an affinity for the state ever since, a sentimental attachment that derived from his sense of Vermont as belonging to a prelapsarian world, a time when his family was still intact and he was, as yet, innocent of tragedy.

  Standing there, envelope in hand, he was visited by a visual memory of New Halcyon, of undulating green hills and narrow, blue Lake Sylvan, at whose northern tip was clustered the handful of buildings (general store, post office, diner) that made up the town. On the eastern shore was the country club, with its big, barnlike main building, where Jasper would, between tennis lessons, play the battered piano or rig up an informal round-robin ping-pong tournament for the kids. Some hundred yards down the beach were the two red clay courts bounded by windbreak cedar hedges, where he patiently ladled balls to the six- and seven- and eight-year-olds ranged along the service line; and behind the courts, the drooping stand of weeping willows sprouting from a secluded section of beach where, on his final night in New Halcyon, Jasper had allowed himself to be dragged by the pretty and flirtatious kitchen girl, Holly, whose advances he had successfully parried all summer. (At just eighteen, she had seemed too young for an almost twenty-three-year-old graduate student like himself; besides which, he did not believe in romantic entanglements with coworkers.)

  This last reminiscence formed his only discordant memory of New Halcyon. For he had permitted things to go further than intended with Holly, a bout of innocent kissing and caresses devolving, under the combined impetus of the broken moonlight on the water, the two or three glasses of wine he had drunk and the melancholy sense of summer coming to an end, into a session of increasingly fierce and passionate making-out. Their grapplings had culminated in a muddled moment of arrested intercourse when Holly, after zipping open his fly and pulling off her underwear, clambered up his body, arms around his neck, legs around his waist, and briefly impaled herself upon him. He still wondered at the presence of mind that had compelled him almost immediately to withdraw, to fight free of her octopus embrace long before the threat of climax. Embarrassed, he had hastened back to the clubhouse, saying that he had to dispense the tennis trophies. She failed to return to the party, and he left early the next morning for Yale and never saw or spoke to her again. But he had always felt an obscure, lingering sense of shame over the episode—as if there had been something ungallant in his quick retreat from the beach, where he had left her searching in the sand, with a sweeping, balletically pointed toe, for the flat-soled, strappy silver sandals that had fallen off during their exertions.

  He shook off the memory, and absentmindedly drew his thumb under the envelope’s top flap. Inside were half a dozen pages held together at one corner by a small bulldog clip. The top sheet carried yesterday’s date (April 30, 2007). In place of a salutation were the meaningless words, “In re: Paternity.” Below were a few curt sentences:

  Be advised: you have been named as defendant in a parentage complaint involving the daughter of Holly Elizabeth Dwight (deceased). Please consult the attached summons and accompanying documentation and reply to the Office of Child Support of Vermont within twenty days of receipt. If you have questions for this department, please contact Mr. Nathan Stubbs, Family Service Division Officer. [A phone number followed.]

  He had to read the letter two or three times before its meaning sunk in. When it did, he was deeply shocked. Not by the paternity claim—he had not seen Holly in—what?—almost twenty years. That he could be the father of any baby of hers was patently ridiculous, the result of some bureaucratic snafu, some misunderstanding that he could quickly clear up with this (he looked again at the letter), this Nathan Stubbs. What had shaken him was to learn that Holly was dead. She would have been only (he did some quick mental arithmetic) thirty-eight—no, thirty-six years old. So young. And to have left behind an infant child!

  He flipped through the attached pages—various forms snarled with legalese and an affidavit by someone identified only as “CD.” He did not bother to read the attachments. Eager to clear up the misunderstanding without delay, he carried the complaint with him down the hallway to his office, treading lightly past Maddy’s room so as not to wake her. He eased closed his office door, went to the desk and punched in the number at the bottom of the letter. When he got Stubbs on the line, Jasper explained that the summons had been sent to him in error: he had not seen Holly in almost two decades, and it was thus impossible for him to be the father of her baby. But he was curious to know how poor Holly had died. Could Mr. Stubbs share any details?

  “Ms. Dwight died in an automobile accident,” the man said, with just enough waspish haughtiness to communicate his impatience at having to dispense this detail. “The child in question, however, is n
ot a baby,” he went on. “We have a female minor making the claim of paternity. A seventeen-year-old girl.”

  Jasper, who had been pacing the carpet in front of his desk, stopped dead. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  The man went on: “When interviewed by Family Services, the child informed us that her mother on several occasions told her that her father was Jasper Ulrickson, author, residing in Clay Cross, Connecticut. Hence your receiving a summons from this office. If you do not dispute the claim, then—”

  “Hold on,” Jasper said, finally finding his tongue. “You’re saying this child is seventeen?”

  He heard clicking computer keys on the other end of the line. Then Stubbs said, “Date of birth is thirty-first May, 1989, which would make her seventeen. End of the month she turns eighteen. That information was supplied in the documents sent to you.”

  Jasper’s mind was racing now as he was plunged back into that distant summer, that moment at the Labor Day dance with Holly. He had pulled out of her almost immediately, long before orgasm—although he knew that in rare instances even so short a contact could result in pregnancy. But could he have been so unlucky?

  He did a rapid calculation, counting forward nine months from that Labor Day of 1988. If he had made her pregnant, she would have had the baby at the end of May 1989. The child’s precise birthday!

  He groped with one hand, like a sightless person—like his blind Geoffrey Bannister—for the back of his office chair, to steady himself. He pulled out the chair and lowered himself into it.

  “Mr. Ulrickson?” said a voice in his ear. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” Jasper managed to say. He had forgotten that he was on the phone.

  “You will see, in the documents, a Voluntary Acknowledgment of Paternity Form. If you do not dispute the claim, please fill that out and return it to the Department of Children and Families within twenty days.”

  Holding the phone between his shoulder and ear, Jasper paged through the documents and found the form. Below a block of legal language was a place for him to sign, pledging that the child was his. Despite the clinching evidence of the dates, and a certain doomful certainty that had established itself in his heart, he knew that he could not sign the form without first speaking to a lawyer, and said so.

  “If you are disputing the claim,” Stubbs resumed, in the robotic tones of someone reciting a familiar speech, “please have your lawyer contact this office so that we may arrange for a DNA test.” He asked if Jasper had any questions. Jasper had nothing but questions yet somehow could bring none of them to mind right then. “Well, feel free to call back,” Stubbs said. He rang off.

  Jasper holstered the receiver and rested his elbows on the desk. He rubbed his face for almost a full minute. Could this be a dream? He actually pinched at the skin on his forehead to check that he was truly awake. Then, with trembling fingers, he took up the complaint. He leafed through to a page labeled “Affidavit of CD.” This, he now realized, was the sworn statement of his alleged daughter. The D must be for Dwight. But what did the C stand for? Christine? Cynthia? Catherine? He knew, from a Bannister mystery he had written about a child kidnapping, that minors were identified, in court documents, by initials, to preserve their anonymity—but still, it struck him as strange beyond reckoning that he did not know what his alleged child’s given name was.

  The affidavit read:

  When I was small, my mother always said that my father was Hughie Soames, manager of Soames’s Bait and Tackle, and that he died when I was two years old. But when I was about eleven, she admitted that my real dad might be a man named Jasper Ulrickson, a writer in Connecticut. They met when they were working at the New Halcyon Country Club, nine months before I was born. My mother worked in the kitchen and Jasper Ulrickson was the tennis pro. I said that she should try to find out for sure if he was my dad, because then he could help to pay child support. (Even though my mom worked two jobs, we were always short.) My mother said no, she didn’t want to tell anyone and she didn’t want me to contact him. She had had some run-ins with the law, mostly DUIs and one for shoplifting, and some bill payment problems, and she said that the state would take me away and put me with my father because he was rich, and that was not fair, because she had done everything to raise me. So I did not tell anyone. But when my mother died, I was frightened. I did not want to go into foster care and be with strangers. And that is why I could not keep the secret any longer, and why I have come forward to try to see if Mr. Ulrickson is my father.

  Below were her initials in a looping, girlish hand: CD.

  Jasper had always had an acute sense of his good fortune and privilege, had understood that he belonged to a tiny minority free from the material concerns that plagued most of humanity. To assuage his sense of inequity—his guilt—he had donated liberally to charities, volunteered at homeless shelters, dispensed medicines to underprivileged neighborhoods. Those actions now struck him as not so much futile as misplaced: he had been blind to the need that resided at his own doorstep, within his own family, his own bloodline.

  That is, if the girl was truly his.

  He glanced at his watch. Three-seventeen—still almost a quarter of an hour before he had to wake Maddy. He snatched up the phone and called Omar Mohyeldin, a lawyer who handled his publishing contracts. Jasper often turned to him for advice about legal procedures in his Bannister novels. Struggling to sound calm, he told Mohyeldin that he needed to speak to a good family lawyer. “For a new Bannister,” he added, permitting himself this small white lie. (The fewer people who knew, at this point, about the paternity claim, the better.) Mohyeldin (after some thought, and some audible clicking on his computer) gave Jasper the name and number of Murray Pollock of Pollock, Munson and Kline, in Hartford. Jasper thanked him, hung up and immediately called the number.

  After the usual struggle with spectral receptionists and phantom assistants, interspersed with would-be “calming” interludes of classic rock hits played on synthesizers, Jasper finally got Pollock on the line. He poured out his story in a torrent: his moment on the beach with Holly, the letter informing him of her death and the claim, by her surviving teenaged daughter, that he might be her father. When Jasper finally fell silent, Pollock, in an unhurried, leathery-grained voice, said, “Are you the Jasper Ulrickson who just came out with that memoir on Tovah—the one my wife can’t stop talking about?”

  Jasper was brought up short. “I suppose so,” he said. “Yes.” The last thing he expected was to have to field questions about Lessons from My Daughter. “But my concern at the moment—”

  “Because phony paternity claims,” Pollock went on implacably, “do have a habit of cropping up when someone wins the lottery—or goes on Tovah and has a best seller.”

  “Oh, I see—”

  “Mind you,” Pollock went on, “such scams are usually pretty easy to spot. A drunken phone call in the middle of the night. A handwritten letter sent regular mail. How were you served?”

  Jasper described how a man had come to his door and requested that he sign for the envelope. “I assumed he was from FedEx. But I suppose he could have been a process server. I wasn’t really paying attention. In any case, the summons certainly looks real.”

  “Any guess,” Pollock said, “as to why she never told you about the child?”

  Jasper recited the girl’s claim that Holly, a struggling single mother, had feared that the child would be placed with him.

  “Smart woman,” Pollock muttered. “Well,” he went on in a businesslike tone, “I’d like to get a gander at that complaint. I’ll also have a word with the folks at Child Services in Vermont. It’s their job to contract with a lab for the DNA test. Results are reliable to a statistical certainty of one in six billion, so if it comes back positive, she’s your kid. No amount of lawyering can change that.”

  “I understand,” Jasper said.

  “And don’t worry,” Pollock said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.” />
  4

  Dr. Carlucci, in agreeing to discharge Pauline from the hospital into Jasper’s care, had told him to avoid subjecting her to any undue shock or upset. “A strong jolt could trigger a new stroke,” the doctor had warned. As Jasper went down the hall to Maddy’s room to wake her from her nap, he wondered if the paternity claim was not precisely the kind of development from which Carlucci would have advised him to shield Pauline. Certainly, if a DNA test were to come back negative, she need never know of the whole business. But if their lives together since the stroke had taught him anything, it was the impossibility of keeping even the smallest secret from Pauline, whose compensatory powers of observation made her awareness of his inner life almost telepathic. Nor did he wish to keep the secret from her. Openness, honesty, transparency were the foundation upon which their marriage was built, and he could not, in any case, have imagined facing something as momentous, as potentially life-changing, as this paternity claim without the support and advice of his life partner.

  He stepped into Maddy’s darkened room. Pauline looked up with the usual smile in her eyes—but her gaze instantly darkened. She had detected something in his face. He made an expression meant to calm her, then stepped to the bed and kissed Maddy’s forehead, his usual method of waking her. She stirred and sat up. “I had a dream about something scary,” she said, screwing her fists into her eyes. “Someone was coming here.”

  “You can tell us about that later,” he said. “Right now, I want you to go to the kitchen and be with Deepti—I just heard her come back in. I have to talk with Mommy about grown-up things.”