“A young probationary professor. One of your father’s protégés. A handsome boy, a lost soul whenever he stepped outside his lab.”
“You robbed the cradle.”
“I still had my figure.” She sighted down her long nose at me. “And you might have the grace to ask, who seduced whom? The point is, I never loved your father more than when I was cheating on him.”
“Mom?”
“I wanted my Alfred back as I once knew him, that brilliant young man who once depended on me. We were great partners in the beginning, your dad and I. I worked to put him through graduate school, he supported my concertizing until Mark and Emily came along. We worked together to establish his career, our life together. He became known far and wide. But somewhere along the way I became superfluous, the ‘skirt’ who from time to time accompanied a frankly pompous old physicist to university events, or played East to his West at bridge.
“I woke up one morning and suddenly I was over fifty. My husband’s world was his students and his colleagues and his research; I knew they always had been. My children were finished with me. I felt left behind. My nest was empty.”
“So you found a pretty new chickie.”
“He was, you know.” She laughed. “But the point is, the boy moved on and eventually your father and I found each other again.”
“Did Dad know?”
She shook her head. From the expression on her face I wondered if she was disappointed that he didn’t know.
I asked her, “What brought you and Dad back together?”
“Emily,” she said, smiling softly as she remembered my sister. “After the shooting, when she was in a coma for so long, it took all the strength both Dad and I had to wait out the course of Emily’s passing. We needed each other again, and the irony was that he needed me more than I needed him. Men always think they should be able to fix things. I knew I couldn’t.”
“A beautiful story,” I said after a moment; I needed to let this bombshell sink in. “I’m shocked, I’ll get over it. But why are telling me this? You think I should go out and find myself a younger man?”
“That, my dear, would be up to you.” She reached into the pocket of her silk skirt and pulled out the slip of paper I had crumpled in the kitchen earlier. Slowly, she opened it up, smoothed it on the arm of her chair. She looked at the name I had written for what seemed like a very long time. She was working up her courage, choosing her words, and I began to find it difficult to breathe.
“Years ago, before you were born...” she said, pulling her eyes from the paper to look at me. “And you might remember hearing about this. Your father was invited by the French government to come over as an advisor to their new national nuclear power program.”
“I remember hearing about it,” I said. “You and Dad took Mark and Em to France for a year. A wonderful opportunity for everybody. I wasn’t even around yet, and I’m envious.”
“It was wonderful,” she said, looking far away again. “For the most part.”
I was beginning to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, down where all that turkey and apple pie and sharp cheddar were churning around. “What was the not-wonderful part?”
“Isabelle Martin.” Mom pronounced the name as the French would. She leaned forward, extending the slip of paper toward me. “Isabelle was a gifted young graduate student in nuclear physics, an intern on your father’s French project.”
I looked at the name I had written and then I looked at Mom. “Isabelle and Dad?”
She bit her lip and nodded.
There was a rustling behind me, stocking feet on the hardwood floor. I turned and saw Uncle Max. Clearly, he had been eavesdropping from outside the room. And because he seemed so calm, so serious, and because he came straight to me and took my hand as he settled onto the wide arm of my chair, I knew that what he had overheard was not news to him, and that he knew ahead of time that Mom was going to tell me about Isabelle.
“So, she was a crazy person,” I said. “Had a fling with Dad and went off the rails?”
“Crazy?” Max chuckled softly as he draped his arm behind me, drawing me against his broad chest. “She was a brilliant young female physicist. And she was French. Who could tell from crazy?”
“You knew her?” I asked, leaning to the side so I could look up at his face.
“I met her,” he said. “Went across the pond a few times to smooth out some of the legal details.”
I weighed the two big questions on my mind, went for the bigger of them. I turned back to Mom. “When you found out, you stayed with Dad?”
She looked me in the eye and answered as if I had challenged her. “I chose to stay with the life we built together. Our children, our community, our home, our marriage vows.”
“You’re made of tougher stuff than I am.” I was thinking of my own reaction when my first husband, Scott MacGowen, Casey’s father, told me that he was having an affair with one of the young paralegals in his law office. “When I found out about Scottie and Linda, I showed Scottie the door and closed it behind him. End of story.”
“Perhaps you had more options than I thought I had, Margot.”
Mom sounded defensive, and I was sorry if I had made her feel bad. Her world was in fact very different from my own. Among other things, when I found out about Scottie’s affair I was earning a good income and felt that I was tough enough to take care of my daughter and myself without being dependent on anyone. As it turned out, I needed Lyle, Guido, Max, Mom, Dad, and later, Mike. But I got by, as I knew I would.
I took a breath, caught Max watching me, expectant. I said, “Scottie and I had something very good for a while. Or I thought we did—until the day he walked out. Over the years, I have wondered if we could have worked things out over time. We never could have gotten back together, but it would have been better for Casey if we had become at least friends. Scottie said that’s what he wanted. I regret the pain we caused her. But there was that one little detail....”
“The extracurricular baby?” Max said.
“That one,” I said. “I give Scottie credit for making a commitment to take care of his baby with Linda, though the mere fact of that baby broke my heart, crushed a good part of what I thought I knew about us. But I didn’t have what it took to make space in my life for another woman’s child.” No, I thought, feeling that tightness labeled guilt weigh on my chest again. I left Casey to juggle two households on her own.
Mom wouldn’t look at me. Her chin quivered, a telling sign of the depth of her anguish, because my mother almost never cried. She asked, “Which would be the biggest issue for you, the baby, its mother who would inevitably come as an attachment, or the infidelity?”
“All of them,” I said.
Max took my chin and turned my face toward his. He said, “I was shamelessly eavesdropping a little earlier. You asked Betsy a question in jest.”
I had asked a lot of questions. In jest? The one I knew the answer to, “Was Dad not my biological father?” suddenly landed like a whirring Mixmaster to stir up that mass of turkey et cetera in my middle parts. I wondered if my legs would support me if I had to make a sudden run for the bathroom.
Looking at her hands folded in her lap, Mom said, “I hoped this day would never come.”
Max went to her, knelt beside her chair, folded her in his arms. She let him hold her for a moment, her head resting on his shoulder, before she patted his cheek, reassured him with a game smile, and broke out of his embrace.
“Margot, my darling girl.” She wiped her nose on the handkerchief Max handed her, and then looked directly at me. “Forty-three years ago, there was a beautiful young French scientist named Isabelle who had a baby, whom she named Marguerite. And then Isabelle gave her precious child to her lover’s wife to rear. The wife named her little girl Margot.”
5
Once upon a time, forty-three years ago, there was a terrible storm in the night. My mother, Betsy Duchamps, all snug in her bed in Berkeley, wakened and k
new it was time for me to be born. The weather was so fierce that my father was afraid it wouldn’t be safe to drive Mom to the hospital. So he called his good friend Ben Nussbaum, the family doctor, and asked for advice. Dr. Nussbaum lived only a few blocks away. He came straight over with his wife, Gracie. But by the time they arrived all question of taking Mom to the hospital was moot because I was already on the way. And so, in the middle of a rainy, noisy, blustery night, I was born in my parents’ bed, in the house in Berkeley, California, upstairs from the room where I now sat looking into the bottom of a wineglass, contemplating that story and other stories that were the foundations of who I had always thought I was.
Mom and Max had gone up to bed hours earlier. I promised Mom I would be up, that I just needed to think through some of what they had told me. I prowled around downstairs for a while, looking at familiar things in a new light, trying to remember all that had happened to me in that house, as if unsure I ever belonged.
A favorite old fairy tale, the story of my birth, had been taken away from me, and I was given a new one of equal or greater drama to replace it. I wasn’t born upstairs. I wasn’t even born in the United States. According to my mother—what else could I call her?—and Uncle Max, when my family left France to return home after their year abroad, Dad did not know that Isabelle was pregnant. For all the notions that people in the U.S. might have about the liberal sexual mores of the Europeans, forty-some years ago it was very much not all right with Isabelle’s very traditional, middle-class French family or the university she attended that she found herself both pregnant and unmarried.
Isabelle appealed to my father for help, though neither Max nor Mom was at all clear to me about what sort of help Isabelle had in mind. According to them, I was born in the infirmary of a convent near Isabelle’s family’s ancestral home, a village in Normandy. My father was listed as the father on the original birth certificate. Because of that, among the little legal details Max went over to take care of, the American embassy in Paris was persuaded to add my name, which at that time was Marguerite Eugenie Louise-Marie Duchamps, to my father’s passport. That done, the two men bundled me up and brought me home to Mom. To live happily ever after.
I should have known from the extravagance of names I was saddled with at birth that someone other than Mom had named me.
In a file in my house in Malibu Canyon I had a birth certificate bearing the official seal of Alameda County, California, that said I was born at home in Berkeley, and avowing that Dad and Mom were my true parents. Dear Dr. Nussbaum had agreed to sign the false birth certificate, attesting that he was the attending physician, and then he filed it with the appropriate government agency somewhat after my actual birth; delay of paperwork, he had said. Very tidy, if corrupt. The official seal did not change the fact that I was a bastard child who had unknowingly given false information her entire life to schools, government agencies, my employers, myself. My head spun, and not because of the wine I drank.
If, along the way, any of the people involved had said no to their part in the scheme, my life would have been entirely different. I would never have loved and been loved by Mike, would never have suffered through losing him. Casey simply would not be. That other life: better, worse, who knows? What I did know was that I cherished the life I’d had so far and the people in it. Most of all, the people in it.
There was one element that both versions of the story had in common about my first night in the house in Berkeley: a terrible storm full of thunder and lightning.
All of my life I have been terrified by electrical storms. Not pull-the-covers-over-my-head scared, but cold white panic and a screaming need to flee from the flashes of light and crashing, house-shaking booms of thunder that are inescapable.
Skittish colts have been known to run blindly to their deaths during electrical storms. Early Drummond, my neighbor, told me about a five-month-old roan on his grandparents’ farm in Missouri who spooked during an electrical storm. In the colt’s panic to get away, it ran itself into a barbed wire fence, got hung up there, thrashed violently, and somehow tore out an eye before it managed to break free. After that, it ran zig-zags across a meadow until it dropped dead out of exhaustion and pure animal fear.
When I was a little girl, if I were wakened in the night by an electrical storm, rare as they are in California, I generally did the little girl version of the colt in the meadow. I would run out of the house in a blind panic, thinking I was somehow safer outside from the rolling, approaching boulders of thunder. Summoned by my screams, my parents always ran out to fetch me, brought me inside, held me tight in their arms and told me, again, about the night I was born, until I was calm again. I was frightened, they always said, because the first sound I ever heard was thunder, the first light was lightning.
In the new version of that story there was a terrible storm on the night Dad first brought me to the house in Berkeley, but I was already terrified of thunder and lightning before that night. On that first night, Mom and Dad took me into their bed and held me all night long. I only stopped screaming at dawn when the storm passed.
At some point in my life reason trumped panic and I was able to get through the worst of storms alone and without running away. But the fear was still there. Always.
I sat in my chair in front of the fire, looking at my father’s empty seat—how I wished he were there to talk to—and thought about what Mom and Max had told me. There were big gaps in their story—my story—and I did not know anyone who could fill them. Isabelle, probably the best source, was gone before I even knew she existed.
At some point during the night, I hit some part of every one of the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—as I tried to shed parts of what I thought I knew about my life within a family and to believe a new reality, as sketchy as it was. By dawn, the most important fact that came out of all that cogitating was that the woman I always believed to be my mother had taken me to her heart and had loved me and cared for me, and would for the rest of her life. As if I were her own.
I felt very sad for her. Mom’s two natural children, Emily and Mark, both died tragically while young. The only child left to her, in the end, was me, the paramour’s daughter. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, still trying to sort everything into neat answers that I knew didn’t exist. Nothing worthwhile in life is ever entirely tidy.
I must have dozed off. When I finally dragged myself upstairs, stiff and headachy, a little hung over probably, it was full daylight. I stood outside Mom’s bedroom door and listened until I heard her move around on the other side. Tentatively, I tapped on the door.
“Come in,” she called.
She was standing in front of the mirror over her dresser, twisting her hair into its impossible bun. We looked at each other’s reflections in the mirror, a small filter between the warm, flesh versions of ourselves. She seemed to be a little frightened. What next? was the unasked question on her face. Her eyes were swollen and red-rimmed. Even at my father’s funeral my mother had not wept as she must have during the night while I was downstairs stewing.
I stood behind her, wrapped my arms around her, met her eyes in the mirror.
“Thank you, Mom,” I said. “You are a remarkable woman. And I love you very much. I always will.”
She smiled, reached back and patted my cheek with one hand while she held the hair she had coiled at the back of her neck with the other. “I was worried about you, Margot. So much to get used to.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, releasing her so she could skewer her bun in place with its single long pin. “I’m fine.”
“Questions?”
“Tons. First, who am I? When I’ve figured that out, the rest should be easy.”
“Well.” She laughed gently. “That little girl with two mothers and two names? She called herself Maggie. I’m confident that you have always known who you are.”
“Then I suppose it doesn’t matter what anyone calls me,” I said. I peel
ed off the dress I had put on the previous afternoon before dinner and reached into my bag for my robe; I needed a shower. “Except, don’t call me late for breakfast. I’m starving.”
“As I recall,” she said, laughing gaily as if a great load had been removed from her shoulders, “you drew breakfast duty.”
“Damn. Slipped my mind.” I wanted a nap, too. “Give me ten minutes to get cleaned up.”
It took me twenty minutes, not ten, to pull myself together. When I opened the swinging door and stepped into the kitchen, I found Max making waffles, Guido putting a second pound of bacon into the microwave, Casey scrambling eggs, and Zia setting the kitchen table. Mom sat holding a mug of coffee and reading the morning newspaper.
“They got hungry and started without you, dear,” Mom said, looking up, smiling, when I walked in.
“Hey, Ma,” Casey greeted me. “You look like hell.”
I reached for a mug and poured myself coffee. “Gran kept me up all night boozing.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” She loaded eggs into a serving bowl. “Anyone mind if Zia and I take BART into San Francisco after breakfast? We told some friends from school we’d try to meet them.”
Mom said, “If you’re bringing your friends home for dinner, give me fair warning so I’ll know how much turkey to reheat. Lord knows there are enough leftovers to feed the masses.”
“Mom?” Casey asked me.
“Sounds like fun.” I yawned as I sat down. Good idea for the girls to look elsewhere for entertainment during the day. Guido and I had TV business to talk over with Max. But before that, I had some phone calls to make, first to Rich Longshore to give him more information about Isabelle, and second to Isabelle’s family in France. Mom had given me their contact information before I got into the shower. I knew that would be an interesting conversation. And one I wasn’t quite ready to share with Casey.
The Paramour's Daughter Page 5
