The Heirs

by Susan Rieger

  —

  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.

  “I don’t understand,” Harry said.

  “Don’t you see,” Eleanor said. “The Wolinskis’ claim makes no sense unless it’s true. Why would Ms. Wolinski pick him as the father? How would she have settled on him unless she knew him? She’s not a scam artist.”

  “How could he have abandoned them?” Harry asked. “He was an orphan. How could he leave them fatherless?”

  “That makes it more likely, don’t you see?” Eleanor said, wondering at Harry’s slowness. He was usually so quick to see things. “Dad gave them a mother and provided her with the wherewithal to stick around and raise them. I don’t think he ever thought of himself as fatherless, only motherless. All his life, men have looked out for him. Reverend Falkes. Dean Rostow. Granddad.”

  Harry thought about this. “But why should he leave us so much? We have so much. They have nothing.”

  “Not nothing. No inheritance. Whoever paid the support cut it off when the younger son turned twenty-three. He launched them. That seems like something Dad might do.”

  Harry looked sharply at his mother. For the first time in his life, he saw her as a person, and not his overly fond mother. He found himself growing angry.

  “You didn’t know about them until they appeared, is that right?” he asked.

  “The Wolinskis? No.”

  “You’ve been thinking about this for a while, is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “You believe her, don’t you?” He was the lawyer now, cross-examining a hostile witness.

  “No,” she said. “Maybe. Vera knew your father. He’s the man in the photo.” Eleanor cleared her throat.

  Harry sat quietly for a few moments.

  “Dad was a bigamist. Our family life was a lie,” he said. He turned on his mother. “Two years, two children. You had to…” He stopped.

  Harry put off calling Sam for ten days. He had been too rattled by the conversation with his mother to talk about it. All his life, he had trusted his instincts. The question he had asked Eleanor had come to him in a flash, a sudden, staggering insight, penetrating to the heart of the mystery that was his mother. He waited for the shock of recognition to pass between them.

  Eleanor’s response was white anger. He saw it in her tight mouth and narrowed eyes, the dagger look, not seen since Gran had died.


  “Another woman may have had two children with your father,” she said. “I don’t know more than that.” She cleared her throat.

  Harry sat back in his chair, jolted by the unexpected response. Looking up at the ceiling to avoid her eyes, he replayed the scene in his head. She was not telling the truth, not the whole truth. How could she not have known? Why else would she be bringing up the Wolinskis now? He lowered his eyes to meet hers, then looked sideways, out the window. She wants to throttle me, he thought. She had never hit him, or any of them.

  Eleanor reached in her bag for her wallet. “I’m thinking of setting up a trust for the Wolinski boys,” she said. “I’ve talked to the lawyers at Maynard. They haven’t figured out how I can do it without reopening the Surrogate’s case, but they will. They don’t approve. Not their business.”

  She rose from the table. He turned his head to look at her. “You need to stop thinking you’re always the smartest person in the room,” she said. She put down a wad of twenties and left. Harry went home and took a Xanax.

  When he finally talked to Sam, Harry stopped short of her parting remark.

  Sam was enraged. “Do you know what you did? You accused Mom of covering up for Dad, of allowing herself to be humiliated by him.”

  Harry felt his temper rise; he had been on a quest for the truth. “I didn’t make an accusation, I made an observation, an obvious observation.” He paused. “And she cleared her throat, twice.”

  “What about Dad? Why aren’t you mad at him?” Sam asked.

  “He’s dead,” Harry said. “I can’t tell him what I think.”

  “What is it you think?” Sam said.

  “He betrayed us,” Harry said.

  “No,” Sam said. “If he betrayed anyone, it was our mother. How are you the injured party?”

  “He didn’t care for us. He was never there,” Harry said.

  “That’s a lie,” Sam said. “He was there, in his way, and he loved us, in his way.” Sam wanted to punch Harry, something he hadn’t done in thirty years. “And we all loved him.”

  “An affair is one thing,” Harry said, “but another family? And not one son, but two. That’s unacceptable.”

  “Where is this anger coming from?” Sam said. “Why weren’t you angry when the Wolinskis were suing us?”

  “I thought they were cheats, frauds,” Harry said. “I didn’t believe them. I thought of it as a kind of joke. Ha-ha-ha, Dad’s secret life.”

  “We still don’t know,” Sam said. Harry didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, I get it,” Sam said. “Your masculine intuition.”

  “It makes sense, if you’d let yourself think about it,” Harry said. “Why did she clean out the apartment and get rid of all Dad’s stuff, making it impossible to test their DNA? Why wasn’t she upset when they sued? Why does she want to pay them off? It’s all clear now. Mom made fools of us in Surrogate’s Court. She played a very deep game.”

  “You can’t believe that,” Sam said. “Have you ever seen Mom upset?”

  “Why isn’t anyone else angry, or at least upset? Dad was a bigamist.”

  “More like Schrödinger’s father,” Sam said. “With us and with Mrs. Wolinski at the same time.”

  “Always clever, Sam,” Harry said. “No heart.”

  “You’re all heart, Harry,” Sam said. “Have you discussed this with your wife? What does Lea say?” His question was met with silence. He waited.

  “I haven’t said anything to Lea,” Harry said.

  “Have you spoken to Mom since then?” Sam asked. Silence again.

  “No,” Harry said.

  “You’ve never gotten Mom right,” Sam said. “You’ve always gotten her wrong.”

  “What if I am right?” Harry said.

  “What if you’re right? Should Mom have left him when she found out?” Sam asked. “If you keep on, you’ll wreck the family. I won’t forgive you.”

  “It has a life of its own,” Harry said.

  “Snuff it out,” Sam said.

  —

  Harry couldn’t keep his counsel, even when it was in his interest. Will called him “the Blurter.” Jack was a blurter too, but his blurts seemed more in keeping with his genial egoism. He attached no value to secrets or confidences, no matter how painful or humiliating. “Who cares who knows?” Jack would say. He told his fourth-grade class that his grandmother had dropped dead sitting on the toilet. When Mrs. Mortimer, his teacher, reported this to Eleanor, Eleanor didn’t blink.

  “I thought Jack’s third-grade teacher had spoken to you,” Eleanor said. “You should get ready for more of the same. He’s tactless, guileless. He says whatever comes into his head. I found it almost endearing when he was younger. There’s no cure yet. He doesn’t care what other people think except the musicians he admires.”

  “Is he ever scolded? Punished?” Mrs. Mortimer asked.

  “Nothing works,” Eleanor said. “We’ve tried everything short of confiscating his trumpet. We threatened once to take it away for a day. He held his breath until he passed out. He’s better now with his brothers. They do not suffer under the same ethical constraints as his parents or his teachers.”

  Eleanor didn’t tell Mrs. Mortimer that Harry and Will had beaten Jack until his nose bled after he told his third-grade class that they had wet their pants when they were mugged in Central Park by a man with a gun and tattoos on his face. They had tried first to humiliate him—Mikado justice—but already at eight, he was inured to humiliation.

  “Your wiener is smaller than my little toe,” Harry said.

  “Tom’s wiener is bigger than yours,” Will said.

  “I’m only a kid,” Jack said. “Wait until I’m grown. Mine’ll be bigger than your foot. Trumpet players have the biggest pickles. Everyone knows that.” Will pushed him to the floor; Harry put him in a headlock.

  Will said Jack was the Dark Side of the Golden Rule. “He does unto others as he would have them do unto him, and the others want to kill him.”

  Harry’s blurts were different. They fell into two categories. The first kind were excited utterances, spontaneous and thoughtless spoilers, admissible as hearsay. If Harry brought a gift, he’d announce the contents as the recipient was unwrapping. “It’s a Swiss Army knife, the big fancy one.” If he recommended a movie or a book, he’d tell the ending. “Ewell, the guy who killed Tom Robinson, tries to kill Scout and Jem. Boo Radley saves them and kills him.” If he was planning a surprise, he couldn’t keep it under wraps longer than a week. He told Lea he was going to propose a month before the actual event. “I think I’m engaged to be engaged,” she told her mother. Harry’s egoism was less pervasive than Jack’s but also less genial.

  The second kind of blurts were unwelcome truths—hard, unpleasant facts he thought other people ought to know. It was an old story for Eleanor, but until Café Luxembourg, she had never been a blurt victim, only a witness. When he was fifteen, he told seven-year-old Tom there was no Santa Claus. Tom was furious with Eleanor. “Why didn’t you tell me? I look like a baby.” He was crying. Eleanor knelt down. “I believed in Santa Claus until I was eight,” she said. Tom wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Really?” he said. She nodded. Tom put his arms around her neck and cried with relief. Eleanor was not telling the truth. Her awakening had come much earlier. She knew her mother would never let a fat man who smoked a pipe and trailed soot into their apartment. “I buy you all the things you need,” Mrs. Phipps had said when Eleanor, age four, had asked if Santa was coming. “Don’t be greedy.”

  “Harry is mean,” Tom said. Eleanor considered her reply. “He can’t help himself,” she said.

  When Eleanor asked Harry why he did it, he said, “It was time he knew. It was embarrassing that he still believed.”

  “Who was embarrassed?” Eleanor said. “Tom or you? You’re too old to be embarrassed by another person’s behavior. Look to your own.” Harry flushed. He never again let someone else embarrass him. His brothers were the chief benefi
ciaries of this new policy, though Eleanor too benefited; she no longer had to mop up after him.

  Eleanor’s Santa intervention worked only in cases of displaced embarrassment. Harry kept telling people things they didn’t want to know. When he was in his late thirties, Harry told a good friend his wife was having an affair; he’d seen the adulterous couple kissing on a street in the East Village. The good friend stopped speaking to him. Harry couldn’t understand why, when he was only telling the truth. “It’s killing the messenger,” he said to Sam.

  “The messenger here is not innocent,” Sam said. “You’re not Western Union. There’s a difference between the person who writes the telegram and the person who delivers it.” Sam laughed. “Then again, you may have saved the marriage,” he said. “Your friend could get mad at you instead of his wife. One of the relationships had to go.”

  Harry might have kept his friend if he had been willing to apologize, but he wasn’t. Apologies weren’t in his repertoire. “The two are related, the blurting and the not-apologizing,” Sam said to his mother. “He’s never wrong.”

  —

  Sam taught himself to read when he was four. “I had to,” he told his father, “I needed to read my Superman comics. No one will read them to me.” Harry and Will would be in the park throwing a ball, catching a ball, hitting a ball. Sam would be in his bedroom archiving his comics or building LEGO. As he worked, he would hum to himself, snatches of melodies he’d heard on the radio or in church. Sitting with Sam one evening shortly before his sixth birthday, Rupert realized the boy was humming a section from “Im Abendrot,” the last of Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.”

  “Do you think you’d like to sing in the St. Thomas Choir?” Rupert asked.

  Sam looked up from the instructions. “No, thank you,” he said.

  “Do you sing at school?” Rupert asked.

  “No,” Sam said. “I don’t like to sing. I listen to songs in my head. They sound better. The songs at school are rubbish.”

  Sam was the only one of Rupert’s sons who’d picked up his Anglicisms. He’d use them when he was alone with Rupert, as if they shared a secret language. Sam liked especially the British English words that meant something else in American English: trainers, flat, bonnet, braces, dust, fringe, flannel, jumper. He kept a list in a strongbox. Sam was a collector and archivist, not only of comics. He never wanted to throw anything out.