They never made it to the armor, but on the way back out, they passed through another room where Kit wanted to linger. Drums, masks, and clumsy-looking jewelry filled the room, but all this visual clutter was decidedly upstaged by the coarse-haired, bullet-breasted, bug-eyed, howling-mouthed figures lined up along one side of the gallery. Raised on white pedestals, they were made of old, decayed wood—split by long cracks, eaten away by insects. Some were missing limbs, fingers, noses. Some had large penises that jutted like boughs from a tree trunk. One had thick rusty nails for hair. They should have been ugly, if only for their complete lack of color—the opposite of the mownay pictures he’d liked so much—yet gathered together, each one standing in a column of light, they had a powerful collective personality, like a conference of warlocks. They reminded Kit of the dancers at a Christmas pageant he had gone to with his mother one year: the Mummery, it was called.
“They remind me of Christmas,” he told her.
“Now that’s an odd association,” she said. “I’m glad your Nana’s not around to hear that.” But his mother seemed pleased with his reaction.
In the museum shop, she told him to pick out some postcards—not to send, she told him, but to keep as a reminder. “In your room, you can create your own museum. In miniature.”
He did just that, and he would add to it whenever he had a chance to buy postcards of pictures and objects he liked. When they moved to Jasper’s, he took down each one, meticulously peeling away the tape that held it to the wall. Up in the crow’s nest, he reconstructed his gallery above his desk. He had thirty-five postcards then. By the time he left for college, he had close to three hundred.
After more than an hour of shivering among the Uglies and their cohorts, Kit rolls out of the bunk, careful not to strike his head on the frame supporting the upper mattress. He stands beside the bed for a moment, just to look at his son. Will is turned toward the wall, only a tangle of dark hair (Sandra’s hair) visible above the quilt.
She thinks this is about you, he might say—and could say, without waking the boy, if he wanted. And she’s wrong, he would like to say—and to believe.
Not finishing his book in time for his tenure review had nothing to do with not knowing the source of the genes carried on his Y chromosome. Even Sandra would concede that. But two full years of no secure employment (his book dead in the water, most of his academic friendships shriveled) have failed to produce enough motivation in Kit to spur him toward something else. And it’s this—this inertia, as she called it—that Sandra feels certain is aggravated by the ancestral mystery. “To change direction, to go somewhere entirely new, maybe you need to know exactly where it is you came from in the first place. A secure foothold. Don’t you think?” That’s what Sandra said in the counselor’s office. The counselor answered, “You phrased that so well,” and asked Kit what he thought. “Sounds a little too pat,” he braved. “But what do I know?” Would it have felt different if the counselor had been a man?
He wraps the fleece blanket around his shoulders and leaves Will’s room. He stands in the hall and considers the three other doors, all slightly ajar but none beckoning: his daughter’s room, the bathroom, the room where he should be sleeping beside Sandra. Briefly, he feels defiant: I will not let you tell me how to live my life. I will not let you run the goddamn show. He imagines entering their room and standing by the bed to make this statement. She will wake up instantly. She will have to accept what he says; she cannot evict him from his house.
But he goes downstairs.
In the dim kitchen, he mutters to the geranium plants, “Time for breakfast?” To the refrigerator, “Am I in the mood for Grape-Nuts? Toast? Yogurt?” He thinks of the cinnamon Pop-Tarts he and Jasper used to share, toasted and slathered in butter. Sandra, he’s sure, has never bought Pop-Tarts.
The furnace startles him with an answer. It is time, if not for breakfast, at least for the heat to push its way through the pipes all over again.
He goes into the office, sits at the bulky outdated computer: one more thing that needs to be replaced. Without turning on the lamp, he wakes the monitor from its cryptic facsimile of slumber.
His in-box contains one new message: Ian, the only colleague with whom he’s remained friendly, has chronic insomnia. The e-mail was sent at 3:12 a.m. It’s short: you up by any chance? staring at a stack of papers on public art in nyc. if this won’t put me to sleep, what will? After Kit packed up his office and left the college, it took Ian about a year to forget not to complain about work, to remember how lucky he is to have been anointed worthy of sticking around for good. Kit wishes he could put aside the envy; whatever his flaws, Ian is loyal.
He closes his e-mail and wanders across the lower screen to Safari, the same way a child might wander from one friend’s house to the next when the first one isn’t home. Besides, Google has an answer—a completely impartial answer—for everything. He types in searching for my father. The pinwheel spins, an elfin roulette. The first links are myheritage.com and mylife.com, followed by peoplefinderchat.com. Bleakly, Kit scans the screen and spots the query I am trying to find my father but am not adopted.… His heart lurches as he clicks on the link.
The questioner’s tone and diction suggest someone young and helpless—and, he’s not sure why, female. Or maybe it’s the tearfulness that comes across. Her mother won’t tell her a thing about her father, and his name is not on the birth certificate she found by snooping through her mother’s files. Half a dozen indignantly supportive people have answered the query. How dare the mother withhold a part of her child’s very identity! What country does the writer live in? Might there be a good excuse for the mother’s secrecy? (Perhaps the dad is serving a long prison sentence for being a child molester.) Can she afford a private investigator?
Kit laughs quietly. He’d never thought of that option. He tries to picture a PI taking on this task—and doing what? Following Kit’s mother everywhere, hiding behind bushes, driving several cars behind her as she shuttles about from teaching to rehearsals, from Trader Joe’s to CVS? Or would he simply take her hostage for a few hours, throw her in a trunk and drive her to a desolate warehouse or storage pod, tie her to a chair, and scare the information from her? Kit derives a moment’s perverse pleasure from this vision of his mother. So Sandra’s right again: he is angry. But there is nothing like being out of work, out of civilized purpose, out of ego, he thinks, to make you feel a sweeping rage, as broad in its reach as a beam from a lighthouse.
He scrolls down and stops at a tiny photo, a video freeze-frame of a young boy next to a YouTube link; the expression on the boy’s face is pleading. The video has actually been rated: five stars. As if it might be an Oscar contender.
“Jesus.” Kit goes back to the search field and types in waylaid dads. At the head of the queue, Google offers him this nugget of farce:
The Kitchen Bitch Ponders: Waylaid I seem to have been waylaid by events beyond my control, I must, must.… Oh the Ignominy of It All—This is a phrase Dad said a lot …
Yes, indeed, the Ignominy of It All. The World Wide Web, almost telepathically, understands him perfectly. What human being, stuck in the labyrinth of mind and soul, could ever come up with About 288,000 results in 0.45 seconds?
Kit stares at the endless list of absurdities before him: Waylaid in TEXAS, Waylaid by a waitress, Waylaid by the Flu Bug. Heat emanates from the radiator against the wall beneath the desk, warming his feet, encouraging him in his flippant search for the paternal grail.
Soon after the twins were born, Kit pressed his mother for the third time; afterward, he knew it had been the last. She had driven down from New Hampshire to meet her grandchildren, to spend a week helping the new parents (one of them frantic, terrified, and doing his best to fake a sense of calm) cope with two babies at once. Before she arrived, Sandra had impressed on Kit how knowing the identity of his father would be essential to having a full picture of their children’s medical history. “What if he had diabetes—or high b
lood pressure—or severe asthma? Conditions with early warning signs. Or think about preventive measures.”
“Why would she know these things about the guy? That is so unlikely.”
“Come on,” said Sandra. “It’s so obvious she knows more than you want to give her credit for.”
“Obvious how? You’ve never even talked to her about this stuff.”
Sandra regarded him with a tender pity. “Kit, anybody could tell from the way you describe her reactions in the past that she has strong feelings about this guy, or who he was to her. He wasn’t some boy who picked her up in a bar.”
“Sandra, she was seventeen. She wasn’t hanging out in bars.”
“I’m sorry. You know what I mean. But I’m sure that if it had been nothing more than a one-night stand, a blunder on an adolescent date, she would have confessed that to you by now—told you when you were an adolescent going on dates. And she grew up in this reasonably small town with upstanding parents. I mean, all the families knew all the other families, wouldn’t you guess?”
Kit’s brooding had led him down all these byways, a hundred times over. He thought of his grandfather, who owned a hardware store, and his grandmother, who, before having his uncle and then his mother, had taught in the local first grade. They hadn’t rejected their pregnant daughter, thank heaven, but surely they’d have wanted to exact some kind of recompense, if not responsibility, from the “guy” Sandra referred to so casually. They hadn’t been rich, and even if they had …
Now something almost insupportable occurred to Kit. What if his mother had been raped? Or seduced by some older man, a married man or a man simply passing through town on business—the textbook traveling salesman? What if his father hadn’t been a “boy” at all? What if that allusion was the easiest excuse? He couldn’t believe he’d never thought of these possibilities. To the extent that he had received a “facts of life” lesson from a relative, that relative had been Jasper—who gave him the brief speech, clearly canned, that he must have delivered twice already. Respect girls etc. Resist urges etc. Exercise self-control etc. But what if Jasper had been assigned this task not because he had done it before but because Kit’s mother was traumatized when it came to teenage sex?
Sandra, ever vigilant, saw his expression. “What did I say?”
“It’s not you. I’m just—overwhelmed. By this,” he said, gesturing impatiently at the drifts of tiny clothes, tiny blankets, tiny nursery accessories littering every piece of furniture in sight. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. Let’s just be more direct with her, that’s all.”
“I’ll talk to her. I promise. Let’s not make her feel ganged up on.”
“Two of us would hardly constitute a gang,” said Sandra.
Kit conjured, then, the horrendous notion of a gang rape. Maybe, for the most ominous reasons, she didn’t know who his father was. “Jesus,” he whispered, and before Sandra could question this exclamation, William or Frances began to cry, setting off the other one, too. They tended to cry—to do everything, from eating to defecating—in tandem. They were so young then, barely a week, that Kit still had trouble telling them apart in an instant. They had yet to earn nicknames, to stop squinting at the brilliant, otherworldly light. They had only just shed the grisly knobs of tissue that remained of their umbilical cords, proof of their first dependency, on Sandra alone, on unimpeded access to her blood, her hormones, her oxygen; her body at work or rest, eating meals, taking showers, pruning trees, shoveling mulch, talking on the phone, reading books. Sandra had been their safe haven, their crib, their hometown, their entire civilization; now they were out on the wild frontier—of which Kit was the most prominent feature.
He waited until the third night of his mother’s visit, by which time she had coaxed their lives into semiroutine. They sat at the kitchen table, finishing the bottle of wine opened at dinner. Kit held Frances; his mother held William. They were feeding the babies Sandra’s milk while Sandra slept upstairs.
“Mom, that dinner was amazing. Sometimes I really miss your pies.”
“Sandra’s no slouch in the kitchen.”
“No,” said Kit. “But there are some things you make that always take me back. You know? Those summers you baked all the time: bread, muffins, two or three pies a week. Those blueberries from that field just up the hogback … remember how you used to take me picking, how you’d pretend to hear bears?”
They spoke in raised whispers, even though the babies were awake, sucking hard. The idea was that they would drink themselves to sleep, give Sandra two or three more hours of rest. When either twin so much as whimpered, Sandra would wake, no matter how exhausted she was.
“It’s a treat to bake for you,” said his mother, almost primly. “Bart has very high cholesterol. No more butter for him.” She didn’t want to talk about those summers, the years with Jasper.
It was now, thought Kit, or possibly never.
“Mom.”
After a moment, during which he struggled with what exactly he should say, she looked up from William to Kit. “Sweetie?”
“Mom, I’ve never stopped wanting to know. About the other genetic half of me. I know he wasn’t a father, not in the sense of a presence, but still …”
Kit’s mother focused intently on the baby in her arms. With the expertise of a longtime parent, she used a corner of the cloth hanging over her shoulder to blot milk from William’s cheek. “Water under the bridge, Kit. So far downstream by now. Out to sea. Can’t you let it go?”
“Not now that I am a father.”
“But you, Kit, are a true father.”
“I don’t understand why you have to keep this to yourself. I think you forget I’m no longer a child. If it’s something difficult or traumatic, something you worry would shock me, I’m sorry, but I hate the possibility that maybe you were hurt and you keep it to yourself because … that maybe you were …”
“Of course I was hurt”—her voice rose to a hiss—“but only by my own foolishness. It’s not something I discuss with anyone. Not Bart, not your sister. No one. I’ve said this before. You came along, and you were wonderful. I was never lonely again, once you arrived. I never looked back. That’s what matters.”
Kit felt absurdly young, but he couldn’t surrender yet. You can’t take no for an answer this time, Sandra had told him the night before.
Frances had fallen asleep in the crook of his left arm. Carefully, he withdrew the bottle and set it on the table. Frances’s mouth continued to pulsate, fishlike; a small amount of milk seeped from her lips, soaking into Kit’s shirt. He felt the intimate warmth of Sandra’s milk against his belly. Though he continued to whisper, he enunciated carefully, to make it clear how serious he was. “Sandra wants to make sure we know everything we can about the babies’ family histories. Medical … predispositions. Chronic illnesses. Things like that. We need to know these things, Mom. I agree with her.”
Kit’s mother had made a slope of her body against the back of the chair and laid her grandson along her slim torso, belly to belly. He looked boneless, his tiny body subsiding into hers. She stroked his back, pressing upward with the flat of her hand; Kit realized he had forgotten to coax the gas from his daughter. His mother’s eyes were closed, her cheek against William’s porcelain scalp.
“There’s nothing alarming you’d need to know, I’m quite sure of that. I’d have told you if there was.”
“But Mom, how do you know?”
She raised her face and looked at him, her beaded earrings capturing light from the candles that still burned at the opposite end of the table. “Because I do.”
Both babies slept. Kit knew they should move the twins to their crib upstairs; Kit, too, needed whatever sleep he could bargain from theirs. So this was it: the same impasse all over again. He was trying to think of a new angle, to think like Sandra, who would have known how to maneuver out of this corner, when his mother said, “You should know that the man you’re wondering about is dead.
Even if I told you who he was, if it made the slightest difference, you couldn’t search him out. You couldn’t meet him.” Her expression was miserly, not kind, and though she kept her voice low, her next words came out like a threat. “You need to leave it alone. Just believe me.”
“He’s dead?” Kit looked at her, and before he could think, he said, “God, Mom, I’m sorry, but that is the oldest line in the book. Do you expect me to believe that? Do you expect me to stop being curious even if it’s true?”
Kit’s mother pressed her lips together. She readjusted William in her arms, stood, and started toward the stairs.
“Mom?” Kit said fiercely, trying not to shout.
She turned around before she got to the staircase. “You do not get to know everything just because you want to know it. Did some ‘counselor’ give you this idea, tell you you’re entitled to know? I am not impressed by this whole psychotherapy fad, this let-it-all-out philosophy that’s got some kind of stranglehold on your generation. I am insulted that you’re calling me a liar, but I understand. If that’s what you choose to think, there’s nothing much I can do about it, is there? But I can go to bed. You should, too.”
Kit lay beside Sandra that night and did not get the precious sleep he craved. The twins slept for a rare stretch of four hours, during which he thought about his mother’s angry speech. He realized, sadly, that when she mentioned Kit’s “generation,” she was talking about a broad population that, at one end, might have included her, Daphne Rose Browning Noonan McCoy, if she hadn’t been forced to become older than she wanted to be—forced by Kit, even if he was blameless. He would bear whatever disappointment Sandra felt in his failure to “find out the truth.” This quest, he thought, is over—if it ever really began.
Upstairs, the alarm clock bleats. Kit hears it cease quickly; Sandra is up. (Sandra does not believe in the snooze option.) She will shower and dress before waking each child, a kiss with a ten-minute warning. She will come downstairs to make coffee for Kit, tea for herself, and prepare whatever healthy breakfast she has already planned: halve grapefruits, measure oats, slice a loaf of whole-grain bread, stir farm-share honey into the Greek yogurt of which she is lately enamored.