of clothes, tell me he didn’t want any of that Oo(t)-gweh-rheh, and go out the door, sometimes until after work, sometimes until a week or more had gone by. I didn’t cook breakfast for him long.”
“Why was he that way?”
“I don’t know, I told you. He just was. His ma and dad spoiled him, told him he was better than me, and I guess he believed it, but I don’t know why he wanted to get married in the first place, if he thought that.”
“But he always came back in those days.”
“Yes, eventually. I would wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, startled, because he had climbed in and was snoring next to me, and sometimes I just found him in the morning, drinking coffee in front of the stove, like he had just slipped from our bed before I had stirred, to surprise me with a fresh pot.”
“So why did he stop coming back after I was born? Why did he disown me?” We were getting to it, then, the harder questions, the real ones. My siblings always said our dad was never around, but more and more, I was getting the feeling that was only partially true. I had continued to hope that if I had primed my mother, used Socratic teaching method, she would begin freely discussing this forbidden topic, but she was like my students, fighting me all the way with silence and misdirection. I was prepared, though, had trained a very long time, as I had for my orals to complete my dissertation.
“He just did,” she said again.
“Did he think I was someone else’s kid?”
“He was just an unhappy man, I told you. He always thought funny things about people.”
“Did he have reason to believe I might not be his?” Would she confirm here that he really did treat me differently than he did the rest of the kids? I held my breath for a moment, waiting it out, this time, asking it without asking it, that tightrope.
“He was coming around less and less in those days. There was a man, a very nice man, and almost everyone out here liked him,” she said.
“Am I this man’s child?” I asked, finally.
“He was a very nice man,” she repeated, “but also very free. I thought by that time the old man wasn’t coming back, and I figured, since he had been around so much with who knows who all, my keeping company with this man wouldn’t do anyone any harm. The man lived in Texas, anyway, and it wasn’t like he would be back much. He used to joke, said if we ever had kids . . .” She stopped, changed direction, slightly. “We both had red hair, but his was lighter than mine.”
“Am I?” I repeated. It was surprisingly hard to repeat the entire question.
“I don’t know. It’s possible. Dad’s shit-ass sister talked him into forcing me to get a blood test when it was clear I was pregnant. She was always convinced I was trying to get at his money. Hah! What money? I had this man’s dog tags, he had given them to me one of the last times I had seen him, but he and Dad had the same blood type. The same you have. The only ones who knew were the three of us, and Martha. She was the one who took me. Back then, the agencies didn’t chase for support like they do now. I think that’s why your friend T.J.’s mother eventually just handed him over to someone else. The bother for her wasn’t worth it.”
“Am I really yours?” I had to ask. If everything I had ever believed was now up in the air, why not that, too? It seemed like everything was possible, even that Tin Man, lurking just out of sight all these years, hiding in the picnic grove restrooms during rainstorms to avoid rust.
“Of course you’re really mine. When Dad said he wasn’t going to claim you, the last thing I said to him when he went out the door that final time, was, ‘Okay, she’ll always be my baby.’ And the rest of the kids, they didn’t treat you any different, you were everybody’s baby. Especially Royal, he took you everywhere with him.”
“I remember,” I said, which was why I had believed if anyone were going to tell me the truth, it would have been him. “Didn’t you think I was ever going to ask?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t. I was hoping it wouldn’t matter to you, hoping we had loved you enough that it wouldn’t matter.”
“It isn’t a matter of love, Ma.”
“It’s always a matter of love. I thought you would have at least learned that by now.”
“What’s the man’s name?”
“Do I have to tell you?”
“Don’t you think I deserve to know? Is that him in this morning’s paper? Is he the man you used to talk about, sometimes, when we were all little kids?”
“Yes, that’s him. He’s a very nice man. Could make me laugh so hard, was so free, willing to be goofy, but the real man, the one inside the goofy one, well, he was shy, sweet, and had the most beautiful ears. I still don’t know for certain which one is your father, could be either. You’re as dark as the rest of us and that man was very fair-skinned, but you do have such pretty ears, too.” She reached over to touch my ear. I moved away, just an inch. It was enough, and she lowered her hand. “It doesn’t surprise me to know he was trying to save that woman from Japan. That’s how he was.”
“He didn’t seem to help you too much,” I said.
“He doesn’t know. When the tests came back with no clear answer, Dad and your aunt never pushed it. I suppose they could nowadays, but Dad’s dead, and your aunt, thank goodness, is still busy chasing money somewhere else.”
“So he has no idea I even exist? He didn’t bother to find out?”
“He wondered. The last time I saw him. He asked if there was anything in my life he should know about. I told him no. He had married that woman by then, so there was no sense in stirring up things that couldn’t be. He wasn’t going to leave and come up here, and I wasn’t going to leave and go down there, so we decided to love each other one last night, and leave it at that.”
“When was that?”
“The last time we were together. Fred Howkowski’s funeral. When he brought the boy back, your friend out there on the roof. We had that one night, while you and the rest of the kids and that little boy slept in the back bedroom. We took all you kids to the drive-in that night, hoping to tire you out so we could have a few hours together, some awful Bigfoot movie, as I recall. You wouldn’t remember. You were just a baby, then. After we put you all to bed, we tried to get a lifetime’s worth of loving into one night and hoped we could make it last.”
“But you can’t just decide to stop loving someone, suddenly one day. It’s a gradual thing, or it doesn’t happen at all.” For me, it had been a gradual thing with Doug. Perhaps something still lingered there, something I could find when I would run into him at the National Picnic, or even at the grocery store, but it wasn’t much and it faded fast as soon as I pictured Martha still smoking and sewing and spreading and smoothing her criticism like a quilt.
“Don’t you think I know that now?”
“Which part?” I asked.
“You decide,” she said.
“So I’m half white. My whole career has been a lie.”
“Our life together, here, there, in the city, wherever—it’s not a lie. You’re my baby, the baby of all of us. You are who you are.”
“I’m going with T.J. I’m going to meet him.” I had made the decision the second T.J. seemed even remotely interested, but I had to come here first, ask that question before I set out on the road. The idea of that other man, that other possibility, had long lived in my mind, growing, becoming more real, but the face was always a blank, like those fake life-size cutouts you can stick your head through and become Santa Claus, Scarlett O’Hara, or a bathing beauty, but as soon as you step out from behind the plywood, you are yourself again, and that body is empty, waiting for the next identity. This man, though, living somewhere in West Texas, trying to save random delusional Japanese