Dave was not seriously hurt, which is a good thing, of course. I’m sure Dave would say it was a good thing. But I suspect Dave might not have minded if he’d been hurt just a wee bit more than he was. Just enough of an injury he could have gotten away with skipping my father’s eightieth birthday party two weeks later.
I do not wish to suggest that Dave dislikes my family. Or that I dislike my family. I love my family and Dave will not admit to disliking most of them. At least not when he can deal with them one or two at a time. But he has only the one sister, Louise, who has only one husband, thoroughly housebroken, and one kid, reasonably well behaved if a bit over indulged. Thus, while Dave’s extended family could populate a small village, his immediate family is a tightly structured unit.
Me, I’m one of five kids. And all five are married, with one to five kids of their own. Katherine and James also trail ex-spouses who are still on friendly terms – at least overtly friendly – with my family and who therefore get invited to such bashes as the patriarch’s birthday. Thus my immediate family consists of some 43 people. If those 43 populated a small village, it would be a rather raucous spot. Not one of the 43 is capable of shutting up for thirty seconds and every one of them is sure he or she is the star of any show.
Including me. Sane as I may manage to be in other settings, throw me back into the family stew and I revert to type. Which is another reason Dave is not particularly thrilled when my family gathers. If we’d met back when I still lived among my blood relatives, Dave would undoubtedly have married someone else. An only child of deceased parents perhaps.
The chaos surrounding Dad’s birthday bash began several months before the party, of course. The chaos originated in the very decision of whether to have a party.
The idea originated with Cecelia, which is problematic in itself. Nobody in the family really likes Cecelia much, except my oldest brother Bob, who had the bad taste to marry her. Having said that, I will be gracious enough to say also that if the rest of us had
all stepped back and let Cecelia organize my father’s birthday party, it would undoubtedly have taken place without any crises. Probably without any fun, either, but crisis free. We’re talking about my family, though, if you remember. All chiefs, no Indians, and no one but Bob too fond of Cecelia.
She had raised the idea as far back as Thanksgiving, among the sisters and sisters- in-law, in the kitchen of my parents’ house, washing dishes. It was a bit odd that she and Bob were there since they usually spend Thanksgiving with Cecelia’s family, but lately she seems to see herself as some sort of family social director, which has not made her any more popular.
“You know,” she said as she swathed leftover pumpkin pie in enough plastic wrap to have concealed a Christmas tree, “your father – oh, Katherine, surely that platter should be washed by hand. Here let me do it.” And she abandoned the pie to take the platter right out of Katherine’s hands.
“Mom’s put it in the dishwasher for forty years,” said Katherine, grabbing it back and stuffing it into the bottom rack.
“Oh,” said Cecelia, waiting till Katherine turned away and snatching the platter out again. “Well, as I was saying, your father turns eighty next summer, and I was thinking it would be a really sweet idea to throw him a party.” She began to wash the platter at the sink.
“That’s not for months,” objected Patty, stripping bits of turkey off the carcass. This had somehow become her job since med school, my Dave having once made a lame joke about the supposed similarities between carving a bird and surgery. Dad wasn’t yet ready to turn the carving knife over to the next generation, let alone a female member of the next generation, but my mother, sisters, and sisters-in-law were all quite willing to yield the thankless task of packaging leftovers. “I can’t plan that far ahead,” she muttered as she frowned at the remains, planning which section to attack next. My mother had, as usual, bought the largest turkey she could find despite the fact that they always came out tasting like leather and everyone filled up on the side dishes.
“Well, it’s just that if we want to have it someplace nice,” Cecelia explained as she rinsed the platter, “we’ll need to book it months in advance.” She lay the platter on the counter while she crossed the kitchen to the drawer where my mother kept the clean dishtowels.
Katherine seized the platter and returned it to the dishwasher, which she then slammed shut. “Dad hates parties,” she declared.
“That’s true enough,” said Liz. “Oh, thanks, Cee.” She took the clean dishtowel out of Cecelia’s hands as my sister-in-law stood baffled, looking for the platter. Cecelia doesn’t like to have her name shortened to Cee, as Liz knows, but then Liz hates drying the wineglasses, which is what she was stuck doing because Cecelia had organized the tasks. “Dad hates fancy parties. He complained for six weeks about the party you gave for Bobby’s graduation.”
Cecelia also dislikes hearing her son’s name shortened from Robert to Bobby – in fact Katherine has been known to speculate that she calls him Robert the Third at home. But Cecelia didn’t address that issue just then. “He had a lovely time. He told me so himself,” she said defensively.
“Well, he’d hardly admit to you if he hadn’t,” said Katherine. She was squinting at the controls of Mom’s new dishwasher, probably afraid that if she went to fetch her reading glasses Cecelia would deduce where the platter had gone and remove it again.
“You forgot the soap,” I told her. I reopened the machine to fill the dispenser. Cecelia spotted her missing platter, but with Katherine on one side of the door and me on the other she had no chance of getting it. I felt a twinge of guilt, ganging up on poor Cecelia that way, but if she and Katherine were going to go head to head over this party idea, I was throwing my support to my own sister. Blood is thicker than bone china – although Mom did usually wash that platter by hand – and Katherine’s idea of a party is much more fun.
And there would be a party. I knew that Cecelia, once she got her teeth into the idea, would not abandon it. It was a choice of our party versus her party, and whether she
knew it yet or not, Cecelia had lost control of this birthday party as thoroughly as she had lost control of the platter. “Dad doesn’t mind casual parties,” I said.
“He seemed to have a good time at our housewarming,” Becky ventured. Becky is my brother James’s wife, and unlike Cecelia she has accepted that she is peripheral to decision-making in our family. Maybe because she offers opinions so rarely, they’re usually given serious consideration when she does.
“Right,” said Katherine. “A cookout.” James and Becky had shown off their new custom house last summer with a cookout designed to keep as much of the confusion as possible out of the house itself and in the not-yet-landscaped yard. But Dad had had a good time, in part because Mom had been distracted enough by the landscaping plans – Mom was into gardening last summer – that she hadn’t exercised her usual vigilance and Dad had gotten rather drunk before she noticed.
“Perhaps we should ask your mother,” Cecelia put in, not yet willing to admit defeat. She figured Mom wouldn’t vote for a cookout.
She was mistaken. “Oh, yes, a cookout would be good,” Mom said. She was ensconced at the head of the kitchen table watching the rest of us clean up and get in each others way. “Here though. It’s not fair to ask James and Becky again.”
She meant she didn’t want James providing an unlimited supply of beer again, but Becky hadn’t really wanted to have the party, so it was settled.
“Right,” said Katherine. “A cookout. Fourth of July weekend. It’s the week before his birthday, so we can get stuff ready and he’ll think it’s just a usual holiday cookout. Then we’ll surprise him with the cake and stuff.”
“Do you really think a surprise party is a good idea for a man his age?” Cecelia asked. “I mean, what if his heart can’t take the shock?”
Patty pooh-poohed that idea, and Patty was the doctor in the room. “Oh, Dad has the heart of a twenty-year old,” she said. We didn’t yet know that, by the time the party rolled around, we would find ourselves wondering if he didn’t have a few other traits more suitable to a twenty-year old as well. It wasn’t until the following spring that we started worrying about that.
Of all my siblings, Ginny probably sees the most of Mom and Dad on a day to day basis. Ginny married Dennis, her high school sweetheart and they live the next town over. Thus it’s Ginny who ends up at doctors’ waiting rooms, car mechanics’ parking lots, and, this past March, the accountant’s office. It was Ginny who first suspected something was up with Dad.
She didn’t think the bit of overheard conversation was so odd that she rushed to call everyone that same afternoon. But she was struck enough to mention it when we spoke a few days later.
“They were just finishing up when I got there to pick Dad up after Jason’s Little League game,” she told me. “The accountant told him it was only deductible if she was a dependent.”
“What’s deductible if who’s a dependent?” I asked.
“That’s just it,” she said. “When Dad saw me he turned kind of red and said it didn’t really matter, he was only asking a hypothetical question, and then he began on this enthusiastic series of questions about Jason’s game and boasting to Islingham about what a great shortstop his grandson is.”
“I didn’t realize Jason played shortstop,” I said.
“He doesn’t. He’s catcher, he’s lousy, and Dad wouldn’t know anyway. He pays no attention to the kids’ sports activities. He’s only interested in their grades and their college plans.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I think it’s sunk in that none of his grandchildren are exactly athletic scholarship candidates.”
“So do you suppose Dad’s at it again?” Ginny asked.
I considered. “It,” of course, referred to the extracurricular activities we adult kids all knew our father had engaged in at times over the 52 years of his marriage.
“He’s 79,” I reasoned aloud. “And it’s got to be 20 years since the last one.” “20 years since the last one we know about,” Ginny corrected.
Then Dad vanished for a few hours the Friday before Easter. It’s not that my mother keeps tabs on him like the mother of a two-year old keeps tabs. But she can’t drive since her cataract surgery, and he bought himself a cell phone so she could get a hold of him in an emergency. Granted, he’s never really mastered it, and disconnects calls by accident or forgets to charge it. So when Mom realized he wasn’t in the yard as she’d thought, and he wasn’t in the house, and she tried to call him, she didn’t really worry too much when she got the voice mail prompt instead of his answering. She just left a message about wanting another dozen eggs to hard boil for the visiting grandchildren to dye the next day, and would he pick some up if he got the message before he came home.
But because she’d looked at the clock when she left the message, she knew he’d been gone at least an hour when Cecelia called to double check how many people were going to be at Easter dinner so she’d know how many Parker house rolls to bring. Then, Cecelia called back two hours later to volunteer to come separately from Bob and Bobby on Easter, an hour early, to iron my mother’s good table cloth — because Cecelia regards an unironed table cloth the way a Red Sox fan regards the New York Yankees — Dad still wasn’t home. Mom still wasn’t worried, but Cecelia was.
Cecelia has an unfortunate tendency to call people right before any family gathering with new ideas for turning my family’s rather casual get-togethers into the more formal affairs she thinks they ought to be. So maybe Ginny, James, and Patty were all out, or maybe they were screening their calls. At any rate, I was the first sibling or sibling-in-law Cecelia managed to reach, although what she thought I could do living six hours away when she only lived 90 minutes away I’m not sure.
As soon as I heard her tense voice I automatically and reflexively began to excuse myself from whatever it was she wanted me to do. “We’re not coming to Syracuse for Easter,” I told her. “We’re going to Dave’s family.”
In truth, we’d declined Minny’s invitation as well as my mother’s. We were going to the Mets game, but Cecelia would have considered that inappropriate. She herself had
a rigid schedule of holiday family rotations. That was why we’d all been so surprised to see her at Mom and Dad’s at Thanksgiving instead of at Christmas.
But she hadn’t called to assign me a side dish or discuss my wardrobe. “Your father’s missing,” she said.
“Missing what?” I asked, assuming he’d absented himself from some pre-holiday outing Cecelia had set up, taking the youngest grandchildren to some Meet the Easter Bunny luncheon or taking all the adults to some Good Friday church service.
“He’s been missing for three hours and he doesn’t answer his cell phone.”
“Well, he is an adult,” I pointed out. “He’s allowed to go outside by himself. And he hardly ever remembers to charge the phone.”
“I think it must be Alzheimer’s,” Cecelia said.
This leap was like dealing with Minny, although my mother-in-law would have had a hard time keeping a trace of inappropriate glee out of her voice at the prospect of some calamity befalling someone else, since whatever it was she probably would have predicted it at some point. Cecelia sounded honestly upset.
“Alzheimer’s?” I repeated. “Dad’s sharper mentally than most twenty-year olds.”
“It can come on quite suddenly,” Cecelia insisted. “Do you think I ought to call the police?”
“Well, exactly how long has he been missing?” I asked.
“At least three hours,” she said.
“And Mom was concerned enough to call you?”
“Well, no. I’d called her to ask ... oh, what difference does that make?”
“None, but Mom would know if he’d been acting strange lately.” And at that
point, of course, I flashed back to the conversation with Ginny about what she’d overheard at the accountant’s. That was definitely not something I was going to discuss with Cecelia.
And why you might ask was I so determined not to discuss the matter with my sister-in-law? I’ve already mentioned that we adult children knew our father did not have a faultless track record when it came to fidelity. And since Bob knew, Cecelia would
know. But I wasn’t about to explain my suspicions to my sister-in-law. To explain why I didn’t want to, I need to explain how we came to know, and how various of us had reacted to the fact. I need to backtrack more than twenty years here.
Ginny had been in college at the time, and had decided on the spur of the moment on a Friday afternoon to go home for a visit. Maybe she’d broken up with a boyfriend and couldn’t face a dateless weekend. Maybe she had accumulated more dirty laundry than she could manage in the dorm laundry room; I don’t know. At any rate, it wasn’t a planned visit and she didn’t call first. But she headed on home expecting to find Mom in the kitchen and Dad off at his law firm.
Mom, however, was in her golfing phase at the time. She had headed off to the country club for an instructional nine holes with the golf pro. She never did master the game. Nine rounds could have taken her all afternoon even if she hadn’t had to let so many foursomes play through ahead of her. Dad had been much more encouraging about her golfing than he was about most of her rotating hobbies.
Ginny, I would guess, parked her beat-up Toyota in the driveway and never looked in the garage to see if any other cars were there. If she had, she might have noticed Dad’s car, not Mom’s. She let herself into the back door, yelled hi, and waited for a reply. None came. She thought nothing of it. She hadn’t expected Dad to be there and Mom might have been out for any number of reasons. So she carted her bag or bags up toward her bedroom, and it wasn’t till she got upstairs that she heard something in Mom and Dad’s room. Her first thought was a burglar.
Now if I’d been there, that might not have been my first thought. Bob had spent two summers filing in Dad’s office several years before this incident, back when he first decided he wanted to be a lawyer too. He’d noticed over the first summer how friendly Dad was with some of the female staff. But while he’d shared his suspicions with me, Katherine, and James, he’d felt Jeff, Ginny, and Patty were too young at the time to hear such ideas, especially since he had no proof.
And if I’d been there and I had suspected a burglar, I most certainly would not have reacted as Ginny did. I would have been out the door to call the cops from a
neighbor’s phone. But Ginny has always been one to take the bull by the horns, or in this case, to take the heavy brass lamp from the hall table by its neck and rush off to rescue Mom’s jewelry.
She’s always been too embarrassed to describe the ensuing scene in much detail, and for obvious reasons, I’ve never asked Dad. But I gather the dent you can still see in the lamp resulted from it’s slipping from her fingers as the shock registered, rather than it’s having been thrown or swung at the equally startled paralegal who was in flagrante delicto with our father.
Nor do I know what Mom made of the dented lamp, or of the duffel bag of Ginny’s dirty clothes in the upstairs hallway when Ginny herself had fled back to school to make tearful, horrified phone calls to her siblings.
At Bob’s insistence Cecelia had been included in the discussions that followed this event. (Dave had refused to become involved.) So why didn’t I want to mention to Cecelia what Ginny had overheard at the accountant’s? Because twenty-some years ago, Cecelia had been the most fervent advocate for telling Mom what Ginny had seen, although she’d agreed to abide by the group decision when she was outvoted. And when Mom did find out a few months later, Cecelia denied having told her. I for one believed her, because Cecelia is the worst liar I’ve ever met. In fact I’ve always suspected that’s how Mom did find out, that Cecelia attempted to lie about it.
I, fortunately, do not share Cecelia’s handicap in that area. So I pushed the idea of Dad holed up in some motel room with some bimbo out of my mind – one secret to successful lying – and I refocused on the conversation with my sister-in-law.
“Have you tried calling Ginny?” I asked.
“Of course I called Ginny. She’s not home. I left a message.”
“Did you try her on her cell?”
There was a millisecond of a pause before Cecelia responded. “I thought she
didn’t have a cell. She told me she hates them, won’t use one.”
As I said, I have no problem lying. “Right,” I said, “I forgot.” I reached for my
address book to look up Ginny’s cell number.
“Can you hold on?” Cecelia asked. “I just got a call waiting beep.”
“Sure,” I told her, and while I was on hold I considered the possibilities. It was odd for Dad to go out without telling Mom. On the other hand, she was getting a little hard of hearing without being willing to admit it. If Dad had called out that he was going to go meet a friend for lunch, or some such, it was possible she hadn’t heard. Still, I figured I’d better call Ginny on the cell and alert her to possible trouble. Then Cecelia came back on the line.
“It was your Mom,” she said. “He came back.”
“Where was he?” I asked.
“Apparently she didn’t ask him. She just told him she needed eggs, and he went
right back out.”
“Well, he’s okay then,” I said.
“I guess so,” Cecelia agreed, but I could tell she wasn’t sure about that. “It’s very odd, though, don’t you think?”
“Not being odd would be odd for Mom and Dad,” I told her. I’m not quite sure what I meant by that, but trying to figure out what I might have meant shut Cecelia up long enough for me to get off the phone. Little did I know that my whole concept of odd was in for revision.
The next odd thing that happened was not reported to me by a sibling or an in- law. I saw it myself, and it might not have struck me at all if my suspicions had not already been aroused. Mom and Dad came to New York for a visit the end of May. Jeff and Liz’s daughter was graduating from Vassar, they went to the graduation, and came on down to the city for a few days after. They took in a museum, took Patty’s son to the zoo, and then Wednesday Mom and I went to a Broadway matinee while Dad met some old business associates for a late, leisurely lunch. And yes, I’m pretty sure it was in truth old business associates he was lunching with because I’d fielded a couple of the phone calls arranging the date.
We were supposed to meet up in Bloomie’s after, that being near the restaurant where Dad was seeing his friends, and Mom being convinced Dad needed a new suit.
Mom and I got there early. When setting a time with Dad, I’d allowed extra time for finding a taxi after getting out of the theater. Since I didn’t usually go to Wednesday matinees, I didn’t realize how large a percentage of the audience would consist of seniors’ clubs from the suburbs who were all piling back onto their buses, not looking for cabs.
“We’ve got a half hour to kill,” I told Mom when we got to the store. “Do you want to sit down, get a cup of coffee someplace?”
“We’ve been sitting all afternoon,” she said. “How about we head up to the children’s department and let me get Emily a birthday present.”
Ginny’s youngest is a nine going on nineteen year old fashionista. I had to agree she’d be more likely to wear a birthday gift from Grandma if it came in a Bloomingdale’s box than one from J. C. Penney, so we headed upstairs.
I have only a son, and a son who hasn’t yet heard that grunge is dead at that, so once I helped Mom find the appropriate department, my services and opinions were not required. While Mom browsed the racks, looking for something that would be devastatingly cool without making her youngest granddaughter look like a very short streetwalker, I wandered around elsewhere on the floor, feeling nostalgic for the days when I had some influence on what my son put on his body. That’s what I was doing in the toddler section when I saw a familiar form in the layettes.
Now as I’ve said, if I had not been suspicious already, I would have thought nothing of it. I would have assumed Dad was looking for a gift. He’d just had lunch with some old friends, some of whom might well be expecting grandchildren. Hell, some of them, on their second or third wives might even be expecting children. He normally passed such errands on to Mom or to one of his daughters – I’d been called into such service myself on occasion. But if he’d found himself in the store early ... I drew a bit closer, trying to see what he was buying.
I was suspicious already, and if he was buying a present it was quite a present. The pile on the counter kept growing, and he kept adding another stretchie, another tee shirt, a couple of bibs.
I ducked behind a rack of tiny, overpriced jeans as he glanced around as if looking for something else he could add to his haul. Tiny, overpriced jeans of course. He headed straight toward my cover.
I panicked. I dropped to all fours behind an unattended twin stroller and nudged it a few feet away, toward a tableful of little sweatshirts, trying to put as much distance as possible between me and Dad. You can’t really steer a stroller crouching on the floor behind it though, and it bumped into a rack of tiny bathing suits. It didn’t bump it hard, you understand, just a gentle little thump, just enough to wake the first twin, who let out a teeny little burble.
I froze. But nothing more happened at first. The rack swayed a bit but didn’t fall. Twin number one, awake now, continued to burble. Peeking around the top of the stroller I saw Dad had not noticed a stroller appearing to move on its own but was instead frowning at the price tag on a pair of tiny jeans. I started to crawl away.
That’s when twin number two, roused slowly but surely by his sibling’s continued vocalizations, began to yell.
Let me tell you, this kid had a pair of lungs that would do credit to an opera singer. The twins, the stroller, and me on my hands and knees were all surrounded in a matter of seconds. A young woman who seemed to be the twins’ mother came running, two salesgirls came running, three miscellaneous shoppers came running, and some guy in a suit, talking into his lapel, came running. Fortunately, neither of my parents came running.
Now I could only assume Mr. Suit-Talking-Into-His-Lapel was a plainsclothes security guy, and while there are probably no good circumstances under which to be arrested for suspicion of assaulting twins in Bloomingdale’s, this was a particularly bad circumstance to risk arrest on suspicion of assaulting twins in Bloomingdale’s. I didn’t want my father to become aware I’d seen and was spying on him, and I didn’t want my mother to become aware my father was there to be seen and spied on. So I did what any sane, rational, reasonably intelligent woman would do under such circumstances. I pretended I spoke no English.
There must be some language in which “contacto lenzi” is the correct term for a contact lens, although I have no idea what language that might be. But I began to mutter that while frantically patting the rug around and under the stroller. This allowed me to remain behind the stroller while allaying the suspicions of my unwelcome audience, most of whom transferred their attention to the twins’ mother and her attempts to soothe her son. Mr.-Suit-Talking-Into-His-Lapel, however, was either more suspicious or more eager to be helpful, because he joined me on the floor and began to feel around as well.
If I actually wore contacts I would have tried to pop one out so he could have found it for me. And while I suspected that dozens of contact lenses are probably lost in Bloomingdale’s every week, I couldn’t count on one turning up just when and where I needed it. Plus Mom would be looking for me as soon as she settled on a gift for Emily, and she – or Dad – might notice the fuss surrounding the noisy twin, who had subsided into aggrieved whimpers, but who whimpered almost as loudly as he had cried.
But the squalling twin sputtered as he yelped, and droplet of baby spittle glinted on the carpet. Not only did it catch enough light that it could conceivably be taken for a lost contact, it caught that light a couple of feet away, behind the table of sweatshirts, where I would be better concealed if my father looked around. I crawled the couple of feet toward the spot – which had the added benefit of getting me away from the stroller which the mother might move any second – and pantomimed picking something up from the carpet. Clutching my now spit-dampened fingers to my bosom I smiled at Mr. Suit, whispered “lenzi mio!” and got to my feet, still crouched over of course, lest Dad spot me. I scurried away bent over like the Hunchback of Bloomingdale’s, and Mr. Suit, naturally since I was behaving so oddly, followed.
I could see in one of the many Bloomie’s mirrors that Mr. Suit was following, although he was trying to give the impression he was browsing the racks. And I could see my mother tucking a credit card and a receipt back in her wallet as a salegirl folded something into a shopping bag. I could not see, however, how I was going to rendezvouz with my mother without further arousing Mr. Suit’s suspicions, or how I was going to get her down to the men’s department without her seeing Dad, without Dad seeing her, and
without Mr. Suit tagging along like the uncool kid you were always trying to get rid of in middle school.
Ah, but this was the children’s department and distractions for all were on hand. If one large-lunged twin had gotten me into this predicament, his sister was on hand to get me out. And I didn’t even have to roll her stroller into a rack of bathing suits for her to come to my assistance. I didn’t have to do anything. As far as I could tell from what I could see in the mirror, her mother did it for me, by picking up her still-whimpering brother. Not one to sit still for her sibling getting all the attention, the previously quiet twin ceased to be quiet, and her lung capacity proved equal to her brother’s. Mr. Suit hesitated, turned to see what was happening, and I took advantage of the opening to straighten up and dash over to my mother.
“I need the lady’s room,” I told her.
“Yes dear, just a moment,” she said as she worked on getting her wallet stowed away. Her wallet is so overstuffed with grandchildren photos that it barely fit into the tiny elegant purse she had considered appropriate for the theater.
“I need it now!” I insisted. “I’ll meet you there,” and without giving her time to respond I sprinted off to the escalator.
I didn’t look back to see if Mr. Suit had resumed trailing me, but if he had he could hardly follow me into the lady’s, and it would be a logical place to retreat if I had in fact had a contact lens that needed to be cleaned and replaced. Of course this tactic did not entirely eliminate the possibility that my mother would spot my father somewhere he had no business being, doing something he had no business doing. Still, I figured I had slightly lessened the odds of that happening. My mother would probably worry that I was ill and hurry to see what was up. She would probably not take time to browse around the baby department.
And by the time I got to the lady’s room I was in fact feeling rather sick. It had been bad enough to consider the possibility that Dad was fooling around again. The idea that he might be out spawning little bastards at an age when he ought to be looking forward to great-grandchildren was enough to turn my stomach.
Several minutes of deep breathing in a stall served to calm my nerves a bit. By the time my cell phone rang with my mother complaining that she didn’t know her way around Bloomingdales and that I had failed to give her step by step directions to the lady’s room I intended to visit, my voice was reasonably calm. By the time she arrived I was powdering my nose sedately.
“Sorry,” I said. “I should have stopped in here on the way up to Children’s. All that coffee at lunch ....”
So we headed off to the men’s department to meet Dad, who was late.
“He has no sense of time any more,” said my mother as she started sorting through the suits she thought he should try on. She didn’t seem bothered by the delay.
When he did show up he was carrying a large shopping bag and grinning broadly. For a moment my heart leapt. If he was bringing his purchases with him, there must be some baby for whom he had a legitimate reason to buy presents. Then he handed the bag to my mother. “I bought you a gift,” he said.
“Why Robert, you shouldn’t have,” she said as she peered into the bag. “Waterford! That’s so expensive!”
“What’s the occasion?” I asked, hoping there was an occasion beyond guilt.
“I knocked over one of your mother’s vases last week,” Dad explained, “so I figured I ought to replace it.”
“You chipped a cheap glass vase from Target,” Mom said.
“Is that what it was?” Dad grinned even more broadly. “Well, you deserve better than that.” Then his face fell a moment as he looked at me. “I should have got you something too.”
God, I thought, he really must be feeling guilty. “That’s okay,” I replied, trying to smile. “I’m not really a crystal vase sort of woman.”
It turned out I was also not the sort of woman who could bring herself to tell her siblings about what she’d seen. I tried. Every time I spoke to one of the others about the party – and that was more and more often as the date drew near – I would open my mouth
to say “I saw Dad buying baby clothes in Bloomingdale’s. How do you feel about a new baby brother or sister?” And every time the words stuck in my throat.
I did manage to tell Dave, but it took me until the Friday we were driving up to Syracuse for the party on Saturday. And he reacted pretty much the way I’d figured he would. He burst out laughing so hard he very nearly sideswiped an SUV.
“It’s not funny,” I sniffed.
“Yes it is,” he declared, before sobering. “Well, except for your mother, if she finds out.”
“She mustn’t find out. We have to make sure nobody finds out,” I insisted. “Promise you won’t say anything.”
“Me?” Dave shook his head. “I never tell any one in your family anything more consequential than yesterday’s weather. I don’t discuss politics, I don’t discuss religion, and I certainly don’t discuss private ....” He chuckled again. “I don’t discuss other people’s private affairs.”
“Well, good,” I muttered, still not entirely comfortable with having told him, although I’d become increasingly uncomfortable with not having told him before this. Sometimes you just can’t win.
He drove a few minutes in silence before he said, “So, big sister, hunh?”
“Don’t say that!” I squawked.
“I won’t if it bothers you,” he agreed, “but what I say or don’t say doesn’t change
facts.”
We were staying with Ginny and Dennis, since Dad wasn’t supposed to know
anyone but the local siblings were going to be there. The plan was to have Dennis call midmorning on the day of the party and have him ask Dad to come shopping with him and render judgment on a new set of golf clubs. Dad’s arthritis had forced him to give up the game a few years before, but that hadn’t lessened his interest or the intensity of his opinions. Take him into a sporting goods store with a large selection of golf gear and you could be assured a couple of hours would pass before he’d be ready to think about leaving.
“Now, you’re not actually going to buy a new set of golf clubs, right?” Ginny asked over breakfast.
Dennis cleared his throat. “Well, I may have to to keep him occupied long enough,”
Ginny shook her head. “I knew we should have had Bob do this,” she said.
“Hey,” Dennis protested, “you and Cecelia were the ones who decided Dad would get suspicious if Bob suggested he drive all that way to look at golf clubs.”
“No,” Ginny corrected, “Cecelia was the one who decided.”
“She was probably just afraid Bob would end up actually buying new clubs,” I suggested.
Dave laughed at that one, splattering himself with coffee. “Without Cecelia’s permission?” he asked. “No way. Bob’s a good little boy, does as he’s told.”
Ginny looked over at the clock on the stove. “Well, it’s close to ten. You’d better call and get Dad moving. Cecelia and the caterers were both supposed to be there at eleven thirty.”
“And the caterers might conceivably be late,” Dennis said as he got up and headed toward the phone on the wall, “but Cecelia, never.” He punched a speed dial number and waited for Mom or Dad to answer.
“Well, if her car broke down,” Ginny suggested.
“Cecelia’s car?” Dennis replied. “It wouldn’t dare. Mom, hi, it’s Dennis. Can I speak to the birthday boy?” Then he frowned. “No, he’s not with me. I’m just calling now.” He looked over at us, sort of shrugged, listening. “Half an hour ago? No, that wasn’t me. Hang on.”
“What?” Ginny demanded.
Dennis looked baffled. “She says he got a call half an hour ago and went out saying he had to help a friend with something. Your mother assumed it was me calling.”
Ginny looked worried a moment, then her face brightened. “It must have been Bob. Cecelia and I must have gotten our wires crossed. I thought you were supposed to get Dad out of there, and she thought Bob was supposed to.”
“Could it have been Bob calling?” Dennis asked into the phone, then “She doesn’t know,” he told Ginny.
“It must have been,” she insisted. “Let me talk to her.”
She and Dennis exchanged places, while Dave and I exchanged glances. It wasn’t like Cecelia to let anybody’s wires get crossed.
Since Mom really did not know who had called, Ginny wasn’t able to figure out any more than Dennis. So the four of us roused our adolescent children lest they sleep right through the afternoon party, then headed over to Mom’s to help set up tables and chairs and await news. I don’t know how many of us believed the idea that Dad was with Bob, but we all held on to the theory publicly until Cecelia’s blue Volvo was spotted coming up the street with a backseat full of Happy Birthday balloons and a front seat full of Cecelia and Bob.
Cecelia did not take the news well.
“Dennis!” she complained. “If you’d called when you were supposed to ....”
Ginny didn’t let her finish, leaping to her husband’s defense. “He did call when
he was supposed to. Dad was already gone!”
“Someone else called earlier,” Mom said yet again.
“And you don’t know who?” Cecelia demanded.
“Well, no,” Mom said. “He answered the phone himself.”
“You let him answer the phone?” Cecelia asked. “Today? Suppose it had been
the caterer?”
Mom looked taken aback and Katherine leapt to her defense. “C’mon, Cecelia,
how could she not let him answer the phone in his own house?”
Mom threw a grateful glance at her oldest daughter, but she still sounded
apologetic when she addressed Cecelia. “He was sitting right by it. Come to think of it, he’s been hovering right around the phone for the past couple of days. He took the cordless phone out in the yard yesterday when he weeded his tomatoes.”
“I keep telling him I’ll come over to weed his tomatoes,” Ginny said. “He’s gonna throw his back out again.”
“I reminded him of that,” Mom said, “but you know how fussy he can be about his tomatoes.”
Ginny turned to Dennis. “Do you think we could build him a raised bed next year, so he wouldn’t have to get down on his knees to do that?”
“I don’t see why not,” Dennis shrugged.
“Oh I don’t know if he’d like that,” Mom said. “He’s very traditional about his tomatoes.”
“We’re getting off the subject,” Cecelia put in. My family has a tendency to wander off the subject, and it has always driven Cecelia to distraction. She was right this time, however.
“She’s right,” I said, although it cost me some effort to admit it openly. “We need to figure out where Dad went.”
Now this might have been the time to bring up the fact that I’d spotted Dad buying massive amounts of baby clothes some six weeks before. The idea did flutter through my mind, but I didn’t voice it. I wouldn’t voice it till all other options had been exhausted. “Are any of his friends not coming to the party?”
Mom thought a moment. “Jack and his wife are away all summer, and Dan and Eileen had a wedding to go to, but I think everybody else is coming, aren’t they Ginny?”
Ginny, who had handled the RSVPs so the phone calls wouldn’t arouse Dad’s suspicions, stared off into space a moment, running through lists in her head. “Yeah, but you know, Eileen called, and Dan can be a little forgetful, so it’s possible he might not think of the party if it occurred to him to call Dad about something.”
“Well, that’s probably it,” Mom said. “So let’s just get everything ready and he’ll come home when Dan has to get dressed for the wedding.”
“Somebody ought to call and check,” Cecelia said.
Much as it pained me to say so twice in a matter of minutes, Cecelia was right again, and I said so.
So we all trooped into the kitchen and stood around in a large, untidy, anxious circle as Mom called Eileen, asked after Dad, and reported back to the rest of us that yes,
Eileen and Dan had remembered the party, and they were still really sorry they couldn’t make it but they were planning to drop a gift off on the way to the wedding and no, Dad wasn’t there.
“And he didn’t answer his cell phone?” Cecelia asked Mom as she hung up the phone.
“Oh, I didn’t call him, Ginny did,” said Mom.
“I didn’t ... I thought you ... Oh for Pete’s sake,” Ginny sputtered.
At that Kathleen grabbed the phone out from under Mom’s hand and punched
numbers in as she mumbled under her breath, “This family ... I swear to god ... nobody thought ....” She shut up and listened as, presumably, she heard the ring on the other end.
Then we all heard the ring. I looked around and, sure enough, there was Dad’s rain jacket on the hook by the back door, ringing away. Dennis was closest, and he felt for and pulled the phone out of one of the jacket’s pockets. “So much for that idea,” he said, flipping the phone case open to stop the ringing. As he did, a small rectangle of cardboard that had been tucked inside fluttered to the floor. He closed the case and returned the phone to Dad’s jacket as Ginny stooped to pick up the cardboard.
“Here,” she said, holding it out to Dennis, “you’d better put this ....”
She broke off as what was printed on the cardboard registered, and an odd, uncomfortable expression washed over her face, sort of like she’d spotted someone she recognized but really didn’t want to see.
Dennis saw his wife’s expression and reached out for the business card – by this point I could see that that’s what it was – and took it from her curiously, glancing at it himself. His expression too changed, only his was more like he was looking at an audit notice from the IRS.
“What?” Kathleen demanded.
“It’s a business card for an Evelyn MacIntosh,” Dennis answered, in a voice that sounded like he was having trouble talking.
“Who?” Mom asked.
Patty took the card from Dennis’s hand and read it at a glance. Then her expression changed. She looked like she’d just swallowed an aspirin tablet that had gotten stuck at the back of her throat and dissolved there. “Evelyn MacIntosh,” she repeated, and then she looked up at the rest of us. Her voice took on a pleading quality, as if she were hoping one of us would tell her that the next two words meant something other than what she knew damn well they meant. “Lamaze instructor,” she said.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Dave turned to me. “Hey Gail, maybe you’d better tell them what you saw in Bloomingdales.”
I didn’t go into detail – nobody needed to know about Mr. Suit and the nonexistent contact lens – but the basic facts were pretty quickly told, and the result was the sort on pandemonium Dave has always hated in my family, everyone talking at once, no one listening. Only stray phrases registered: “He swore he would never ...,” “That doesn’t necessarily mean ...,” “ Don’t let the kids hear ...,” and so on. My mother ignored it all, but walked slowly and resolutely across the kitchen, like a prisoner on his way to the scaffold, and took Dad’s jacket down from its hook. She went methodically through the pockets, but nothing she found seemed to interest her and she dropped a used tissue, a movie ticket stub, and finally the jacket itself to the floor before walking out of the kitchen, still ignoring her grown kids’ babel. The cacophony died out as we watched her go, and in a troop, we followed her through the dining room and the front hall into my father’s study.
Now I have to explain here that we had all been brought up to consider my father’s study, and most especially his desk, as sacrosanct. We had all, at some point in our childhoods, gone in there looking for something – a pen to finish our homework, scotch tape to wrap a gift, a stamp to mail a letter – and found ourselves on the receiving end of a lecture about attorney-client privilege and the absolute need for my father to ensure absolute privacy for the many assorted papers he brought home. If my mother was the one who caught us in there, my mother was the one who delivered the lecture. And as one who had to listen to it more than once, I can tell you my mother’s version was even more intimidating than my father’s. Even now that he was pretty much retired, he
still handled occasional small matters for long-term clients, and the rule was still in effect. So to see my mother walk in there, seat herself calmly in Dad’s big leather desk chair, and begin to go through his papers was strangely unsettling, as if you’d woken up some morning in your own bed and found everyone around you was speaking French instead of English.
She was methodical in her search, but certainly not neat. She went through every pile of papers there, scattering them as she went. When she found something of interest, she held it out to the rest of us without looking up and without speaking.
The first time she did this, no one reacted at first, till she shook the slip of paper at Bob, who was closest to her, till he took it from her hand and examined it. He read it, nodded, and passed it on to Cecelia, and thus it made it’s way around the circle. We were a dozen in all, five kids, five spouses, two ex-spouses, and everyone looked silently and miserably at each bit of incriminating evidence as it made its way around from Bob to Denny, at the end, who then stepped forward and placed it in the growing pile on a corner of the desk.
After about fifteen minutes, Mom finished going through the papers on top of the desk and in the top drawer. There were some half dozen items in Denny’s pile by this time: a receipt from a furniture store for a crib; a letter from a real estate broker about Dad’s cosigning a lease for a Jesse Quinn; an appointment card, dated three months’ previously, for J. Quinn’s appointment with an obstetrician; a photocopied list of what to bring to the hospital when going into labor; Mom’s old, dog-earred copy of Dr. Spock, which had been in the desk drawer; and a photo of Dad with his arm around the shoulder of a very pregnant, very young woman.
The photo was definitely the biggest shock, not only the girl’s age, but her whole sense of style. She had streaks in her hair of an unnatural shade of pink – not that there is a natural shade of pink for hair – she had metal studs attached to odd parts of her anatomy, and there appeared to be a tattoo on her shoulder although the strap of her maternity shirt made it unclear what she’d chosen to adorn herself with. She and Dad were both grinning.
No one had made any comment on Mom’s other findings, passing them around in silence, but this last discovery provoked a series of gasps and exclamations as it made the round of my siblings and siblings-in-law.
“Just look at her!” Cecelia gasped. “How could he?”
“Her looks are not the issue,” Katherine declared.
“But ... But ... I wouldn’t let Robert go out with a girl who looked like that!”
“Well, unlike Robert the Third, Robert the First doesn’t ask your permission,” my
brother James pointed out. This was unnecessary, but Cecelia’s taking the lead in outrage was getting on his nerves I think.
Before she could formulate some sort of cutting remark, however, the phone rang.
Cecelia grabbed at it. Katherine lunged for it. Mom reached for it. And while Cecelia and Katherine were faster, Mom was closer.
“Hello?” she said inquiringly, and then in a different sort of voice, “Bob, where the heck are you?”
I knew that voice. That was the way Mom spoke on the phone when you were out past your curfew in high school and called with some lame excuse. That was the voice with which Mom greeted you at the back door when she’d had an irate call from a neighbor whose cat you’d teased on the way home from grade school. That was the voice that meant you were in big trouble, and if Dad didn’t know he was in big trouble, he wasn’t paying attention.
But of course we could only hear Mom’s end of the conversation. The phone on Dad’s desk did have a speaker option, and Bob – my brother Bob that is – being closest, reached for it. Mom slapped his hand away as if he were a toddler reaching for one too many cookies.
“Parkside General,” she purred into the phone. “And what, pray tell, are you doing in the hospital? ... Oh, I’m sure you’re alright.”
There was a brief moment of buzz among those of us who were listening. Hospital? Alright? But then what ...?
“Somebody you want me to meet,” Mom said, obviously repeating part of Dad’s explanation. “I see.”
That shut us all up. He wanted Mom to meet ... whom? Her? Into the silence in the den came the melodious chime of my parents’ doorbell, but none of us moved a muscle to answer it.
“Oh, I’ll be right there,” Mom assured Dad, and she hung up the phone, closed her eyes a moment, then looked up at the assembled lineup of her children and their spouses. “Third floor,” she told us as if confirming bad news.
“Maternity,” Ginny said. Her two kids had been born at Parkside General.
Just then Bob and Cecelia’s oldest – Bobby to everyone but his mother – stuck his head around the door. “Mom, the caterers are here. They want to know where to set up.”
Cecelia heaved the sigh of the overworked and underappreciated. “Ginny, could you ....”
Kathleen interrupted, placing a restraining arm on Ginny’s arm as she did. “You’re the one who insisted on having this party catered,” she reminded Cecelia. “In fact, you’re the one who insisted on having this party.
Cecelia rolled her eyes then glanced around the semicircle of her in-laws as if waiting for someone else to volunteer to deal with the caterers, leaving Cecelia to organize a united response to Dad’s phone call. But everyone, even her husband Bob, was nodding in obvious agreement with Kathleen. And I’ll give Cecelia this much: she is gracious in defeat. She probably considers it beneath her dignity to be otherwise.
“Yes, of course,” she said, and she left the room.
Kathleen looked at her watch. “Guests’ll be arriving in two hours,” she said.
Mom looked at her own watch. “An hour and a half,” she predicted. “Your
father’s sister has been half an hour early every time we’ve invited her over for the past half century. The woman drives me crazy. But the kids will be here to greet her, and I expect I’ll be back around then anyway.” She rose to her feet and looked around. “Who’s coming?” she asked.
Everyone of course. Bob, as the eldest, insisted on driving Mom. Everyone else piled into their own cars, forming a convoy that probably looked to any observers like a funeral procession minus the headlights and black clothes. We were certainly a rather grim looking crew as we assembled at the edge of the hospital parking lot, and people edged nervously out of our way as we marched en masse through the hospital lobby. Both the elderly woman at the information desk and a middle-aged security guard opened their mouths as if to challenge us, and then thought better of it.
We took up an entire elevator, and the only reason we all fit was that it was one of the oversized ones designed to handle a couple of hospital guerneys. There were a couple of other people waiting, but they declined to get in with us.
And on the third floor we marched off and down the hall in a phalanx with Mom at the head to find Dad standing in front of that big window into the nursery that some hospitals still have. He was pointing out one bassinet in particular to a young guy standing next to him, both of them with the identical loopy grin on their faces.
“Robert!” Mom snapped, and he turned, saying “Kate, come see ....”
Then he saw her support troops, and the smile wavered a little, but didn’t completely vanish. “Everybody?” he asked
“They were all at the house when you called,” Mom said, as if that explained everything.
“Why?” Dad asked. He seemed baffled. He glanced quickly at the young man he’d been speaking with when we got there, then back to our group, then back to the young man. “These are all my kids,” he explained, accompanying the words with a shrug betokening confusion.
“All your kids?” Mom repeated, the sarcasm dripping like icicles in a spring thaw. Dad was obviously still confused, but his eyes scanned the group quickly, and we
could see him mentally ticking off names and numbers. “All my kids and all but one of their spouses,” he averred, and his voice was beginning to take on a bit of an edge to match my mother’s. “Did you lose Cecelia someplace, or did she not want to join in the fun?”
“She’s still at the house, dealing with ...,” his eldest son and namesake put in, feeling called upon to defend both his wife’s family feeling and his own husbandly attentiveness.
“Dealing with the caterer setting up for your eightieth birthday party,” Mom interrupted angrily.
“Birthday party? I hate parties. You know that.”
“Well, right now I don’t care much what you hate.”
“I ask you down here so you can meet ....”
“Meet your little bastard?” Mom interrupted angrily.
“My little ...? Is that what you thought?” Dad seemed truly taken aback by what
she’d said. And the young man by his side, the young man we’d all assumed to be some innocent bystander who’d been either too startled or too nosy to walk decently away from another family’s very public argument, seemed to take offense.
“She is not a bastard!”
Dad turned to him without seeming to find this interjection out of place. “Well, the new one, no, but technically her mother .... But that doesn’t ....” He turned back to Mom, took her elbow and pulled her, despite her resistance, toward the nursery window. “That one,” he said, pointing, “in the second row, Baby Girl Quinn, that’s our first greatgrandchild.”
“Our?” Mom questioned, her anger now undercut by a trace of uncertainty.
“Our,” Dad repeated firmly. Still holding her elbow he turned her toward the young man. “And this,” he said, gesturing, “is her father, lawfully married to her mother, as I well know, having been one of the two witnesses. Jesse, this is my wife, Kate.”
The young man, who did indeed seem to answer to the name Jesse, as in the co- signed lease, held out a hand. “I am really pleased to meet you, Ma’am. Jill will be too.”
Mom allowed her hand to be shaken, although she seemed to be in a daze. The rest of us weren’t doing too good either. Kathleen was the first to find her voice.
“Okay, so nice to meet this guy Jesse and all that, but who the hell is that baby and how does she turn out to be your grandchild? Is Jesse your ... unh ...?” she paused, looking, I assume, for an inoffensive word.
“Bastard?” Dad supplied. “No. Not that I wouldn’t be proud to have sired him. But that would have made it rather inappropriate for him to have married my granddaughter, Jill. The baby, you see, is my greatgranddaughter.”
“Since when do you have a granddaughter Jill?” Mom asked, her suspicions resurfacing.
“For some twenty-two years, it seems,” Dad answered, grinning. “Although I had no inkling of it till last fall, when some pink-haired young lady showed up at the offices of Donovan, Schilling & Greenfield looking for her biological father.”
“Wait a minute,” Kathleen put in. “If you’re her father ...”
“Grandfather,” Dad corrected.
“So,” Mom put in, furious again, “forty some odd years ago you had a bastard
who had a bastard who just had ....”
“Absolutely not,” Dad said. “I may not always have been a model husband, but
I’ve always been a very careful one.”
“But you said this Jill was looking for her father!” Kathleen objected.
“Yes,” Dad said, and then he turned from his oldest daughter to his oldest son.
“Jill was looking for her biological father, about whom she knew exactly three facts. One, that he had been born and brought up in Syracuse. Two, that he’d been in law school when her mother had known him, in ..., “he paused, relishing this, “in multiple senses of the word. And three, that his name was Robert Donovan.”
Bob, while listening to this, had slowly but inexorably turned green. “Jill after her mother?” he asked in a strangled voice.
“Yes!” Dad said triumphantly. “Jill after her mother. Charming lady, Jill the elder. I met her at the wedding.”
“But how ...?” Bob was still having trouble breathing, let alone finding the words for what he wanted to ask, and he paused to inhale deeply.
“When I started grad school here,” the young man, Jesse, put in, quickly but rather tentatively. “Jill, she came to visit me. We weren’t married yet, but Jill, well, she’d been thinking about looking for her real Dad ever since her parents told her her Dad was really her stepdad, which wasn’t till she turned 21. So when she realized I was in school in his hometown, her real dad that is, and she came to see me, well, she looked up lawyers in the yellow pages, here, on the off chance she could find his name. But of course you don’t practice here.”
“So she found me instead,” Dad explained. “The firm still lists me in the yellow pages.”
“And then,” Jesse continued, “when we found out Jill was pregnant and decided to move up the wedding date, well, her grandfather here offered to be helpful. And he was he ever!”
Jesse’s slightly nervous, slightly rambling explanation had given Bob time to get his breath back, and he rounded on Dad. “How come you didn’t tell me?” he demanded.
“Ah, well, that.” Dad was the one having a bit of trouble finding words now. “I did think about it but I didn’t want to cause ... I was afraid that you might ... It was just that you’re ....” He trailed off, seeming to search for the exact phrasing.
“I’m what?” Bob demanded, obviously ready to take offense
But then “There you are!” Cecelia’s voice rang down the hallway from somewhere near the elevators.
“You’re – uh – married.” Dad said, as Cecelia charged down the hall and pushed her way through the rest of us. “Very, very married.” He looked from Bob to Cecelia, back to Bob, and shrugged.
Bob nodded, as Dad’s explanation obviously made perfect sense. In fact we all nodded, so that Cecelia found herself in the middle of a rough semicircle of people agreeing with she didn’t know what. It must have been like stepping into a ring of life- sized bobble head dolls, and it unsettled her a bit. “What’s going on?” she wanted to know.
As usual, Katherine was the first to leap into action. “Cecelia,” she enthused, “come meet Jesse. Jesse is a ...” she hesitated a fraction of a second over what word to use, but gathered her thoughts and barreled on. “A close friend of Dad’s from – uh – from church. They got friendly at church.”
“But I’m not ....” Jesse didn’t know our family well enough to shut up and let it roll, but the rest of the family wasn’t about to let him string enough words together to let Cecelia hear him.
“Well, not at church exactly,” Dad said. “But it was this group from church that set up an outreach program at the university. Jesse here is a student. Going for his master’s degree.”
“How nice,” Cecelia said, trying valiantly to make sense of the situation. “In health services?”
“Computer science,” Jesse said.
“Oh.” Cecelia frowned. “I just thought, since you were meeting at the hospital, that maybe ....”
“The hospital,” Dad put in. “Well, of course that might seem a little strange, but you see ....” The rest of us realized that Dad didn’t know how much of what incriminating evidence we’d all seen in the den.
I put my oar in quickly. “Jesse’s wife just had a baby. They’d just moved here when she found out she was pregnant, so Dad was the one who helped them find the doctor and a bigger apartment and stuff.”
“Oh, right,” Dad agreed. “That’s the kind of stuff the outreach program is for, the church one I mentioned. Help the students navigate a new city. So now I get to be a sort of honorary grandfather.”
“So Jesse is the father of the new baby?” Cecelia asked.
“Well of course he is,” Dad said. “What did you think? That I was siring little bastards at my age?”
“Well ....” This was of course exactly what Cecelia, along with the rest of us, had thought, but not knowing what had gone before, she was reluctant to admit it.
“Why your mother-in-law, my wife, would skin me alive,” Dad assured her.
“Indeed I would,” Mom agreed in her sweetest tone.
Then they both realized that siring a little bastard was exactly what Bob had done,
even if not lately, and that this was his wife they were talking to, and they cast each other stricken looks that Cecelia thankfully did not see. She was looking at Jesse a little specutively. “So you met Dad through the university?” she asked.
The boy was bright enough to have caught on to what was expected of him, although he seemed an inexperienced liar. “Yeah,” he mumbled unconvincingly. “And the church group.”
“And you didn’t know him before?” Cecelia prodded.
“Oh no.” Here Jesse spoke with more conviction. “No, I just met him this fall.”
“So, where are you from, that you needed such help navigating a new city?” she
asked.
Unnoticed by either of them, a young woman – a girl really – shuffled down from
the far end of the hall. The pink hair was mostly grown out now, cropped off, leaving a few pink ends on a dirty blond thatch, a thatch very much the shade of Bob’s. She paused as she reached the far end of the nursery window, scanning the bassinets till she found the one she wanted, then smiling a fond, foolish grin.
“Pennsylvania,” Jesse answered Cecelia. “Outside Pittsburgh.”
The young woman heard his voice, looked around, and her grin broadened even farther.
“And Robert,” Jesse faltered a bit over the name, but got it out with a fair degree of conviction, “has been a great help since Jill realized she was expecting.”
“It was nothing,” Dad put in quickly.
But Jesse would not be deterred. He was so intent on what he wanted to say he didn’t even notice when the young woman walked up behind him, elated in her pink fuzzy bathrobe and bunny slippers.
“Oh no, sir, we couldn’t have gotten through this without your help. Everything from cosigning the lease to buying the crib.”
“It was nothing,” Dad repeated.
“I’ve kept track of every penny,” Jesse plowed on. “And we’ll pay you back when I finish my degree. Every penny.”
The young woman inserted herself cheerfully in the narrow slot between Dad and Jesse, and slipped her arms around both their waists. “Hey guys,” she chirped.
“That’s not necessary,” Dad told Jesse before turning to smile at the girl.
“What’s not necessary?” she asked.
We all realized at once who she must be, of course. All of us but Cecelia. Most
of us, with various unsuccessful attempts at subtlety, kept turning our gazes from her to Bob to her, looking for resemblance. The coloring was similar, and the line of the jaw and mouth, but the eyes and nose must be her mother’s. She looked tired but cheerful and, as the silence drew out and she could not help but become aware of our united scrutiny, she seemed increasingly confused.
Cecelia, too, could not help but notice our inspection and what with the way we kept glancing at her husband, she must have realized this young lady was not her father- in-law’s inamorata. She grew increasingly suspicious.
Bob, on the other hand, was simply thunderstruck. He stared openly at Jill, jaw dropped and eyes agog.
“What’s up?” Jill finally asked.
“What is going on?” Cecelia demanded.
“This is my wife, Jill,” Jesse told Cecelia, and then to Jill, “Hey, Honey, Grand--,
uh, Robert’s family all came on down to see the baby.”
“All his family?” Jill asked, looking around at us. Including Katherine’s ex there
were six adult males she’d never laid eyes on in our group, and she glanced around quickly. Once she’d gotten as far as Bob, however, the expression on his face made it pretty clear which of the six was the one of special interest to her. Their resemblance became even more pronounced as she stared at him with the identical expression on her face.
Kathleen tried to forestall disaster. “Well, Jesse, Jill, it’s been great to meet you. Um. At last. Dad’s mentioned you to me a few times. I’d been looking forward .... But as it happens, today’s Dad’s birthday, and we’ve got guests arriving for a party.” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, any minute now, so we’ve really got to ....” She trailed off as it became increasingly clear no one, including Cecelia, was paying any attention.
“Jill,” Bob finally put in. “You look a lot like your mother.”
“You think so?” she asked in a tiny voice. “Grandpa said I look like ... I mean Robert said I look like -- um – like my father.”
“What is going on?” Cecelia said again, her voice a little shaky now.
“Well now, you know it’s funny,” Dad said quickly. “Turns out Jill’s family was from around here years ago, and I used to know her father. Small world.”
“No,” Bob said firmly, then, taking a deep breath, he turned to his wife. “Cecelia, do you remember when you broke off our engagement my second year of law school?”
She looked startled. Whatever explanation she’d been expecting, it didn’t start like this. “Yes,” she said a bit tentatively. “Although it was you who broke it off. I only said I wasn’t sure ....”
“Whatever,” he interrupted. “Anyway, we broke up.”
“Only for a week,” she said.
“Well, during that week I got drunk every night. And one of the mornings after I
got drunk, I woke up in somebody else’s ... I found I had ... See, there was this undergraduate who had a campus job in the library, so I knew her, and I ran into her in a bar, and she’d just broken up with her ... and then you came by to pick up your books, and we got back together, and ... Anyway, she graduated that spring, and moved away and she never told me she’d gotten pregnant.”
Cecelia’s jaw dropped open and she turned again to look at Jill, who was looking at Bob, not entirely happy with his version of the tale.
“Mom never said you two were drunk. She said it was one night, but a lovely night.”
Bob turned to look at her, and at first he was defensive. “Well, of course she wouldn’t have told you she was ....” And then his expression sort of melted. “Well, no,” he admitted. “We had a few drinks, but neither of us was really drunk. And it was lovely. I mean, we’d been flirting a little bit all semester. You know, the way you do when you find someone attractive but neither of you is really interested in going there.” He turned to Cecelia again. “Because I was engaged. And very much in love. But you still notice other women.”
Cecelia looked as if she might be about to say something but was uncharacteristically having trouble finding the words. That’s when Jesse, of all people, put his two cents in.
“My Dad told me, right before Jill and I got married, when I was worried if I was doing the right thing, ‘cause she was pregnant and all, and I loved her, but I found I kept looking at other women too, my Dad told me that there’s no honor in being faithful if you’re never tempted.”
Bob, and Dad, and Dave too if I’m being honest – well, Kathleen and I too if I’m really being honest – all turned to look at Jesse, nodding approvingly.
“I look forward to meeting your father,” Bob said. Then he turned again to Cecelia. “I’d resisted temptation, without too much effort to tell you the truth, because I was in love. But then you broke ... or I broke ... anyway, we had a fight and supposedly broke up, and I ran into Jill in tears because she and her boyfriend had just broken up, and, well, there didn’t seem to be any reason to resist temptation.” He turned to his daughter. “And it was lovely. But even the next morning we both agreed ... at least she said she agreed ... that it had been ... not a mistake exactly but ... kind of too much of a rush.”
Jill nodded. “That’s what she told me. And then she said she saw you with the girl she’d seen you with before.” She turned to Cecelia as if finally putting two and two together. “That must have been you. She said she saw him with this gorgeous brunette she’d seen him with all semester. And then my Dad ... well, my stepdad really but I always thought he was just my dad ... apologized and they got back together, and she
didn’t know she was pregnant till after graduation, and everybody, all her family and friends assumed my dad – my step dad – was the father. She wasn’t even sure till I was born.” She’d been addressing this explanation to the family as a whole, but at this point she turned a little more to Bob. “But she thought I looked like you. And my blood type showed my Dad couldn’t be my biological father. But he was my Dad. I mean, he loved me from before I was born, even though he knew I might not be his.”
“Is that why she never contacted me, never told me?” Bob asked.
“I guess so,” Jill said. “She was pretty mad at first when she found out I’d gone looking for you. And Dad was hurt. He thought it meant I wasn’t happy with him as a father or something. But at first I was just curious, you know?”
“Yeah,” Bob agreed. “I think I do know. I’m feeling pretty curious myself.”
“And now?” Cecelia asked.
Jill looked at her questioningly.
“You were curious at first. What are you now?” Her tone wasn’t sharp or hostile
but curious herself, as if she were still trying to fit pieces together in her mind.
Jill thought a second, and then grinned a bit mischievously. And the grin was so
much like Bob’s that it took my breath away. “I’m tired, and exhilarated, and nervous as hell!” She turned to Jesse and threw her arms around his shoulders. “We just had a baby!”
She turned back to Bob. “My Dad is her grandfather even if he’s really my step dad. But you can be the step granddad if you want. Come see?” And she held her hand out to him impulsively, then hesitated and looked a question, not at him but at Cecelia. Bob too looked askance at his wife.
She in turn looked exasperated. “Well, what are you waiting for?” she asked. “How many times in your life do you expect to get an invitation like that?”
So Bob let his daughter pull him over to the nursery window and point out the right bassinette, while the rest of us hung back, unwilling to intrude. After a few seconds, Bob whispered something to Jill, who nodded, and he turned and beckoned his wife. She walked over slowly and for the first two and a half seconds she stood between the two of
them, rigid even with Bob’s arm around her waist. And then, even from behind, we could all see the moment she fell utterly, completely, madly in love with her step granddaughter. Her shoulders relaxed, her head tilted to the side, and she slid her own arms, one around her husband’s waist and one around Jill’s shoulders. “She’s beautiful,” she whispered.
We’re on the whole a considerate family. We gave them another two and a half seconds of privacy before we all spilled forward to admire the newest member of our considerate family. I’m not sure we were all oohing and aahing in regards to the right bassinette, but all newborns are beautiful and, let’s face it, except to their mothers they all look pretty much alike.
We might have hung around cluttering up the hallway and interfering with Bob and Cecelia getting to know Jill and Jesse all day if Dad had not commented after a few minutes how delighted he was that his first great grandchild had been born on his own 80th birthday, at which point the rest of us all gasped “Birthday! Party! Guests!” And proceeded to stampede toward the elevators like a herd of startled wildebeests.
It was Kathleen who shoved Bob and Cecelia back off the elevator just before the door closed. “We’ll handle the party,” she said. “You have more important things to do.”
Cecelia started to step forward again, even though Bob did not. This was, after all, really her party. But then she nodded and stepped back, although holding the door from closing a moment to make sure she had the last word. “You’re right,” she said. “I do. Thanks.”
The party was a roaring success. Bob and Cecelia even got there in time for the cake, which was probably a good thing because I’m not sure Kathleen would have managed to light the 80th candle before the first one melted all the way down. Cecelia had a plan for four people, one on each side of the rectangular cake and armed with long fireplace matches, to get it done quickly without setting the cake or each other on fire. She even had a little diagram she made us all look at first. And even before we started, she marshaled the youngest grandchildren to gather around Dad’s place at the table to help him blow 80 out candles without collapsing. The resulting photos are great. She let Kathleen take over the cutting and serving, which was therefore a little less efficient.
She and I ended up next to each other with our slices of cake but she didn’t seem hungry, even though she’d missed the excellent lunch.
“I’m glad we made it back for the cake,” she sighed. “Bob would have liked to stay, but it was a little awkward when Jill’s Mom and Dad – well, step dad but she calls him Dad of course – got there.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
“Oh, it’ll be fine in time,” she assured me. “After all, we’re all adults.”
I was going to point out that we didn’t always manage to act like it, but Dad
stood up and raised his glass of champagne, and called for attention.
“I want to thank my family for this lovely party,” he said. “If I’d been asked, I
would have said I didn’t want one, but turns out I would have been wrong.”
“A rare admission,” Mom called out. “I call upon you all to witness it.”
Dad waited for the laughter to die down before he continued. “I’ve enjoyed it so
much that right here and now I’m going to invite you all back next year for a joint birthday party. The young lady’s name is not yet decided, but she’ll be one year old a year from today.”
The friends, neighbors, and those grandchildren who had not yet cornered a parent to demand an explanation for our period of absence that morning all looked a bit confused by this but Dad didn’t stop to explain.
“So I’d like to propose a toast,” he went on, “to the source of my biggest problems over the past 80 years, and also the source of my greatest joys. To my family.”
And we all drank to that.