Perfect Family (20 page)

She wrapped herself up in the same blankets they'd used for her father. She turned out the lights and lay down on the couch. She'd wait for William. William was her responsibility now. She'd set these events in motion, and now she'd stay on the couch and wait until he got home safely. But she fell asleep. She woke up early. She tried to remember why she was there. And then it came to her. The whole evening before. Her father's fall, the hospital, and then, oh God, what she'd said. William. She tore upstairs to make sure he'd come home.

The door to William and Ruth's room was wide open. The bed was neatly made. The closet was empty. William and Ruth were gone.

The culvert crossed over one of the wider feeders to the lake, opposite Fond du Lac, and ended in a small turnout on its other side. William pulled over, got out of the car, and made his way down to the water's edge to a small crescent of sandy beach.

The truth of what Mira had told him was a weight, a plumb that had sunk right down to the core of him. The rightness of what she'd said was mixed with the memory of her blank face, her plain strange face, her eyes pale and small without the makeup. Who was he now? He felt the question all through himself. He raked the sand with his fingers. His mind was alive with memories, glimpses, bits of conversation. The whispers of adults when he was a child and all those lessons in high school biology about blue-and brown-eye dominance. He'd studied that section hard in school without knowing why. What he'd learned? Dark-eyed parents can have children with any eye color. But light-eyed parents didn't usually have dark-eyed children. His eyes were much darker than those of his parents. “Possible but unusual,” his textbook had
said.
How come you didn't get the red hair?
People asked that all the time.

Nobody had ever called him Will or Bill or Billy. He was William Carteret and only William Carteret. Friends of his had asked about that, too. Why did his sisters have those with-it names when he didn't? He'd said his parents had needed a boy to carry on the Carteret name, and lucky for them, the boy child, the official heir who would carry on the name, was born first, and with that out of the way, they could have some fun. They could have all the girls they wanted and give them playful nicknames, playful lives.

He said this tongue in cheek, but he believed it. He was the only boy in the Carteret family line. He was being groomed to take over the business, as all his predecessors had, as his own father had. They'd begin in the summers during college and then, upon graduation, work full-time in sales or production, then move up the ladder until the patriarch stepped down. It was history. It was a given.

In the family library was a book titled
A History of the Carteret Ball Bearing Company of Hartford, Connecticut
, put out on the occasion of the company's fiftieth anniversary. It was full of black-and-whites of the old factory buildings, groups of laborers standing around cold heading machines, grinding and lapping machines. Pictures of the men shaking hands with other men, sealing deals. A photograph of a roomful of women in high-collared white blouses and slender waists all sitting at typewriters and smiling. There were old advertisements for Carteret ball bearings and the great things they could do. The invention of the ball bearing was second only to the making of iron.

William had asked his mother about his name once. Why he was William and not Jasper? She'd just smiled and said that Jasper was such an old-fashioned name, didn't he think? And William was just, well, more up-to-date. He hadn't been convinced. Something in her tone, and being a brooder, made him wonder if his parents had noticed some quality about him that immediately said
This isn't a Jasper
. Now he could almost laugh at that. Not because he wasn't a Jasper but because he wasn't a Carteret.

And that business about his birth certificate.
My God. The lost original.
When he needed it for a passport application and asked his mother, she said it was lost but that she would write away for a copy. What came back was a small square of paper, embossed with the seal of California, that gave his name and date of birth but nothing else. It all made sense now. The original was elsewhere or destroyed. The original would have given his real father's name. And the lost photographs. There were drawers full of photographs of the girls as babies, but none of him. Again, the explanation was always vague. Something about a flood in the basement years earlier, a robbery. Never one clear answer. The explanation in his own mind had always been that he was born when his parents' life together was new and chaotic, that he was unplanned, that they were poor and had no money and no time for the frivolity of baby pictures. The girls were born in more stable times, when their parents were organized enough to file birth certificates and put photographs into albums. And the dearth of pictures of his mother. It was what had made the picture Pony showed him so unusual. They had dozens of photographs of his father as a boy, and of generations of Carterets, but none of his mother as a child. The boy in the picture he'd seen, he realized with a start, must have been his biological father.

As if a light had been shined onto the past, he had answers to so many questions that had gone unanswered. There would be more, hundreds more, he knew. It hadn't been chaos at all. It had been secrecy. But why? Why hadn't they said anything? Was his father a criminal? Mentally ill? What was so awful that it could not be spoken aloud? Except to Mira. The deepest cut of all.
Mira!
William was a fool. The one who didn't know. That was the worst of it. And Pony must have known. It couldn't be a coincidence. The picture of his mother and that boy? The boy
was
his father.

He looked up. The early sun struck the top peaks of the mountains. Below, barely distinguishable from its surroundings, Fond du Lac looked benign, like any summer house in which a family would get up, have their coffee, and take out the canoes.

William drove to the general store. The newspaper delivery trucks were there, unloading bales of
The New York Times
and
The Boston Globe
. William used the outside pay phone to call Minerva. It was very early, and he woke her. “It's William,” he said. “Is it true I'm not my father's son?”

A long pause at the other end, and then she said, “Oh, Jasper finally told you.”

“Mira told me.”

“Not Jasper?”

“He's in the hospital. Exhaustion, they think.”

“I see,” she said. “This is a great deal for you, William.”

“You bet,” he said.

“I wasn't aware that Mira knew.”

“Maybe they thought it was none of my business.”

Minerva didn't respond.

“Mira said his name was—is—Lawrence. Did you know him?”

“Not well, but yes,” Minerva said.

“I'm coming down there,” he said.

 

He slipped quietly back into the house. Mira was on the couch, looking worried even in her sleep. He awakened Ruth and told her they had to leave. And Ruth—God, he loved her—took one look at him and just did it, packed her stuff, no questions asked until they were in the car and he told her what Mira had said. She told him to pull over and say it again. She asked if he'd like her to drive.

“After we pay Jasper a visit,” he said. “Then you can drive.”

The hospital room was small and very white. The windows were open, and there was a fresh smell to the place. Jasper lay in the far bed, propped up, an oxygen tube coming from his nose, machines at his bedside blinking and recording things. His eyes were shut. Tinker was asleep in the near bed, still in her red shirt and tights, barefoot.

“Jasper?” William said.

Tinker startled awake and swung her legs over the side of the
bed. She reminded William of a child, her face puffy and confused.

William raised a hand to quiet her. “I won't be long.”

“What do you want?” Her eyes were huge.

Jasper opened his eyes and blinked. William leaned over him, so close he could smell the old man's medicine breath. “Is it true I'm not your son?”

Jasper glanced toward the window.

William jabbed the old man's shoulder lightly. “Yes or no?”

“I'm calling a nurse,” Tinker said.

Jasper's lidded eyes met William's. “Yes,” he said.

William had expected this, but even so, he sagged under the weight of it and fell into the chair drawn up beside his father's bed. Beside
Jasper's
bed. He opened his hands. He didn't know where to start.

“Leave him alone,” Tinker said.

William didn't take his eyes off Jasper. “And you never mentioned this because…?”

Tinker moved protectively to her father's bed.

“Because your mother wouldn't allow it,” Jasper said. Or that was what William thought he heard him say.

“Mom's been dead a while,” he said. “Not a good excuse.”

Tinker fumbled for the buzzer again and pressed it hard.

“Your mother wanted the matter put behind her,” Jasper said.

“The matter,” William said. “The
matter
?”

“You're my son.” Jasper's voice was stronger now. “You've always been my son.”

“Not your son, Jasper. I'm Lawrence something's son. What's his last name?”

Tinker's buzzer was going nonstop. William knew he didn't have much time before they kicked him out.

His father shook his head. “I campaigned for telling you the truth, believe me. But your mother was adamant. It was her information to reveal, William. Not mine. Don't forget that.”

“And what about me?” William said.

A nurse appeared in the door. “Is there a problem?” she asked.

“I took you in, William,” Jasper said, his old growling self coming back in spades. “I made you my son. I made you a Carteret.”

“I'm not a Carteret,” William spat out.

“What more do you want?”

What more? He wanted everything. He wanted everything back, a life re-lived in the light of truth.

“Sir, I have to ask you to leave,” the nurse said.

“I drove her to San Diego.” Jasper smiled at the memory of it. “I helped find a place for the two of you. I loved her. Larry never found her. He never came after her. She didn't want to tell you because if you'd known, you'd have wanted to find him, and he'd have found her. She was afraid of him.”

“She could have told me that,” William said, the words bursting from him. “I would have understood.”

“No, you wouldn't.” Jasper sounded disgusted.

“It's why you want Andrew with Tinker instead of me. Right? Raised by your own flesh and blood, right, Jasper?”

“Stop calling him Jasper,” Tinker said.

Two more nurses—a man and a woman—came into the room. The man took William by the elbow. “Come away, sir,” he said.

But William had one more shot: “And it's why you sold the business, right? There wasn't a real Carteret to take over.” He never got the answer.

“You saw that,” he said to Ruth in the car. “The son of a bitch.”

Ruth said nothing until they reached Springfield. “You're still the person you were, William. In the important ways. You'll always be who you are.”

But who had he been? He felt parts of himself falling off, like the calving of a glacier. What would be left? His life was a lie. Everything about it. So many people had known. The realization that he was no one came in waves, worse than grief. Why had his mother told Mira and not him? His mother, Jasper, Mira had watched him grow up thinking he was Jasper's son, and all the time they'd known he
wasn't. Had they laughed? It was as if the ground had opened up and he was free-falling. Who was he? And why had the people he thought loved him lied to him all this time?

He dropped Ruth at the house in Glastonbury where she was working. Mindy was in the garage when they drove up. She came to the car. “Well, well, well,” she said. She seemed ready to argue with him again. The old William would have done it, but not this William. No matter what Ruth said, he wasn't the same guy he'd been before, so what the hell? He spun out of the driveway, drove to New Haven, where he left the car in a high-rise parking garage, and took Metro-North into Grand Central, then the subway uptown.

At the Seventy-seventh Street subway station, William emerged onto the street, walked back along Lexington Avenue to Seventy-fifth, then over to Minerva's building, just off Park. He gave his name to the doorman, then took the elevator to the seventh floor. She met him in the hall. She had on a black cardigan sweater over a yellow shirt, a long brown skirt, and under the brown skirt a pair of red slacks. She squeezed his cheeks. “My dear William,” she said. “Yes, yes.”

The apartment had a small foyer crowded with cupboards, coats hanging from a long wooden rod, and stacks of old magazines and newspapers. The foyer gave onto an equally crammed living room, stuffed with furniture and filled with light.

He knew there would be no rushing her. She led him by the hand to the spare bedroom at the back, explaining as they walked that she'd started dozens of seedlings in small pots under gro-lights in the winter, and now she had early tomatoes, peppers, and zinnias. In the bedroom he inspected her city garden under its humming fluores
cent lights against the wall. She was having an ongoing fight with the building's board of directors for not letting her keep pots on the roof. “Honestly, William. These people have no imagination,” she said. “So unreasonable.”

He recognized, as they made their way back to the living room—stopping in the hallway so Minerva could point out a photograph or two—that she did exactly what Jasper did. If there was something important to discuss, there was a delay, a stage set, as she was doing now. He never minded it in Minerva, though.

She pushed back her jet-black hair, a gesture of vanity held over from her youth. She'd fixed the roots since Pony's funeral. In the photographs she pointed to, she was at first a tailored, chic, and beautiful young woman, becoming exotic and then eccentric as time and the photos wore on. She came to the end. “Here,” she said, taking a small framed photograph from the wall and handing it to him. “This is your mother and me. It was taken in 1957. I was twenty-two, and Olivia, your mother, was about ten or eleven. Papa had died the year before. We were terribly sad.”

He looked closely. Minerva stood with an arm around his mother's shoulders, wearing a pale dress with a full skirt and a belt tightly cinching her small waist. His mother, even though she was so much younger, was almost the same size as Minerva but robust. She had on a sleeveless blouse, jeans with the cuffs rolled up, and bright white socks, and it must have been a breezy day, because her blond hair was blown across her neck. She scowled into the camera. “You do know the story of Papa's accident?” Minerva asked.

William shook his head.

“Well, for heaven's sake, he worked for the railroad. A piece of heavy machinery broke loose, crashed down through the ceiling of the warehouse where Papa was working, and sheared the top of his head off. He died immediately. Mother had to go to work to keep us fed. I was old enough to work, too. Poor Olivia was left alone so much after that. Larry Anholt wooed her, and poof, she was gone.”

Minerva led the way back to the living room and indicated an
armchair, tucked in between more trays of plants, where he was to sit. Glasses of red iced tea and a plate of cookies were on the table beside the chair. Minerva passed the cookies to him and slid a glass of iced tea across the table. She took a sip of her own.

“It was Mira who told you?” She frowned. “Curious.”

“She's known for years. She said Mom told her when she had an abortion.”

Minerva raised her eyebrows. “Oh my.”

“Did you know that?”

Minerva shook her head. “This is a great deal for you so soon after Pony's death. But it should have been done years ago. After Olivia's death, I urged Jasper to tell you. And at the wake for Pony, I made clear to him I would tell you if he did not. I was not aware that Mira knew. How very curious. I apparently felt an unnecessary urgency. You see, I was afraid that if Jasper did not tell you and I went to my grave with this information, you would never know. I'm an old lady, William. Death awaits.”

“Oh, come on,” William said automatically, then felt embarrassed. It was what you said to flatter women. What Minerva had said was true.

She threaded her fingers together and shut her eyes. “Your parents believed they could triumph over the past,” she began. “I'm speaking of your mother and Jasper.”

“What about the other guy?” William said.

“Bear with me, dear.” She smiled. “Your mother and Jasper thought they could ignore an unhappy past and create a dazzling new future for themselves. Today people are more apt to indulge the past. Am I correct? To dig up secrets and so on.”

“People like to know what happened. Bad or good.”

“And you?”

William shrugged.

Minerva sipped her tea, smoothed her skirts, checked her image in the mirror. “I appall Tinker, don't I?” She laughed. “She has very little curiosity, that one. Why, children come right up to me in the
subway and ask if I'm poor or crazy. But the family? Never. We're a family of silence, William. And things that cannot be spoken become powerful.”

She fingered the cuff of her sweater. “Your mother gave me this for Christmas once. The trousers belonged to a man with whom I traveled in Asia. A lovely man. I had them taken in, of course. For me, memory is attached to my clothing. And you? Where do you keep the stories of your life?”

“Never thought about it.” William tapped his head. “Here, I guess.”

Minerva pressed a hand to his heart. “Perhaps here?”

“I'm not following, Minerva.”

“What do you remember of your early life?”

“The usual. Growing up. Vacations. Christmases. I remember when the girls were born.”

“Your earliest memory. The very first.”

“California,” he said without hesitating.

“Aha. Tell me.”

“There was a green tree in the backyard. The bark was green and smooth, like a lizard.”

She nodded. “A paloverde. What else?”

“I went swimming in this pool. I didn't want to go in, and I tried to get away, but the teacher pulled me away from the fence and held me under.”

“A frightening memory. What does it mean to you?”

“I knew I'd better do what he told me to do. I learned to swim.”

“Do you find it odd that your mother and Jasper lived in California?”

“Didn't used to,” William said. “Now everything is odd.”

“What explanation did they give you?”

“They met out there. That's all I really know. They weren't big on reminiscing.” William hadn't been told any of this specifically, but what he'd pieced together over the years was this: that Jasper had left the family business and gone west to try his hand at other endeavors,
and there he'd met William's mother. William had never probed because underneath that story was something darker. He was afraid to find out that his own unplanned birth and the responsibility of having a child had driven his father back home to Hartford, back to the family business he'd tried to escape. If it hadn't been for William, his father might have pursued a dream.

The heat in Minerva's apartment was stifling. All the windows were wide open, and the smell of pavement and exhaust, not exactly unpleasant, floated through the apartment on the occasional hot breeze. Minerva put a gold cushion on the coffee table and raised her bare feet. “Jasper adopted you here in Connecticut. You are the child of my sister, Olivia, and Lawrence Anholt. People called him Larry.”

“Anholt,” William said.

“A-N-H-O-L-T.” Minerva placed her hands over his and leaned into him, her eyes glistening. “Shall I tell you again?”

He nodded. Tears filled his eyes, and he tried to squeeze them dry.

“Your biological father was named Larry Anholt. Your mother had you in California. Jasper Carteret met your mother there, and by then she was desperate to leave Larry. Jasper helped her to do that. He adopted you when you came to Connecticut.”

William needed to move around. He went to the open window. The air was as thick there as inside, and hotter. He went down the hall to the bathroom. He shut the door, sat on the edge of the tub, and pressed his face against the cool white tile on the wall. He couldn't think. His mind raced. When he could breathe again, he stood at the mirror and splashed water on his face. He stared at his ashen reflection. How in hell could he not have known this? Why hadn't Minerva told him? Like a life spent with spinach between your front teeth and no one saying a thing. Up until yesterday he would have said you were what you believed. People became who they wanted to become. Belief and behavior trumped biology. Now he knew that was a crock. Biology was everything. He did not have Jasper Carteret's blood in him. He had Larry Anholt's. But who was that?

Minerva knocked at the door. “William. Dear. Are you all right?”

“Out in a minute.” He splashed once more and dried his face on a hand towel. When he returned to the living room, Minerva was back on the sofa. She patted it with one hand, and he sank down beside her. In her other hand, she held a black-and-white photograph. It showed two people standing beside a car. Beyond them lay an expanse of desert, as if they'd stopped at a scenic overlook out west. “Olivia and Larry,” Minerva said.

William held it close, tilting it for better light. His mother and father were the same height. His father was lean, like William. He looked hard into the man's face as if it could tell him something. “That's him?”

“He was very handsome,” Minerva said. “I'll give him that much.” She handed William a magnifying glass. Under the glass, his father's face was dark, perhaps sunburned. He squinted so hard it was difficult to see what the man really looked like. His arm was tightly around Olivia. The fingers dug into her sleeve. Could this be the guy in the picture Pony had shown him? He hadn't looked closely.

“Where are they in this?”

“Puma Springs, California. It's a small town close to the Mexican border. In the Sonoran Desert.” Minerva shook her head. “I'm so sorry, William. I wish I didn't have to do this.”

“Better you than Dad,” he said. “Than Jasper.” William felt a rush at using the name. “Why the big mystery?” He wanted it to sound light, almost funny. It was the most terrifying question.

“Jasper had better answer that,” she said.

“But what do you think?”

“People believed they could control their futures. I can't exactly say it was their fault, William. Belief governs with an iron hand.”

“What was Larry like?”

“I met him only twice. The first time was in Puma Springs. Larry was working there. An agricultural job of some sort. The pool you remember is most likely the pool at the motel in town.
The only pool. He made clear that he was not happy to have me there, that he wanted Olivia to himself. We walked in the desert. I think they liked to do that. It was recreation for them. He was very much the outdoorsman, like you. I didn't have the proper shoes, and I turned my ankle. Larry stopped and watched your mother tend to my foot. I remember distinctly that he made no move to help. I thought it might even please him that I was injured. He insisted upon continuing the walk, but of course I was unable. So the two of them went on while I waited in a bit of shade. It was an hour before they returned. My ankle had swollen by then, and it took us a long time to walk back the little distance I had come. At the time, I felt distinctly that I was at fault for slowing them down so. But in retrospect, well, it was irresponsible of them to leave me there such a long time in the baking sun. I knew your mother thought it was wrong, but she did as Larry said. She was besotted with him.”

“You didn't like him, did you?”

“He was too strong for your mother,” she said.

“And the other time?”

“Years later. I was living in Los Angeles.” Minerva pronounced it the old way, “Los Angle-ese.” “Larry didn't knock. He just came inside my house. A woman was with him, and he wanted me to know he had married her, as if that would encourage me to tell him where Olivia was. She was a very plain woman with watery blue eyes and mousy hair, but aggressive, too. She sat herself down at my dining room table as though she owned the house. You can tell so much from the way a woman sits. She looked around, sizing things up. I had many lovely items, and not one of them escaped her notice. I told them I didn't know where Olivia was. As much as his wife was an offensive person, I was glad for her presence, because Larry had a temper. I thought he wouldn't lose it with her there.”

“So he was a son of a bitch.”

“But you are not, my sweet. If that's what you're thinking. You in
herited your mother's temperament, not his. I've been watching, and I can assure you of that.”

It was exactly what he'd been thinking. “It feels like half of me is up for grabs,” he said.

“Everyone deserves to know his biological past.” Minerva's cheeks colored with indignation. “It belongs to
you
. It is your birthright. I've held my silence. I knew that as you grew older, you'd pay attention to Jasper's health for information about your own. We all do that, start looking to our parents for clues about what might go wrong. Or right. It was critical for you to know that Jasper's health does not apply to you.”

“That was the argument at the wake, right?”

Minerva nodded.

“Am I a bastard?”

Minerva burst out laughing. “I believe you are.”

“So where is Larry Anholt?”

Minerva clasped her hands. “I don't know,” she said. “Perhaps this will be a start.” She handed him the envelope he'd seen earlier on the table. It contained a small, aged newspaper notice from
The Puma Sun
newspaper, a poor photograph of five men standing in a row. Lawrence Anholt was identified as second from the left, and he stood, as did the others, with his arms folded across his chest and his head back. The text explained that the five were foremen at DiRisio Farms and that Lawrence Anholt was formerly of Stanley, Idaho. William stared at the tiny, grainy face of his father.