The Edge of Doom (4 page)

Aware that this was an impertinent inquiry, Kate shrugged to herself and waited to see how he would answer the question.

“I don’t drink,” he said. “A matter neither of principle nor addiction. I simply don’t care for it.”

“Fair enough,” Kate said. A tea-drinker for a father; well, the resemblance was hardly likely to cover all elements. But she did feel disappointed, which was ridiculous.

“May I tell you the reason for my dislike, or what may be the reason?”Jay asked.

“Please do,” Kate said, certain this promised to be the most bizarre conversation she had ever had in a life hardly devoid of oddball conversations.

“My mother was an alcoholic. As is not uncommon with the children of such parents, I came to loathe the smell of drink. Even wine, I’m afraid. I haven’t, however, become a fighter for temperance or an advocate of prohibition. Liquor doesn’t bother me now when others drink it, and hasn’t for a long time; I just don’t wish to join in. You, may I guess,” he said, smiling at Kate, “are of quite the opposite view, finding drink a happy companion to food and good conversation. I wish I could join you in that.”

And, Kate thought to herself, I shall tell Reed that we began by speaking of drink. Jay’s mother drank. Perhaps he was attracted to my mother because she didn’t; it wasn’t, of course, ladylike then, except for the careful sip of wine with dinner, and I don’t even remember her doing that. Another unsummoned memory; this could become tedious.

Laurence seemed to feel that such an odd subject—even if Kate, in his opinion, always seemed to have peculiar conversations—needed some alteration.

“Kate is a professor; teaches literature. What do you do, Jay?” Thus Laurence commanded the dialogue onto another plane.

“I’m an architect; I specialize in the reconstruction of landmarks and other beautiful aging buildings. To combine modern convenience with the elegance of an earlier time is a challenge I find exciting.”

“Can you really make a decent living doing that?” Laurence asked. Kate stared at him, only just remembering that when Laurence was nervous in a family situation, he was likely to say something downright rude, though he didn’t realize it.

Jay looked unabashed. “A decent living, yes,” he said, as his tea arrived, and he put sugar into the cup and stirred. Kate, who seemed currently given to unexpected recollections, recalled having been told that nondrinkers liked sugar, while drinkers, who often didn’t, found their sugar in liquor. “But not a lavish one,” he added. “No one, you see, is reliant on me for financial support, so I can do what I love to do—a great blessing.”

This, the man’s second private revelation, woke Kate to the fact that he might feel as though he were being interviewed, judged whether or not he was qualified for a position he did, after all, already occupy. She turned the conversation around to a comparison of architecture and literature, made easier for her by the fact that architecture had become a popular subject in academic literary departments. When it became clear that no other provocative matters were to be discussed, Laurence announced his intention to leave. It was, however, evident that he had not the smallest intention of retreating while they were still there. And so, shortly, they all stood up, ready to depart. While they were claiming their coats downstairs, Kate and Jay managed unobtrusively to exchange telephone numbers.

Outside on the street, Kate and Laurence shook Jay’s hand. Laurence insisted upon seeing Kate into a taxi; the meeting must not continue without him. And so, with a moment of meaningful eye contact, Kate and Jay Ebenezer—for she could not quite yet think of him as her father—parted.

CHAPTER FOUR

. . .thee my daughter who art ignorant of what
thou art, naught knowing of whence I am.

Kate called Jay on the following day. She had, after some thought, decided that it was up to her to make the next move; reaching him by telephone, she suggested dinner in a quiet restaurant.

“Lovely,” Jay said. “I’d like that. Soon. For now, what would you say to a walk in the park tomorrow? It’s supposed to be a breezy March day; I’ve always liked breezy March days. We can just stroll about.”

“Might I bring my dog?” Kate asked. “She’s a rather large dog, but perfectly calm, either indifferent to overtures or casually friendly.”

“Sounds the perfect companion to conversation. May I meet you on your corner whenever you say?”

“How about two?” Kate said. On this Friday, as on most, she had some sort of meeting in the morning, but would be free by two.

“Two it is,” he said. Kate gave him her address and the location of the nearest corner.

“We’re going to meet a new member of the family,” she told Banny, who, deciding an immediate excursion was not being offered, stayed where she was.

For once, the weather forecast had been accurate: it was cool and breezy, with a feeling of spring in the air. Banny stood still to be greeted by Jay, but then looked at Kate, reminding her that the park had been promised. They crossed the street and set off around the lake. As they walked, they talked, but only intermittently. It occurred to Kate that in a restaurant they could have gazed at each other; strolling side by side, their words carried more meaning than their expressions or their appearance. Not a bad way to become acquainted, Kate thought.

In fact, their walk began in silence. Theirs was not a situation for which conventional or even mildly suitable dialogue had been established. Everything Kate wanted to ask she dismissed as outrageous even before it could be expressed. “How did you and my mother become lovers? How often did you sleep with each other? How, in sum, did it all come about?”

He seemed to sense her perplexity through her silence. “Ask anything you want,” he said. “Or would you rather I began? I want to know so much about you.”

“Perhaps we can take it by turns,” Kate said, smiling. She would have liked to add that what he wanted to know about her fit more readily into the bounds of ordinary conversation than what she wanted to know about him. “I’ll start. How old were you when . . . ?” She had been going to say when I was born, but she really wanted to know about the nine months before that.

He understood her question. “I was not yet twenty when I met your mother. She was thirty-six. We became lovers soon after we met. It was the love of my life, and, I suspect, of hers. Sorry to sound so like a romance novel, but it does happen sometimes; I can testify to that.”

Kate smiled at him. “Did you ever see the Noel Coward movie called
Brief Encounter
? I saw it on television not too long ago. It was the essence of impossible, perfect love, to the accompaniment of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto. When they part, the man says to the woman: ‘I will love you all my life.’ Is that the sort of thing?”

“I’m afraid it is. I adored her, and she was, I think, actually in love for the first time.”

“Meaning, among other things, that she enjoyed sex for the first time?” Kate said, determined to be disgraceful and even scandalous. It was all very well, fathers turning up when one was getting along in one’s fifties, but they could hardly carry on as though this were a play by Noel Coward, however much the endurance of original passion in that play testified to Coward’s dramatic flair.

“Oh, yes,” he said, unperturbed. “You are the child of passionate love. They used to say that made a person special, but I doubt it’s true.”

“I doubt it, too. It’s more likely to make a person illegitimate,” Kate said. “Fortunately, you two were hedged about by custom, and the Fansler talent for noticing nothing even under their noses until and unless it exploded. As it has now done.”

They had, by this time, turned at the edge of the lake, but instead of following the lake, they headed east for the boat pond. It was too early for children’s sailboats, or the more complicated toy vessels driven by radio controls; the pond was drained. They sat on a bench, contemplating the passing scene; Banny lay down. The sun was in their faces, which they both found pleasurable.

Jay took her hand and held it for a moment, forcing her to look at him. “We both have questions; yours are about the past, and however personal, I intend to answer them honestly because you have the right to ask. My questions will be about the present: what you are now, what you think now, how you got there (some past allowed in this connection), where you expect or hope to be going. My questions will sound interested, which they are; yours may seem to sound probing, even audacious. You must ask them anyway; I really do see that, and hope you agree to this assessment of our different roles.”

“I agree perfectly,” Kate said. He let go of her hand, and they both again faced outward toward the pond. “So I’ll begin, if only to say tell me about it, from the beginning. From when you met, and how. I’ve been trying to remember her, my mother. She’s rather vague in my mind, probably because she was inclined to be offhand with me, apart from seeing that I was taught correct behavior, sent to good schools, dressed properly and never left to the mercy of my brothers—all of which seemed very much in the ordinary way of things. Had I been asked, and of course I wasn’t, I would have said that she was indifferent to me, beyond her familial obligations. You mustn’t think I minded. That was how mothers were expected to be, in those circles, in those years. The terrible fifties were really terrible.”

“I suspect she was afraid of showing too much preference for you. True, you were a girl and therefore could be treated differently from the boys, but she feared to cast suspicion on your birth; your difference from your brothers seemed so obvious to her.”

“It just occurs to me,” Kate said. “She must have given my father reason to think I could have been his. Were they sleeping together then, my father and mother?”

“Oh, yes. He still made his marital demands with regularity; there was no problem on that score.”

“Oh, the hell with the details,” Kate said. Her imagination temporarily balked at contemplating the situation. “I just want to know how she acted in love; how it was with the two of you. I want to know she had that happiness, even for a while. I can’t sound more like a soap opera than that, surely.”

“She was happy with me,” Jay said, “but she never would consider leaving Fansler for an uncertain, less endowed life with me. We parted finally a short while after you were born. I guessed, and I think I was correct, that she waited to see if you would be accepted as Fansler’s child, with no questions asked by anyone. Once that was certain—and she appeared so proper, so firmly in her rather stiff role as wife and mother of Fanslers, that suspicion was unlikely. I departed soon after. She asked me not to try to get in touch with her again, and I consented. And here, half a century later, we are.”

They sat for a time in silence, glancing at one another and smiling, as though admitting their curiosity and recognition of this strange meeting. Kate perceived, as she assumed Jay did, that there was a quality of flirtation about their reunion; he was an attractive man, clearly vigorous over the verge of seventy, and she, well, it hardly took much imagination to envision the whole business as a popular drama, a combination of drawing-room comedy and Eugene O’Neill, or as a soap opera.

Jay chuckled; he seemed to have followed her thought. “You mentioned soap operas a while back,” he said. “That’s not so far afield from where I began this attempt to find you and meet you. It was all the talk about DNA on police dramas, like
Law and Order
. I had thought often of looking you up, trying to get acquainted with you, but why should you believe that I was your father? Then the idea of DNA suddenly hit me: I can prove I’m her father, I suddenly realized. Why not do it then? DNA has released criminals from wrong convictions and imprisonment, why shouldn’t it provide me with a daughter?”

“Why not, I guess,” Kate said.

“You don’t mind then?”

“I don’t mind now. How could one mind such a luscious piece of drama entering one’s life? If I had been asked did I want to find my ‘real’ father, would I have leapt eagerly to welcome the possibility? I’m not so sure.”

“Well, here we are.”

“Indeed. Are there questions you wish to ask me?” Kate said. “I have been doing all the quizzing.”

“I know a good deal about you, as far as the facts go. Your career isn’t hard to trace. You haven’t any children?”

“No. Have you other children?”

“No. I married a woman with two sons; she was a widow, and I have been a father to them, as I think they would acknowledge. I adopted them. But they do not have my DNA.”

“And how much does that matter?” Kate said. “I’ve been asking myself that ever since the news of you was delivered by poor, shocked, but fascinated Laurence. What made you go to him as your first move?”

“I thought it all out. It seemed the best way. You could always just refuse to see me without actually having to reject me personally.”

“Most considerate. But you guessed that one can never keep from investigating a mystery about oneself.”

“Hoped, rather. You are hardly the woman to act as expected. I’m glad you agreed to meet me.”

“Any other questions for me now?” Kate asked.

“Only to ask if we might meet again. It’s only logical that you would have more questions for me.”

Kate nodded in agreement. “The matter of money, for instance. You told Laurence you wanted to find me in order to leave me money. I take it that wasn’t the whole reason.”

“It wasn’t even part of the reason. That was an untruth, I’m afraid. Oh, I have some money to leave, but I’ll probably will it to the boys, unless you have any thoughts on the subject. I . . . well, you see, I did rather know the Fansler outlook on life. I thought if I said I had money to leave, Laurence wouldn’t think I was after your money or his. Sorry to have been deceptive, but it wasn’t hard to figure out that you didn’t need my money, so it wasn’t likely you’d be disappointed not to get it.”

“You don’t hold a very high opinion of the Fanslers, do you?” Kate asked.

“Do you?”

“Not really. We don’t agree on anything much, politics mainly, but almost everything else as well. Still, they are one’s family. Or were. You make me wonder if my mother was ever really a Fansler.”

“She chose to be one. She chose them over me.”

“Do you think it was that she wanted to be well-off?”

“In part. She didn’t have illusions about love keeping one warm, as the song went. But there was more to it than that; much more. There were her three sons, and your future, which was certainly better assured under Fansler auspices. And I think she felt she owed some loyalty to your father. Finally—and I spent a long time puzzling this out, as you can imagine—I think she felt herself suited to the Fansler life. I helped her to see that; there’s the ironic part. Instead of feeling there would never be passion in her life, now there had been passion in her life. That had happened. She could go on as before, but having experienced something important.”

“You make it sound rather cold-blooded, hard-hearted, logical.”

“It was. I don’t think that she was a romantic any more than you are. I’ve often wondered why she became pregnant; she had been in charge of the birth control. This is all the outcome of years of thought, but I decided that she had decided to give fate a chance. If there was a child, then what? If her husband would accept the child, that would be one way fate might go; if he didn’t, that would be another. I don’t think she was so much logical as indulging in a form of Russian roulette. And having gone for the gamble, she stuck by the odds; she accepted the outcome.”

“Shall we walk?” Kate asked. They rose and retraced their steps toward the lake, to Banny’s evident relief; they had sat a good while.

“I think it’s the whole question of DNA that keeps troubling me,” Kate said. “Why should it make such a difference to us, discovering our relationship this late in both our lives. The truth is Reed has probably had more effect on me than your DNA has had; don’t you think that’s likely?”

“Yes, I do. And I hope to meet Reed one day soon, if you’ll allow it. DNA was just the means of finding you, and of proving to you that I was your father. It wasn’t a reason for anything. On the other hand, I may have wanted to find you because you’re my only biological child. And—don’t underestimate this—my only daughter.”

There were swans on the lake. Central Park swans did not migrate to the south in the winter, apparently having, like Canadian geese, discovered ample supplies of food year-round in New York City. Soon the swans would be building a nest, as they did each year, on an island in the lake. Swans married for life, but went through the same courting rituals each year before mating. Kate had read up on swans since she had begun watching them on the Central Park lake, which was ever since she had had Banny to walk with.

She mentioned this casually to Jay, wanting to turn the conversation away from their quizzing of one another. And yet, she felt impelled to return to her questioning.

“I keep wondering about my mother,” she said. “How it happened. It’s always hard, I guess, to imagine one’s mother in the throes of passion.”

“As I told you at Laurence’s club, my mother drank. My parents started out with promise, but there was the Depression, my father lost his job soon after I was born, it all went downhill. I think now, looking back, that my mother would have liked to have had a professional life, but that wasn’t widely thought of for women in those years. She was depressed, she drank, my father lapsed into silence.”

“Did your mother and father both like Dickens?”

“Ah, the Ebenezer connection. Yes indeed. They read to each other when they were first married; my mother told me that. And I was born on Christmas.”