From Here to Paternity (6 page)

"I'm not sure people like that are capable of being taught lessons," Jane remarked.

Tenny turned her attention to a guest who had approached the front desk with a handful of maps and a desperately confused expression.

Jane and Shelley went back to the restaurant.

The table Jane had staked out and then abandoned had been taken, but they found the last free table in the far back corner of the room. As they wound their way toward it, they saw Doris Schmidtheiser at HawkHunter's table.

His other companions had either already left or been driven away by her. She was rattling along, gesturing wildly, riffling through her file folders. HawkHunter, his charisma briefly on hold, was looking frantic. Jane smiled. Nobody was immune from Doris Schmidtheiser's attentions.

They sat down and Jane quickly flipped open the luncheon menu. "I've discovered that this resort is missing only one thing," she said.

Shelley was surprised. "I can't imagine what that is."

Jane grinned over the top of the menu. "Bathroom scales. Shall we order?"

After they'd ordered, Shelley got out her small notebook. "Jane, that was a fascinating morning. You won't believe what I've learned. You know I've been meaning to get busy for a year or so on a family history. My mother keeps nagging me to organize all those notes and pictures and old newspaper clippings and obituaries from my grandfather's attic. But I had no idea how to go about it. Now I think I've got a fix on it. It all comes down to the Mormons."

"Mormons? Your family was Mormon?"

"Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to be more accurate. No, my family wasn't Mormon, but it's the Mormons who have all the information."

"How so?"

"Well, I'm not sure I've got this exactly right, but it seems that according to their beliefs, family ties are forever. When you go to heaven, you'll be reunited with your entire family. All your ancestors. But to prepare for that, you have to know who they all were. So one of the important aspects of belonging to the church is to do your own family genealogy. Knowing your ancestors is part of the religion, you see. Then, when you've got them all sorted out, you submit them somehow to the main church in Salt Lake City for something called 'sealing', and then they'll be waiting for you in the afterlife."

"Okay, but what has that got to do with
your
family?"

"It's like this—since this is a church belief, the church collects records to make it possible to do this genealogical searching. Unimaginable numbers and kinds of records from all over the world. Census records and family histories and court records from every county in the country, and church records from every church that will allow its records to be photographed."

"Oh, not just Mormon churches?"

"No, all kinds of churches. Some of the records go back hundreds and hundreds of years, and they're all microfilmed."

"I still don't see—"

"Even though they collect this material for then-own people, they make it available for free to anybody who wants to use it."

"You're kidding!"

"Not a bit. There are hundreds of Mormon churches around the country with what are called"— she paused, checking her notes— "Family History Libraries. I got a list of them and there's one right in our neighborhood, in fact. The actual films aren't there, but the indexes are. You can go in—for free, mind you—and look through the indexes to all these documents and learn what film numbers they're on; then you order the film from where they're all kept in Salt Lake City. You just pay a couple of dollars for the postage and handling, and a few weeks later, your film arrives and you can read it right there on special microfilm-reading machines at the local church library."

"This is amazing. Who'd have thought?" Jane said.

"Oh, there's more. They've sort of 'distilled' a lot of the basic information down into a couple of gigantic computer programs called… let's see…" She thumbed through a few pages. "The Ancestral File and the International Genealogical Index. And you can use their computer to get into all this material as well. The example they gave in the class was that if you know your grandfather's name was James Johnson and he was born in 1899, somewhere in the United States, you can plug all that in and the computer will turn out a list of every James Johnson born in 1899 in the United States. Well, not every one, but all the ones they've got in their records so far. Then you can sort through and learn more about each of them to see if one of them is yours. And if one is, you can sometimes find out what film number has original documents about him and maybe who else is researching the same family. That way you could get in touch with some third or fourth cousin you didn't even know about and compare notes on the whole family."

The waiter arrived with their orders: a tuna salad sandwich for Shelley that gave new meaning to the concept of tuna, and a chicken Caesar salad for Jane that was large enough to feed a family of four. They ate for a few minutes in blissful silence. Jane finally took the edge off her hunger well enough to pause and say, "So if you need to look up something—a will, for instance—in some little county in Oregon or some place, you don't have to actually go there and search for it. You can just order a film of the records?"

"That's how I understand it," Shelley said. "The instructor kept emphasizing that not all records for any given place have been filmed, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have been. If you live near Salt Lake City, you can just go into the main library and search without waiting for the film to be delivered. So if you needed something in a hurry, or if you didn't know enough about court jurisdictions to know exactly where to look, you could hire a genealogist there to look it up for you."

"This really is astonishing," Jane said, applying herself to her salad again. "This main library must be a stupendous size. And think of the organization required to keep it operating smoothly. So what else did you learn about?"

"Mainly not to take spelling seriously. Like Lucky was saying this morning, spelling has been pretty haphazard until quite recently. My own guess would be that it didn't get to be awfully important in this country until Social Security. Did you know that most states didn't even have such things as birth certificates until this century? And some didn't require them until the 1930s or so."

"Well, I suppose there were still a lot of people outside cities having babies at home until then. Look over there, Shelley."

Doris Schmidtheiser had moved to another table and was talking with overbearing animation to an older couple. The woman sitting there was frantically signaling for their bill so they could escape if they got a chance, and the man was leaning back in his chair looking stunned by the sheer force of Doris's insistence.

"Poor things. Makes you feel we ought to rescue them, doesn't it?" Shelley said.

"No. Nobody rescued me. Least of all my best friend—who had the nerve to laugh at me when I took cover."

"She's probably trying to get people to come to her debate," Shelley said, ignoring Jane's accusation. "I do sort of feel sorry for her. Maybe I'll go. Just sit in on it long enough to swell the crowd a bit."

"What do you anticipate in the way of a crowd? Two or three misguided martyrs?"

"Oh, she might get a good turnout. After all, this whole Tsar thing is of interest to the people attending the convention. The Holnagradians, or whatever you'd call them."

"I think it's a swell idea for you to offer yourself up that way."

"You're not curious?"

"Not in the least," Jane said. "With my three kids, I've heard very nearly every subject on earth debated at some time or another. Though I'll bet this crowd won't sprinkle their arguments with terms like 'butt breath'. That's very popular just now."

Shelley laughed. "Might liven things up a bit if they did. So what are you going to do instead?"

"First I'm going to find the girls. They were supposed to check in with me—"

"Oh, I forgot. They came by the front desk while you were cravenly hiding in that oversized closet. They said they were going to take ski lessons this afternoon. Here on the bunny slope. And the little boys are still in the game room. They probably won't come out until it's time to go home."

"In that case, the first thing I'm going to do is take a nice, long nap. It's the only thing I'm going to do, matter of fact. I haven't had a serious nap in about two years. I mean a 'significant' put-on-jammies, get-under-covers nap."

Shelley signed the tab and Jane took care of the tip.

"Enjoy yourself," Shelley said as they parted ways in the lobby.

"I am," Jane said. "I really am."

Jane wasn't used to naps and woke up at four feeling stupid and disconcerted, as if she had a bad case of jet lag or had suffered a spell of amnesia and lost half a day. But by the time she'd showered and dressed, she was feeling quite refreshed. She took Willard out for a bit of a run and was just coming back when Mike and Mel showed up. Their faces were sunburned and Mel was limping along, exhausted.

"Did you have fun? Did you get hurt?" she asked.

"It was great, Mom!" Mike said. "And I did great for a first-timer."

"He sure did," Mel agreed. "I couldn't believe how he took to it."

"I met a girl I'm taking out to dinner, Mom, if that's okay," Mike said.

"Sure. Whatever."

Mike bounded across the parking lot to the men's quarters. Mel said wearily, "I'm a hundred and four years old. I could have been beaten with a baseball bat and feel better than I do now. Do you have any idea how much work skiing can be?"

"I thought you'd done this before."

"I had. Lots. When I was about Mike's age. Centuries ago."

"Then go take a hot bath and you'll feel better."

"I'd just drown," Mel said grumpily. "Why are you so damned perky?"

"Perky? Why, Mel, nobody's called me perky in ages. I had a nap."

"A nap," he said, his expression misty and filled with longing.

"Go take one yourself. It's a vacation. You can do whatever you want."

He put his arm around her waist and leered. "Not exactly
anything
. Not on this vacation anyhow, surrounded as we are by your children."

"Well, nearly anything. I'm going to rescue Shelley from the genealogists and see if the boys have suffered any permanent mental disability from a day with the video games. I'll come fetch you later and we'll have a nice dinner, okay?"

Mel agreed and limped off.

By the time Jane found the meeting room where the debate was going on, it was over. Applause spilled out into the hallway as she approached. The door was flung open and Doris Schmidtheiser plunged out, her movements jerky, her big angular face red and working with emotion. Though Jane tried to dodge her, they collided. Papers and folders flew everywhere.

Jane knelt to help Doris pick them up. The older woman muttered tearfully, "I'm sorry. I wasn't looking…"

"Quite all right. But I'm afraid you're going to have a time sorting this all out—"

But Doris wasn't listening. She'd grabbed an armload of papers, hoisted herself up and was practically running away.

Jane picked up the rest of the papers, tamped them down, and slipped them into an accordian-type folder Doris had dropped. She'd get them to her later, when Doris had calmed down. Jane peeked into the doorway and spotted Shelley. She waved a greeting and then got out of the emerging audience's way.

"What a rout," Shelley whispered when she joined Jane in the hallway.

"Mrs. Schmidtheiser ran into me as she came out. She was really upset," Jane said. "What in the world happened in there?"

"Let's go have a glass of wine by the pool," Shelley suggested.

When they were comfortably settled with tall tulip glasses of white wine, Shelley said, "I don't know exactly what happened. Most of the debate was like a foreign language to me. All sorts of sources were flung around. The genealogists, of course, knew the relative merits of them. I didn't have a clue. But it was apparent that Gortner got the best of poor old Doris at every turn. I don't think it was that he had a better case—although I could be wrong—but that he had a more scathing manner and presentation. You know—the kind of thing where you don't present your own side as much as you make fun of everything the other guy says."