The Paternity Test (18 page)

The question I feared most, for having no good answer yet:
The baby? Has it solved what you had hoped?

I met him at the Monster (his idea), a kitschy piano bar: Broadway Playbills, movie stills, mythic faux-bronze figurines. At ten past four, the place was hushed; we were the only patrons.

Joseph was at the bar already, and just as I approached, the bartender set a highball glass before him. This was when I got a hint of trouble. I could clearly see a lime wedge floating in his cocktail, an oily film of Rose’s on its surface. How many times had I heard Joseph call to task a server: “This here is a vodka gimlet. I asked for vodka
Gibson
.” But Joseph simply thanked the man and took the drink and swigged. He turned to me. “Isn’t it nice to see you.”

He kissed me on the mouth—a cleansing ethyl sting—and held me in a meatless hug, as limp and bland as tofu. His calm was so unsettling, his lack of confrontation, that I was rendered impotently dumb.

Joseph freely filled the void with straight-up, friendly questions: How was work? The cottage? Were we settled?

Finally I’d had enough. I poked him. “Not still mad?”

“Mad?” he said. “After all these months? At you? Come on.”

“Please! I know you, Joseph. Since when do you forgive?”

He ordered another gimlet, a Maker’s Mark for me. Then he said, “It isn’t really forgiveness. Not exactly.” He drank, and his lips went tight, tart. “It’s that when you’re my age, nothing—and I mean nothing— ever stays hard too long.”

It was a good line, and made me think of all his sharp and funny lines, over the dozen years of our acquaintance, the magic of his up-by-his-own-bootstraps, dauntless charm. Oddly enough, I realized, he put me in mind of Debora. Opposites stylistically but similarly magnetic. I longed to tell him about her, about our whole endeavor.

I thought of a segue: wasn’t Luis, his late lover, Brazilian? “I ask,” I said, “because our surrogate mom is from Brazil.”

“Luis was only half,” he said. “And half Japanese. Thankfully, the Brazilian half was the one, you know, that counted. Speaking of which, I have two phallic items, are you ready?”

Off he went on a ludicrous jag about men who’d been circumcised as infants, then sought to restore their foreskins: “I can’t say I argue with the goal, but, well, the method! Basically what they do is tie a weight . . . but it gets worse. The name of the thing? The Penile Uncircumcising Device. Get it? PUD? People are so stupid.”

Before I could respond, he teed up his next topic: “You heard about the Hasids spreading herpes?”

I told him no.

“Hasn’t reached the Cape, I guess, but here, it’s an uproar. So, you know, when Jews get snipped, the mohel then cleans the wound. Most just do it manually, but the Hasids use . . . wait for it . . . their
mouths
. ‘Oral suction’—which doesn’t sound half bad. But come to find out, they’re spreading herpes to eight-day-old boys.”

“Awful,” I said. “That’s totally child abuse.”

“Abuse?” he said. “It’s murder. At least three kids have died.” Joseph took a dramatic gulp of his gimlet. “You’d think that the Hasids would back down a bit, PR-wise. But no, what do they do? They threaten to march on City Hall: the whole Holocausty bunch of them, decked out in yellow stars.”

The thought of it appalled me. But
Holocausty
? Oh, Joseph.

“For Jews, this hits their guts,” I said. “Especially for survivors. I asked Stu once, ‘If ours is a little boy, will you insist?’ and God, you should have heard the way he—”

“Really, now, enough,” said Joseph. “Enough about foreskins.”

As if
I’d
been the one-track-minded rambler!

“Surely we can find a more uplifting subject,” he said, and then launched a flibuster of mind-numbing duration on interoffice politics at Educraft.

I’d wanted him to greet me as a just-back-home explorer, to ask about the new worlds I’d encountered. I would tell of Surromoms, and Linda Po, and Debora. But no, he only nattered on, through gimlets three and four, till finally it was time to say good-bye. Even factoring in my dread of all things Seder-related, I couldn’t wait to get up to the Nadlers’.

Surprisingly, the frst part of the evening was a breeze. The standoff didn’t come till after dinner.

All of us were crowded around the table, stuffed with food: Walter and Ellie, and Rina and Richard, and, f nally, Stu and me. Walter was demanding that we hide the Afkoman—“a special matzo,” he translated for my benefit—without which he couldn’t complete the Seder. Hiding it seemed to be a job for children.

I was lost: if he
needed
the matzo, why ask us to
hide
it? I had sat through Seders here a couple of times before, but hiding a matzo? It didn’t ring a bell.

“Dad, we’re not kids,” said Stu.

“To me you are. You’re mine.”

“But why should we—”

“I’d like you to. Isn’t that enough?” Walter scanned the table for support.

Rina shrugged and kittenishly snuggled close to Richard. (She used him this way commonly, playing at a helplessness that let her off the hook.) Richard, always mindful of a feud’s emergency exits, made a grave but carefully neutral nod. Husband first, or son-in-law? He seemed to split the difference.

“Not enough?” pushed Walter. “A father saying ‘please’?”

As the other son-in-law (son-
outlaw
, joked Walter), and as the only non-Jew at the table, I felt I should also keep mum. My policy with the Nadlers was generally to side with Stu, but now, I wondered, why not just accede to Walter’s wish?

Stu could get so stony in his parents’ presence sometimes. He yearned to please, but seemed to think that only he knew how. Lately, though—ever since the bad-news call from Debora—Stu had dug his heels in, not just with his parents but with me too, with the whole world, as though to concede defeat in
any
situation would show he’d given up on getting pregnant. At the movies, last Sunday, Stu had all but strangled the teenaged soda vendor, who rang up his medium as a large. “Stu, it’s fifty cents,” I’d said. “Come on. Doesn’t matter.” “Yes, it does,” he snapped at me. “It
does
.”

Even if I wanted now to enter this dispute, the thought of any action but submission was remote. This was the effect of the food I’d overeaten (on top of all the Maker’s Mark with Joseph): hard-boiled egg, matzo, geflte fish, brisket, half a dozen chunky side dishes. Maybe, I thought, the CIA could try a new technique: subject evildoers to a Seder’s endless courses, till f nally, helpless, overwhelmed, they squealed.

Now Stu’s mother brought another tray in from the kitchen, but, thank God, all it bore was coffee.

Walter humphed. “I bet if
she
asked—right? Ta-dah, you’d do it.”

“Oh, my sweet martyr,” Ellie said. “You finally learned? Children always love their mother best.” She poured Walter a piping black cup.

Ellie was a slender woman, equable, unmade-up, with an air of elegance-in-reserve. She’d been a Barnard girl, fending off proposals right and left (a med student, a circuit court clerk), when Walter Nadler, installing new deadbolts in her dorm, had asked if he could treat her to a coffee. He was a decade older and the opposite of loaded—his locksmith shop was barely breaking even—but she liked his schussing accent (he’d squelched it less, back then), its suggestion of alpine adventure.
Whoosh!
She was avalanched away.

At least that was Ellie’s version, the one she’d always told me. In Walter’s account, she knew from the get-go who he was: not some mountain-breeze-in-his-hair, swashbuckling Teuton but a Yid from the ruins of Berlin. She knew, and she saw his lonely lostness, and took pity.

I could easily see Walter playing on her pity. But the landsliding brunt of him—that also rang true: all I had to do was think of Stu, and multiply. Walter, at seventy, wasn’t appreciably taller than the gaunt boy he’d been when he arrived. (I had seen the photo on the Nadlers’ bedroom wall: a stunned, stunted ten-year-old, standing at a ship’s rail, Europe a dim, broken line behind him.) Neither was he much heavier, except for his high, proud paunch. The belly seemed less to be a part of Walter’s body than a tactical accessory to it—a rucksack, ready-packed in case of a new disaster.

Leaning back possessively now, palming his stomach’s dome, Walter said, “But really. Seriously, kids. Do it. When they were little,” he told me in his Jew 101 voice, “I promise you, this was their favorite part. See, they go and hide it, and then I look and look. But
never
find— that’s the father’s rule. So: how to get it back? Offer a reward. A toy, maybe. For Stu? A model airplane kit. For Rina, a set of watercolors. The rewards, kids—right? How you loved!”

Stu and Rina leaked similar noises of annoyance.

“We’re
not
little,” said Rina. “It’s late. Let’s move on. I’m feeling”— she held her sides—“sort of queasy.”

All night she’d been saying similar things, citing symptoms, bidding for the family’s special treatment. (As if a woman planning to
adopt
got morning sickness.)

“Indulge him,” Ellie told her. “You’ll be glad. Especially you.”

Stu said, “Please just drop it. This is silly.”

But
he
was being silly. I wasn’t in the mood. Not after the kind of day I’d had. “C’mon, hon.” I stood; I tugged at Stu’s elbow. “Let’s go hide the whatsit, right now.”

Stu could have his superstitions, fine. But I had mine. Here was one: The way to build your be-a-parent karma? Honor your own parents. Do their bidding.

“C’mon,” I said again. “Stu, get up.”

Richard said, “You know what, Stu? He’s right. Pat is right.” (Trying still to make up for his shittiness last November? Maybe, but so what? I would take it.) “Up,” he said. “Up! We’ll have fun.”

Stu could see the writing on the wall; he gave in. His frown, as he stood up, was laden with indignity but also (I was guessing) with relief: the soothing pain of yielding to a parent.

His look was not dissimilar from Milo’s, at the zoo, just before Glenn had hauled him off: agreeable abjection, miserable coziness, the quintessential face of
I’m a son
.

Oh, I wanted a Milo of my own.

Glenn, when he’d brought the boy back from the bathroom, had given us a recap of the lesson: “Babies pee in their diapers, we decided— remember, Milo? And big boys pee where? In the bathroom.”

“Well, then,” I’d chimed in, “your choice is pretty easy. I mean, you don’t want to be a
baby
.”

Milo firmly shook his head no.

“You want to be a big boy, now, right? Dontcha, Milo?”

But once again Milo shook his head.

“No? Not a baby
or
a big boy? But then . . . what?”

Milo squeezed his penguin to his chest. “Stay the same.”

If only I could have bottled his charm and sold it!

“That’s how I feel sometimes, too,” said Zack, “but it’s impossible. Everybody has to grow up sometime.”

Milo’s eyes narrowed to a disbelieving squint. Then he asked, wonderingly, “
Him
go in the bathroom?”

“Who do you mean—Pat?”

He nodded. “Him go too? Papa Pat? Him go in the bathroom?”

“
Uncle
Pat,” corrected Glenn. “You know he’s not your papa.”

“No one’s,” I said, “yet. But soon. Fingers crossed. And yes, bud. I do go in the bathroom.”

Milo’s eyes went wide as he scanned me up and down: another bizarre creature at the zoo.

Back at the Seder table I was feeling a bit like Milo, watching these strange specimens, the Nadlers.

Walter, having failed, by design, to find his matzo, had f nally asked his children to relent. Now he clutched the Afkoman with beady-eyed relief, as if its fate had ever been in doubt. “Boys,” he said, addressing me and Stu. “You won’t mind? This year’s ransom will go to Richard and Rina.”

“What?” said Richard. “No—we’ll share it, four ways ’round. Heck, the hiding place was
their
idea.”

But Walter, with a brick-wall grin, shook his head. “Trust me.”

The hiding place, in point of fact, had been Richard’s idea (a teetering stack of last year’s
Security Systems News
, the matzo safely tucked between two issues). Why would he be lying now, on Stu’s and my behalf ?

Although I’d built him up, with good cause, as a bogeyman, tonight Richard was earning his redemption. A minute ago, when Rina and Stu had bickered about the matzo (“Put it somewhere blatant, Stu—he’s still not going to ‘find’ it”; “Slap Dad in the face? What’s the point?”), Richard had stepped between them and distracted them with a joke. I ignored the details, but noted instead his style: his broad put-on accent, a parody of Borscht Belt comics. It made me see the possibility that Richard’s whole persona was a shtick, a highly skilled choice. His narcissism, his oiliness: perhaps they were a master craftsman’s tools.

And now, too, with Walter, Richard was trying—wasn’t he?—to wield his tools to fx a confrontation: “The only reward we need,” he said, “is being here, as a family. Ree and I—we don’t want more than that.”

“Can it, Rich,” said Walter. “Not buying what you’re selling.”

“Walter,” Ellie warned him.

“Don’t ‘Walter’ me, my dear. It’s both of our idea. Am I wrong?”

“Yes,
my dear
, but the point . . . the point is to be generous. You don’t have to be antagonistic.”

Walter offered his wife a chilly smile. “Geez,” he said, turning to his son-in-law and daughter, “who’d have thought that it would be so hard to give a gift? But anyway, here we go. Drumroll, please.”

All there was was sticky nervous silence.

From somewhere in the heirloom Seder plate, he pulled an envelope, its flap inked in smudgy, old-man scrawl: “R&R.”

I coughed to hide a laugh at the thought that this was
restful
. But maybe Walter had missed his own pun.

“By now you kids know that your mom and I are planners, always trying to think ahead, for you.” Walter beamed; he relished this performance. “The days you kids were born, we set aside some money—as much as we could manage—and invested.”

“They know this,” Ellie said. “You’ve told them this before. They know it’s what paid for their tuition.”