CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Doug and Nora did what they hadn’t done since Carver was a little kid with the flu: they simultaneously gave him their undivided attention and did exactly as he asked without complaint.
Nora did most of the talking. She told him they found out about his paternity the same way Chip had, based on his blood type.
She’d volunteered with the Red Cross as a teenager and knew the basics; when they gave Carver the heel prick test and then informed her that he was type O like she was, she realized what had happened.
“You have to understand how miraculously unlikely it was for this man to be able to father a child,” she said. A terrible miracle, a black swan event.
Nora proceeded like a lawyer. Not wanting to alarm Doug needlessly, she told her affair partner to come give a sample so she could paternity test Carver against him. He was a match. At this point, she confessed everything to Doug.
“That was the worst day of my life,” she said, and Carver glanced at Doug, who was maintaining eye contact with the coffee table. “And I’m very grateful to your father for how he handled it. He said his name was on your birth certificate, so you were his, and he’s always said that.”
Doug nodded.
Nora told Carver that his biological father was named Isaac Levin, and he was a friend to both her and Doug.
She repeated that he was a doctor and training to be a surgeon, as if she didn’t want Doug to know they’d been privately discussing this in the hall.
He was a runner like Carver, though he ran marathons and not triathlons, and in fact didn’t know how to swim.
He was tall, she said, and apologetically added that he got his height from her, or more aptly from her father Archer, who was 5’7.
“Do you have a picture of him?” Carver said, glancing between them.
Doug, who’d been staring into space, cleared his throat. “I’ll see if there’s one in the study,” he said, and walked out.
Nora watched him go, then said, “He’ll be gone a while. He doesn’t like to discuss Isaac.”
“I wouldn’t either,” Carver said.
Nora nodded, then looked down at her hands in her lap, examining her fingernails.
“It was harder because they were friends, and it was very difficult on your father when he died. He could never bring himself to forgive him, even at the end. He refused to visit him in hospice. Isaac asked for him several times. He wanted so badly to apologize before he died. But your father wouldn’t give him that.
I think he regrets it. Just the finality of it. ”
“Yeah.”
“He was Jewish,” Nora said, glancing at him. “Isaac.”
“I kind of wondered from the name.” Carver absorbed this for a moment. “Does that make me Jewish?”
“No, that comes through the mother. You’re Lutheran.”
“But ethnically?”
“I suppose. His parents were Russian Jews, Ashkenazic.”
This was a revelation. Carver was now thinking of the various low-level antisemitic remarks his father had made over the years — stuff about Jews being cheap and unfriendly. Unfriendly, huh? Maybe too friendly.
Carver looked at his mother. “Are they alive? His parents?”
Nora shook her head.
“When did they die?”
“About seven or eight years after he did.”
This chilled him. “So I could have known them.”
“Carver,” she sighed.
“I could have known his parents.”
“He was one of four kids. They had plenty of grandchildren.”
He stared at her. “My cousins?”
“God,” Nora said. “This is what we were afraid of, that you’d want to leave us. You want to go be with all those nice Jews who’d be thrilled to be reunited with you, and kiss you and bake you bread.”
This did in fact sound wonderful. “Jesus, Mom, have some fucking empathy.”
“I do! This is empathy, I can see it on your face. You’re fantasizing about running off with them. You’ve wanted to run away your whole life, don’t think I’m not aware of that. I’m your mother.”
“Then why didn’t I ever just do it?” Carver snapped.
Nora’s pale eyes examined his face. “Because you’re too smart. Deep down you know that wherever you go, there you are.”
“You know, those people lost their brother, and their son. It might be nice for them to see me. I mean, it’s too late for his parents, obviously.”
“Yes, it was selfish of us,” Nora said. “I know it was selfish. But genes aren’t everything, kid. To Doug’s parents, you were their grandchild. And you were, and they loved you. Don’t rob yourself of the good in your life just to punish me.”
Carver scoffed and adjusted the ice pack on his knuckles. “You robbed his family of some of the good in life. Don’t turn this around on me.”
Nora was quiet for a while. He watched her impatiently, his leg bouncing. “You’re probably right to be this angry,” she finally said. “I hear myself defending and making excuses, but I don’t know how much I believe what I’m saying. But I have to say it anyway. Okay?”
Carver hadn’t been expecting this level of self-reflection and was too grateful for it to say anything other than, “Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Did Isaac want me to meet his family?”
“I think he was ambivalent. He told me that I was welcome to tell them about you after he died, if I ever wanted to, but he was okay with you being raised as Doug’s.
He felt a lot of shame about our affair.
He didn’t want his parents to see him as an adulterer.
” She gave him a thin smile. “Especially not with someone like me.”
“Did he meet me?” he said. “I wanted to ask that earlier.”
Nora took a while to respond, again. Her golden hair was falling out of its updo; pieces were loose and the clip was sagging. “Yes,” she said. “A few times.”
“I don’t remember this.”
“You wouldn’t. The last time you were two and a half, it was a few weeks before he started chemo again. He rode you around in a wheelbarrow at a park. You laughed and laughed.”
“Did Dad know you were doing this?”
“Of course!” Nora exclaimed. Within this new context, his parents’ frequent testaments of loyalty to each other now felt insidious.
“Why did you cheat on him?” Carver said.
Her face fell. She looked down, then sighed. “It was a very long time ago. I don’t have many excuses for that girl.”
“That girl was thirty.”
“And how wise do you feel, at thirty-six?” Nora retorted. “What did you get up to last night while your wife slept alone upstairs?”
Carver’s cheeks burned. “At least there aren’t any children involved.”
“So is that why you’ve put off having them?”
“You do not have the right to be the asshole here,” he snapped. “Not in this conversation. And you basically just said as much.”
“Fine, then go back to asking me questions. You baited me, honey, you know you did.”
“You don’t have to take the bait, but whatever. What did he think of me?”
Nora broke into a smile. “He thought you were wonderful,” she said.
A pleasant warm knot formed in Carver’s chest and crowded into his throat.
“He felt we were doing an excellent job with you,” she said.
“Truthfully, I think he was almost relieved it happened the way it did, especially after his diagnosis became terminal. Even if he and Rachel had been able to conceive, he wouldn’t have been able to spend much time with that kid, with his schedule.
I don’t think he wanted to be a dad as much as he felt a cultural obligation to reproduce.
Your father, on the other hand, always really wanted to be a dad. ”
Now Carver was irritated with his biological father for what sounded like a kind of deadbeatism. He had acted as an unwitting cuckoo bird and laid an egg in Doug’s nest, and Doug had loved but deeply resented his innocent cuckoo bird child.
“You sure this guy couldn’t have spent time with his kids?” Carver said. “He was able to spend time with you and Chip.”
“Oh, did Chip give you that story?” Nora said with some irritation. “Isaac barely saw him. Maybe once or twice in passing. I’m not some whoring boozehound.”
“Once or twice would be enough to remember. Kids are sensitive to things before they understand them.”
“Fine, it’s entirely possible that Chip remembers seeing him once.
The reason I spent time with Isaac is we still lived in the city then, and your father was traveling for work a lot.
Isaac worked in the neighborhood and lived down the street, and he started coming over — as a friend — just to keep me company.
He was going through a divorce at the time, and I was alone with Chip for months on end.
I’d work all day, come home and relieve the nanny, and parent him by myself. ”
She was trying to get him to feel sympathy for her, but he refused to do so right now. He was starting to better understand why Chip was the way he was, though. “A lot of people go through that with no nanny and no affair,” he pointed out.
“Well, then they’re more noble and worthy than I am, Carver.”
“Am I like him? Do you see him in me?”
“Of course I do,” Nora said, to his relief.
“I told you you’re both runners. You like to stay fit and well-groomed the way he did, you’re intense and driven and smart in the way he was.
Like you, he could be almost monomaniacal.
He was very steady, though — he never blew up. When he got angry it was a cold anger.”
“He kind of sounds like an asshole.”
“Oh, God, I don’t mean to give you that impression at all. He was sweet and generous and funny, everyone liked him. His colleagues said his bedside manner was lovely. He would never lose his temper with a patient, he just abhorred incompetence. We had that in common.”
This had gone on long enough. Carver was starting to feel a pang of disloyalty in his gut. “I want to go talk to Dad now,” he said.
“Please don’t make him talk to you about Isaac.”
“I won’t, Jesus. I just want to talk to him about how he feels.”
“Honey, you’ll just make him uncomfortable. He’s not good at those kinds of conversations.”
“Tough shit, I’m calling the shots tonight.” He clapped his hands to his thighs and stood.