In October, I found out what I found out. Now it was the Fourth of July, some nine months later. I was in Baltimore to visit Mom in assisted care because I’d elected not to speak to her about it on Thanksgiving and spoil the family’s holiday at brother Bob’s house and then I let Christmas go for the same reason. Then I flew back in early January for a quick day visit and from there I was back home working – my life in Tennessee, wife, kids. But I still needed to find out – who I was, where from, identity, even the body I lived in.
Mom in the meantime was sundowning more; my sister Tammy here in Baltimore said Mom had good days and bad. Long ago Mom named Tammy after her favorite Doris Day song. Dementia now meant Mom no longer used the phone, even after I bought her the new one, number buttons the size of credit cards. But I wasn’t fooled; dementia also helped my mom not have to talk to me.
On the one day in January prior to my new semester I’d finally gotten up the courage to ask my mom, Irene, whom the grandkids called Mimi, what I needed to ask, the question that seemed preposterous.
“Is it possible that Dad wasn’t my Dad, but somebody Irish? Because I did a test. Dad isn’t Irish and the DNA said my father had to be.”
I was 62 years old, couldn’t sleep, and didn’t know a full half of myself.
We were in her room upstairs at the assisted care facility, where everything smelled like air freshener and urine. It was a non-denominational center, but in practice almost entirely Jewish. My mom made her stand, in a friendly way, on Christmas. She taped a cardboard Santa on the wall outside her door. Her room was filled with yuletide trees and bulbs, music boxes and bows, red and green and silver. I’d bought a lot of her trinkets myself. Mom in her wheelchair turned away so that I saw the age spots on her cheek she’d partially covered with makeup. I sat near in a wooden chair consciously not looking at my cell phone on the snack table next to me recording what she would say to my questions in her diminished voice.
“Teddy,” she said, yelling quietly making her voice crack, “How can you ask me such a thing? Your father is your father.” He’d been dead now twenty years.
“Of course, Mom. I’m not questioning Dad. That’s not what I’m talking about. I think someone else was my birth father.”
I held out papers with the test results, graphs and maps of my ancestry from spitting in a tube. It was actually the second time, because I’d done the test once before and now it said the same thing I thought it was crazy. Crazy real.
She didn’t look at the papers.
My compulsion to test had been part of my research, writing about family heritage and desiring to know what heredities I bore unknown. I teach American literature and found affecting what novelist Ishmael Reed had conjectured, that people supposing themselves something called white, if they were to examine their genetic makeups, would find something like fifteen percent African ancestry. I had mapped my Dad’s very white Pelton line going back to Massachusetts Bay Puritans and the founding of the town of Groton in Connecticut. On a research leave a few months before, I visited a monument to Captain James Avery, who married Hannah Pelton in the small Connecticut settlement adjacent to Pequot land. Groton was named after the eponymous town in England that was the ancestral home of John Winthrop’s family. The house of my distant family – “the hive of the Averys”– stood from 1650 until a fire near the end of the 19th century. A stone monolith marked the site in the century and a quarter since then, now across from a Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 1.
I tested the first time about a dozen years before but the results didn’t seem accurate and I dismissed them as a new technology that hadn’t yet been fine-tuned. But now I saw the test hadn’t been faulty, as I’d first told myself. Now I had even a new word for it. The Dad who raised me was not in my haplogroup.
“Mom,” I said, softly but not offering any out, “I can’t think of any other explanation. There’s no accounting for how much Irish is here.” Mom also had Irish lineage, but only as a share of her mother’s side. The test showed me at 62 percent, like my real father was kin to the Lucky Charms leprechaun.
“This is wrong, I’m telling you. I was a good girl. Your father was the only one.”
“I only know what the data is telling me, Mom.”
Again we paused. In the classroom I’ve cultivated the ability to wait a long time for an answer. In the meantime I was reminded again how even with my mother’s generous daubings with spearmint and cinnamon, I still smelled piss, though it was worse out in the hallway.
“Okay,” Mom said. “Yes, you’re right,” she said. “Yes.”
“How did you know?” she asked me. “I never told anybody. It’s been sixty years.”
“Sixty-two,” I said. “DNA.”
But she would not say who was my biological father.
I thought I might go at it indirectly, asking her about what her life was like in those old days, when she’d been dating my Dad in 1961, age 19, my Dad ten years older.
I knew some of these stories. How my Dad showed up in a Cadillac for their first date, borrowed from the uncle he was living with at the time, who worked as a chauffeur. How when they went to Jones Beach Mom was embarrassed by how much hair my Dad had on his chest.
“I had only dated boys before,” said my mom. “Your father was a man.”
She was the last of five kids to live in the apartment in Brooklyn she shared with her mother, and left at 17 to live near her sister in Long Beach, on the Atlantic shore. She’d take the subway into Manhattan to her job as a counter-girl at Schraffts. That’s where she met my Dad, who served in the Korean War and now was saving money from a soda jerk job to buy a service station and start a mechanic’s garage. They dated off and on for two years. He’d worked on a tanker and a submarine in the Navy. Mom lived for a while with three Idlewild Airport baggage handlers.
“Was one of those guys the one?” I asked.
“I’d have to think about it.” Mom’s explanations got more cloudy. “It wasn’t Dick. It wasn’t Bobby, although he could have. No he didn’t. Bobby Duo was his name. Dick was a nice guy. Bobby was also a nice guy. I knew a lot of nice guys that were nice. I mean that bought me Christmas presents.” She searched for the right word.
“They were gentlemen,” I offered.
“They weren’t gentlemen,” she said. “But they did buy me Christmas presents, and they did respect me. There’s a difference. They sent me a Christmas card, To my little Irene, and they wrote on it, Grass is green, something … or .…
She thought for a moment. “Something something, Grass is green, We all love you, Our little Irene.” She laughed. “I think I still have that card.”
No way she still had that card.
She listed guys, pointing her finger to note each one, a gesture I also have. “It was from Dick, Bruce, Jim, and – who was that guy I said was nice?”
“Bobby?”
“Oh yeah, Bobby was nice too, but the guy that brought me to Aunt Vi’s house on New Year’s Eve. His name was Dick. I don’t remember his last name. But he was a nice guy. Him and Dick and Jim and Bruce.
“Dick was nice, but cheap. I went out with a lot of nice guys.”
“You were a good girl.”
“I was a good girl. Your Dad, though, he wasn’t always nice. I was nice to him, but he wasn’t always nice to me.”
Later, Mom lived in an apartment my dad, Ted, helped her out with. Then they had an argument, my cousin Kay, Viola’s oldest daughter called it. Kay was the cousin closest to Mom’s age. All the while I was growing up I’d heard this referred to as the time, just before they got married, when Dad got cold feet. They were engaged, but they had a fight, Kay said, and my Dad took off.
Then he came back, they had the wedding, and I was born eight months later.
“Your father never understood me,” Mom started again. “I would be holding one kid and feeding the other.” There were lots of cousins on my mom’s side – I can’t remember them all, but let’s say 15. “Your father thought I was showing off. I don’t think that way. I just always was taking care of kids, diapering this one, feeding that one. He thought I was showing off. It was just what I had always done. He never understood me. I can’t believe he’d say that I was showing off. He thought I was trying to trick him.”
She was still upset with him.
“Anyway, I went to the pastor and asked him what I should do. The pastor said, ‘Do you still see the boy who did this to you?’
“‘I haven’t seen him again,’ Mom related. ‘And he doesn’t know.’
‘Your fiancé, Ted, does he love you?’
‘Yes. He says he does. He’s a good man.’
‘Don’t tell him,’ said the pastor. ‘I don’t see why anyone has to know. Marry your new husband and be a good wife and raise your child.’”
“So Dad never knew,” I said.
“Your father never knew.”
“Do you remember that pastor’s name?”
“I don’t know, Teddy. It was so many years ago.”
I tried to picture these scenes in my mind. It was the easiest thing in the world to picture my mom around children. I have photos of her with my own kids. One in my mind has my mom in a recliner, holding our younger daughter Gray, about a year old, on her lap, with a Dora the Explorer book open in front of them, Mom leaning back and to the side facing the camera, saying something to my older daughter Sofe, who’s cracking up laughing.
“The strangest thing,” says Mom, in her room at the facility. “The strangest thing is I feel completely different about it now.”
“Different how?”
“I don’t feel guilty about it anymore,” she says.
~
So now I was back on the Fourth of July and I didn’t have any more than a day before I’d need to leave again. My wife and I would begin the drive back with the kids in the morning.
It was Baltimore hot and muggy and the residents were all in the main activity room, inside French doors from the lobby where I came in, where the air conditioning was better. There were patriotic decorations and party tables and later there would be a woman who often came to entertain. I had heard her before – she would play the white baby grand piano in far corner of the room and sing songs.
I didn’t see Mom at first and then I did, on the opposite side of the room from the piano, small and hunched in her wheelchair at a table with a man I’d talked to about the election, who stood up and shook my hand. He was one of the younger residents, probably in his late 70s, with some brown in his white beard.
“Are we going to get someone good to run for president?” he said heartily. Baltimore senior citizens are Democrats and the Biden administration was collapsing.
“Do you like Kamala Harris?” I said to the man, who hadn’t heard the latest news, that the president had named a successor.
This made him smile. “I believe so!”
He glanced over at Mom, who was waiting patiently. “I was just keeping your mother company,” he said, and he took his leave. “President Harris,” he said, rah-rahing his hand as a parting gesture.
Mom gave me a big smile of dentures, to the best of my knowledge the same as she’d had for countless years living in upstate New York, where we two had lived not nearly as far away from each other. I’d told her so many times she shouldn’t Krazy Glue her dentures, but she was proud of saving money. The prominence of her teeth was now exaggerated by her thinning face. She didn’t like to eat and the family tried to police her food intake whenever we could.
I knelt down in front of Mom in her wheelchair and kissed her on the lips. Her cheeks were soft as air.
I loved seeing my mom.
But now that I sat down I began to witness the drama playing out between Mimi and the attendant in charge of desserts and keeping order for the holiday assembly. She had a square, no-nonsense jaw and asked me if I’d like cake while looking suspiciously at Mom.
“Yes,” I said. “Could we get two pieces?”
The attendant left than Mimi said, “Don’t mind her. They never use these things.” Mom held up a handful of plastic sheeting she’d been hiding under the table. “Don’t you think it looks nice?”
I realized Mom wanted to take the plastic, red, white, and blue, striped and starred tablecloth off this round party table and stash it in her room. They had a manicurist at the facility and Mom was using her freshly done, red-painted nails to peel off the tape that kept the covering secured.
The gruff kitchen woman snapped back on us and lectured my mom.
“Mimi, we’re not going to do this again today. We need these tablecloths for dinner after the music.” She swatted at Mom’s hand like she would a stubborn first-grader.
Kitchen Woman went away and my mom whispered to me, “Take the tape off that side.” She nodded as well with her eyes at the flag-printed napkins and whispered, “Put that in your pocket.”
As I folded a wad of napkins and put it into my shirt I saw an opening to address what I’d been trying to get her to talk with me about for months but living three states away had so few chances.
“You know,” I said, “You haven’t answered those questions I asked you in January.”
“There’s a reason for that,” said Mimi, impishly, “What do you think that reason is?”
I realized the quest for the table decorations offered me an opportunity to get on her good side. So for my mother’s benefit I rolled my eyes around cartoonishly until they landed on the edge of the table on the far side of where the authorities might see and unpeeled a portion of the plastic tablecloth from underneath my side of the table.
“Well,” I said loudly, “I haven’t been able to see you since then,” exaggerating my voice in an attempt to convince our adversary that we were too involved in other business to be hatching a plot to denude the table. “I wasn’t going to ask you on Mother’s Day.”
“I’m still not going to answer,” said Mimi, with a puckish grin.
She kept peeling on her side as well but now Kitchen Woman was on her like a hawk.
“I’ve told you, Mimi, you can’t have that! We re-use these – now you stop that!” She put a piece of 4th of July cake on a small paper plate in front of me.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the server. “I was hoping we’d each have one.” I slid my piece over to Mimi.
It was a busy room, other attendants putting up chairs in the far corner and extending outward from the piano as people started to sit in those seats and also roll wheelchairs over, awaiting the performer. All the residents were downstairs, either in this room or in the lobby, the heat likely making the rooms upstairs uninhabitable in the middle of the day.
“Mom, I’m not going to stop asking these questions,” I said, in a hushed voice. “I deserve to know who my father is.”
“Why do you need to know?” asked Mimi. “You know who your father is. Your Dad will always be your Dad.”
Near the French doors a man began speaking in a loud, flat voice, “I’m not going to do it, I’m not going to do it, I’m not going to do it.” Eventually the receptionist came from the front desk beyond the door and took him by the arm and he quieted.
“Why did you have to tell Bobby?” said Mimi, who was mad I’d told my brother Bob and his wife what I knew so far of Mom’s admissions of what I’d discovered in the Ancestry.com test.
“This is about my life, Mom. I can tell who I want,” I said back, not angrily but firmly. It had taken me some time in therapy to admit my mom had been wrong never to tell me. “I’m as close to Bob as I am to you, so of course I told him.”
But this wasn’t getting me anywhere. I decided to make a bold move with the tablecloth, reaching across to peel back a whole segment from between us, then leaning over and placing my arm on top of it so I could fold it under and at the same time keep it from being seen.
I’d been examining the names of my new set of relatives these past few months, testing on 23andMe as well as Ancestry.com. The companies’ privacy policies released different sets of names to me. This allowed me to deduce more possibilities of who I might be related to among relatives of relatives. So I thought I might introduce another game Mom might like. “What are his initials Mom? Were they JS?”
Mom was tickled by this suggestion, smiling broadly, though after a moment she still stayed silent, looking over at the man who had remained standing by the doors, the receptionist still next to him.
I had listed some names in the DNA matches that could be the mystery man, so I pressed on. “RW?”
But Mimi remained distracted.
“You were going to tell me his initials Mom,” I said, before darker thoughts came into my mind from when in January she told me she’d confessed at the time to a priest, whose presence I now saw differently. I was thinking also of Mom saying no one would ever suspect, she’d always been such a good girl.
“Mom, you weren’t raped, were you?” I asked. “Or was it a priest?”
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head, like realizing her own game had gone too far. And then: “I can tell you his first name.”
I moved my chair closer to her, so our faces were just inches away, and saw droplets on her eyelashes. She blinked a couple of times, looking directly in my eyes, beaming with feeling.
“His name was Bobby,” she said. “You were a love child.”
I knew who this was from the names I’d narrowed down. Soon I was able to write a living relative and confirm my guess. I found out Bobby Last-Name-Withheld had died in 1991. Even more sadly, I have since been frustrated by a family that will not return my messages seeking additional information, besides the one younger person I contacted, a beautiful soul I’ll call Jae, who is sadly cut off from others in her family who might be helpful.
“Bobby,” I discovered in census records, was someone who lived just a few miles from where Irene had grown up in Brooklyn. He was a year older and had served in the Marines. I created scenarios in my head: recently having finished his tour overseas, maybe he and Mom had seen each other at a party in those crazy few weeks in Long Beach that would shape the rest of my mom’s life when she also, my cousin Kay said, maybe tried to kill herself, but then who knew if it was a real attempt or just a way of communicating her predicament and getting help when Ted left for California, where he’d worked as a machinist a few years before and had been stationed for part of the war. It was May 1961: maybe in the meantime Mom knew Bobby already from the neighborhood. Maybe they had started dating and he confessed his love when my mom told him her fiancé had taken off. Maybe, maybe so many things.
My newfound niece Jae, her father my also-deceased half-brother, her grandfather Bobby my father, and herself also a genealogist mapped this mystery man back to Irish Hickeys and McGarveys and Corcorans and Farraleys and a patrilineal French Canadian line that through several related-name changes yielded an original surname of “Bienvenu,” so that I had a Québécois great-great-grandfather with the novelistic name Francois Xavier Bienvenu.
In one photo that she sent me, Bobby appears to be about 40 years old, spooning ice cream out of a tall Styrofoam cup. He has thick black hair like mine was at that age and a mustache like I’ve never worn. He died, apparently, of liver cancer, but this is unconfirmed. I’d like to substantiate health records; my family medical history is still half question mark.
Recently, rooting around online, I found a photo on Bobby at 14, posing with members of the Freshman Debating Society at a private high school in the Bronx. He looks like I did at that age, when I also loved to debate. Did he graduate from that school? Or did his parents run out of money, necessitating he enlist in the military to give himself a future? That’s kind of what happened to Ted, the Dad of my life, who took the entrance examination at the University of Connecticut and qualified for entrance but didn’t have the money to go and so enlisted in the Navy at 17.
Cold leads still wait for me to push on them for more … but my mom’s now also left the world and my heart isn’t in it.
Mom had one more thing to tell me in the next minute or two, as we looked at each other in revelations of love and loss. But though we did not yet know it, Kitchen Woman was about to finally reach breaking point and swoop in, grab the handles of my mother’s chair, and wheel her away from me, as residents lose the right to entirely control their own circumstances in such places and ages. Kitchen Woman decided she had endured this foolishness long enough. The entertainment had arrived. Olga, an elegant, silver-haired, Russian immigrant would play a musical program for the 4th of July and tell us how much she loved this, her adopted country, ever since she arrived here in 1999 and discovered what true freedom was.
Olga had learned to play piano in Russia but over the years, she told us, she had come to love the Great American Songbook and asked the residents to sing along as she played “America the Beautiful,” “This Land is Your Land,” “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “Mairzy Doats and dozy doats and liddle lamsy divey” and more to which my mom, relieved from the burden of confessions and wheeled into Olga’s audience with full attention sang and put me in mind of when we would drive on weekends when I was a child three hours upstate into the country where my parents eventually moved after I went to college and sing in the station wagon Mom in the middle, seat me in the back, harmonizing to “You Are My Sunshine.”
Olga played “Home on the Range” and I recalled my mother’s old Brooklyn version of the lyrics: oh give me a home where the Buffalo roam and I’ll show you a house full of shit.
But the attendant had not yet arrived and Mom was faintly trembling, her eyes liquid like one coming up from underwater, just breaking the surface. “That’s why your brother is named Bobby,” she said and paused a second as I let that sink in, then added, “Robert isn’t a family name.”
My brother Bob is four years younger than me. He took a test himself when I told him this, but he was Ted’s son. My mom and Bobby’s relationship had not continued.
There was one more question I asked.
“Why did you keep this secret for so long?”
“I didn’t want him to find out.”
Mom was 82 and Bobby had been a year older, and a man.
“He’s probably dead by now, Mom,” I said.
“No, he’s not,” said my mom, for no other reason than that she believed it.
And this was the moment our nemesis swept my mother away to preserve the precious plastic tablecloth, and she and I would speak no more.
I carried over my own chair to the group singing along with the music. I was vibrating from head to toe, like coming out of a wind tunnel into the still air.
I sat next to my mom but she didn’t even look at me. I had pried the secret from out of her heart that had resided there for longer than I had been alive. If I was in shock, Mom had suffered a wound from which I don’t think she ever recovered. This really had been a love story, I realized. My mother had almost certainly stopped seeing Bobby in 1961 when my father returned and she swelled with a child she had to pretend was his. But I think it’s likely she never said goodbye, keeping Bobby a secret in her heart for 63 years, never telling him about me. How could she? The pastor had told her not to because you can’t tell two men that they’re both fathers of one baby boy.
Bobby may have loved my mom and likely told her he did, those magic words that brought me into the world, and I’d like to think even that he meant them. But my mother had a life to put back together and the story of my life was settled and proceeded.
Mom always wanted a baby and if Dad wasn’t going to give her one, she made sure she got one anyway.
I returned the next day to say a quick goodbye to my mom and hopefully grab a moment for a few more questions like, how did they meet? when was the last time she saw him? was she sure Dad never knew? But I’d have Susan and my teen and tween daughters with me and they might not see Mimi again so it was important that I not monopolize this time. We didn’t have much time; a ten-hour drive back to Middle Tennessee lay before us.
When we got buzzed inside I saw Mimi again slouched low in her wheelchair. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to have been moved outside the circle of residents and visitors listening to a rabbi conducting a discussion to my near left in the lobby. A sign on the wall indicated it was the week of Parashat Korach and I smiled at the attendants and residents who looked my way, Susan and I keeping the kids quiet as we walked around the perimeter. I squatted next to Mimi’s chair and touched her hand, small and fragile.
She didn’t wake, even after I spoke her name two or three times.
It took us almost a quarter-hour to wake her, trying to do so quietly but then also with others’ assistance as we became more of interest to those nearby. “She was awake just a half-hour or so ago,” they said. I hadn’t ever seen her like this before.
When she did open her eyes it was like there was nothing behind them. My daughter Gray hugged closer to me, frightened.
An aide came over and positioned her wheelchair so that we could gather around her and not disturb the discussion.
Now Mimi raised her head a bit and we told her we had to leave and drive back home and that we loved her.
Her gaze never met any of our own and she never reflected any recognition of us.
I recalled my sister Tammy saying she had good and bad days.
Two weeks later, Tammy called to tell us Mom had a major stroke and was almost entirely paralyzed. A test soon revealed she no longer had the ability to swallow.
Her advance directives prevented use of invasive methods to keep her alive and she passed away before the end of July.
Besides joining in the singing, I believe the last words I ever heard my mother say were that her lover Bobby still lived.
During those dark days when she was so desperate, when she didn’t know whether her baby was going to have a father, when she couldn’t tell anybody, when she tried to hurt herself or maybe just tried to get someone to come to her aid, however it might happen, to solve her problem, she wanted a baby and had one inside her.
There had been two men in her life, but I was her sunshine, her only sunshine. I made her happy when skies were gray.
~
Ted Pelton is the author of several novels and novellas, including Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) and Bartleby, the Sportscaster. He also has dozens of short fiction and poetry publications, including in BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Elm Leaves Journal, and Western Humanities Review. For fifteen years, 2000–2015, he published Starcherone Books. He is a Professor of English at Tennessee Tech University.