The Paternity Test (10 page)

Why was Debora saying this? To prove her lack of bias? To show us what a super match she’d make? I could see my own surprise mirrored in Stu’s stare: we had thought that
we
might be the ones who’d have to plead. (The previous night, debriefing, we’d parsed Danny’s reactions: the way he’d seemed, a couple of times at lunch, about to snap. We’d decided that we were actually glad to see his doubts, glad that his and Debora’s stories weren’t completely airtight. “If they were, that would be more worrisome,” Stu had said. “The truth is, it
is
strange—it’s craziness—to do this. No one’s reasons are ever going to make perfect sense.” “No,” I said. “Not theirs . . . and probably not ours, either.”)

“. . . found it in the station,” Debora was now repeating. “Just lying there. Isn’t it amazing?”

At a loss, I looked to Stu, who motioned for me to answer.
Play along
seemed to be his meaning. “Wow,” I said. “So, what you’re saying is . . . we should troll the subways?”

“Troll?” she said.

I couldn’t help but laugh. A tough translation!

Stu explained, “We hoped we wouldn’t have to
find
a baby.”

“Not if,” I said—how close this was to flirting—“we have
you
.”

“Of course,” she said. “Of course you will. You do.”

Stu was off that day, so the three of us decided we should meet again for lunch. Four, counting Paula. (Danny was up in Chatham, at a gut rehab of an old ship-captain’s house.)

I chose Baxter’s, for its chowder, its view of the chilly harbor. Maybe, too, because it was a favorite of my mom’s. This time Stu had no neurotic doubts about our plan.

Debora was waiting with Paula at the food-ordering counter. The girl was even prettier and more mature than in her picture. Graver, in her four-year-old’s way, than her own mother. She shared Debora’s up-and-at-’em shine.

“I bet I know who
this
is,” I said, crouching down.

Paula glared with show-me impatience.

“Snoopy, right?”

She shook her head.

“You
look
like a Snoopy. Let’s see, then. Hmm. Cleopatra?”

Paula’s impatience devolved to forbearing condescension.

I hated feeling, every time I met a new child, that all my personal worthiness depended entirely on whether I could make that child smile. But I myself was guilty of judging others thus. The first time I took Stu to my sister Sally’s house—her kids were then three and almost six—I had watched him walk inside, then drop onto his belly and enter the boys’ bed-sheet fortress. Squealing with delight, the nephews dubbed him Stooby-Doo. And not till my shoulders fell did I know I’d been cringing—a whole-body clench of apprehension—thinking,
What if they don’t like him? How could I love someone
they
don’t love?

“Wait, I know,” I said to Paula now. “A new idea.” I held a palm before her face. “Here. Punch me.”

Paula flinched and drew away, stepping close to Debora. Stu flinched too, and fixed me with a scowl.

“Really. Hit my hand. I’m testing something.”

Paula looked to her mother—for permission? Protection? Debora shrugged:
Your guess is as good as mine
.

I thought I had bungled things, but
zam!
A snake-quick strike.

“Ouch,” I said. “That’s good. One more time.”

Nimbly, determinedly, Paula punched again. A tiny, tight fist with outsize force.

“
That’s
it. I should’ve guessed. Pow,” I said. “Pow. Now I know your name for sure.
Pow
-la.”

Paula grinned, her tongue poking out between her teeth; it pulsed like a small, happy heart.

Debora smiled, too, and then I saw her shoulders fall. Had she been asking of me what I’d asked of Stu at Sally’s?

Our food came: fish and chips and chowder all around. We took it to a table by the water. But Debora didn’t eat; she was busy talking. She wanted to know everything, she said, about our lives. “
Everything
. Tell me. Please tell!”

“Everything? Gosh,” I said. “Who knows where to start?”

“Okay, then—how you got to here.”

Stu said, “You mean to Cape Cod? From New York?”

I could see him getting ready to talk about his sister’s diagnosis and the previous Nadler traumas, the duty he felt to procreate, the Cape as family-friendly. What would he say about our other reasons for starting fresh? Nothing, of course. (Not to Debora, no.) But I would have liked to know the way he thought about it.
I had to save my marriage with Pat? I had to save myself ?

Debora said, “To here in
life
is what I want to know. I have a teacher—sorry,
had
; I still confuse my tenses—in Brazil, when I was still small. She says to me: Debora, there’s three kinds of people. Those who run away
from
something. Those who run
to
something. And those who never even think to run.”

I feared Stu might bristle at this near-stranger’s presumption, but Debora, with her undulating voice, pulled it off. Plus, if anyone deserved to be presumptuous, it was she. She who’d grow our baby in her womb.

“Sorry,” she said. “Too fast? My problem, Danny says.” She made a tumbling motion with her hands. “Something smaller, then, okay?” she ventured. “Maybe jobs?” She turned to Stu. “A pilot. How exciting! To have these people’s lives all in your hands—this must be hard. Or maybe it’s the best part, no? To have these people trust you?”

“Well, no. I mean, sure, I guess . . .” Stu chewed on his thumb.

“You flustered him,” I told her. “A feat that few have managed! Prize goes to Debora. Gold medal.”

“
Me
,” said Paula. “I should get a prize. Prize for Paula!” She beat her small fist against the table.

“Oh, pardon me,” I said. “Of course. Please forgive me.” I offered her my soupspoon. “
Plastic
medal to Paula.” Gleefully she popped it in her mouth.

Debora said, “And your work also, Pat: responsibility.”

“For me? Ha. No. Nothing quite so lofty.”

“But people trust you. With their children. To teach them, make them better. This is why, I think, you really like it.”

Normally I pooh-poohed my work (
Shrug
. “Pays the bills . . .”); no one dreams of being a
textbook
writer. Certainly not the younger me, who’d fancied himself a wordsmith: someone who would remake the world, a couplet at a time. But really, once I’d purged myself of all those arty airs, I
did
like my work—I felt it as a calling—for just the reasons Debora had surmised.

“What you said?” Stu told her. “I tell Pat all the time. I’m still trying to get it through his skull.”

I had to give Stu credit for handling my writer self. Back when we had met, before I’d sloughed my fantasies, I confessed I hoped to be a poet. With roiling gut and seized-up throat, I managed to ask The Question: Would Stu read a couple of my sonnets? “I don’t think so, no,” he said. “Not the best idea.” “You’re scared you won’t like them,” I said, “right? Is that the problem? And then you won’t be able to like
me
.” Immediately I pictured just exactly how I’d dump him: in public, maybe, in front of all his friends? “Wrong,” he said. “A thousand percent wrong. Will you listen? What if I read them now and I tell you I adore them? You’ll (a) think I’m only
saying
I do because I love you; or, worse, (b) think I hadn’t truly loved you without them. But Pat, I love you by yourself. With or without your poems. And
not
reading them’s the only way to prove that. So yeah, I want to read them. Can’t wait to. Will be thrilled to. But not until I’m sure you understand that I don’t
need
to.”

Eventually he did read them, and forced me to accept his admiration.

Still, I wasn’t good at getting praise—from him, or Debora, her presence like a sudden burst of sun that makes you swoon. “Well,” I said, “fine. People trust the
work
I do, without knowing, you know, I’m
me
.” I made a quick, deprecating flourish near my face. “I mean, people are weird about their children.”

Debora turned instinctively—and so did I—toward Paula, who rollicked in her seat, immune to our attention, conducting a silent song with her new spoon.

I said, “Sorry, Sweetpea. We boring you to tears?”

Now she looked up at me perplexedly, self-doubting. “I’m not crying, am I? Am I, Mãe?”

“No, no,” said Debora. “You almost never cry.”

Paula regained her confidence. “I’m
building
.”

Indeed she was. With her French fries. An enclosure of sorts: stacking walls, Lincoln Logs style.

“Paula, stop,” said Debora, firmly but not sharply. “In restaurants we have to act like big girls.”

“But look, it’s a house. For the fly. He hurt his wing.”

Sure enough, in the center of her structure stood a fly, tracing slow lopsided loops. It buzzed like a gadget miswired.

Debora said, “Now, Paula . . .” (I sensed her weighing different tones: Disgust? Reproof ? Admiration?) “It’s nice of you,
querida
. But sorry, it’s no good. The fly with one wing, she can’t live.”

“No, Mãe, it can. It can. I’ll be
its
mãe.” Turning from her mother, she looked at me pleadingly, as if I might vouch for her powers.

But Debora rose, ending the discussion. “Eating with your fingers, and touching a fly also? Now it’s time, I think, to wash up.”

Together, hand in hand, they headed for the restroom. Ashamedly I caught myself vetting them—their traits—the way someone shopping for a pedigreed pup would scrutinize the mama dog’s teeth. Of Paula I was thinking: creative, persistent. Of Debora: even-keeled, attentive.

“Isn’t she great?” I said to Stu.

“Paula, you mean? Or Debora?”

I felt like a raving groupie. “Both!”

“The way Danny talked,” said Stu, “I thought she’d be a handful. Paula. You know, a real hellion.”

“She seems perfectly sweet to me. If I had a kid as good as her, I’d—”

“Right,” said Stu. “Which makes me still . . . but hey. Not complaining. Happy to borrow those genes, if they’re offering.” He nicked a fry from Debora’s plate and downed it.

“Debora seems so . . . open,” I said. “So forward, but in a good way. Maybe it’s a Brazilian thing? Ipanema, bikinis . . .”

“Not her part of Brazil,” said Stu. “Up there, I think they’re cowboys.”

“But still, all that sunshine? I Googled it: purest air in the world. Or second-purest—and that’s according to NASA.”

“Funny thing?” said Stu. “I didn’t plan to like her.”

“Oh. Oh, that’s lovely. You planned to—what?
Dis
like our baby’s mother?”

“
Our baby’s mother
. Exactly. That was how I thought of her: how healthy she’d be, how fertile, how Jewish. Never thought to care what she’d be like as just herself.”

The restroom door marked Gulls (its counterpart said Buoys) swung open, and Debora and her daughter bounded out. Paula, as she neared the table, broke into a trot, and I got set to catch her if she leapt. But no, she barreled past me. “Look,” she called. “A boat!”

I was turning to look when the ferry’s horn blasted; I felt the sound churning in my chest.

Paula, unfazed, honked back to the boat. “Baaaa,” she sang. “Baaaa. Where will they sail, Mãe? To Brazil?”

Debora laughed. “Much too far. No. Just Martha’s Vineyard. Want to go and see? Should I take you?” She indicated the door out to the deck.

“No,” said Paula. “Him.” She pointed at me, grinning.

My kingdom for a little girl’s grin!

“Delighted to,” I said. I reached for Paula’s hand. Then, catching the flare of a jealous glance from Stu, I tried to quash the joy of being chosen. I opened the door. “Find us in a few.”

At first Paula clung to me, startled by the salt air’s slap. “Hey,” I said, sheltering her, “it’s okay. See the people?” A few hardy passengers, despite the day’s chill, clustered on the ferry’s top deck. “See? They’re saying hi to you. Wave back!”

Paula, emboldened, wriggled from my grip and twirled a small dance of salutation.

“There you go,” I said. “That’s a big brave girl.”

“Watch,” she called. “Watch me.” Now she struck a model’s pose, arms shaped to match the ferry’s prow.

I did watch, but what I saw was overlaid with memory: my mom and me (at Paula’s age? no, a few years older), one summer, riding the Vineyard boat.

Why were we, the two of us alone, on the ferry? I had heard her offering a reason to my dad: something about a species to be seen in Chappaquiddick, a juvenile something-or-other. Mom had been a teacher—junior high biology—but stopped working after she got pregnant. Less because she could than because she couldn’t not: what would all the other wives in Newtonville have said? Now, with the three of us kids safely out of diapers, she had found new outlets for her passion: secretary of the Sandy Neck Preservation League, organizer of weekend walks for birders down from Boston.

But where were her binoculars today, her battered field guide? She’d brought only her sunglasses. Her son.

“Oh,” she said when I asked her. “Oh, Pat. I’m so sorry.”

Sorry for what? What did I care? Birds were only birds.

“I told him,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “I told him this was crazy, bringing you.”

“
Dad
told you to bring me?”

“No, honey. Not him. You couldn’t . . . you’re too young to get it.”

I didn’t get it—not yet—but still, my backbone shrank.

At the Oak Bluffs terminal I stood to disembark, but Mom took my palm again. “No,” she said. “No, let’s just go home.”

And so we sailed back, across the torpid sea.

Why on earth, if she had planned a lover’s tryst, bring me? As cover, was the easy answer. To head off Dad’s suspicion, making me a pawn in her deception.

Today, though, braced against the same stinging breeze, gearing up to have my own child, I could finally understand the opposite possibility: maybe she had brought me so she
wouldn’t
take the risk—a grapnel that would keep her tied to home. Maybe that was part of why she’d had us kids, to start with.

Funny: all my life, I’d been bent on blazing a different path, but maybe, in the end, I followed in her footsteps. Did Debora’s old teacher’s scheme allow for this exception? Someone who ran away from things but also, in that running, turned back?