The Paternity Test (7 page)

He named the date when his flight would land; he told her to be ready.

Her mother called her crazy. A sex tourist, that’s all he was; hadn’t Debora heard the news reports? Her father, too, in his shrugging, hapless way, voiced disapproval. As did her brothers (all but Waterston, the seeker).

Debora didn’t care. Or she
did
, but in reverse: their doubt made her all the more eager to prove them wrong, they with their adherence to their wilted little hopes, who hadn’t seen the promise in her orchid. None of them could understand how fortunes might be made just from rainwater and sun and ambition.

When she met Danny’s plane, she wore her city jeans. He grabbed her where the stars were sewn and lifted her off the ground.

Waterston was their witness when they signed the marriage license, after which he served them
casadinhos
in his kitchen, where the three of them danced
chachado
past midnight. If it wasn’t the lavish
festa
she’d envisioned as a girl, with scores of friends and cousins making merry, it was better for being her invention.

Marrying Danny made everything move slaphappily fast. Before she knew it she was on an airplane, then another, then climbing into his tall green American pickup truck, which had a tailgate sticker saying “Carpenters Do It By Hand,” another on the bumper reading “Measure Twice, Cut Once.” Debora inhaled his woody, welcoming scent. She was eighteen.

That was what she told us as we tucked in to our lunches at the Pancake King, across from the Barnstable airport.

Brazil! Now her tan made sense, her zigzag sentence structures.

Stu and I had one side of the syrup-stained table, Debora and her husband the other. All the while she talked, I watched her shining eyes: brown flecks and green all dazzlingly jumbled, as if daring the world to sort them out. Even without her tale, I’d have pegged her as a dreamer. The single-minded way she looked at Danny, still. The fervor.

Danny, with his hooded gaze, was harder to decipher. He nodded as she talked, but also smirked impatiently, a champ hearing the legend of his biggest win again. Shyness might have prompted him to stare down at his hands—bulky, robust hands that crushed his napkin. Shyness, maybe, or shame (to be seen with two gay men?). Or maybe it was only nerves, like mine.

Above us, cardboard angels and Saint Nicks hung from strings, quivering in the heating duct’s blast. I wanted to make a joke—
Santa’s got the D.T.s
—but that might further alienate Danny.

Stu was also hard to read, as silent as the moon, running a hand along his crew cut’s bristles. Christ, I wanted to swat him. Speak up! Charm their pants off !

Debora had finished; for just a second I thought about amusing her with Stu’s and my first-acquaintance story. When people asked how we’d met, and we answered “Beating meat,” they thought we were being euphemistic. But it was true: we’d both volunteered at Serve the World, cooking healthful meals for people with AIDS; we found ourselves stationed at a vast expanse of butcher block, tenderizing a thousand cuts of beef. With straight people I normally withheld further details: the rush to Stu’s apartment, the other beaten meat. But even without those details, the story might seem flippant. And that was the very last thing we wanted her to think of us.

Fathers. We could be fathers. We were ready.

To fill the silence, I chose instead to ask her about cashews: Did they grow on vines? On trees? Underground? Already I was sketching out a reading lesson’s draft. (More than a decade at Educraft had trained my nose for topics.) Also, now I’d get to hear her tuneful voice again, the way her accent breathed new life into the dullest words.
To
became
tchoo
—a blown kiss.

“You raised cashews?” I said. “Funny, but I’ve never even thought of where . . . I mean, for us, they just arrive in little cans! How do they—”

But Stu raised his hand to cut me off. “Sorry,” he said. He looked at Debora, then Danny. “You seem like lovely people. You do. But clearly there’s been a misunderstanding.”

Debora’s expression, still buoyant from the memory of her courtship, sank now to one of bemusement. She crossed her arms and stared at them—as if expecting, in place of her two elegant brown limbs, a defect (flippers?) that clearly would discredit her DNA.

“I mean,” said Stu, “we weren’t expecting someone . . . someone Brazilian.”

Debora’s face went rigid, persuasively panic-stricken. “Wait. What do you mean? You knew! You didn’t know?”

“How?” said Stu.

“I thought I told. And, well, my name of e-mail.”

“Brazucamama?”

“Brazuca means ‘Brazilian in America.’”

“And anyway,” said Danny, awakened from impassiveness. “So what if she is? What’s the big problem?”

Good question. I was already a fan of her tropical force, her foreignness, which seemed nothing less than a free bonus. I wouldn’t mind a mixed-race child: I thought of Milo’s sweet sepia skin.

Benevolently, Stu laid a hand on Debora’s wrist. “It’s just—one of our things is for the mother to be Jewish. Jewish, you know, by
birth
. By blood. When you said, in your e-mail . . . we didn’t know it was Jewish just by marriage.”

Debora exchanged an inscrutable glance with Danny, who shook his head and loaded a link of sausage onto his fork. “Funny,” he said, “’cause Debora’s the one who cares about that stuff.” He gulped down the link in one bite.

“What makes you think,” she started, her tone not mad but curious. Then her eyes lit with a dawning recognition. “Oh! A brown Jew!” She laughed, pointing to the wrist that Stu had touched. “I’m Brazilian, so I can’t be Jewish, yes? You think?”

“Well, no,” Stu said. “No, it’s just—” But his sheepish shrug conceded the point.

“Look,” she said. The word came out as
looky
. “It’s okay. In Brazil, even, many do not know. Many, many. The Inquisition—you’ve heard of this, no?”

Sure, we said. In Spain.

But remember, she said: Portugal was still then part of Spain. So Portugal, too, had its Inquisition. Jews fled to Portugal’s new colony—to Brazil—so far away, so wild, they hoped they could live there with no problem. And where, in that far, wild New World, should they go? The wild northeast. Rio Grande do Norte.

“But even to here,” she said, “Inquisitors, they arrived. The Jews had to hide, to convert to Catholicism. Converted but still Jewish in their hearts.”

How strong is the heart, she asked? How long does it hold? A hundred years passed—two hundred—and in a few northeastern towns lived Brazilians who didn’t know why they ate no pork, or why, at the start of April, bread was disallowed. They were Catholic but never knelt in church like their neighbors. On Fridays, every family lit two candles.

Gente da Nacão
—the People of the Nation—that was what they called themselves, said Debora.

“Then a man, he came,” she said. “A teacher. A rabbi. When he heard the way they lived, he told them who they were. Think of this!” She looked at Stu, then me—those eyes, with their complicated shine. “It’s like for you, maybe, when you learned that you are gay. Except you knew
inside
, always, who you really are. These people, they didn’t know. They had to be
explained
.” She lifted her cup but couldn’t seem to pause and take a sip; her words, blowing across the coffee’s hot surface, churned up puffs of steam like an engine’s. “Some of them didn’t want to change, they wanted to stay converted. But others made a group for learning Jewish things, for prayer. My grandfather’s home, this was where they met. My own
avô
! My mother didn’t care so much, you know, but
Avô
taught me.”

Now she drank her coffee—a long, contented draft—her smile a bit short of overproud. More or less the same goofy smile I’d worn in boyhood, when boasting of my great-times-something-grandfather John Faunce, who’d sailed to Massachusetts on the
Mayflower
. (Or so claimed Mom, booster of her family-by-marriage. The truth, as I’d learn in a high school history class: John Faunce had shown up three years after the
Mayflower
, his ship less stirringly named the
Anne
.)

I hoped Debora’s pride wasn’t misplaced. I could never tell what would pass muster with Stu: what would be Jewish enough, or too Jewish. Take Richard, whose being a Jew was crucial, in Stu’s eyes, to making him a suitable father for Rina’s children, but whose tribalism sent Stu into fits. (“He writes checks to Lieberman—Senator fucking Lieberman!—just because he’s, ‘you know, one of ours’?”) Or this: Why did Stu love my foreskin, and yet, when I’d cited the barbarity of circumcision, did he snap, “Any boy of mine is having a
bris
. Period”?

Now I stroked his thigh beneath the table like a rabbit’s foot, trying to coax a positive response. But no coaxing was necessary: his face was bright with awe.

“Wow,” he said to Debora. “Your story is just—wow. Talk about keeping the flame lit.”

“We knew we were different,” she said. “Special. But not why.”

“Which almost makes it better. I mean, that’s
faith
, right? Believing in something you don’t understand?” His thigh, underneath my hand, was dancing.

Yes, I thought—
that’s
the Stu to show them!

“Can I warm that up?” asked the suddenly looming waitress. Her nametag read: “Be gentle, I’m new!”

“Not for me, thanks,” I said.

“You?” she said to Stu.

But he, still enthralled with Debora’s story, didn’t notice.

“Sir, coffee?”

“He’s fine,” I said, my hand atop Stu’s mug.

I went back to my lunch, pleased that Stu was pleased—but what was this other proto-feeling, a pinching in my gut? I crushed the thought that it could be envy. I
wanted
Stu to click with Debora, of course I did. And yet. They shared this thing, this Jewishness, that I couldn’t be a part of. I felt a tinge of adolescent angst.

The Pancake King’s throwback vibe probably wasn’t helping. Its Sputnik-era Formica, its cheap, sugary smells—I don’t think it had changed by 2 percent since my first visits, as an achy-voiced, sexually flummoxed teen. This was where my summer pals and I had double-dated, paired off with whichever sunburned girls we liked that week.

And really, I did like the girls. They Benadryled my itch. But lord, the kilowatt hours I burned in trying to convince them—my bumbling way of trying to convince myself—that I wasn’t
more
attracted to their boyfriends.

Flustered now, I fumbled a clump of hotcake in my lap. And then— crap!—a forkful of hash was capsized.

“Anxious?” Danny said. “Easy does it.” He had clearly also noted Debora and Stu’s bond; he angled his body to talk with me alone.

“No,” I said, “it’s just. Well, yeah. Anxious. Yes.” I brushed bits of hash to the floor.

“Don’t worry about it—I mean, when’d they start making these tables with seats, like, a hundred miles away?” He leaned forward conspiratorially, cutting his glance to one side then the next, at diners who were digging in to heaps of the trucker’s special. “It must be ’cause everyone here is so f.a.t.”

My laugh pulled the tension’s thread and started its unsnarling.

“But seriously,” he said. “Awful, isn’t it? You look at what some of these people are eating—hell, what
we
are—and you realize it could feed, like, a dozen Ethiopians. Or”—he jerked his thumb at Debora— “Brazilians.”

“But I
like
the seats like this.” It was Debora, who’d swiveled toward us. “
Looky
—much more room for a woman to be pregnant.”

Her closeness was disarming (I hadn’t thought she’d heard us). Her closeness and her loaded word:
pregnant
.

It sent us skidding into a perilously intimate silence. There were griddle sounds from the kitchen, the cash register’s ding. And then I remembered what I’d learned in driver’s ed. Counterintuitive, but:
Steer into the skid
.

I sat up and wiped my lips, and said, “Debora. Tell us. Why would you have someone else’s baby?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you!”

She cried this with such ardor that I almost, honest to God, said, “You’re welcome.”

“It’s good to talk direct,” she clarified. She planted her elbows on the table. “So. Why a baby for someone else? ‘For someone else’ is the question, no? Not ‘why a baby?’ Because, well . . . babies,” she said. “Children!” She sounded like a schoolgirl asked her favorite food (
Chocolate!
). “Our daughter, Paula, she is so wonderful. She changed everything.” Debora gave the verb an extra syllable:
change-ed
. “For me she did. Like she came and washed”—
wash-ed
—“my eyes. Now I see everything so clear.” She stared at me and Stu as if her sheer enthusiasm could make us, too, view life through her high-powered vision. She asked, “Would you like to see a picture?”

Of course we did!

From her purse she brought forth a laminated snapshot: a little pigtailed girl, a shade paler than Debora, with squinty, gleaming, skeptical features. It wasn’t hard to love Paula, even from just a picture. I wished the girl were here right now: I’d grab her by the wrists and—
whoosh
— turn us into a human helicopter.

“If you had a machine to make gold,” Debora said, “and you’d already made some for yourself—nice house, nice car, everything— would you throw away this machine? Or would you make gold for other people?” She laid the photo on the tabletop. Her ace.

“Wow,” said Stu, “is being pregnant really that much fun?”

“Oh, yes, I
love
this,” she said. “I think it’s why I’m made.”

Stu picked up the photograph, turned it in his hands. Narrow-eyed, uncertain, he looked not unlike Paula. “Thing is,” he said, “it’s
not
gold. That’s not what we’re dealing with. A baby. Specifically, half your baby.”

“What he’s saying, I think?” I said. “We recognize how tough it is, for any surro, to give away a baby. Especially a TS, you know? It’s almost . . . well, unfathomable. You’re sure doing traditional’s right for you?”

“I’ll tell you serious, okay?” she said. “When I was thinking in doing this—the long time I was thinking?—I always planned that I will do gestational. It seemed just more simple, you know? For Danny’s feelings, too.”