27
It was time to tell Jacob. He had just returned from his summer program and was settling back into life at home. I hadn’t wanted to give him this strange news while he was still in California, in case it would be upsetting to him. But I couldn’t withhold it any longer. I had raised him without secrets—perhaps to a fault. I had grown up in a house where the air crackled with the unsaid. I had always wished for Jacob to feel that, in his home, the air was clear.
As I considered how and when to tell Jacob, I wondered, as I had when we were with him in L.A., whether it would matter. What were genes, after all, to a seventeen-year-old boy? Michael had been focused on the idea that Jacob now had a different grandfather, a living grandfather. But would Jacob feel that Ben Walden was his grandfather? I doubted it.
Jacob had never known my dad—so would this feel like a loss to him? I thought about this as I cooked my son’s favorite dinner—grilled steak, roasted broccoli, spaghetti with butter and grated Parmesan—as if a good meal might help.
Family dinner had been a cornerstone of our lives since Jacob was in his high chair. So much of my way of doing things had been a reaction to the choices my parents had made. I had always known that I had formed myself in opposition to my mother. But I hadn’t realized to what degree I had designed our family life counter to the one I remembered. As a child, I had most often eaten dinner alone. Meals with my parents were always in the dining room. The house of my childhood was formal and cold. The home I had shared with Michael and Jacob for fifteen years was simple and warm. But more than anything, what I aimed for was ease. I wanted to laugh with my son. I wanted him to feel he could be honest with me. And just about nothing made me happier than seeing how close he was with his dad. They had a few passions in common—particularly music, and the Red Sox—and a dialogue that was all theirs.
Michael had a good-size family. His parents were still living and had always been a big part of Jacob’s life. Jacob had uncles, aunts, and an assortment of cousins as well. It had been a source of sadness to me that I hadn’t been able to give him the same. No grandparents, a half aunt who displayed little interest, and cousins who were black-hat Orthodox, with whom he shared nothing at all. I had made sure to encourage a relationship between Jacob and my father’s younger sister, Shirley, who was unusually open-minded, despite her strict religious beliefs. The previous year we had gone to Chicago for a visit. But the threads connecting him to my family were few and fraying.
I thought back to Jacob’s bar mitzvah. I had presented him with a blue velvet pouch containing my father’s enormous, yellowed tallis, the same one I remembered playing with as a child in shul. It had dwarfed him, and my aunt Shirley had sent along a pair of silver, filigreed tallis clips to hold it together on his narrow frame.
Here’s my father’s tallis. You wrap it around yourself like this.
These clips were your great-grandfather’s.
I had felt, on that day nearly five years earlier, a sense of completion. My boy, enfolded in his grandfather’s prayer shawl. A modern, eclectic service that I had worked hard to design, which reflected our family and also honored my dad and his legacy. Though my Orthodox relatives would not attend Jacob’s bar mitzvah, I felt I had their blessing. I stood next to Jacob in front of our gathered family and friends and spoke of how proud his grandfather would have been of him. L’dor vador.
“Honey, there’s something important we need to talk with you about.”
Jacob was suddenly very focused as we sat down to dinner.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I added quickly. “You don’t need to worry.”
As I began to share the story with Jacob, it felt unlike any previous time I had recounted it. It mattered—whether he would be aware of it or not—it mattered to him. I was giving him a missing piece of his own history. Michael was across the table from me, quiet, listening as I went through the details: the DNA test, the strange results, the lack of a biological connection to Susie, the mysterious first cousin. The artificial insemination, the discovery of the young medical student from the University of Pennsylvania. My voice shook. I was trying not to cry. Telling Jacob that my father wasn’t his grandfather felt like I was undoing the work of a lifetime, or perhaps several lifetimes.
Jacob reached over and took my hand once he understood.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
His chair scraped back as he stood and came around the table to hug me—my beautiful boy, who wouldn’t exist if everything hadn’t happened just as it did. The dogs hunted for scraps at our feet. As I held Jacob close, I kept reminding myself that everything I had built—my family, my personhood—was unaltered. My new knowledge changed both everything and nothing. My life was like one of those large and complicated jigsaw puzzles that, once finished, displayed a completely different image on the reverse side: a streetcar in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge. Van Gogh’s sunflowers, a self-portrait. Same puzzle pieces. Same materials. Same shape. Different picture.
As it slowly sank in, Jacob asked only a few questions—all of them about Ben.
“Is he alive?”
“Yes.”
I hadn’t told Jacob Ben’s name. I didn’t want him going upstairs to his room and heading down the Google rabbit hole. I also wanted to protect my son. I had no idea how Ben was ultimately going to respond to my request for that single cup of coffee.
He gave a nod.
“Are you going to meet him?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to. I hope so.”
“Can I meet him?”
“Let’s see what happens.”
I resisted the ridiculous urge to tell Jacob that his grandfather was still his grandfather. What could that possibly mean to him? My father was an abstraction, an ancestor to him—nothing more. All those stories, the tallis, the sepia photographs scattered around our house of the little boy in the bowler hat—those were important to me. But they held no more of a sense of reality for my son than the fables and fairy tales I’d read to him when he was a child.
Jacob sat back down at the table and began cutting up his steak. I was suddenly hungry myself, relieved that this conversation, which had been looming, was now behind us. I watched as he ate his dinner with the gusto of a teenager and wondered if he would always remember this evening, or if it would eventually fall into the category of weird, but no big deal. He seemed to be lost in thought as he ran a hand through his thick, dark blond hair. I waited to see if there was anything else he wanted to know, or if we were just going to move on to other subjects. The Red Sox had a game that night. He and Michael would probably watch after dinner.
He took a big sip of water, started to say something, then stopped.
“What? You know you can ask me anything.”
His hand raked through his hair again.
“So, just wondering—does this mean maybe I won’t end up bald?”
Michael and I burst out laughing. My father and grandfather had heads like cue balls. I hadn’t known it had even occurred to Jacob that it was hereditary. Ben Walden, on the other hand, did indeed have an excellent head of hair.
“You probably won’t end up bald, honey,” I said, glad that he was able to crack a joke. “I hadn’t considered that particular upside.”