I go downstairs to meet my father for lunch. An elderly Oriental gentleman steps out from behind the mailboxes. “I’m your real father,” he says.
We go back upstairs. He uses an elegant cane, a slim black implement with a silver pommel. I can’t help admire it. When we’re seated in my main room, sipping tea, he launches into the story of his life, and thereby the so-called unveiling of my true origins. I listen sourly, one eyebrow cocked. Finally it’s too much, I say: “But look, to be perfectly blunt about it, how do you reconcile the obvious ‘physiognomic’ discrepancy between us?” He looks at me intently, and then he shrugs. He grins, sadly, and gets to his feet. “Well, I guess you’ve seen through my story,” he says. “Thank you for the tea, anyway.”
I see him out. I come back into the room and stand there abstractedly at the table, hands in my pockets, trying to make head or tail of what has just transpired. The clock chimes the hour. The door of the big closet opens and my father creeps halfway out. He looks about with great agitation. “The cane!” he whispers fiercely. “Did he leave the cane?” I stare at him, dumbfounded. “For God’s sake,” he cries, “are you deaf?”
He comes out a step, peering. Then he gives a gasp and lunges over to the couch and pulls out something that was pressed into the angle of the cushions: the glossy black shaft of the cane. Averting his head from it, he scurries back to the closet and flings the cane into the back and starts piling coats and suitcases and kicking shoes and tennis balls on top of it. “Help me!” he yells.
When finally we have buried the cane to his liking, we come back to the table and he flops into a chair. He mops at the floods of sweat on his brow. “An old suitor of your mother,” he says, panting. Then he leans forward and raises a finger at me with stern urgency. “Now listen, my boy,” he says. “You’re old enough to understand certain things I’m going to tell you.” I look back into those bulging, green and grey eyes of his, and despite myself I feel my knees getting weak. “That thing in there — you’ve got to keep it hidden. Whatever happens, never let your mother see it!” He seizes hold of one of my wrists. “Do you understand me?” he cries.