The Edge of Doom Read online

  “Thirty-six may have been late then for a first child,” Reed said. “Perhaps not for a fourth.”

  “I didn’t know you were an expert on human fertility.”

  “I think you’re letting this affect you inordinately, Kate. You usually don’t get carried away and testy.”

  “You’re right; I’m sorry. I can’t imagine why this is causing so forceful a reaction. It’s as though I’ve been told I may be someone other than I thought I was. Do you suppose this is what it’s like to discover you’re adopted?”

  “Probably. I think that’s why adoptive parents today let the child know it’s adopted very early on.”

  “Really, Reed, no testiness is intended. But you do seem to be a fountain of familial information.”

  “Odd bits of information turn up in the D.A.’s office where I spent so many long days, and some of them even take on significance. DNA is hardly unknown in connection with the criminal world. Anyway, everything I’ve mentioned is commonplace in newspapers these days. You know it all too, if you think about it.”

  “I’m not sure I want to think about it. Let’s talk about something else; something very clearly else.”

  And they did, for that evening at least. But as they talked, Kate found herself overwhelmed in a way she would not have thought possible. Why, after all, was this news so stupendous?

  By the next day Reed had unearthed a friend who was a DNA expert, or enough of one to satisfy Reed’s purposes and Kate’s. He had promised to report to Reed on e-mail, and did so. Reed had asked him a specific question: assuming a man (Reed had put his inquiry in general terms) claimed to be the father of a certain woman, could DNA testing, for example, distinguish between the man as the father of the woman and the man as the half brother of the woman? For it had occurred to Reed that this man might actually be a by-blow of Kate’s father; in that case his DNA would certainly establish a connection with her. He had mentioned this possibility to Kate, who had silently rolled her eyes and only demanded to know the results when Reed had got them in hand.

  The results had arrived at his office in the afternoon, and he handed the printout to Kate as soon as he was inside the door. She had been loitering about near the front door, expecting him, unable to settle to anything or even to stay seated in one place. Banny, regarding her with an obviously troubled expression, turned her head from side to side as though watching a tennis match.

  When Reed arrived to find her at the door, he looked as troubled as the dog. “For God’s sake, Kate,” he said, taking off his coat and reaching into his briefcase, “don’t you think you’re overreacting just a bit?”

  “Of course I’m overreacting, and what’s more, I don’t know why I’m overreacting. What possible difference can it make, over half a century later, if I turn out to be the result of one sperm instead of another, or if my mother, whom I thought of as the height of conventionality, and who was, after all, born not that far from the last century, was screwing around?”

  “All right,” Reed said, “what difference is it making, or threatening to make?”

  “I haven’t a clue, so don’t ask. My questions are rhetorical. Where’s the damn report?”

  Reed handed it to her. “Let’s sit down,” he said. “The answer to my question is clear enough, though the explanation is hard-going, becoming quite complicated and esoteric.”

  Kate took the sheet of paper from Reed, and sat down to read it. She did not put her feet up. He saw her read through it and then begin again. The doctor had clearly considered Reed’s request about the man’s being a possible half brother to Kate as the substantive question. If the man were indeed the father of the woman in question, he had told Reed, there would be no doubt about it. He had further written:

  “It is possible to discern a father-daughter relationship from a half brother–half sister relationship. First, consider the X chromosomes.”

  Kate made what she hoped was an intelligent effort to consider the X chromosomes, before deciding that this was a waste of time. She read on; the doctor had decided to use himself as an example:

  “My daughter has two X chromosomes. One of them comes from me, and one comes from my wife. If my daughter were in fact my half sister and we shared the same father, as in the case you are asking about, it would not be possible for her to have the same X chromosome as me, because I inherited my X from my mother, who is unrelated to her.”

  Kate looked up. “Yes,” she said, “I think I’ve got that. More or less. This reminds me of Charles Sanger’s demonstration that Emily Brontë really knew inheritance law when she had Heathcliff inherit everything from both families.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re sounding more like yourself,” Reed said. “When you mention literature, I know sanity is not far away.”

  Kate read on: “The answer for the twenty-two other chromosomes, called autosomes, is more complicated but also definitive. Sorry about the techno-speak, but it’s the only way to be accurate. Here goes: For a given pair of alleles carried by my daughter, it is certain that one of them comes from me. If she were my half sister, there would be a 50 percent chance that the allele she inherited from our shared father is not the same allele that I inherited from him. If we consider allelic pairs from each of the twenty-two autosomes, there is only about a one in 4.2 million chance that my half sister and I would inherit the same twenty-two alleles from our father. So if you assess RFLPs at twenty-two loci, one on each autosome, and find that in all twenty-two cases the woman and man share an allele, then she is his daughter to a certainty of one in four million. Another way of looking at this is that in the father-daughter pair, the daughter has half of the father’s DNA, while in the half-sibling case, the two each have half of their father’s DNA, but not the same half.”

  “What is an RFLP?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t know,” Reed said, “but it seems that the conclusion is clear enough. If this man is your father, that will be readily apparent. If he is your half brother—and after all that’s just a possibility that came to my mind with no basis in fact—then we’ll know that, too. So at least evidence from the DNA will be clear enough.”

  “Well, whatever that man says the report says, I think we had better have it done over. We’ll have to ask him to prick his finger into some Kleenex. After all, fair’s fair.”

  “I’m sure he will see it that way,” Reed said. “Now how about concentrating on the fact that whether he’s your father or not will not alter a single moment of your life up to now. You are still the Kate Fansler who has lived so far. What it may change in your perception of your parents is another matter, I do realize. But that, dear Kate, is in the past. The long ago, over half a century past.”

  “Is it all right if I wonder about what my mother was up to?”

  “Wonder away. But until we know the results of all this DNA business, we can’t be sure she was up to anything.”

  “You realize he must have been much younger than she. Probably he was the age of her oldest son, or very near to it.”

  “Well, good for your mother, but I doubt he was Laurence’s age, which was eleven when you were born. She undoubtedly was a most attractive woman even past the height of youth, as you are.”

  “Nicely put, Reed. I can hardly wait to meet the man.”

  “Do you want to meet him only if he is your father, or do you think he will be interesting in himself?”

  “I guess I want to know why he would play this charade if he isn’t my father; and I need to know all about him if he is.”

  “We do have to remember that Laurence may be undergoing a senior moment, as I believe they are now called. There may be no such man at all.” Reed went to prepare their drinks.

  “The trouble is,” Kate said, “I don’t know what to hope for. As T.S. Eliot put it, ‘wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.’ But it’s a little hard to know what the wrong thing might be in this case.”

  “Or the right thing, either,” Reed muttered, as
they settled down in the living room. “I didn’t know you liked T.S. Eliot.”

  Kate smiled her appreciation at his trying to change the subject, enticing her to talk about poetry, which she loved but rarely taught and never wrote about.

  “T.S. Eliot the man seems a frightful creature; he probably always was,” Kate said. “But the poet, alas, that is something else.”

  “I used to feel that way about baseball players,” Reed said. “I know it sounds frivolous, but it was a great shock to me as a boy and even after that to discover what awful men some of my favorite players were. It took me a while to understand that one can love and admire the game, or the poetry, and not care for, in fact ignore, the players and the poets. It’s nice to discover that a great shortstop is a sweet guy, but it’s his elegant moves as a shortstop that one relishes.”

  “That’s right,” Kate said, but Reed could tell her mind was wandering back to her possible paternity. “Shall we eat in tonight?” Kate asked, getting to her feet. Reed nodded, and they both went into the kitchen, bringing their glasses. “I guess even Joe DiMaggio has turned out to be a quite unlovable guy with a good sense of marketing himself,” Kate said, still trying to stick to any other subject, baseball as it had turned out.

  “Well, he was a Yankee,” Reed said, keeping up his end, “so what could you expect? I was a Giants’ fan.”

  “Are you still?” Kate evidently was determined to spin out this discussion so kindly started by Reed; it could hardly last very long, of course, as Reed understood.

  “The Giants moved to the West Coast,” he said. He had never taken very seriously the possibility of interesting Kate in baseball, or any other spectator sport. But he was amused by her determination to “make conversation,” an undertaking they had never before felt the need of. “I’ve always been a National League person,” he said. “The very idea of the designated hitter offends me.”

  Kate looked puzzled.

  “Don’t ask,” Reed said. “It’s not really easy to explain. Are you feeling any better?”

  “A little saner, I think. There is some chicken left; is that okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “What I can’t get out of my head,” Kate said, removing dishes from the refrigerator, “is that the person I am is in part due to someone I’ve never met or known about.”

  “The person you are is due to you,” Reed said. “You are what you made yourself. I grant you all the facts about genetics, but plenty of women your age with the same genes might have turned out very differently.”

  “We can’t know that.”

  “Granted. We can’t know anything, so why brood about it? And don’t reheat the chicken; let’s eat it cold.”

  “What I keep thinking of, Reed, is the woman I might have been if what this man claims is true. Suppose I had been the child of my putative father, if you see what I mean. I might have lived in the suburbs, and had three children, and taken courses in flower arranging.”

  “I can’t imagine that, no matter who your father was.”

  “It’s still a pretty shocking prospect,” Kate said.

  “But not frightening surely. I should think you’d feel glad to have escaped such a fate. Not that it’s a bad fate, but it hardly suits you.”

  “It’s what might have suited me that I keep thinking about,” Kate said. “What I might have been. All the other hopes and desires I might have had.”

  “What you need,” Reed said, “is another drink.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  That thou art my [daughter], I have partly thy

  mother’s word, partly my own opinion; but chiefly

  a villanous trick of thine eye and a foolish hanging

  of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me.

  In the days following, Kate’s thoughts as she went about her work intermittently returned, as of their own volition, to conjectures about genes. This was not a subject on which she was highly informed, nor did she seem to wish to undertake extensive research, or indeed any research, on the matter. Research, in Kate’s view, had to have a purpose, and she could not at the moment see any purpose in the gathering of genetic information. Keeping her mind on her job was effort enough and, on the whole, successful. But in between, the same themes emerged.

  She knew the work of so-called sociobiologists who saw genes as the dominant, probably the only force behind individual actions, and the work of those more liberal who, by emphasis on upbringing and environment, countered such theories, finding them racist and socially biased. Between these alternatives she wandered, first convinced of genetic dominance, then persuaded by the force of cultural and social pressures. In short, when not teaching literature or coping with the responsibilities of academia, Kate convinced herself one moment that who her father was hardly signified, made little difference to who she had become, and at another moment felt certain that what had formerly seemed, in her opposition to her family’s doctrines, as originality on her part was little more than different genes at work. She did not yet know if her genes were different, less Fansler than she had supposed, or if she was simply who she had always supposed herself to be. And so she speculated, her thoughts chasing one another circuitously and pointlessly.

  Teaching literature in her seminars, she managed to keep her mind on the texts and the students, but questions would intrude: how explain George Eliot, no more like her family than Kate was like the Fanslers? The Brontës, on the other hand, had each other, the moors, their isolation; they seemed to share the same mysterious source of talent. But was not such talent always hard to account for? Not so, Kate reminded herself before her office hours, with musicians or mathematicians, whose amazing talents, manifesting themselves at an early age, seemed almost always to be inherited.

  She, Kate, had after all proceeded through her twenties hand in hand, as it were, with the march of feminism, an influence unlikely to have affected her brothers or her parents, and probably sufficient to account for her deviations from them.

  Walking home in the hope that exercise and air would clear her head, she considered twins. Who had not heard stories of identical twins raised apart who turned out, meeting as adults, to be wearing identical ties and to each have a dog named Eddie? Well, no one doubted that genes existed, but the human chromosome endowment was so large, who could say whence came what trait? And what about adopted children, who got on with life as life should be got on with, as a living present and not an endowment from the past?

  Kate opened the front door of their apartment to find herself greeted by Banny and Reed, both lingering uncharacteristically in the hall.

  “Is something wrong?” Kate asked, forgetting about genes and thinking only of disaster.

  “Not at all,” Reed said. “We just wanted to be sure we would hear you come in.”

  “About the DNA?” Kate now asked, recovering herself.

  “Yes,” Reed said. “I just got off the phone with Laurence. He asked for you but seemed willing to talk with me. Relieved, in fact, to tell the truth.”

  “And?” Kate urged, as Reed paused.

  “That man does seem to be your father. He is also not your half brother, an idea of mine reflecting my ignorance of the finer points of DNA, without basis or, it transpires, without substance. Of course, as Laurence suggested and I agreed, new samples from both of you must be tested. But one does rather have the impression that you are a Fansler in name only.”

  “Well, that’s over then. Now we know.” Kate, rather to her surprise, found herself content with the result. What dramatists we all are, and you especially, she said to herself, mocking. What a letdown it would have been to be just what you always were, with nothing new and challenging to disrupt your life.

  Something of this must have shown in her face, because Reed grinned and took her hand, leading her into the living room. Kate, still holding on to her bag, dropped it in the hall. “Adventures are always fun,” Reed said, “as is speculation in the right conditions. Apart from your brothers, whose react
ion to this news, if true, I can hardly envision, there is nothing much to worry about, and you can stop saying that life holds no more surprises. I call this surprise a dilly.”

  “Are we to know his name?” Kate asked when Reed had poured their drinks and she had at last sat down, allowing Banny to collapse at her feet with a grateful sigh.

  “That’s about all we know,” Reed said. “Laurence almost forgot to ask him his name, doubtless, as I suspect, bowled over by the DNA report. I think your brother didn’t really believe the man’s story for a moment, and is quite rocked by this proof—which Laurence doesn’t doubt, by the way—proof about you and his sainted mother. I hope you’ll forgive me for referring to her in so discourteous a way.”

  “His name?” Kate demanded, ignoring this.

  “Ah. Well, that’s rather a shock, too. His name is Jason Ebenezer Smith. Everyone calls him Jay.”

  “Ebenezer! Laurence is incapable of making that up. Are you being cute, Reed? I must say that isn’t like you.”

  “I am never cute,” Reed said with mock dignity. “The man, Jay, gave his name as Jason E. Smith—that was the name on the letter that came with the DNA report—and Laurence demanded to know what the E was for. No doubt he was hoping against hope that something would prove the whole business untrue. So Jay E. Smith told him his middle name was Ebenezer.”

  “And of course Laurence didn’t know enough to ask a question about Dickens. He or you might have quoted Shakespeare: ‘I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.’ And I still can’t get over his reading up on Edith Wharton.”

  “No, apparently he didn’t catch the Dickens connection. And I don’t believe that’s a Shakespeare quote.”

  “You can look it up. But why would anyone name a child after Scrooge?”