Reborn

3

As Carol drove home, her thoughts bounced between the past, the present, and the future. She thought of how excited Jim must be. He had been searching for his natural parents for so long. What had happened at home today? How had he found out? It made her think of her own parents, dead now almost ten years. She wondered for the millionth time how they would have felt about their only daughter marrying Jim Stevens. She knew they had never cared much for Jonah and Emma Stevens, although they hadn't known them well. Her folks would have much preferred Billy Ryan, she was sure, but he had wound up entering the priesthood.

Who'd have ever thought Carol Nevins, Miss Mary Catholic School herself, would wind up married to the Wolfman, the football crazy? Not Carol.

Oh, but he had been something to see back then. Only occasionally did he carry the ball. Mostly he cleared the way for those who did. And he seemed to relish the job, leaving a trail of battered and broken defensive players in his wake, some seriously hurt.

But there was a gentle side to Jim, too. That was the Jim she had loved since that dreadful time in 1959 when both her parents had been killed on a rainy, foggy night in a head-on crash with a semitrailer on the Expressway. In an instant of smashing glass and screaming steel she had become an orphan. The grief had been crushing, numbing in its intensity, but the terror of being an only child and suddenly alone in the world had made it even worse.

Jim had saved her. Until that time he had been a high-school friend, a football hero she had dated occasionally. Nothing serious. She hadn't been going with anyone special then. She and Bill Ryan had drifted apart a few months before. There had been lots of sparks between Bill and her, but his shyness and reticence had dampened any fires before they got started. When her whole world seemed to be collapsing around her, Jim had been there for her. Plenty of friends had expressed their sympathy and tried to comfort her, and her Aunt Grace, her father's only sister, had taken a leave of absence from her nursing job in the city to stay with her, but only Jim seemed to understand, to feel what she was feeling.

That was when Carol got the first inkling that this was the man she wanted to marry. That wouldn't happen for a while, however. Not until after four years of college together at the brand-new State University at Stony Brook. And it wasn't until their junior year, as they lay in bed together in a motel room, that he told her he was adopted. He had held off for years, thinking it would make a difference. She remembered being amazed. What did she care who his forebears were? None of them lay curled against her in bed that night.

Graduation flashed before her—Stony Brook Class of 1964—Jim with his journalism degree, Carol's in social work, starting careers, growing closer, until finally the wedding in 1966, a small affair, with Jim squeezed into a tux and suffering through a nuptial Mass. An uncommon man doing such a common thing, an irreligious man taking vows before a priest just to make Carol and her Aunt Grace happy, an antiritualistic man partaking in one of the most primitive of rituals.

"It's okay," he had said to her before the ceremony. "It's all the years that follow the voodoo that really matter."

She never forgot those words. The laconic blend of cynicism and sincerity typified everything she loved about Jim Stevens.

She pulled into the driveway and stared at their home. She had grown up in this house. A tiny ranch on a tiny lot—white, asbestos-shingle siding with black shutters and trim. She didn't like the way it looked in winter with the trees and the rosebushes bare, the rhododendrons drooping from the cold.

Spring, spring, you can't come too soon for me.

But it was warm inside and Jim was fairly bouncing off the walls. He was like a kid at Christmas. Dressed in an oxford shirt, straight-legged jeans, smelling of Old Spice, his hair still wet from the shower, he hugged her and whirled her around as she stepped in the door.

"Can you believe it?" he cried. "Old Doc Hanley fathered me! You're married to a guy with Nobel Prize genes in him!"

"Slow down, Jim," she said. "Just cool it a little. What are you talking about?"

He put her down, and in a rush he told her about the letter and the "obvious" conclusion he had drawn.

"You sure you're not getting carried away?" she said, taking off her coat.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't want to be a wet blanket," she said, smoothing down his wet hair, "but no one's calling you Young Mr. Hanley yet, are they?"

His smile faded. "And no one ever will. I'll be James Jonah Stevens until the day I die. I don't know what Hanley's reasons were for dumping me in an orphanage, and I don't care how rich or famous he was. Jonah and Emma Stevens took me in and raised me. As far as I'm concerned, they are my parents."

Then why did you search so long and hard for your biological parents? Carol wanted to say. For years it had been an obsession with Jim. Now he seemed to be saying that it really didn't matter.

"Fine, Jim. But I just don't want you to get your hopes up again and then get hurt. You had a lot of false leads before when you were looking, and it always got you down when they didn't pan out."

She remembered many days, through their college years and afterward, spent combing through the tangle of old records at the St. Francis Home for Boys. Jim had finally given up the search after their marriage. She had thought he'd put the question of his natural parents' identities behind him for good.

And now this.

"But this is different, don't you see? This came to me, I didn't go after it. Look at the whole picture, Carol. I was a foundling, less than two weeks old when the Jebbies literally found me on the steps of the orphanage. All the scene needed was a snowstorm howling around me to make it a perfect cliché. No trace of my biological parents. Now, twenty-six years later, a man I never knew, never even met in my entire life, names me in his will. A famous man. One who may not have wanted his name touched by scandal back in the forties, which is a long ways away in time and temper from the hippies and free love we've got today." He stopped and stared at her a moment. "Got the picture?"

She nodded.

"Good. Now tell me, hon, given those facts, what is the first explanation that comes to your mind when you try to figure out why the rich old man names a foundling in his will?"

Carol shrugged. "Okay. Score one for you."

He smiled brightly. "So! I'm not crazy!"

His smile always warmed her. "No, you're not."

The phone rang.

"That's probably for me," Jim said. "I called that law firm earlier, and they said they'd get back to me."

"About what?"

He gave her a sheepish look. "About who my real… uh, biological father is."

She listened to his end of the conversation and sensed his frustration when he couldn't get any information out of the lawyer on the other end. Finally he hung up and turned to her.

"I know what you're going to say," he told her. "Why is this so damn important to me? What does it really matter?"

Her sympathy for him was mixed with confusion. She wanted to say, You're you. Who you came from doesn't change that.

"It wouldn't be the first time I've asked," she said.

"Yeah, well, I wish I could drop it, but I can't."

"You let it eat at you."

"How do I explain it? It's like having amnesia and being alone on a ship drifting over the Marianas trench; you drop anchor but it never hits bottom, so you go on drifting and drifting. You believe that if you knew where you came from, maybe you could get some idea where you were going. But you look behind you and it's all empty sea. You feel cut off from your past. It's a form of social and genetic amnesia."

"Jim, I understand. I felt that way when my folks were killed."

"It's not the same. That was tragic. They were gone, but at least you had known them. And even if they had died the day after you were born, it would still be different. Because you could go back and look at pictures of them, talk to people who knew them. They would exist for you, consciously and subconsciously. You'd have roots you could trace back to England or France or wherever. You'd feel part of a flow, part of a process; you'd have a history behind you, pushing you toward someplace far ahead."

"But, Jim," she said, "I never think of those things. Nobody does."

"That's because you've got them. You take them for granted. You don't think about your right hand much, do you? But if you'd been born without one, you'd find yourself wishing for a right hand every day."

Carol moved close and slipped her arms around him. As he hugged her, she felt the tension that had been rising begin to recede. Jim could do that. Make her feel whole, complete.

"I'll be your right hand," she said softly.

"You always have been," he whispered back. "But I've got a feeling that this is it. Soon I'm going to know for sure."

"I guess you won't need me anymore then," she said, putting on an exaggerated pout.

"That'll be the day! I'll always need you."

She broke away. "You'd better. Otherwise I'm sending you back to St. Francis!"

"Christ!" he said. "The orphanage! Why didn't I think of that! Maybe we won't have to wait till the reading. Maybe we can find a connection there now!"

"Oh, Jim, we've been through those records a thousand times at least!"

"Yeah, but we never looked for any mention of Dr. Roderick Hanley, did we?"

"No, but—"

"Come on!" He handed her her coat and went to the front closet for his own. "We're going to Queens!"