stories about when he and his brothers were little (apparently my father had run away from home once, although only as far as the garden shed, where the other three had kept him supplied with food and sleeping bags and comics until he got bored enough to go back inside) or, in other moods, talked about his work. “The thing is,” he said once—turning from the cluttered desk, leaning his head back to massage his neck with one big hand—“it’s a different job now. I don’t mean all the computer stuff, the digitization; I mean the tone of it. People used to get in touch with me out of curiosity—they wanted to know the family history, they’d got as far as they could on their own, they were hungry for more. I was like a fairy godfather, dropping unexpected gifts into their laps: Look, here’s a copy of the letter your grandfather wrote to his sister during World War I! Look, here’s your great-grandmother’s birth certificate! A photo of the old family farm!”
He poured the tea, held out a mug to me. “But now, with DNA analysis, it’s more complicated. People are coming to me because their analysis didn’t turn out the way they expected. ‘But I’m supposed to be a hundred percent Ashkenazi Jewish, why does this say twelve percent Irish? Why are my third cousins coming up as second cousins?’ They’re unsettled and they’re frightened, and what they want from me isn’t the lovely presents, any more; it goes much deeper. They’re afraid that they’re not who they always thought they were, and they want me to find them reassurance. And we both know it might not turn out that way. I’m not the fairy godfather any more; now I’m some dark arbiter, probing through their hidden places to decide their fate. And I’m not nearly as comfortable in that role.”
“It’s not that bad,” I said. I didn’t want to minimize what he did, especially not now, but all of this seemed like a bit much, a streak of melodrama that I hadn’t spotted in Hugo before, and it made me uneasy. Any anomaly in Hugo unsettled me: just a quirk I’d never noticed, or the first step into some nightmare downslide? “I mean, they’re the same people, no matter what you find out.”
That long look, thoughtful and interested, over his glasses. “It wouldn’t bother you? If you found out tomorrow that you were adopted, say, or that your grandmother was actually the child of some unknown man?”
“Well,” I said. The tea was mouth-puckeringly strong—I’d lost count of the spoonfuls of tea leaves—but Hugo didn’t seem to have noticed and I wasn’t about to point it out. “Being adopted would bother me, sure. A lot. But if Gran’s mother shagged around . . . I mean, I didn’t know her; it’s not like I’ve got any respect for her to lose. And it doesn’t make any difference to me. So no, I wouldn’t care.”
Hugo smiled. “Well, then,” he said, reaching for a biscuit, “you’ve got nothing to worry about. One look at your profile and anyone could tell you’re a Hennessy.”
When Melissa came home we would put the work away and help her make dinner—exuberant, experimental dinners full of ingredients I didn’t know how to pronounce, let alone what to do with (galangal? teff?). Melissa was happy; I could see it, in the unguarded glow of her face when she looked up at me, the skip of her step between the cooker and the counter. Although it baffled me, I was glad of it: I knew she shouldn’t be there at all, shouldn’t be dealing with any of this, but I needed her, and that glow let me dodge the looming sense that I should really get her out of there. After dinner Hugo would light a fire in the living room—“I know it’s not a cold night,” he said simply, the first time, “but I love wood fires, and I can’t afford to wait for the winter”—and we would play rummy or Monopoly, among the faded red damask armchairs and old Italian engravings and worn Persian rugs that had been the same all my life, until Hugo got tired and we all went to bed. We mentioned Hugo’s illness only incidentally—planning for his appointments, passing his cane. What had happened to me never came up at all.
Little rituals. Me brushing Melissa’s hair by the bedroom window, morning sun transforming it to pure light streaming through my hands.