Disconcerting to Clare, this person resembles her enough to be, recognizably, a relative, yet the more she regards him, the less certain she is that this is so.
He has coarse, even pitted skin, putty-colored. She is fair-skinned, with a smooth complexion.
He is surly-mouthed, ungenerous. She is quick to smile, flatter.
It appears that eating is a challenge to this person, who grips his spoon awkwardly in the fingers of his left hand, but the great-aunts don’t annoy him by offering assistance, Clare has noted.
Nerve-damaged, Clare thinks with a twinge of pity. And perhaps he is brain-damaged as well. There is a stony, shut-off look in his eyes.
“Gerard, dear! Here is a niece of yours—Clare—”
“—a niece who is new to you, dear. New to all of us—a surprise . . .”
Gerard frowns at Clare without seeming to acknowledge her. She represents an intrusion, it seems; an interruption of his breakfast and newspaper. Grudgingly he nods, mutters what might be h’lo.
Unless it’s an enigmatic mutter—eh.
“Clare, dear—our nephew Gerard, who lives in this house—with us—since his mother passed away—”
“Your father’s younger brother, Clare—”
“No. Gerard was older—”
“He was not. He was younger . . .”
“Younger than Conor—at the time. But now Gerard is older.”
“Well, he has become older. Every year older.”
“That’s what I said, exactly! Every year, older.”
Gerard is a lean wolfhound of a man, sunken-cheeked, suspicious, uncomfortable with being discussed as if he were not present. His expression suggests the vexed anguish of the martyred Saint Bartholomew in the seventeenth-century oil by Casolani. Clare has the idea that the elderly great-aunts are deliberately testing their nephew’s patience with their banter, under the guise of being friendly and protective.
“And yet, you know—Gerard is not old. Gerard is—”
“—to us, still a boy.”
There is something disfigured about Gerard, Clare realizes. His eyes, disconcertingly like her own, are yet deeper set in their sockets, rimmed in shadow. His jaws sprout wispy hairs, and there are tiny cuts, dully gleaming with blood, on his cheeks, as if he has shaved hastily or carelessly. His left ear appears subtly mangled, and both his ears are flushed. He wears mismatched clothing, a brown tweed jacket that fits him loosely, a black T-shirt, corduroy trousers. The tweed jacket is old and frayed at the elbows but seemingly of a high-quality wool; the black T-shirt imparts a slovenly, priestly air.
“Hello! I’m very happy to meet you—Gerard.”
The name sounds too intimate—Gerard. Clare wonders if she was expected to call him Uncle Gerard.
Though she is feeling ill at ease, Clare manages to exude a warm rush of optimism, enthusiasm. When in doubt, it is wise for an attractive youngish woman to play the ingénue. She wants to be liked!—badly. For is Clare not a long-lost relative of Gerard’s, mistakenly given away as an orphan? Should Gerard not be smiling at her with an expression of wonder, welcome?
Should not Gerard leap from his chair, hurry to her, hug her?—his strong arms threatening to crack Clare’s ribs?
Should not Gerard kiss her cheek, laugh in delight at her, with her?
But glowering Gerard merely shifts his shoulders in the tweed jacket. Clare hears him murmur what might be yeh, or uhhh. No doubt he is annoyed at being distracted from the newspaper folded beside his bowl of porridge.
“I’m Clare. I guess—your niece? I mean—a niece of yours . . .”
How absurd! Clare feels her face burn, embarrassed. When you’re a child, you are vulnerable to individuals like Gerard, usually slightly older children who intimidate you with their inscrutable, seemingly hostile behavior; you can see that they feel disdain or dislike for you, yet you can’t imagine why, when you have done nothing to antagonize them. Not knowing why, you persevere, smiling until your face aches, hoping to entice a cool smile from the other even as you know the effort is hopeless.
But Clare is not a child now. Clare Seidel is thirty years old. Indeed, she is a much more attractive individual than putty-skinned Gerard Donegal, at whom she wouldn’t have glanced in another setting. Clare should have long outgrown that treacherous childhood terrain, in which you can’t escape your tormentors because they are classmates at your school and you are thrown together with them, as in a particularly congested circle of Hell, through the machinations of well-intentioned adults.
The great-aunts are lightly chiding, provoking: “Clare is your niece, Gerard. We told you about her just yesterday. Don’t you remember? She is the daughter of—”
“—you remember: Conor.”
Gerard frowns severely. Shakes his head no.
Clare wonders how to decipher this. Gerard doesn’t remember his deceased brother, Conor, or doesn’t wish to remember? Or perhaps he doesn’t believe that the young woman to whom he has been introduced, who continues to smile hopefully at him, is indeed his niece.
“Clare is Conor’s youngest child, Gerard—”
“You remember—I am sure.”
Clare is distracted, hearing the name Conor uttered so frequently, and so casually.
It is the first time that she has heard “Conor” spoken aloud, she thinks. Unless Lucius Fischer had spoken it on the phone.—She can’t recall.
A magical sound to the name that makes her want to cry yet smile happily. My father.
As a woman named Kathryn was her mother. My mother.
Overwhelming to Clare, a riddle she has no idea how to solve, the realization that the three strangers in this room, in her presence, are not only related to her by blood, but they once knew her father, and they might speak casually of him if they wished—Conor.
For all of her conscious life Clare has accepted her situation—orphan. No relatives. And now . . .
Clare has been studying the birth certificate her mother Hannah sent her by priority mail. An official document that Clare had surely seen in the past but with so little interest she’d forgotten it.
Why should I care who I’d been? They gave me away, they didn’t give a damn for me.
The names of her (birth) parents hadn’t seemed to Clare to signify actual people, as the names of remote places don’t seem altogether real. She’d become accustomed to thinking of these strangers as deceased since her birth, as if her birth had initiated their death(s); but she had no reason for thinking such a bizarre thought. She has always known, or should have known, that she was given up for adoption at the age of two, nearly three. Not as a newborn.