Golden Fleece

“So he’s in hospital, right. Where? Thunder Bay General?”

“He’s dead. I’m sorry, Aaron. I’m so very, very sorry.”

That had been Tuesday. Instead of enjoying the Passover seders, the Rossmans now sat shivah. All mirrors in the house were covered, as were the household god’s reflective eyes. Lapels were out of fashion, but each mourner made a small rip in the front of his jacket, acknowledging the Almighty’s right to claim his servant. Even during the first three days, set aside for weeping, there were surprisingly few tears. Just emptiness, a vacuum in their lives.

Joel and Hannah had flown in and flown out, Joel from Jerusalem, where he was studying engineering at the Hebrew University, Hannah from Vancouver, where she worked in a small advertising agency. But Aaron had stayed to help put his father’s affairs in order. On the eighth day after the funeral, work was permitted to resume.

Aaron’s mother, divorced a dozen years from his father, had tried to muster the sorrow appropriate to the occasion, but it had been too long since Benjamin Rossman had been a part of her life. Halina, though, was devastated, broken, wandering the house aimlessly. Aaron sat on the edge of the bed his father had shared with Halina, the contents of the strongbox strewn across the pale Hudson’s Bay Company six-point blanket. A birth certificate. A few stock certificates. A copy of his father’s will. His father’s high-school diploma, neatly rolled and tied with a ribbon. His marriage contracts, the one with Aaron’s mother expired, the one with Halina never to run its term.

Papers.

The inventory of a life.

The small collection of facts and figures that were still handed over with a flourish, a flare.

True, these were mere echoes of the actual records of Benjamin Rossman’s life, stored in gallium arsenide and holographic interference patterns. But they were the records that mattered most, the things he had cared about above all else.

Aaron opened envelopes, unfolded sheets, read, sorted into piles. Finally, he picked up an unsealed number- ten envelope. In the upper left was printed the stylized trillium logo of the Government of Ontario and the words Ministry of Community and Social Services. Aaron registered a certain dull curiosity at the unusual source of the envelope as he opened it. Out came a single form with ornate border and tightly packed barcodes: Certificate of Adoption. Aaron was surprised. Dad adopted? I didn’t know that. But then he read further down the form—the whole thing had been printed as a single job on a tunnel-diode printer, so the filled-in blanks didn’t stand out at all. The name of the adopted child wasn’t Benjamin Rossman. Oh, that name was there, but next to the title adopting father. No, the name of the adopted child was Aaron David, birth surname confidential, new legal surname Rossman.

His father’s death had left Aaron numb, too numb for this discovery to yet register fully. But he knew in his bones that ultimately he would feel this shock even more than the loss of his father.

Aaron’s mother’s house hadn’t changed much. Oh, it seemed smaller to Aaron than it had when he was a child, and he’d come to realize that his mother had absolutely no taste in furnishings, but he fancied he could still hear the soft echoes of his brother and sister playing, smell the lingering aroma of his father’s hearty if none-too- spectacular cooking. He sat in the big green chair that he still thought of as Dad’s, although his father hadn’t visited this house for years before his death. His mother sat on the couch, her hands in her lap, her eyes not quite meeting his. LAR had fixed coffee and had left it waiting in the dumbwaiter.

“I was sorry to hear about your father,” she said.

“Yes. It’s very sad.”

“He was a good man.”

A good man. Yes, all dead men are characterized as having been that way. But Benjamin Rossman had been a good man. A hard worker, a good father. And a good husband? No. No, that had never been said. But, on balance, a good man. “I’ll miss him.”

He waited for his mother to say, “Me, too,” but of course she didn’t. She hadn’t seen Benjamin in over a year. For her, not seeing him today was no different from not seeing him any other day. I’ll never let that happen to me, Aaron thought.

I could never love somebody one day and turn my back on her the next. When I get married, it will be forever.

“Mother, I’m going to try out to become an Argonaut.” For two centuries, the Argonauts had been the Toronto team in the Canadian Football League. Although Aaron followed the game, he had never expressed an interest in playing. But his mother knew what he meant. The whole world knew about the new Argonauts, the crew for the massive starship being built in orbit high over Kenya.

“That mission will last a long time,” she said. And left unsaid: And I’ll be dead when you return.

“I know,” he said. And left unsaid: I’m already dealing with the loss of my father. Can the loss of the rest of my family be so much worse?

They sat in silence for many minutes. “I went through Dad’s papers,” Aaron said at last. A pause. “Why didn’t you tell me I was adopted?”

His mother’s face grew pale. “We didn’t want you to know that.”

“Why not?”

“Adoption … adoption is so unusual these days. Birth control is so easy. Unwanted children are rare. We didn’t want you to feel bad.”

“Are Hannah and Joel adopted, too?”

“Oh, no. You can see it in their faces. Joel takes after his father—he’s got his eyes. And Hannah looks just like my sister.”

“So you weren’t infertile.”

“What? No. There aren’t many things that can prevent a person from having a child these days. Not much that they can’t correct with drugs or microsurgery, after all. No, there were no problems there.”

“Then why did you adopt?”

“It’s not easy to get a permit for a third child, you know. We were lucky. Here in northern Ontario, population laws are less strict, so—so we had no trouble getting permission, but—”

“But what?”

She sighed. “Your father never made a lot of money, dear. He was a manual laborer. Not many of them left. And I shared a job with another person. Not uncommon for one parent to do that, especially these last few years, since they outlawed day care. But, well, we didn’t have a lot. Take LAR, for instance. He’s one of the cheapest household gods you can buy, and he still was more than we could really afford. Feeding another mouth was going to be difficult.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you adopted me.”

“The Government Family Allowance. You get double benefits for an adopted child.”

“What?”

“Well, there’s so little incurable infertility. It’s hard to find parents willing to adopt.”

“You adopted me instead of having a child of your own because it was cheaper? ”

“Yes, but—I mean, we grew to love you as our own, dear. You always were such a good little boy.”

Aaron got up, made his way to the dumbwaiter, lifted a cold cup of coffee to his lips. Frowning, he put it back and asked LAR to zap it in the microwave.

“Who were my birth parents?”

“A man and woman in Toronto.”

“Have you met them?”

“I met the woman once, just after you were born. A sweet young thing. I—I’ve forgotten her name.”

A lie, thought Aaron. Mom’s voice always catches just a tad when she’s lying.

“I’d like to know her name.”

“I can’t help you with that. Wasn’t it on the adoption certificate?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, dear. You know how these things are. They’re kept confidential.”