disconcerting if he hadn’t experienced something like this himself while living Jude’s life.
After a while, Bern couldn’t put off the question any longer.
“Mrs. Lerner,” he said, “did you… do you have any idea who our biological parents were?”
She smiled, the same melancholy, understanding smile that his aunt had smiled when he visited her in Houston and asked the same question.
“Well, you should call me Regina,” she said. “All right?” And then she hesitated a moment before she added, “Not for many years, I didn’t know.” She looked away and then down at her hands on the table. “Jude was just out of university,” she said, lifting her eyes to Bern. “He knew he was adopted, but he never particularly showed any interest in his biological parents. I don’t know why. So many people do. But he didn’t. And he knew that we would’ve happily helped him find them if he had wanted. We’d always made that clear to him. But he never asked to pursue it.”
She studied her hands again, smiled, and shook her head.
“And then one day-this is still so strange to me, even now-I answered the doorbell. A woman was standing there… and very abruptly she said that she was Jude’s mother and that she would like to talk to me.
“It was a cold, drippy day, early December, and I had a fire going in the living room in there. She was chilled, and I made coffee. We sat in there and talked, a couple of hours, I guess it was. She never told me her name. I begged her… but she was resolute.”
Regina sipped her iced tea, and it seemed to Bern that she wanted to get the words right. He glanced at Susana, who had her eyes fixed on the woman.
“She told me,” Regina said, “that she had terminal cancer and that while she was still well enough to talk about it, she wanted me to understand Jude’s beginnings. If I wanted to tell Jude about her and what she had to say, fine. If not, that was up to me. She just didn’t want the truth of it all to die with her.”
Regina sighed and began her story.
“She was from a small town in the South, wouldn’t say exactly where. She said that when she was seventeen, she discovered that she was pregnant, and that the father was the son of a prominent judge in the county. The boy’s family wanted her to have an abortion to prevent a scandal. But her parents-her father was a grocer-disagreed, saying they wanted the child and that they weren’t ashamed of anything… except that the boy wasn’t standing by their daughter.
“The judge then began to bring certain pressures to bear against the girl’s family: Bank loans were suddenly called in; insurance policies were canceled for esoteric reasons…” Regina shook her head. “A small town like that, uncommon deference to powerful men is not out of the ordinary. You can imagine. Anyway, the upshot of it was that the girl ran away, to spare her parents even more of the judge’s wrath. Her parents were heartbroken, but she wouldn’t reveal where she’d gone. The judge hired private detectives to try to find her.”
Regina sighed again. “It was a sad and sorry story. During this time alone, running, the girl discovered that she was expecting twins.
“It seemed like too much for her to bear,” Regina said, “working at menial jobs, unwed, pregnant, visiting charity Hospitals. When the boys were born-she wouldn’t tell me where-she got on a bus and traveled to St. Jude’s Charity Hospital in Memphis. She abandoned one boy there. Jude. That was the name they gave him there. We kept it. The other baby she took elsewhere. She didn’t say where. I guess it was Atlanta, the old Lanier Memorial, as you said.”
“Why in the world did she go to so much trouble to separate the babies?” Bern asked.
Regina nodded. “Well, the story of what was happening slipped out, as things like that have a way of doing, and the judge’s family was shamed into changing their own story, putting a different spin on it. Now they claimed that the girl had kidnapped the children and that their son wanted desperately to have custody of what was rightfully his. The girl was obviously irresponsible. The judge hired private investigators to find her. When… your mother learned of this, she vowed that the judge would never have her children.”
Regina looked at Bern. When she spoke, her voice was compassionate, softened by years of seeing the unfairness of life, the dangers of rushing to judgment. “You have to understand. She was young and not terribly sophisticated. She thought the judge could pull strings everywhere, not just in their small town. As she saw it, the only thing to do was to separate you. Twins would be so much easier for the judge’s investigators to track down. So, different hospitals, different cities.”
Bern was amazed, but he could imagine the rest of it.
“And St. Jude’s’ records were intact,” he said. “That’s how she was able to go back there and find you.”
Regina nodded.
“And the old Lanier Memorial’s records were fouled up somehow.”
“That seems to be the way it happened.” She nodded. “Yes.”
“And then years later,” Susana said, “when the CIA came to you for their standard interview when Jude applied, you told them about Jude having a twin.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you tell Jude about it, after our mother came here?” Bern asked.
“Yes, I did. I told him just what I’ve told you.”
“Then he knew he had a twin.”
She nodded.
“And how did he feel about that?”
“He was pretty sobered by it. As I said, the woman wouldn’t leave her name, gave no information about herself. She said it wouldn’t do any good. She said that I was Jude’s mother and that’s the way it ought to stay.”
“And then she… just left?”
“Yes, but first, sitting there in the living room before the fire, she opened her purse and took out a small envelope. Then she took out a little pair of scissors. She cut a lock of her hair and put it in the envelope, then sealed and put it next to her cup on the coffee table. ‘For DNA,’ she said. ‘And maybe a memory.’
“A taxi came for her. I remember standing on the front porch and watching the smoke coming from the taxi’s exhaust in the cold gray air as it disappeared down the street. For some reason”-she shrugged, tilting her head to one side with a sympathetic smile-“that struck me as a particularly lonely sight.”
Bern stared into his glass. He was glad to know that much at least. Regina Lerner’s story was both satisfying and dissatisfying, and he decided that that’s the way it would have been regardless of what the story had been. That’s the way the beginning of his life was, a conundrum woven of whys and if onlys, a sort of logic worked out in the frightened mind of a lonely young girl who was trying to be wise for her parents, and for herself, and for the two little boys she didn’t want to grow up in the old judge’s cruel world. You couldn’t blame her for being young.
But he couldn’t help but wonder if she really was terminally ill, or if that had just been a story to give them all a reason to put an end to it, to put it all to rest. Of course, if he was going to doubt that, he might as well go ahead and doubt all of it. How could he pick and choose his truths?
Regina reached out and placed her hand on his. She held it there a moment as they looked at each other, and then she removed it.
“Mr. Gordon,” she said, “Richard Gordon, told me about some of what happened to Jude… and to you. And he told me that since Jude was nonofficial cover, or even something more… I don’t know, more secret than that, we couldn’t talk much about it.”
“I guess not,” Bern said.
“And you’re an artist, too,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That’s… amazing.” She smiled, marveling, taking a moment to look at him again, as if his face revealed wondrous things to her. And Bern imagined that it did.
“Well, anyway,” she went on, “I’m going to Mexico City next week. To clean out his apartment. Mr. Gordon said the embassy would have someone stay with me. I can ship it all back, he said. Everything.”
She looked at Bern, and he said that was good. She glanced at Susana and then back at Bern.
“I’d like to do that alone,” she said. “But when I have everything back here, would you like to come over? We’ll divide his things. I.. . want you to have whatever you’d like to have.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”
She looked down at her own hands, which she was clutching together on the table now. “Mr. Gordon said
