“Hello, is this Mr. Esca?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, Mr. Esca, it’s good to finally get a chance to speak to you. I’ve been trying to track you down for the last six months. You’re a difficult man to find.”
“And may I ask what this is about?”
“Of course. This concerns your brother, Whitlock.”
I would love to have said that there was a stab of concern, of worry, of anything resembling brotherly interest, but the fact of the matter was our paths didn’t cross, growing up. Our lives had been so scheduled, so regimented, so separate from one another, our parents only vaguely involved with those pursuits that supposedly instilled good breeding, that we were strangers to each other. We never played together; I couldn’t remember a friendly game of anything. I saw them at mealtimes, but there was no talking at the dinner table, as our nanny and the cook hovered close. All of that combined meant that when he said Whitlock’s name, I registered no emotion at all.
“Mr. Esca?”
“Yes, sorry. What about him?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, I don’t know if you were aware, but he’s running for Congress during the next election here in Connecticut, where the family now resides.”
“I was not aware,” I told him, and wondered vaguely when they had all settled there.
There was a pause.
“You changed your last name from Graves to your maternal grandmother’s last name some years ago.”
“Right before I started school in California, yes.”
“You dropped your middle name as well.”
“Pardon?”
“You kept only your first name and legally dropped Milton, which was your middle name, when you changed your last name to Esca.”
“Yes.”
“Your school has a strict confidentiality policy, which means they wouldn’t confirm your attendance, or your name, unless I could prove you’d committed a crime.”
This was not news to me. “Yes, I’m aware.”
“May I ask why you changed your name?”
“I wanted a clean break,” I told him honestly.
He took a breath and cleared his throat, as if what he was about to say next was uncomfortable. “This is difficult for me to speak of, Mr. Esca, but your father would like you to sign a document that declares you your aunt Geneva’s son. And would, of course, come with a new birth certificate, social security card, et cetera.”
What surprised me the most was that I wasn’t at all surprised. There was a logical progression to the request. My parents hadn’t wanted me in the family since I was seventeen. The fact that they were now trying to make it legal, make it appear as though I had never been their son in the first place, made a weird sort of sense. Whitlock’s opponents would make every effort to dig up his skeletons, would try to defame him, because that was politics. If the family could manufacture a story, say that they’d only raised me after my aunt died in a car accident with the man who’d kept her as his mistress, they could also plausibly deny that Whitlock had a gay brother who they’d disowned.
I absorbed the news that I was to be removed from their lives as soon as the filing of the paperwork went through. I would become the son of my aunt, who, I’d been told, had brought her own shame to the family, and who, interestingly enough, had also chosen to use her mother’s maiden name. I had once asked my mother why Geneva used Esca instead of Humboldt, her family name, and was told their father didn’t want anything to do with her. What was interesting about this was that my grandmother, Caroline Esca, who I remembered fondly before she passed, had doted on me and had, without question, loved Geneva best. My mother had complained about that often, and bitterly. I had overheard the downstairs maids gossiping when I was just a kid that my mother had been horrified by her sister’s behavior. My mother hadn’t cared about Geneva, but she cared very much that the scandal might affect her.
“The new birth certificate would list Geneva as your mother, no father named.”
So I was to be thrown away twice. They had already done it once, and now, fifteen years later, they would do it a second time. The irony that I was to be remade as the son of my grandmother’s favorite child was not lost on me. It was oddly fitting, though, that the only picture I had kept of my family was a framed print of my grandmother and my aunt, holding hands on a bench in a garden. It had been a fixture in my room, growing up, because I thought it was beautiful. That was what love looked like. I was grateful it had been packed up, along with the rest of my room, when I left, no one giving it a second thought, as both women had been gone for several years by that time.