"But you have visited her?"
"Oh sure. You see that painting there," he said nodding to a large portrait on the wall behind me. "My wife found that in a sale just outside of Hyannis Port. Bought it for two hundred and fifty dollars. Turns out it's an original and probably worth ten thousand if it's worth a penny. She was good at making finds like that.
"So," he said without taking a breath, "how's your fiddle playing?"
I put the lemonade down slowly on the small marble table beside me. Morton had left a wooden coaster that looked as if it, too, was some sort of antique. Then I turned to the judge. My silence made him swallow hard. He stared a moment and then he nodded softly.
"This isn't just a casual visit, is it? You came here to ask me something specific, didn't you?"
"Yes sir," I said. "I think you know what it is, too," I said. He nodded again, put his own glass down, and took a deep breath, closing his eyes and then opening them.
"You sure you want to ask me these questions?" he said.
"Yes. I know everyone tells me there's no point in stirring up the past, that it just brings a lot of pain to a lot of people. But I grew up believing I was one person and then I found out, in a hard and shocking way, that I was someone else, that the people I had loved and trusted all my life were lying to me, about the most basic thing of all, me, my identity," I said.
The judge nodded.
"When you get to be as old as I am, you look back on your life and it seems as if you've led at least two different lives:-I wasn't a wild young man. I never did much that would make my parents ashamed, and I did do a lot that made them proud. Funny thing is, if you've had good parents and you've loved them and known they loved you, even after they're dead, you worry about doing things that would make them ashamed. I guess that's what people mean when they say you can live on in your children."
"I don't know both my parents," I said. "I may never know who my real father is, but I know my mother and now I know my grandmother. Are you my grandfather?" I asked bluntly. He stared at me. "Grandma Olivia doesn't want me to know the truth, but I think she has her own private reasons for that."
He smiled.
"You're a bright young woman. Any man would be proud to call you his granddaughter."
"Are you that man?" I pursued.
He brought his head back and gazed up at the ceiling. When he lowered his head, his eyes were glassy with tears. I held my breath.
"My Louise knew, but she was too much the lady to ever bring it up," he said. "And you should have seen her around Haille. She never made that girl feel unwanted. Hers was a heart so full of charity and love, it could forgive Judas.
"Oh, I could say I drank too much in those days. I could blame it on bourbon, or I could say Belinda was beautiful and enticing, which she was, but in the end, I have to bear the burden of my own sins."
"Then you are my mother's father and, therefore, my grandfather?"
"Yes," he said. He shook his head and smiled. "Look how simple it is to say it now. Maybe because I'm looking at you and I see the pain. I can't lie in the face of that. At least, I can't now," he said. "I never had to lie to Louise. She never came right out and asked me," he said. "Isn't that wonderful? I didn't deserve her."
"Did my mother ever know?"
"Yes, but not until she was much older. Actually, not long before she got herself into trouble and she and Chester left Provincetown."
"You mean pregnant with me?"
He nodded.
"I think I suddenly need something stronger than this," he said, holding up the lemonade. "If you'll excuse me a moment.' He rose and went to a cabinet to take out a bottle of Tennessee whiskey. He poured himself a half a glass and drank most of it in a gulp. "Fortifies the courage," he explained, poured himself another, and stood by the window.
"How did she find out?" I asked.
"I had to tell her eventually. When I discovered she and Kenneth were getting too serious about each other. It broke my heart to do it, but under the circumstances, I had no choice." He turned, looking as if he had aged years in minutes. "They both resented me for it."
"Especially Kenneth?"
"Yes," he said, bowing his head in sorrow. "It's terrible enough when a son learns his father was unfaithful to his mother, but when that infidelity steals away the woman he loves, the pain is far more and the chasm it creates between father and son . . . well, it would be easier to step across the Grand Canyon than bridge the gap that's grown between my son and me. I'm afraid, I'll take that to my grave."
"Why was my grandmother locked away in that place?" I asked, my eyes narrow with suspicion. Judge Childs shifted his eyes away guiltily and gazed out
the window as he spoke.