Surely Joseph meant something by these actions. Whether they were a rebuke or a homage to his parents, I don’t know. Whether his purposeful trip to Poland while dying — he collapsed at the Warsaw airport — was part of a delusion or merely curiosity about the scene of his parents’ drama, again I don’t know. Mrs. Stein didn’t volunteer if she knew and I felt asking whether he explained himself to her was inappropriate. Besides, she might be ignorant of his reasons. Until he called to say he was dying in a hospital in Warsaw, she hadn’t heard from him in a year. She told me when she arrived the next day at his bedside, he was incoherent most of the time. She reported that in one of his lucid moments he said there was something in his will for me, and I had better do what he asked or he would never let me win at chess. “What does that mean?” she asked.
“He always beat meHe always beat me,” I said. “He was always smarter than me and he liked to remind me of it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her calmness, now widowed and without her child, intimidated me. She was tiny. Her pale skin hardly obscured the veins and bones of her hands. Her chin quivered all the time and her eyes were as lifeless as a doll’s. Yet speaking of her son, her voice was strong, apparently untroubled. “He was crazy. Didn’t know what he was saying. He was very fond of you. He probably thought it was a funny joke. He liked making people laugh,” she said, a quality of Joseph’s that I must have missed.
I understood when the will was read. Other than a trust fund for Mrs. Stein, he left his money to Harlan. Joseph’s cold behavior to his lover, breaking off their relationship and making contact impossible, only intensified Harlan’s grief. He said, “Fuck you,” when we heard the clause leaving the money to him, but he broke down on his way out, sagging into the arms of a mutual friend to sob. Mrs. Stein watched them comfort each other impassively. She seemed all the more isolated because she hadn’t met most of Joseph’s intimates until his memorial service. I felt useless to her and angry at Joseph. I was angry at him for many things, in particular his legacy to me. His message referred to the fact that he left me his papers, all his research on the brain, in the hope, he wrote, that I would use my skill to explain his theories to the general public. Was that nastiness? Egomania?
To my surprise, Diane took his side. “I think you’re wrong,” she said to my speculation. We were walking home from the lawyer’s office in Midtown to our apartment on the West Side. It was an early spring day. Although cool, the sun was out. Central Park was crowded with people wearing as few clothes as they could bear. “He left things to only three people — his mother, Harlan and you. The three people he loved most.”
“Or resented the most.”
“Come on, Rafe. And he left you his work, the thing he valued most. He’s trusted you with it, even though he knows you don’t agree with him. That’s quite a compliment.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it just amuses him to think of me saddled with the job of disseminating ideas I don’t agree with.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think that highly of Joseph. I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but he was too much of an egomaniac to risk throwing away his life’s work just to tease you. He trusted you. He knew you’ll do him justice.”
“Fuck you, Joseph,” I said. But I began reading and making notes on his papers the following weekend.
Two weeks later I took on a collaborator for the job, Amy Glickstein, a brilliant young neurobiologist who shares Joseph’s faith in biochemical determinism. I asked for her help after an incident of great significance in my personal life that changed my attitude as to whether I was fit for the job of exclusively representing a point of view other than my own. My father returned to the United States. I learned this in a straightforward way, but it was still a shock. On a Thursday afternoon, I picked up the phone at the clinic and a reedy male voice asked in Spanish if I was Rafael Neruda. When I said yes, the caller continued in rapid Spanish that I couldn’t follow. I interrupted, asking if he could speak English.
“Not good English. I am Francisco Neruda,” he announced.
I stared into space for what felt like a long time, but was probably only a moment. I said without thinking, “No, you’re not.”
“Yes. That’s my name. But they call me Cuco. I am your half-brother?”
Then I understood. Embarrassed, I said, “Of course, of course.” And I added, foolishly, “Nice to meet you.” I continued to fumble. “I mean, talk to you. We never met, so …” At last, I stopped the silliness. “Perdóname. I didn’t know your name. In fact, I don’t really know anything about you. I’m sorry, but no one told me. Are you Carmelita’s son? Born in, let’s see—?”
He interrupted. “That is correct. I’m twenty-eight years. No one informed you of anything?”
“Informed me about you?”
“No. Excuse me. I’m not clear. My father — excuse me — our father, he thought … He asked me to call.”
“Is he here? Are you here? Are you calling from the States?”
He told me they were in Tampa. Grandpa Pepín was having trouble with his mind, he said, and they had come to take care of him. I spoke to Pepín every other month and he seemed to be in excellent physical health, except for arthritis in his knees that especially annoyed him because he could no longer garden. He was ninety-two years old, living alone in the same house whose porch and lawn were the scene of my World Series injury. He didn’t like to travel and, for reasons the reader well understands, I didn’t care to visit Tampa. I hadn’t seen him in six years. Listening to my half-brother’s brief explanation, I felt so many different pangs of guilt that I almost laughed. No matter how many psychological textbooks I might consult, here was one situation where I was the bad guy, pure and simple. Three male relatives were down there whom I had neglected or betrayed or pretended didn’t exist. Once I accepted the fact that I was hopelessly and forever in the wrong, I relaxed. Selfjustification may do wonders for the ego, but it’s exhausting and probably bad for the hairline as well. “How can I help?” I asked. “Do you need the names of doctors?”
“No, thank you. Abuelo has a doctor. Dr. Garcia.”
“Yes, I know,” I said, a little peeved. After all, when Pepín outlived two generations’ worth of Latin doctors, I had helped find younger men such as Garcia, each time warning the new doctor to conceal the fact that his parents were anti-Castro refugees from Cuba. Grandpa didn’t trust non-Hispanics or anti-Communists to treat him — the truth is, he wasn’t that happy about putting his health in the care of people a third his age no matter what their ethnicity or politics. Although I had seen Pepín only five times since I was a child, I liked to think I had done my best to stay in touch and help. But who was I kidding? I wasn’t close to him. Pepín had never told me about my half-brother or my father’s whereabouts, claiming he didn’t know, when obviously he did. “Tell me, what’s wrong exactly? You said he’s having trouble with his mind?”
“He can’t help himself. He needs someone to cook and clean.”
“But there’s a woman who comes,” I began, again referring to something I had arranged. There was no shaking off my guilty desire to prove I had made some attempt to be good. I was ashamed that Grandpa Pepín had lapsed into senility and I hadn’t noticed from our phone conversations.