“How can I help you?” I said.
“I hardly know how to begin,” he said.
“I think you’ve already begun by telling the guard that you were a son of mine,” I said. “Was that a joke?”
“Do you think it was a joke?” he asked.
“I don’t pretend I was a Saint when I was young and away from home so much,” I said. “But I never made love using an alias. I was always easy to find afterward, if somebody wanted to find me badly enough. So, if I did father a child out of wedlock somewhere along the line, that comes as a complete surprise to me. I would have thought the mother, the minute she found out she was pregnant, would have gotten in touch with me.”
“I know 1 mother who didn’t,” he said.
Before I could reply, he blurted words he must have rehearsed en route. “This is going to be a very brief visit,” he said. “I am going to be in and out of here before you know it. I’m on my way to Italy, and I never want to see this country ever again, and especially Dubuque.”
It would turn out that he had been through an ordeal that lasted much, much longer than the siege of Scipio, and was probably harder on him than Vietnam had been on me. He had been tried for child molestation in Dubuque, Iowa, where he had founded and run a free child-care center at his own expense.
He wasn’t married, a strike against him in the eyes of most juries, a character flaw like having served in the Vietnam War.
“I grew up in Dubuque,” he would tell me, “and the money I inherited was made in Dubuque.” It was a meat-packing fortune.
“I wanted to give something back to Dubuque. With so many single parents raising children on minimum wage, and with so many married couples both working to make enough to feed and clothe their children halfway decently, I thought what Dubuque needed most was a child-care center that was nice and didn’t cost anything.”
Two weeks after he opened the center, he was arrested for child molestation because several of the children came home with inflamed genitalia.
He was later to prove in court, after smears were taken from the children’s lesions, that a fungus was to blame. The fungus was closely related to jock itch, and may actually have been a new strain of jock which had learned how to rise above all the standard remedies for that affliction.
By then, though, he had been held in jail without bail for 3 months, and had to be protected from a lynch mob by the National Guard. Luckily for him, Dubuque, like
so many communities, had backed up its police with Armor and Infantry.
After he was acquitted, he had to be transported out of town and deep into Illinois in a buttoned-up tank, or somebody would have killed him.
The judge who acquitted him was killed. He was of Italian ancestry. Somebody sent him a pipe bomb concealed in a huge salami.
But that son of mine did not tell me about any of that until just before he said, “It’s time to say, ‘Good-bye.’” He prefaced the tale of how he had suffered so with these words: “I hope you understand, the last thing I wanted to do was make any demands on your emotions.”
“Try me,” I said.
Thinking about our meeting now ifils me with a sort of sweetness. He had liked me enough, found me warm enough, to use me as though I were a really good father, if only for a little while.
In the beginning, when we were feeling each other out very gingerly, and I hadn’t yet admitted that he was my son, I asked him if “Rob Roy” was the name on his birth certificate, or whether that was a nickname his mother had hung on him.
He said it was the name on his birth certificate.
“And the father on the birth certificate?” I asked.
“It was the name of a soldier who died in Vietnam,” he said.
“Do you remember what it was?” I said.
Here came a surprise. It was the name of my brotherin-law, Jack Patton, whom his mother had never met,
I’m sure. I must have told her about Jack in Manila, and she’d remembered his name, and that he was unmarried and had died for his country.
I thought to myself, “Good old Jack, wherever you are, it’s time to laugh like hell again.”
“So what makes you think I’m your father instead of him?” I said. “Your mother finally told you?”
“She wrote me a letter,” he said.
“She didn’t tell you face to face?” I said.
“She couldn’t,” he said. “She died of cancer of the pancreas when I was 4 years old.”
That was a shock. She sure hadn’t lasted long after I made love to her. I’ve always enjoyed thinking of the women I have made love to as living on and on. I had imagined his mother, game and smart and sporty and funny, with lips like sofa pillows, living on and on.
“She wrote me a letter on her deathbed,” he continued, “which was put into the hands of a law firm in Dubuque, not to be opened until after the death of the good man who had married her and adopted me. He died only a year ago.”
“Did the letter say why you were named Rob Roy?” I inquired.
“No,” he said. “I assumed it must be because she liked the novel by that name by Sir Walter Scott.”
“That sounds right,” I said. What good would it do him or anybody else to know that he was named for 2 shots of Scotch, I shot of sweet vermouth, cracked ice, and a twist of lemon peel?
“How did you find me?” I said.
“At first I didn’t think I wanted to find you,” he said. “But then 2 weeks ago I thought that we were entitled
to see each other once, at least. So I called West Point.”
“I haven’t had any contact with them for years,” I said.
“That’s what they told me,” he said. “But just before I called they got a call from theGovernor of New York, who said he had just made you a Brigadier General. He wanted to make sure he hadn’t been made a fool of. He wanted to make sure you were what you were claimed to be.”
“Well,” I said, and we were still standing in the reception room, “I don’t think we need to wait for blood tests to find out whether you are really my son or not. You are the spit and image of me when I was your age.
“You should know that I really loved your mother,” I went on.
“That was in her letter, how much in love you were,” he said.
“You will have to take my word for it,” I said, “that if I had known she was pregnant, I would have behaved honorably. I’m not quite sure what we would have done. We would have worked something out.”
I led the way into my office. “Come on in. There are a couple of easy chairs in here. We can close the door.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I’m on my way. Ijust thought we should see each other just one time. We’ve done that now. It’s no big thing.”
“I like life to be simple,” I said, “but if you went away without another word, that would be much too simple for me, and for you, too, I hope.”
So I got him into my office and closed the door, and got us settled in facing easy chairs. We hadn’t touched. We never would touch.
“I would offer you coffee,” I said, “but nobody in this valley has coffee.”
“I’ve got some in my car,” he said.
“I’m sure,” I said. “But don’t go get it. Never mind, never mind.” I cleared my throat. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, you seem to be what I have heard called ‘fabulously well-to-do.’”
He said that, yes, he was fortunate financially. The Dubuque meat packer who married his mother and adopted him had sold his business to the Shah of Bratpuhr shortly before he died, and had been paid in gold bricks deposited in a bank in Switzerland.
The meat packer’s name was Lowell Fenstermaker, so my son’s full name was Rob Roy Fenstermaker. Rob Roy said he certainly wasn’t going to change his last name to Hartke, that he felt like Fenstermaker and not Hartke.