“He is the person who scratched the face out,” I say, realizing.
“Yes.” She hands it to me.
Suddenly, I feel special.
I am the only one of her children my mother is going to tell. I am the one she trusts with this secret. Because I am the eldest, perhaps. Or because we spent time together, alone, when I was sick after my surgery. Or because I am trustworthy. And I was bold enough to ask.
She looks at me kindly for a beat and says: “Daddy is not your biological father.”
I can only stare at her. My mouth drops open.
She takes a deep breath and goes on. “The man in the photograph was named Buddy Kopelnick. And—I’m sorry, Carrie. I should have told you a long time ago. Or maybe I shouldn’t be telling you now. I honestly don’t know what to do. Your father loves you very much. Harris, I mean. He loves you. And he’s never wanted you to know.”
“Buddy Kopelnick was my father?”
She shakes her head quickly. “No, no. Harris is your father. He is your legal father. His name is on your birth certificate.”
“But…I wasn’t his baby. Is that what you’re saying?”
“We were married when I got pregnant. Harris wanted you to be his and I wanted you to be his, so we agreed that you would be his. Once you were born, we agreed we would never talk about it.” My mother wipes her eyes like an actress in a movie. “Some part of me has always wanted you to know,” she says. “Buddy was a good man.”
“Who was he?”
“He was a boy I went with in college,” she says. “But in those days—well, Buddy was Jewish. My family didn’t want an interfaith marriage. A mixed marriage. Nowadays, no one would think much of something like that, would they? Or not many people. Attitudes have changed so fast. Erin is Jewish, isn’t she?”
I nod.
“Well. You know Daddy loves to tell the story of how he proposed to me four times before I said yes.”
“Um-hm.”
“I didn’t say yes because he finally bought a ring,” Tipper says. “Though that’s the story I always tell. I said yes because I finally understood that I could never marry Buddy. Marrying Harris meant I had to stop dithering, stop thinking about it, stop wishing things were different. I chose my future, and once I chose, there was no going back.”
“You loved Buddy.”
“I loved Buddy,” says my mother. “But I love your father now, too. I grew to love him.”
I remember what she said when she let me wear the black pearls. Harris bought them, she’d explained, for their second anniversary, when she was pregnant with me. It was a very meaningful gift, she said. Things weren’t easy then.
“So you kept on with Buddy while you were engaged to Harris,” I say, understanding. “And after you were married.”
She nods.
“And when you got pregnant, you knew the baby was his.”
“Your father had been in London,” she says. “For three weeks. He was looking into buying a press there, something like that. I hardly recall the whole story. But he’d been gone a long time.”
I do not know what to say.
I wish I had never asked.
“I wanted to be pregnant,” my mother says softly. “I wanted you so much. I was just confused, very confused, in the first years of my marriage, about who I loved and why I had gotten married. And when I realized I was having a baby, I also realized that I didn’t want to leave your father. I had chosen him already, and even if I had said yes for some wrong reasons, I was married. There was every hope that I could make something good of it.”
She glances at the clock and goes over to her dressing table, talking as she puts on delicate, almost invisible makeup. “My girlfriends advised me not to tell. All of them did. But I knew I didn’t want to live with a lie between me and Harris. I had to take whatever consequences were coming, right away. That was the only way we could move forward.”
Moving forward. Always a value of theirs. “That’s when he gave you the black pearls,” I say. “That was the tough time you were talking about, when you were pregnant with Buddy’s baby.”
She nods.
“And Harris scratched the picture?”
“Yes.” My mother puts a thin black headband on, to keep back her hair.
“What happened to Buddy?” I ask.
“He’s gone,” she answers. “He got sick. I heard about it from some college friends.”
I turn my face down into my parents’ bedspread. I know I should not cry. Or yell. Or do anything else that will make Tipper upset with me. I am overwhelmed, suddenly, with the idea that my position in the family is conditional.