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clear that Norman is still taken with Ellen. He asks me about her in great detail. I feel like the child of divorced parents—except that I have no idea who these people are. I have no idea what they are talking about. And what they are most interested in is talking about each other.
    He tells me that he and his wife wanted to adopt me, and that Ellen wouldn’t allow it. “I wanted to take care of you,” he says. “After it happened, after she’d given birth, I heard that you were a boy.” He looks at me as if there’s something to be said.
    â€œI’m not,” I say.
    â€œI guess it’s good we didn’t adopt you. My wife might have taken it out on you, she might have treated you badly.”
    â€œYes, it’s good.”
    â€œShe told me she was pregnant the day my mother died.”
    Later, I ask Ellen about these things and she is furious. “He was never going to adopt you. He never even suggested it. I made the arrangements myself and never told him what I was going to do.”
    â€œDid you tell him you were pregnant the day his mother died?”
    â€œYes,” she says, and there is the defiant flick of a lighter, the suck of a cigarette.
    I change the subject. “Ellen told me about her father,” I say to Norman. “She was very close to him and he died of a heart attack.”
    â€œHe didn’t die of a heart attack,” Norman says, indignantly. “He was the White House bookie and he died in a shoot-out with another bookie.” It makes sense. It explains a part of the story that Ellen couldn’t really explain, something about men carrying her father into the house, him dying upstairs, and the family having to stay at a fancy hotel for a while.
    I remember an early school field trip to Ford’s Theatre—the image of Abe Lincoln being shot and then carried across the street to Petersen’s Boarding House to die.
    I am relieved that Ellen’s father didn’t have a heart attack. There are criminals in my past, but at least their hearts are strong.
    â€œTell me about your people,” Norman says. He asks about “my people” as though I was raised by wolves. Clearly, my people are not the same as “his people.”
    â€œMy people,” I tell him, “are lovely. You couldn’t ask for better.” I owe him nothing. My people are Jews, Marxists, socialists, homosexuals. There is nothing about me, about my life, that he would understand.
    We are winding down. I am exhausted.
    â€œI’d like to take you into my family, to introduce you to your brothers and sister. You have three brothers and a sister. But before I can do that, my wife wants everything to be clear. She wants a test to prove that you are my child.
    â€œWould you consider a blood test? You wouldn’t have to pay for it.” It’s the “You wouldn’t have to pay for it” that throws me. Is this what I get as my big reward, the reparation for the wrongs of the past—a DNA test? And what’s behind Door Number Three? Insulting as this is, on some level I can’t blame him. Throwing it to science might be a good idea—it might make fact out of what feels like fiction.
    â€œI’ll think about it,” I say.
    â€œFine thing.”
    Â 
    In the middle of July 1993, I agree to the DNA test. Norman and I make a plan to meet at a lab. I take the train to D.C.
    It is less a lab and more a collection center, a bureaucratic black hole, the most generic office ever made. The fluorescent lighting works like an X-ray throwing everything into relief.
    Norman is there waiting—the only white man in the room. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the lawyer’s office. We sit next to each other, the metal chairs are linked together—forced closeness.
    We wait.
    They call Norman’s name. He tries to give them a personal check, but they won’t take it. There are signs