The Inheritance Paradox
Eleven (My Story)
IT TOOK ME the entire week to write about Dad’s adventure during the Great Chicago Fire. I was handwriting it all, but my computer was open next to me as I looked up details of the fire that burned October 8-10, 1871. I’d doubted some of the things he said, like October in Chicago being hot, but they’d been in the middle of one of the hottest stretches ever seen there and there’d been a drought for the entire year. Fires—mostly smaller—had been sparked all over the Midwest.
I found myself carrying my fountain pen and journal everywhere with me and writing whenever I could. Between writing the story down and plunging into the specs for our project at work, I was putting in pretty long hours. I still managed to have meals with the family, though. That brought another surprise. Zach brought a girl home. I knew who Val was, in a general way. She was in his class and if she wasn’t the valedictorian, she’d certainly be the salutatorian. Zach had mentioned once that she was helping him study for exams, but this girl had been in the garage helping Zach dismantle the Corvair. I thought maybe I should spend an evening with him again.
Val was pleasantly geeky, outgoing, and seemed happy to have been in the garage most of the afternoon. The class schedule for seniors was light, focused solely on their exams. Once the last final had been taken, they were off until graduation in ten days.
“Zach said his grandfather had a car like the one we’re working on,” Val said. “That’s so cool. I hope he likes this one when it’s finished.”
“Where are you headed for college, Val?” Brenda asked.
“Stanford. I’m going to study Symbolic Systems and Engineering. It’s a good program and unique to Stanford. I got a lot of scholarship aid so it won’t be too expensive,” Val said.
“That sounds complex,” I said. “I hope you’ll enjoy your summer before you have to start classes.”
“Oh, I think we’ll enjoy it a lot,” she said, grinning at Zach.
Megan would arrive on Saturday for two weeks, in the middle of which would be Zach’s graduation. We were going to work together on packing up the house when she was available. She was visiting us, but she also would be working remotely when she got in. I couldn’t wait to get an in-depth conversation going with her about Dad’s stories.
We’d talked on the phone, of course. I hit the high points of his story, but didn’t get into the amount of detail he’d revealed. For her part, Meg had said she was going to do a DNA study of our family and see if there were any records that matched us going farther back.
“But how are we going to track down the real Dad prior to 1979?” she asked one evening when we talked. “I got a book.”
“That’s a surprise!” I laughed. Between Megan and me, I was sure we had at least as large a library as Dad had.
“Hush! This book was Finding the Family You Didn’t Know You Had, a Guide to Genealogical Research. I’ll bring it to you when I come to visit. One of the tips was to research a dead relative you do know so you can connect to others through them.”
“Sounds interesting. I thought you were doing all your searches through DNA,” I said.
“Do you have any idea how popular DNA searches have become to people wanting genealogical information? That’s why I want to collect samples from everyone in the family when I visit. Alex, who I work with, got involved in family history stuff and through his DNA match on one of the commercial sites, he discovered he had an older half-sister! It was a real shock to both of them. Neither had any idea their father had been with someone else at one time or another. Thing is, they are both delighted to have a sibling and they are getting along famously.”
“You think we might have a half-sibling from before 1979?” I asked.
“Who knows? I’m interested in our DNA for other research reasons. When was the last time you were sick?” she asked out of the blue.
“Sick? I broke my arm a few years ago.”
“That’s an injury, not an illness.”
“I sort of had the sniffles during COVID when Brenda got so terribly sick, but I don’t remember ever being really sick,” I said. In fact, our kids were never really sick for more than a day. I credited it to being rigorous about all of us having all our vaccines and have a pretty healthy lifestyle.
“Exactly. Nor have I ever been seriously ill. As far as I can remember, neither Mom or Dad have been sick. And neither of your kids. I think it’s something in our DNA and I’ve gotten clearance from the director here to pursue an investigation.”
“That’s incredible. I mean, do you think we are just immune to illness?” I asked. “Wait. When Dad started telling me stories, he said he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.”
“I wouldn’t say we’re immune to disease, but we might have a resistance to viruses. I trust modern medicine and healthy living. But I want records from our grandparents as well as our family. I just don’t know how that’s going to go,” she said. “So, I was reading this book. Remember? I found our grandparents marriage certificate. Get this: they were married in 1934. They’d been married fifteen years when Dad was born!”
“That’s insane. Did they live in different countries? How could they wait that long to have a kid in that era. Do you think they were abstinent?” I asked.
“I think you should start looking up the family background. I’ll send you the file I found and you can start looking things up,” she said.
“Right. I’ve got all kinds of time on my hands. I’ll see you Saturday. Maybe we can both sit down with Dad and ask about our grandparents. I’ll see what I can find before you get here.”
My grandfather had passed away four or five years before I was born and Grandma moved to Florida. She died when I was in my teens, but I remember her saying something about life in Florida being much easier than in Michigan. I figured I’d start by searching for an obituary for my grandfather in Michigan in 1976.
It always seemed like my grandparents must have died young. In 1976, my father was only twenty-seven years old. But the information my sister gave me about my grandparents having been married fifteen years before Dad was born bumped their ages up a ways in my mind. Instead of my initial thought that he must have been in his forties when he died, I know bumped that up to in his sixties. Still young by today’s standard, but not as young as I thought. I wondered what he died of and if that would change the curve regarding our family’s resistance to disease or viruses.
I was working on the search late Friday night when I finally got a lead that wanted me to subscribe to a search service, but mentioned dates of 1910-1976 and the city of Battle Creek. The problem I was facing was that not all records from that far back had been digitized and put online. I went through ancestry, genealogy, and family finder websites, many of which wanted money to subscribe to their service and a credit card to even access their free trial.
It was about one in the morning when I finally hit paydirt. The Battle Creek Public Library had several searchable archives, including digital images of the local newspaper back into the 1960s. I had a date for my grandfather’s death now—December 5, 1976. So, I just started with the paper from that day forward and scanned the images of each issue of the newspaper. The obituary for Wallace Harrison Holbrook was printed three days later.
The information stunned me and I quickly printed a copy of the image, as well as downloading it to my own computer. Megan wouldn’t believe this!
I didn’t have all that long to wait to share the news with her. I fell into bed and straight to sleep about two o’clock in the morning. The next thing I knew, Brenda was shaking me awake go to the airport. I anticipated Brenda would go with me, but she said she thought I’d want the first time with my sister unencumbered by anyone else.
It was only a thirty-minute drive to the airport on Saturday morning, but I needed another half hour to park the car and head to the right exit for her flight. I was just inside the main concourse when I got a text from my sister saying she’d landed and would be exiting from gate A12. That took her a while as it was one of the farthest gates from the exit, but I was there and waiting for here when she exited the concourse and ran to meet me. We had a good hug and then headed toward the parking garage.
“You didn’t have to park and come in,” she said as we walked. I took her roll-aboard from her, leaving her with just her humongous computer bag. “I could have just gone to the arrivals pickup area and let you drive through.”
“I had time and really wanted to meet you,” I said. “I have so much to share with you. I think that’s why Brenda decided I should come alone to pick you up.”
“Oh, I’m looking forward to seeing her! And the kids. And Mom and Dad. It seems like forever since I was here for Christmas. They’d only just started looking for a smaller place to downsize for their retirement.”
“As if they were only just retiring instead of being 70 and 76 years old,” I laughed.
We got to the car and I headed out of the garage to hit the freeway. I fished in my pocket and handed the printed copy of Wallace Holbrook’s obituary.
“You found it!” she said.
“Took me most of the night. Brenda woke me up just in time to come and get you this morning. Just read it and tell me what you think.”
“Okay. So, he was born July 28, 1910 and died December 5, 1976. Just sixty-six years old. Buried in Battle Creek. At least we should be able to find the grave,” she said. “Wait! This… Survived by his wife, Louise (Becket) Holbrook, with the exact address of where they lived! And then, in order, his son and daughter-in-law Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Holbrook of Marquette, Michigan and their three children! We have cousins! More! His daughter and son-in-law, Leah and Gabe Lincoln of Indianapolis, Indiana and their two children. His daughter and son-in-law Sharon and Richard Chamberlain of Richmond, Virginia. And finally, his son and daughter-in-law Rev. Eugene and Mary (Fletcher) Holbrook of Kalamazoo, Michigan!”
Megan read through the entire obituary again before she finally turned to look at me with her mouth dropped open.
“Rev. Eugene Holbrook? Reverend? He wasn’t in prison before he met Mom, he was a preacher! That’s going to take some getting used to. And he was married! Just all unbelievable! I need to stop somewhere before we get to their house and let this soak in.”
“Lunch?” I asked.
“Yes. Anything would be good.”
I pulled into the Waffle House in Ann Arbor and we managed to get a booth. We were still a little early for many people to be around for lunch on Saturday. We ordered something we thought was innocuous and I started pounding down the coffee.
“I can’t believe it!” Meg said. “Our father doesn’t have a religious bone in his body! He never went to church. None of us did. Do you think the newspaper confused him with someone else?”
“I don’t think so. You know Mom said she thought he was divorced when they met, so that part tracks. But, geez! She thought maybe he’d been in prison or a hospital. He said he’d been sick. Why would Dad keep a secret of being a minister?” I asked.
“He must have had a real disagreement with the church. I guess that makes sense if he started talking about time traveling,” Meg said. “I guess that would explain all his black clothes and the banded collar shirts. All they need is one of those white tabs to be inserted to be a clerical collar. I thought he just considered it to be his time travel uniform or something.”
“You know, he threw a fit when I tried to put his black suit in the Goodwill bag. Mom came to his defense and said he’d worn it on their first date, at their wedding, at my wedding, and if he wanted to be buried in it, he could.”
“Not soon, I hope. But… I still don’t get why he’s always been so secretive about his time before he met Mom. From what you’ve said, he doesn’t think he started time traveling until he met her, right?”
“I’ll let you read the stories if you think you can wade through my handwriting,” I laughed.
“I’ve been in the medical field for twenty years now. I’m used to people with unreadable handwriting.”
“So, what do we do now?” I asked. We’d unconsciously eaten pancakes and eggs while we talked. I was pretty sure I’d had enough coffee to keep me awake for the rest of the day. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yes.”
I paid the bill and we got back in the car.
“Do you really care?” she asked.
“Um… I don’t know if care is the right word. It’s not like the information will make a lot of difference in how I look at our father,” I said. “I mean, he’s a little quirky with his stories about time travel, but Dad’s a great guy. He’s still utterly devoted to Mom. You know, they still hold hands whenever they’re near enough and when I was shopping with them at the mall and they decided to look at different things, he said ‘I love you’ before he took a step away from her. Still does to this day.”
“They’re so cute.”
“Yeah. So, it’s not so much that I care as that I’m just totally intrigued by what went into making him the kind of person he is. He’s been over a couple of times to help Zach tinker with his car. You know he never missed a meal with the family or any of our school events or sports. I just think of him as always being the kind of man I wanted to be. I want to know what made him that. Were his parents that good an example that he wanted to follow them?” I asked.
“You’d think he’d be closer to his brother and sisters if that was the case. I mean this obituary says we have at least five cousins we’ve never even heard of before,” Meg said. “I really would like to get DNA samples from all of them.”
“I guess I can do more searches now and see if any of them are still alive. These ages listed show that the youngest was ten years older than Dad.”
“Dad must have been a real surprise. Can you imagine having all this information in an obituary today? Someone would get sued for invasion of privacy,” she said.
“I wouldn’t want the names and ages of my kids in my obituary. Or even my age and address in Mom or Dad’s obituary,” I said.
“We live in a different age, Nat. Privacy doesn’t really exist, but people are more obsessed with it than ever.”
“I think Mom and Dad are at our house to welcome you. The kids will be waiting as well.”
Megan and I didn’t have much time for more conversation after we got home. Mom and Dad were there and Brenda had fixed a big lunch for everyone. We did our best to put the food away, even though we’d just had a late breakfast at Waffle House. It was never difficult to eat Brenda’s food. It was a wonder I wasn’t overweight.
We just sat and caught up most of the afternoon, then Mom and Dad took Megan with them when they went home. Megan insisted that she stay in her old room, even though there was nothing left there but the bed and dresser. She said she had some work to follow up on, but we’d all get together for family lunch at the Pagoda—a favorite old-time haunt of the family—on Sunday at noon.
I finally got some time to spend with Brenda as both Zach and Lisa were out on dates.
“So, what was the big news that kept you up most of the night and you had to stop and talk to Megan about?” Brenda asked as we settled down in bed.
“You won’t believe this. I found an obituary for my grandfather. It listed the surviving members of the family,” I said. “It seems I have an uncle and two aunts I never heard of before. And cousins.”
“Oh, my! Why would Dad never mention them? I don’t remember you ever saying anything about them,” Brenda said.
“Never knew about them. I think I’m going to have to make some calls if I can find them. But that wasn’t even the most surprising thing.”
“What could be more surprising than that?”
“Dad was married before Mom. And—this is what is really amazing—he was a preacher serving a church in Kalamazoo. A preacher!”
Well, Brenda was as speechless as Megan and I had been. I rehashed everything over with her. I just wanted to go to my father and ask him to explain. I knew that wouldn’t work though. He’d spent forty-five years hiding it. He wasn’t going to go into it just because we found his father’s obituary. I didn’t want to make him mad. But I was certainly going to do more investigating.
Sunday afternoon we made the trip for a family-style dinner at the Pagoda. I think this was where both Megan and I learned to use chopsticks when we were kids. It was one of our favorite places to go. Zach asked permission to invite Val, and we were happy to have her join us. I knew she’d been in the garage all Saturday morning, but she went home before Megan got there.
“I need some DNA I can run tests on,” Megan said while we started on the soup course. There was a turntable in the middle of our round table and the servers were already loading it up with our favorite dishes. “It’s just so I can have a batch of samples I can experiment on without getting special permissions. They make it so hard these days.”
“What kind of experiments are you going to run?” I asked. “Do you plan to clone us?”
None of us really knew the kind of work Megan did at the Genetic Research Institute in North Carolina. She’d been there for years, and it was hard to imagine it being difficult for her to get any kind of special permission she wanted.
“I’d spend more time looking for suitable subjects if I was planning to clone someone. Who’d want a duplicate of this family?”
“Aunt Meg! I thought you loved our family!” Lisa exclaimed, dropping her chopsticks.
“Oh, I love our family, sweetie,” Megan said. “We love each other and we’re happy. We don’t have any deep family drama hidden. We’ve all grown up relatively unscathed by psychological trauma. But really, Lisa. If you could clone people, would you choose anyone at this table?”
“Me,” Val said quietly. We all looked at her. “I’d clone me so I could go to school at Stanford and stay in Michigan with Zach, too.” She hugged my son’s arm.
“We’ll make it, bae,” he whispered to her.
That was a huge piece of news that none of us at the table were prepared for. Not only were Zach and Val dating, but it was serious enough they were concerned about being separated for school! I certainly had no objections to that, but Brenda and I had suffered through a long-distance romance, and it was only a hundred miles. I wanted to talk to my son and find out if he was also thinking of moving to California, where Val would be going to Stanford.
We spent some time at the table chatting with all three kids about what their goals were and what they planned to study. That got us through dishes of Moo Goo Gai Pan, Mongolian Beef, Kung Pao Chicken, Pork Fried Rice, Szechuan Chicken, Eggrolls, and dessert. We were all feeling full when we paid the bill and headed to Mom and Dad’s for Sunday afternoon packing.
Meg collected DNA samples from all of us. I was happy to see she collected Val’s sample as well. We might as well start treating her like one of the family. I had a feeling we’d be seeing her a lot over the summer. Then Val and Zach went outside and took care of the yard work. I thought Mom and Dad’s yard was looking better than it had in a long time. The kids were working on making the curb appeal better before the house went on the market.
Mom took Megan and Lisa to the kitchen to sort through the two or three sets of China the family had collected over the years. How does that happen? I know Mom and Dad said they were pretty poor when they got married, so they didn’t have China then. I wasn’t really clear about how they ever afforded the house, but they’d been in it for over forty-five years. Maybe one of his older siblings or his parents had loaned them the money.
Dad had other things in mind for us to work on rather than his office and it had nothing to do with telling stories, either. He pulled the cord for the drop-down stairs that led to the attic.
“Your mother thinks we should bring down all the old things we’ve stacked up here and get them ready for a sale. We’ve already moved all the furniture aside in the living room, so we’ll stack this stuff in there,” Dad said.
That was really going to be a task. There was forty-five years of stuff they couldn’t get rid of up there. And I was going to try to carry it all down the rickety attic stairs and then down another flight to the main floor living room with the help of my 75-year-old father.
“Dad, I think we need Zach to help us up here,” I said. “I’ll take some little stuff down as you hand it to me, but I don’t want you trying to carry stuff down the stairs. I’ll take this lamp down and ask Zach to come in.”
“Oh, I could do it,” he said gruffly. “But I suppose I should have asked Zach in the first place. He should protect his poor father’s back.”
Trust my dad to turn the problem around on me! Yeah. I’d have Zach come in and help me, not Dad. I took the lamp to the living room and went out to call Zach in. He was just cleaning up the lawnmower.
“You can go in, Zach. I’ll clean up the lawnmower and do the edging,” Val said. “It’s not a problem. Your dad needs you.”
“Thanks, bae,” he said. He stopped to kiss her thoroughly before he followed me into the house.
We worked the rest of the afternoon on bringing lamps, rocking chairs, end tables, a chaise lounge, and boxes of miscellaneous stuff down to the living room. I don’t think my parents ever threw away anything. There were photo albums, a slide projector and screen, and a box of slides. I’m sure there were boxes of Megan’s and my schoolwork, and then I noticed a box of Brenda’s school things as well. And of course, the Christmas decorations, Halloween decorations, and miscellaneous decorations—some of which dated back to Brenda’s and my wedding.
Some of the boxes, Dad directed to his library to be sorted, and a few things went to the kitchen for the women to sort. I notice Val had come in and joined the kitchen crew and was laughing right along with my wife and daughter at Mom’s stories.
We did not get around to any storytelling, but Brenda spotted a mirror as soon as she walked into the living room.
“The mirror! Oh, no! You can’t give that away,” Brenda shouted rushing to it. It was a nice frame, but the mirror badly needed re-silvering.
“What’s written on the border of it?” I asked.
“Oh, it says, ‘Will you marry me?’ I gave it to your mother for her birthday back in 1980. She kept me waiting three months before she said yes,” Dad said.
“Why so long?” Lisa asked Mom.
“Oh, things weren’t as rushed back then, I guess. I needed to wait for Eugene to really be ready to settle down. It took a little while for him to finish traveling.”
“When she did say yes, we were married in two months. I didn’t want to let her get away,” Dad laughed.
“It hung in my room all the time I lived here,” Brenda said. “Was it there when you were home, Megan?”
“No. I wanted modern things. My mirror didn’t have a frame at all.”
“It’s such a pretty mirror,” Val said.
“It took me a month to figure out what it said. I had to read it over my shoulder in a mirror,” Mom said.
“Only a month?” Dad asked. “You made me wait three months before you said yes.”
“I was trying to figure out some clever way to respond and finally just took the bull by the horns, so to speak,” Mom said. She hugged Dad and gave him a little kiss. “Never regretted it a moment.”
“I used to stare at it hanging in my room,” Brenda said. “It didn’t take long for me to figure out what it said, but by the time I graduated from high school, I’d stand in front of that mirror brushing my hair for an hour, imagining it was Nathaniel proposing to me. When he finally did propose, I couldn’t wait to say yes. Even though it took him two more years to get around to it.”
“And I never regretted it, either,” I said. “I think I’ve had it for today, though. We should go home and get some rest before work and school tomorrow.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
