Harlan's Race

many times with heart hammering. From my dresser, I grabbed the old studio-portrait of Michael, 3, and Kevin, 2, and looked at it. Kevin, the extrovert, was as blond as my wife. Michael, the shy one, my firstborn, was dark like me. He would be 25 now.
    “Michael Brown’s in a meeting,” the Hames-West operator said with a Jersey twang. “May I take a message?” For 82 minutes, I paced around the house, waiting for the return call. John Sive arrived, to talk about parents who were suing Prescott because of me. I couldn’t keep my mind on what he was saying. Since Falcon’s birthday, John had felt a little closer to me. Smiling wryly, he asked if I had a new lover.
    When the phone finally rang, I almost dropped it.
    A quiet young tenor voice said, “Dad?”
    “Michael.”
    “Dad. Oh shit,” he blurted. “I can’t believe I’m talking to you.” Then, “Oops. Maybe you don’t like four-letter words. I’m a child of the Seventies.”
    “I’m a child of the ages.”
    He laughed. “You talk like I thought you would. I... can’t believe you’re not mad at me.”
    “Let’s talk face to face.”
    “I’ll be at the New York Public Library tomorrow to do some research. Meet me at one, by the lions?”
    When I hung up, John saluted me with his cup of coffee.
    “I knew it,” he said. “A lover.”
    “Guess again, John.”
    When I told him, his eyes misted, and I realized that my gain had reminded him of his loss. We sat together in silence for a while, and I held his hand, while the tough trial lawyer cried with the other hand over his face.
    After John left, an awful thought came to me. Supposing LEV. had gotten to my kid, and my kid was going to help them kill me? Why not? Michael had been brought up to think I was evil.
    Half an hour early, on the library steps, I stood hidden behind the downtown lion.
    Nobody noticed the guy in Kangol cap, shabby corduroy jacket, stick-on sideburns and mustache, and horn-rimmed sunglasses. Despite their stains of pigeon shit, the two stone lions stood proud — an interesting symbol for a Leo who was about to find a lost cub. My knees vibrated with tension. Was this the way I’d feel if I was going to see LEV. face to face?
    At 12:55 a young man came out, carrying a folder and looking around nervously.
    Right away I knew it was my son. In fact, the male chauvinist part of me gloated to see how my genes had overridden my wife’s. He was a little shorter than my six feet, but he had my features, bones, eye color — even my contempt for fashion. The wrinkled tweed jacket had homemade elbow-patches. His button-down shirt and fluttering tie didn’t match each other or anything else. But had he inherited the gay part? For all his macho vibration, Michael looked desk-job soft, with a curious air of frailty.
    I showed myself.
    “Dad?” His sea-green eyes were shy. He vibed my wariness, and tensed like a gull about to flush. “Jeez, you look different.”
    When he went to shake hands awkwardly, his research notes fell everywhere. We ran all over the library steps picking them up. If this fumble-fingers was an assassin’s helper, he was a great actor.
    “I have to be careful,” I told him.
    It was a wondrous late-autumn day. As we walked up Fifth Avenue together, a few last leaves were falling from the sycamores, hitting us gently on the head. I stayed wary, casing the passers-by. At the Plaza, weekending executives were sitting on benches, using foil reflectors to tan their faces. In Central Park, bag-men and bag-ladies dozed on the grass, soaking up the last sunshine before they went underground to the steam pipes. Horse carriages clip-clopped, full of smiling tourists who lived in a sniper-free world.
    His eyes met mine. “You were hiding ... checking me out.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Do the bigots still bother you that much?”
    “It never stopped. There’s even a guy who stalks me.”
    “Why don’t you have bodyguards with you?”
    “How do you know I don’t?”
    Michael looked around nervously, getting my point.
    “Tell me about yourself,” I said.
    So he talked, kicking at leaves as we walked. His mother had remarried — a well-to-do real-estate guy that he didn’t like. They were living in Albany, putting him through NYU Medical School. He lived in a tiny studio apartment near school, and had a part-time job at Hames-West. Kevin was a senior at Princeton.
    Finally we were tired — Michael was soft, I was unbelievably wrought up. So we headed for the