Akin

by Emma Donoghue

Genres: Literary Fiction; Family Life; World War II

Synopsis

A retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes a young great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother’s wartime secrets.

Noah Selvaggio is a retired chemistry professor and widower now living on the Upper West Side but born in the south of France. He is days away from his first visit back to Nice since he was a child, bringing with him a handful of puzzling photos he has discovered from his mother’s wartime years. But he receives a call from social services: Noah is the closest available relative of an eleven-year-old great-nephew he’s never met, who urgently needs someone to look after him. Out of a feeling of obligation, Noah agrees to take Michael along on his trip.

Much has changed in this famously charming seaside mecca, still haunted by memories of the Nazi occupation. The unlikely duo, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, bicker about everything from steak-frites to screen time. But Noah gradually comes to appreciate the boy’s truculent wit, and Michael’s ease with tech and sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family’s past. Both come to grasp the risks people in all eras have run for their loved ones, and find they are more akin than they knew.

Written with all the tenderness and psychological intensity that made Room an international bestseller, Akin is a funny, heart-wrenching tale of an old man and a boy, born two generations apart, who unpick their painful story and start to write a new one together.

Release date: September 10, 2019

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 352

Sample

I

An old man packing his bags.

Hard not to read the situation metaphorically, Joan commented in his head.

Noah corrected her: not old. He was only seventy-nine, till next Monday. When he’d been young, your seventies had counted as old, but not these days. Say, youngish up to sixty; then middle-aged, or young-old, through the sixties and seventies. Ancient Romans used to distinguish between senectus (still lively) and decrepitus (done for). Sharp as ever, hale, hearty—surely Noah could still count himself in the senectus camp?

And these were only literal bags he was packing—well, one slim carry-on and his leather satchel. Also, his destination was neither heaven nor hell. Though the mention of Nice, or the French Riviera, or the South of France generally, did make people roll their eyes in envy, especially in a New York February.

Noah was going to Nice for his eightieth. He hadn’t been since he was four. There’d been nothing pulling him back to his hometown; after all, he didn’t know anyone in that part of the world, not since his grandfather had died in 1944. That had freed his mother (Margot) to join his father (Marc) and little Noah in the States. (He’d still been Noé, then.)

Noah folded another shirt. He wasn’t flying out for another three days, but he liked to get his packing done early, to leave time for last-minute chores. Meticulous, he found each balled pair of socks its nook.

He’d never been a keen traveler—because of his rather yanked-about childhood, he supposed. Going to American Chemical Society meetings, all he’d cared about was whether he’d find himself stuck with the graveyard shift (8 a.m. on Sunday) for his paper on, say, polyvinyl-chloride fibers. He’d accompanied Joan on most of her work trips, though as the decades went by she’d started turning down all the invitations she could, everything but the most prestigious keynotes; she recoiled from the prospect of extra nights in hotels. She and Noah had never vacationed much, either. When Joan wasn’t in the lab or on the road, she liked to be at home, buried in a novel, Miles Davis on the record player. Or dropping into sleep in their bed (double; queen was too wide). Back to back, her leathery soles touching Noah’s.

I miss that too, Joan said.

Which was nonsense, of course, because there was no Joan to miss anything anymore: no soles, no souls. These remarks of hers were generated by Noah’s brain, using their not-quite-forty years of marriage as an algorithm. A neurological tic.

Was that five pairs of socks or six? He counted them again.

For the past nine years, on his own, Noah had kept himself too busy for vacations. There’d been hints that he should retire, of course; barbed remarks from colleagues, cost-cutting ones from the dean, benevolent ones from women friends, to the effect that Noah should learn to kick back, live a little, join a choir or take up tai chi in Central Park. His little sister, Fernande, was the only one who’d never suggested it, even though she’d retired from her receptionist job with relief at sixty-five. She must have guessed that her widowed brother needed to stay tethered to the surface of the earth. Having classes to teach—the hard slog of preparation and performance and marking—had reassured him of that much.

Noah supposed what had finally nudged him over the line was his imminent birthday. Professor in his late seventies sounded rather admirable, but professor in his eighties? He’d had no intention of carrying on long enough to end up a laughingstock. Students were harder to impress since the turn of the millennium; they sat there with their external brains, their little screens, ready to fact-check you if you fumbled a formula.

No, it was better to call a halt before the first time Noah’s wits deserted him at a podium. Retired, though; the moribund ring of the word. But then, it had been only a month. Of course he’d have plenty to do. Who could be bored in New York City? It was just a matter of picking how to spend his days. He’d declined the title of professor emeritus; pottering around campus doing a little independent research struck him as pathetic. If Noah was going to study, it would be some quite new subject. Or a hobby; he was sure he’d come across something of interest. He just had to find his feet. His first venture was this trip.

Once he’d zipped up his case, he went to fetch the recycling tub from the kitchen and carried it into the spare room. This had been his and Joan’s home office, but after her death the sight of it had weighed on him, and really he’d preferred to work on campus, so he’d turned it into a guest room. Though now Noah couldn’t remember who his last guest had been. The double bed was always made up, as if ready for a visitor; tidier that way. Several times Joan’s friend Vivienne had suggested he invite a refugee to move in, but Noah couldn’t face housing some stranger.

He knelt to tug Fernande’s boxes from under the bed. Only three left to deal with; just personal papers. (He found objects more troubling.) The Swedes had a word for when you spared your family by tidying up your own stuff in advance—Noah couldn’t call up the syllables, but it meant “death cleaning.” It had been Margot who’d sorted Marc’s effects. (Did you have to be dead for your belongings to be called that, he wondered?) Fernande had done it in turn for Margot, and then for her own husband, Dan, and she’d helped her brother after he’d lost Joan, too, though Joan had been so ruthless about clutter (tossing Christmas cards on the first of January) that there hadn’t been much to do. So Fernande’s death last year was the first time Noah had been given this task to do alone. He was nearly done, he promised himself as he sat on the edge of the bed.

Hospital invoices, her powers of attorney, Living Will and DNR—irrelevant now. Recipes, postcards, photos, appeals from charities, offers from The Great Courses—recycle them all. It was odd to be disposing of the remnants of a younger sister’s life, when logically Noah should have gone before her. Deciding what to keep for sentimental reasons was tricky because there was no one left but Noah. The knack, he’d found over the past year, was to keep sentimentality at bay; to ask, about each item, Does anyone need or want this? until at rare intervals a real feeling flooded over the levee.

This afternoon he found himself saying yes to just three items: the wedding menu from 1982 (Prawn Cocktail, Chicken Vol-au-Vents, Profiteroles); a photo of Fernande in 1990, wild-eyed with bliss after her home birth, a newborn Victor on her chest (those eyelashes!); and a curling sheaf of comic haiku she’d made up for everyone at the Thanksgiving table in 2002. A postwar baby with chipmunk cheeks, Fernande had always had a warmth and lightsomeness foreign to Noah, eight years her senior.

Clippings from magazines, straight into the recycling. Letters in handwriting Noah couldn’t make out, Get Well Soon cards…let it all go. What did a life add up to—Fernande’s, anyone’s? The papers were almost overflowing the tub. Like leaves, he told himself grimly; grow, shed, rot, repeat.

The minute Noah was done, he was going to treat himself to a cognac as well as a cigarette. (The third of his never-more-than-seven a day.)

Just as he tossed a copy of Marie Claire from August 1992, his fingers sensed an odd stiffness. He leaned over to pick it out of the tub. Tucked in the middle, a rigid mailer with nothing written on it—cardboard on one side, brown paper (softened by years) on the other. August 1992: that was the month after Margot’s death. The envelope felt empty till Noah slid his fingers in. He recognized the sharp edges. Photographs.

He tugged them out, pulse thumping just in case they were Père Sonne’s. Half a dozen or so, black and white, clearly old from the format (two and a half inches by three and a half, he’d guess). From the clothes, hair, and general aesthetic they looked 1930s, ’40s maybe. Mostly taken in the street; the setting plausibly though not definitively Nice. Noah polished his fingerprints off the top one (a dandyish man with a cane, caught in profile). But as he leafed through the photos—nine in total—disappointment came fast. None of these bore Père Sonne’s stamp. Besides, they were no good.

Slipshod, unilluminating. A Belle Époque building, for instance, cropped at the fourth floor. An awkward close-up of a box, rectangular, inscribed with a circle, a dash on each side. This stock scene of a middle-aged couple on a bench, seen from behind. A woman with coiled hair, again from the rear—was that angle in vogue at the time, he wondered, the equivalent of pursed-lip selfies today? A shot of children’s feet trotting by was cute in a generic way. Tree roots, not even particularly well framed. None of the subjects was looking at the camera apart from one smiling boy with neatly combed dark hair who had to be small Noé, though Noah didn’t quite recognize himself.

He had to assume it was his mother who’d taken all these. But she must have known better, after decades working with—for—under—her mighty father. Surely she would have borrowed Père Sonne’s superb Contax, or even one of his little portable Leicas. This shot of an empty street, for instance—had she meant to press the shutter just then?

No commercial studio’s stamp on the backs, only jotted letters in two cases: MZ for the woman seen from behind, RJ for little Noah. (Unless it was R.J., a pair of initials? In which case the boy wasn’t Noah at all.) That meant Margot must have printed them herself, in the reeking darkroom in their apartment near the Cours Saleya.

He couldn’t think of anyone else’s brain to pick about this but Vivienne’s. Besides, he’d owed her a call for months.

“Excited for your big trip?”

“I suppose.” Noah often caught a faint whiff of the patronizing in Vivienne’s tone; a hint of the kindergarten teacher. She wouldn’t have been his choice, as a friend—nor vice versa, he supposed. They’d inherited each other from Joan, who’d been Vivienne’s best friend ever since they’d seized on each other as the two Jews in first grade in their tony New York girls’ school in 1942. “How are your people?”

“The kids and so forth?” she asked.

Noah knew that Vivienne’s great-granddaughter in Texas was starting ballet, her grandchildren there and in Oregon were doing postgraduate degrees, and her grown kids in New Jersey and Tel Aviv were going through the minor health indignities of their fifties. “No, actually I was thinking of the Sudanese in your spare room.”

“Oh, the Abdullahs are Yemenis. They’re fine, more than fine—they’re pregnant.”

Noah rolled his eyes. If the couple raised a child in Vivienne’s apartment, would that give them squatters’ rights? Well, let the bank worry about that; she’d reverse-mortgaged the place and was spending the proceeds on her pet causes. (She’d always been a do-gooder—the polar opposite of Joan, whose research was of such clear importance that she’d felt entitled to be selfish in her time off.) Noah occasionally warned Vivienne to keep enough for paying strangers to wipe her butt in the end, but she insisted, on the basis of extensive genealogical research, that no one in her gene pool made it past eighty-five.

He remembered what he was calling about. “The thing is, I’ve found these old photos in the last box of Fernande’s stuff—”

Even if Vivienne had been right here in the hall with Noah, he’d have had to describe them, as she was legally blind. (She’d announced it last year, in an email so perky as to sound proud.) Losing her sight in her early eighties had barely slowed the woman down. She used software that read aloud whatever was on her screen; she’d had the tech guy set it to “Male Australian” to remind her of Frank.

Noah did his best to summarize the images, leafing through them awkwardly with one hand.

“Doesn’t everyone have some crappy photos—lots of them?”

“But why would my mother have bothered taking these—early ’40s, I’m guessing, when she was still in Nice, without me and my father—and printing them, and holding on to them till the end of her days? Then she gave them to my sister, or more likely just left them in a drawer. And why didn’t Fernande mention them to me?”

“No names at all?” Vivienne asked.

“Just what look like initials on the backs of two.”

“Well, you might spot some of the locations when you’re in Nice. As for the human subjects, maybe try the public library. They’ll have some kind of local history collection. If you find any names, give me a shout.”

Vivienne was in touch with distant cousins all over the world, having subscribed to various databases and sent off a saliva swab to a lab. Noah supposed a sense of tribe was crucial if you’d lost your parents. (Her father in the Holocaust, her mother in its long aftermath.) Just when Vivienne’s sight had started really failing, she’d gone off to stay with a family in Spain who’d turned out not to be related to her at all, but she had no regrets; said it was very jolly.

Some kind of beeper went off at her end now. “I must hang up, my group’s phone-bombing Congress about the Muslim ban.”

“OK,” Noah said, “enjoy.”

He knew Vivienne would rise to that. “It’s not about enjoyment, it’s tikkun olam.”

Repairing the world, the Jewish obligation. “I know. I’m only ribbing you.”

  

Noah was eating his usual poached egg on an English muffin in the kitchen when the phone rang. Vivienne again, with further tips?

Jangle jangle. She can leave a message, Joan advised, though she’d always answered, herself. (Before personalized ringtones, the two friends had used a signal to identify themselves: call once, hang up, then call back.)

Not many people but fundraisers and telemarketers bothered Noah at home these days. If it wasn’t Vivienne, this call would probably turn out to be a recording or a robot. Fernande had been in the habit of calling her brother for chats at random intervals—to cheer him up, he suspected. But now, why was he still paying monthly fees on the thing? (A landline, that was the modern word—like a skinny root anchoring a tree to the earth.) That was how the corporations made their money: our mindless, lifelong habits.

Jangle jangle. He hurried down the narrow hall to stop the clamor.

“Noah Selvaggio?” The woman pronounced it uncertainly but more or less accurately.

“That’s me. But if you’re selling something—”

“You’re the uncle of Victor Pierre Young?”

That familiar dread. What was it this time, old debts? Crimes, unpunishable now? “My nephew died more than a year ago.” It hurt Noah’s throat to say it.

“I’m aware of that, sir. This is Rosa Figueroa from the Administration for Children’s Services. I’m contacting you in connection with Michael Young.”

“Oh.”

“Excuse me?”

“I just said Oh,” Noah told her foolishly. What must the child be now—nine, ten? He reckoned the years: eleven, actually. How word of the pregnancy had appalled Fernande and Dan: Victor making such a blunder, when he was still an angel-faced teenage boy. The woman was still talking, but none of it was making sense to Noah. “I’m sorry, Ms.—” Her name would come back to Noah in a moment, once he stopped grasping for it.

“Figueroa. Rosa Figueroa,” she repeated in the too-clear enunciation middle-aged people used with those who were past middle age.

“Could you back up for a moment?”

“I’m exploring Michael’s kinship resources,” she told him.

Had Noah misunderstood—was this some kind of genealogy project, then?

“He’s been living with Ella Davis, his grandmother, but she’s just passed.”

For a moment he thought she meant something like an exam, and then he got it. “I’m very sorry to hear that.” To fill the silence: “What was it that…”

“Complications of diabetes. She was only sixty-three.”

That made seventy-nine sound like the height of luck to Noah.

“And her husband died back in the ’90s,” Rosa Figueroa added. “So now we’re looking for somewhere for Michael.”

Noah was at a loss as to how he came into this. “Why is he not with, ah,”—Angela? Amanda?—“Amber?”

“She’s currently incarcerated.”

He groaned inwardly. “For what?”

“I wonder, could we focus on the child’s immediate needs, Mr. Selvaggio?”

Noah cleared his throat. “I’m just racking my brains as to how I can be of any assistance to you. I’ve never met any of these people, myself. My sister died soon after Victor, and her husband, ah, a long time before that.” Dan had lasted long enough to have a pretty good idea of what kind of son he’d raised—incorrigible, that was the word people used to throw around. But too early to know that Victor would soon follow him, which was a small mercy, and one not granted to Fernande.

“Yes, sir, that’s exactly why I’m getting in touch. You appear to be the last of Michael’s kin here in New York City.”

That old-fashioned word again. Kith and kin, kinsfolk, kindred; like something out of J. R. R. Tolkien. Did she mean legally or genetically? In what sense could you really be kin to someone you’d never met?

“Mr. Selvaggio?”

This social worker couldn’t be thinking of bringing the child here, to Noah’s apartment.

No. It struck him that, like so many other seniors, he was the target of a phone scam. The woman had gotten hold of the names of relatives of his, for some equivalent of the Spanish Prisoner trick—the Nigerian fortune constantly being offered in illiterate emails.

Put down the phone, Joan told him.

“Sorry not to be of more use, Ms. Figueroa”—no trouble remembering the name the crook had given, now, if he took a split second to get the vowels in the correct sequence—“but I’ve got to go now.”

“Please.”

It wasn’t the word but Rosa Figueroa’s tone that made Noah pause, receiver halfway to the cradle. She did sound like a real person, and so weary. “It’s just that I don’t see how I can be of any practical help,” he told her. “Certainly not in the immediate…I’m off to France next week, as it happens. Maybe after I get back we could speak again.”

“This can’t wait. I met Michael for the first time myself this morning. There’s nobody at all to look after him.”

It wasn’t subtle, how she was playing on Noah’s sympathies. He wanted a cigarette.

“Could you come and meet his mother with me, tomorrow morning?”

“But—”

“Let’s all just sit down and put our heads together, all right, to see what can be done for this child?”

Noah sighed.

  

Noah smoked as he leaned out the kitchen window—a waste of heat, yes, but these apartment buildings stayed so baking from October to April you couldn’t survive without opening a window once in a while.

Incarcerated. Was Amber Davis just as much of a fuckup as his nephew had been? Possibly more so. Hadn’t she been a grown woman (though not quite old enough for it to have counted as statutory rape) when she’d gotten the lanky, lovely fifteen-year-old into her bed and conceived this unfortunate Michael?

Noah was trying to get the sequence straight. Victor’s adolescence had had such a disastrous domino effect it was hard to remember the order and duration of each awful event. He was pretty sure that word of the baby had come after Victor’s truncated stay in that so-called therapeutic school upstate (which had almost bankrupted Fernande and Dan before getting shut down) and after he’d run away from their house in Brooklyn for the second time, with Fernande’s jewelry and a checkbook. She’d gotten her gold back, but it had been melted into a lump. The judge had placed Victor in a group home, then, but he’d run away from that too. Always minor-league stuff, but it added up: possession of marijuana, Ritalin, loitering, trespass, disorderly conduct…

What Noah couldn’t remember was, had Michael been born before or after the Limited Secure Placement? Fernande and Dan had been encouraged to call that his group home too, though the fence was of razor wire this time. (Orwellian, the dialect of the justice system.) Noah had visited twice, on his own; Joan had always been busy. The place was just two subway stops from the elegant brownstone where Victor had grown up, but a world away.

Then when he’d been let out after ten months, the boy had “crashed with friends.” Noah had never gotten the impression his nephew was actually living with the young woman and their son. Fernande—more than Dan—had badgered Victor to let them meet their grandchild, but he’d been elusive. When she’d asked if they could send baby clothes, he’d asked for money instead. And then at seventeen, for something petty—violating parole by skipping school?—Victor had been sent off to juvie, a hellhole of a residential center up near Albany. That fence had been sixteen feet high, Noah remembered from his single visit. Victor had come back with kidney damage from a beating.

From that point on, all Noah had heard about his nephew’s doings had come via Fernande. She and Dan had managed to meet the mother and child a couple of times; she’d reported that Victor was “quite involved,” though Noah didn’t know what that meant: changing diapers? Paying support? Noah had seen a few photos and nodded dutifully. He couldn’t remember what the little boy had looked like, now, except that he hadn’t inherited Victor’s looks.

He stood up, stubbed out his cigarette, and tugged the old window shut. He could have made more of an effort with his nephew, he supposed. But it had all felt like such a goddamn waste of breath.

The moment that stuck in Noah’s memory like a sliver was when he’d made himself go into his and Joan’s home office, a few months after her death. (He’d have avoided their bedroom, too, if it had been practical, as well as the bathroom and kitchen and living room; even the rubber mat by the door where she left her winter boots, and the key hook on which she balanced the little roll of dog-shit bags.) Those four rectangular spaces on the office wall, like ripped-out teeth: Noah’s last Père Sonne prints. He knew at once that it must have been Victor, who’d slunk off during Joan’s funeral while everyone else was eating and taken them off the wall, then smuggled them out of the apartment.

When Noah had called Fernande about it, she’d burst into tears, but it wasn’t shock. Victor had sold hers long ago, she admitted. The only photos by their pépère that had stayed in the family were gone now; locked away from the world in some collector’s vault. “What’s the difference?” Victor had responded. “You guys would’ve donated them to some museum sooner or later.” He was nineteen, so it would be adult prison this time. As a favor to her, Fernande begged, would Noah please, please not call the police?

He hadn’t. But he hadn’t forgiven his nephew either.

Noah had stopped asking Fernande for news at that point, though when Victor’s name came up she always spoke with a determined positivity. He’d chosen to assume the best, or the least worst: that his nephew had finally calmed down in his twenties, as so many wild boys did, and become more or less law-abiding. (Amber and little Michael were still in the picture, though having a child to support could be as much hindrance as help, Noah imagined, to someone like Victor.) But maybe Fernande had hidden the worst from her brother, or maybe she hadn’t known the half of it herself.

How could anyone bear to be a parent? Like contracting to love a werewolf.

His sister’s retirement, which should have been a well-earned respite, must have been one long fretting and losing. First Dan—after a stroke, pointless rehab, another stroke—and then, three years later, Victor. Fernande had had to identify her son laid out on a refrigerated tray in the morgue in Queens: still exquisite in all his features, not yet twenty-seven. Farther east on Long Island, the day before, a motel chambermaid had found Victor on the carpet, veins full of heroin and fentanyl.

Which had never made sense to Noah, because he hadn’t thought of his nephew as that kind of user. (A dope-smoker since twelve, but not what they used to call a junkie.) Drugs had their own irrational logic, he supposed, and these days everything seemed to be laced with something worse. If you weren’t quite sure what you were taking, could you be held accountable for doing it, and for leaving your son fatherless?

If it came to that, Noah wondered now, which of our decisions were ever entirely our own?

Never to reach twenty-seven. He’d felt hurt that Fernande hadn’t asked him to go with her to identify her son. What else was a brother for? But he supposed that on such a day, company was no consolation. And she must have known that he’d given up on Victor long before.

Joan, in his head: Come on, surely you have things you should be doing?

Noah stood on the pedal of the garbage can and threw away his cigarette butt.

  

Next morning, he writhed in his seat at the women’s correctional facility. (The latest euphemism for prison.) Whenever he tried to straighten up, the molded plastic prodded him in the wrong part of his back. Rosa Figueroa was across the table, and the speechless notary public, Lucas Weinburg (brought along for what she called witnessing), on his left.

Noah was still rattled from the journey. An hour and a half up the Hudson, through snow flurries, in Rosa Figueroa’s cluttered and underheated sedan, with Lucas Weinburg in the back, apparently asleep. The social worker looked about fifty; worn but not burned out, with only a little gray in her black curls, and a birthmark on her cheekbone, which Noah liked her for. Also one of those discreet hearing aids. She turned out to have a caseload of twenty-four children. When Noah had asked how she remembered who was who, she’d laughed darkly and said the system was in such crisis that she and her colleagues were just doing triage.

After that, the two of them had made desultory conversation about bad news in the headlines till they’d reached a pretty hamlet (“full of Hollywood types,” she’d told him). Then a sharp turn through a gate in a double barbed-wire fence, into the parking lot of the prison.

Behind Noah, a baby wailed on and on. Children, all ages; he hadn’t expected quite so many of them. It hit him now that when a mother was sent to jail, her kids were receiving just as long a sentence. He thought of the boy, Michael.

“All right, Mr. Selvaggio?”

“Perfectly.” He didn’t mention his back. It wasn’t advisable to admit to aches and pains after seventy, or younger people wrote you off.

“There can be delays.”

Noah disliked statements of the blindingly obvious, but the woman was just being civil.

“Just as well it’s a Sunday. They don’t allow contact visitation during the week.”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Seeing her in person,” she explained, “not just by video link. Ms. Davis is actually only entitled to visitors on Saturdays, since her name’s in the first half of the alphabet, but the sergeant agreed to make an exception for a hardship visit because of the urgency.”

Video link would have been fine by Noah. He’d have preferred to stay at arm’s length from this whole mess.

“Also we’re lucky New York State doesn’t insist on the full visitor-application process,” Rosa Figueroa told him. “You just need the permission of the inmate.”

Noah’s head was aching. Nothing about this felt lucky. He’d agreed to this appointment with the inmate out of a sort of guilt by association with Victor, her onetime…partner? Also as a posthumous favor to Fernande. She’d managed to meet her grandson on only a couple of occasions, but she’d spoken of him with a wistful fondness. If he was in de. . .