Golden Fleece

Aaron stroked his chin. The beard had been an experiment—and not a particularly successful one at that. Most everyone agreed that he looked better without it. He did like the reddish hues that it had, though, believing it made a nice contrast with the sandy hair on his head. “Yeah, well, I’m going to shave it off. So, Petey, how’ve you been?”

“Fine. Look, Aaron, is Halina home?”

Halina was his father’s current wife. “No. Should be any minute though.”

Petey didn’t say anything. Aaron peered more closely at the screen, looking at the Native Canadian’s eyes, brown and liquid. The scan lines of the screen segmented them into parallel chords. “What’s wrong, Petey?”

“It’s your dad. There’s been an accident.”

“God. Is he all right?”

“No, Aaron. No, he’s not. His neck got broken.”

“So he’s in hospital, right. Where? Thunder Bay General?”

“He’s dead. I’m sorry, Aaron. I’m so very, very sorry.”

That had been Tuesday. Instead of enjoying the Passover seders, the Rossmans now sat shivah. All mirrors in the house were covered, as were the household god’s reflective eyes. Lapels were out of fashion, but each mourner made a small rip in the front of his jacket, acknowledging the Almighty’s right to claim his servant. Even during the first three days, set aside for weeping, there were surprisingly few tears. Just emptiness, a vacuum in their lives.

Joel and Hannah had flown in and flown out, Joel from Jerusalem, where he was studying engineering at the Hebrew University, Hannah from Vancouver, where she worked in a small advertising agency. But Aaron had stayed to help put his father’s affairs in order. On the eighth day after the funeral, work was permitted to resume.

Aaron’s mother, divorced a dozen years from his father, had tried to muster the sorrow appropriate to the occasion, but it had been too long since Benjamin Rossman had been a part of her life. Halina, though, was devastated, broken, wandering the house aimlessly. Aaron sat on the edge of the bed his father had shared with Halina, the contents of the strongbox strewn across the pale Hudson’s Bay Company six-point blanket. A birth certificate. A few stock certificates. A copy of his father’s will. His father’s high-school diploma, neatly rolled and tied with a ribbon. His marriage contracts, the one with Aaron’s mother expired, the one with Halina never to run its term.

Papers.

The inventory of a life.

The small collection of facts and figures that were still handed over with a flourish, a flare.

True, these were mere echoes of the actual records of Benjamin Rossman’s life, stored in gallium arsenide and holographic interference patterns. But they were the records that mattered most, the things he had cared about above all else.

Aaron opened envelopes, unfolded sheets, read, sorted into piles. Finally, he picked up an unsealed number-ten envelope. In the upper left was printed the stylized trillium logo of the Government of Ontario and the words Ministry of Community and Social Services. Aaron registered a certain dull curiosity at the unusual source of the envelope as he opened it. Out came a single form with ornate border and tightly packed barcodes: Certificate of Adoption. Aaron was surprised. Dad adopted? I didn’t know that. But then he read further down the form—the whole thing had been printed as a single job on a tunnel-diode printer, so the filled-in blanks didn’t stand out at all. The name of the adopted child wasn’t Benjamin Rossman. Oh, that name was there, but next to the title adopting father. No, the name of the adopted child was Aaron David, birth surname confidential, new legal surname Rossman.

His father’s death had left Aaron numb, too numb for this discovery to yet register fully. But he knew in his bones that ultimately he would feel this shock even more than the loss of his father.

Aaron’s mother’s house hadn’t changed much. Oh, it seemed smaller to Aaron than it had when he was a child, and he’d come to realize that his mother had absolutely no taste in furnishings, but he fancied he could still hear the soft echoes of his brother and sister playing, smell the lingering aroma of his father’s hearty if none-too-spectacular cooking. He sat in the big green chair that he still thought of as Dad’s, although his father hadn’t visited this house for years before his death. His mother sat on the couch, her hands in her lap, her eyes not quite meeting his. LAR had fixed coffee and had left it waiting in the dumbwaiter.

“I was sorry to hear about your father,” she said.

“Yes. It’s very sad.”

“He was a good man.”

A good man. Yes, all dead men are characterized as having been that way. But Benjamin Rossman had been a good man. A hard worker, a good father. And a good husband? No. No, that had never been said. But, on balance, a good man. “I’ll miss him.”