says Addison, not unloudly, when Gunner saunters into the family picnic, clutching Belmont Public Library’s sole copy of Moby Dick, which he will neglect to return, an hour late. She’s so used to hiding their marital discord from the outside world that the question, a tossed dagger, feels both shameful and liberating. She and her children (his children, too, she thinks) are seated under the Class of ’89 tent near the edge of the Soldiers Field athletic complex at a large round table with Bennie, Bennie’s partner Katrina, and their sons Lucien and Dante, who are quietly sketching one another’s faces on Lenox rag paper with charcoal. (“To express the soul on paper is for our sons we try to encourage,” Katrina explained, both her heavy accent and her subject/verb placement often indecipherably Teutonic.) Blue-eyed Lucien, born to half-Japanese/half-American Bennie, absorbed, ironically, more of Katrina’s family’s Aryan genes, while brown-eyed Dante, born to fair-skinned Katrina, is darker, more Asian-looking; but it is undeniable that their mothers’ experiment in genetic engineering—one egg from each woman, a cup of sperm from each of their brothers—has been a rousing success: The boys definitely look like blood brothers.
