And then Mr. and Mrs. Finnegan, perhaps in an effort to straighten him out even more, perhaps in an unconscious desire to hurt him as he’d hurt them, revealed something that shocked him.
He was an adopted child.
Paul was stunned. Like most children, he had gone through a phase when he believed that he was adopted. But he had not kept to the fantasy, which children conceive during periods when they think their parents don’t love them. But it was true, and he didn’t want to believe it.
According to his step-parents, his real mother was an Englishwoman with the quaint name of Philea Jane Fogg-Fog. Under other circumstances, he would have thought this hilarious. Not now.
Philea Jane’s parents were of the English landed gentry, though his great-grandfather had married a Parsi woman. The Parsis, he knew, were Persians who had fled to India and settled there when the Moslems invaded their homeland. So … he was actually one-eighth Indian. But it wasn’t American Indian, among whom his step-mother counted ancestors. It was Asiatic Indian, though only in naturalization. The Parsis usually did not marry their Hindu neighbors.
His mother’s mother, Roxana Fogg, was the one who’d picked up the hyphenated name of Fogg-Fog. She’d married a distant relative, an American named Fog. A branch of the Foggs had emigrated to the colony of Virginia in the 1600’s. In the early 1800’s some of their descendants had moved to the then-Mexican territory of Texas. By then the extra “g” had been dropped from the family name. Paul’s maternal grandfather, Hardin Blaze Fog, was born on a ranch in the sovereign state, the Republic of Texas.
Roxana Fogg had married an Englishman at the age of twenty. He died when she was thirty-eight, leaving two children. Two years later she went with her son to Texas to look over some of the extensive ranch property he would inherit when he came of age. She also met some of the relatives there, including the famous Confederate war hero and Western gunfighter, Dustine “Dusty” Edward Marsden Fog. She was introduced to Hardin Blaze Fog, several years younger than herself. They fell in love, and he accompanied her back to England. She got the family’s approval, despite his barbarian origins, since she announced she was going to marry him anyway and he was a wealthy shipping magnate. Blaze settled down in London to run the British office. When Roxana was forty-three years old, she surprised everybody, including herself, by conceiving. The baby was named Philea Jane.
Philea Jane Fogg-Fog was born in 1880. In 1900 she married an English physician, Doctor Reginald Syn. He died in 1910 under mysterious circumstances, leaving no children. Philea did not remarry until 1916. She had met in London a handsome well-to-do man from Indiana, Park Joseph Finnegan. The Foggs didn’t like him because, one, he was of Irish descent, two, he was not an Episcopalian, and three, he had been seen with various ladies of the evening in gambling halls before he’d asked Philea to marry him. She married him anyway and went to Terre Haute, which her relatives thought was still subject to raids by the redskins.
Park Joseph Finnegan made Philea happy for the first six months, despite her difficulty in adjusting to a small Hoosier town. At least, she lived in a big house, and she suffered for no lack of material things.
Then life became hell. Finnegan resumed his spending of his fortune on women, booze, and poker games. Within a short time he’d lost his fortune, and when he found out his thirty-eight year old wife was pregnant, he deserted her. He announced he was going West to make another fortune, but she never heard from him again.
Too proud and too ashamed to return to England, Philea had gone to work as a housekeeper for a relative of her husband’s. It was a terrible comedown for her, but she labored without complaint and kept a British stiff upper lip.
Paul was six months old when the gasoline-burning apparatus used to heat an iron exploded in his mother’s face. The house burned down, and the infant would have perished with his mother if a young man had not dashed in through the flames and rescued him.