The Quest

When I came back to my office, the red voicemail light shone on my big gray phone. It was 3:40 pm, so it couldn’t be my husband yet. Max was supposed to have a meeting with the director of our son’s private school at 3:30 pm, a meeting I couldn’t face going to because I knew it would be tense and difficult, and I’d just been dealing with so much negativity from this school, I needed a break. Max had no problem with my absence—“Let me do this,” he’d said. “I can handle it. You’ve been dealing with them for so long, it’s my turn.”

But it feel odd to abstain. I’d gone to every parent-teacher conference for both of my children, every curriculum night and parent association meeting. As many field trips and class parties as I could manage and still do my job.

I tapped through the elaborate passwords and command codes required every time I access a message. My husband’s voice came up, barely audible against the traffic noise. “It’s over; it went really badly. He’s going to be expelled. She threw me out of her office after maybe five minutes. Call me.”

A dizzying wave rippled through me. I grabbed the phone, dialed his cell and got the report. Yes, after months of complaining about Alex’s behavior problems, the school insisted we either pay for a private aide to control him (on top of $37,500 tuition) or pick him up at noon every day for early dismissal. Perhaps both. Max argued with her, she lost her temper, waved our contract at him, saying, “I can expel him!” It kept deteriorating until the word “lawsuit” was dropped and my husband’s final words, before being given the heave, were “When I’m done, this school will be bankrupt and you’ll be selling pencils on the street!” We would talk it through when I got home.

After I hung up the phone, I went down the hall and made a cup of English Breakfast tea, poured in the skim milk. As upsetting and horrifying as this was, I had to finish my work for the day. I had to get through my edit of “Her Best Ever: Sarah Jessica Parker’s 10 favorite looks.”

I set the tea down and was getting ready to access the Sarah Jessica Parker file onscreen, when I spotted the words “Ancestry.com” peeking out from a stack of papers. It was my DNA kit envelope, all ready to go. I’d done my bit with the swabs: left side of the mouth, right side of the mouth, and “front center” of the mouth, which I wasn’t too certain about.

In the last few months, busy with work, consumed with worry about the children’s struggles in their respective schools and paying bills and my mother’s deepening forgetfulness and everything else, I’d found myself sucked into a bizarre family-history research project of my own creation. I’d joined ancestor.com (a fun free trial is followed by steep annual dues, BTW) and created my Nancy Bilyeau Family Tree, feeling rather ridiculous.

It all began about 10 years ago, when my sister told she had met a distant cousin of ours in Washington DC, an older woman, genteel and refined, who said the Bilyeaus had a restored house in New York City, that they were a very old settler family. And she was correct. Which shouldn’t surprise me, because my sister has a master’s in library science and passed rigorous security checks to become a librarian at the White House. She did very well at the White House until 9/11 traumatized her and she quit right before the one-year anniversary because she was sure the White House would be bombed again or at the very least feel the effects of a dirty bomb set off in suburban Virginia. But enough about my sister.

Actually to say the Bilyeaus are an old family is incorrect. They are a very new family. My father was born Everett Wallace Bilyeu. He added the “a” before he married my mother, in the early 1950s, to distance himself from his relatives, who were I gather a collection of deadbeats and minor crooks and losers to whom the term “underachiever” would be an understatement. My father hated his father. Just hated him. Never talked about him. My grandfather John Bilyeu died before I was born and was an abusive alcoholic who could barely read and made moonshine in the backwoods of Tennessee. When he was a World War I veteran he married a beautiful black-haired 16-year-old girl, my grandmother, Amanda van Hooten, and condemned her to a life of misery, first in Tennesse and then in Detroit, where he worked on the assembly line for Ford Motor Co. He beat my father regularly, and I heard he was particularly vicious because my father wanted to be an artist and so was not a “real man.”

And yet, John Bilyeu is directly descended from Pierre Billiou, who sailed across the Atlantic in 1661 with his family–his wife gave birth to my ancestor, Isaac, on the boat, the St. John Baptiste–and arrived at New Amsterdam, controlled by the Dutch. Pierre, a French Hugenot, built the first stone house on Staten Island, the third oldest house in New York State, which I visited for the first time in 2007, and met the sweet, erudite caretaker who lives in the heated part of the house as an employee of the Staten Island Historical Society.

This is pretty wild stuff for someone who grew up in a small tract house in a bland suburb of Detroit named Livonia. My father did become an artist and painted hundreds of watercolor landscapes that he sold for small amounts of money at art fairs. When I was a child he worked as a sign painter in Detroit. Before computers there were people trained in calligraphy and they painted the better signs for businesses. He would come home tired, smelling of paintbrush-cleaning fluids, and right after dinner head downstairs and paint his watercolors in his tidy basement studio and talk to himself. I would stand at the top of the basement steps where he couldn’t see me and listen to him talking to imaginary people about his art. He was a creative man and extremely funny but a damaged man too who never ever drank alcohol and held in all this anger that would at unexpected times ricochet out, a few times at me. Bam, a blow to the side of the head. Whack, and I’m on the ground because he slapped me so hard. It didn’t happen more than a dozen times in my childhood, but it scared the hell out of me, that sudden switch from funny, friendly Dad into a man with a red face and bulging eyes and a hard fist.

My dad died at the age of 73 in 1998, having never smoked or drank or spent much time in the sun. He got eight hours of sleep and ate oatmeal and yogurt and lots of vegetables and flossed twice a day for at least 10 minutes. Didn’t stop the cancer. He never knew a thing about Pierre Billiou, a man who when the Dutch briefly took back the area from the British rose as high as attorney general of New York State. It’s hard to connect that man to John Bilyeu, the drunk who beat his family.

On the way home from work, to deal with the painful mess that was my son’s education, I dropped my DNA kit into the mail slot in the Time Inc. lobby.