Raymond Peepgass’s paternity lawsuit

Raymond Peepgass’s paternity lawsuit becomes, in the available scenes, a deposition that makes a private affair feel at once sordid, public, and financially ruinous. Asked to account for his encounter with Sirja Tiramaki in Helsinki, Peepgass watches his sexual history become testimony, hears an infant crying beyond the room, and imagines the consequences reaching his family and career. The lawsuit’s pressure is not only the prospect of fatherhood or a court’s decision: it is the forced conversion of intimacy into a record, while Peepgass tries to turn his separate creditor dispute with Charlie Croker into a route out of danger.

The deposition and its setting

The questioning begins with Peepgass’s explanation for inviting Sirja to dinner at the Hotel Grand Tatar. He says he was not interested in Finnish art at the time, but that PlannersBanc had an art program and he wanted to explore its possibilities; Sirja, he says, seemed knowledgeable. The lawyer questioning him treats that account as a pretext, pressing him about what those possibilities really were. From the start, the deposition makes his professional explanation and sexual motive difficult to separate.

The room intensifies his sense of exposure. Morton Tennenbaum, the lawyer for Sirja, sits opposite him with an expression Peepgass reads as contempt. Beside Tennenbaum is Sirja, whose presence he struggles to reconcile with the desire he remembers from Helsinki. Peepgass’s own lawyer, Alexander (Sandy) Dickens, offers little comfort: although he comes from the established firm Tripp, Snayer & Billings, Peepgass now regards him as an unimpressive and costly representative, billing at $400 an hour. At the head of the table, a court reporter records the proceedings on a stenotype machine. The account’s repeated attention to that machine and the reporter’s presence gives Peepgass’s humiliation a durable form: what he says is being preserved verbatim.

Helsinki recalled under oath

The questions take Peepgass back through the evening at the Hotel Grand Tatar. He is asked whether Sirja rubbed his leg beneath the table, suggested that the dining room was too noisy, proposed that they go somewhere quieter to talk about Finnish art and look at her slides, and then suggested his suite. The sequence matters to the deposition because it asks him to assign initiative and responsibility. But Peepgass is too demoralized to mount much of a defense. He wonders what difference it makes who started the encounter when, in his view, the whole episode is already cheap and degrading.

When he calls it a novelty, Tennenbaum repeats the word witheringly. The testimony then approaches the encounter itself: Tennenbaum asks whether Peepgass led Sirja to his king-size bed and made love to her. The excerpt does not supply a verdict or resolve the lawsuit. Instead, it keeps the reader within the ordeal of being asked to narrate an intimate episode under oath, as each recollected detail becomes material for adversarial questioning.

The child and the reversal in Peepgass’s view

Sirja’s young son is nearby during the deposition. A door separates the room from the child, but it does not contain his cries. When he catches his breath, Sirja goes to him, calling him Pawy and speaking to him in Finnish. Peepgass registers a sharp change in how he sees her: the woman he had associated with the affair becomes, in his bitterly phrased perception, the Eternal Mother. He imagines himself as a satyr or rutting boar set against a mother and concludes that he cannot win that contest in a DeKalb County court—or anywhere else.

That conclusion is not presented as a legal finding. It is Peepgass’s fearful reading of the scene and of the story each side might tell. He imagines his children learning the details, or Betty Pierce Peepgass hearing them, and the possibility makes him want to disappear. The infant’s cries make the consequences of the affair tangible to him, while Sirja’s soothing voice gives his fear a human scene to attach to. His anxiety also has a public dimension: he dreads an open courtroom in which the episode might be exposed beyond the people at the table.

Financial peril and a parallel gamble

The deposition has lasted almost an hour by 10:50 a.m., and Peepgass calculates the accumulating cost of Dickens’s $400 hourly fee. He is forty-six, fears that little of his resources will remain, and thinks about the ticking clock even though the questioning has not yet finished the first night in Helsinki. He has also lied to explain his absence from the bank that morning. The lawsuit therefore presses simultaneously on his money, his work, and his ability to keep the affair contained.

At this low point, the thought of Charlie Croker offers Peepgass a first spark of hope. The previous day he had gone with Harry Zale and others to PDK to confront Croker and take control of the G-5, using the term arrest for the attempted seizure. Peepgass recalls having stood his ground in front of Croker’s guests, including Herbert Richman, even though he had wanted to flee. The attempt was not simple: one engine mysteriously failed when they tried to move the aircraft. Nevertheless, PlannersBanc had obtained the G-5 and Croker’s beloved N. C. Wyeth painting, giving the bank leverage over him.

Peepgass now imagines that the bank can offer to spare Croker ruin and humiliation in exchange for deeds to his property in lieu of foreclosure. He wants Croker to be sufficiently weakened—tenderized, in Peepgass’s calculation—to accept. This proposed maneuver does not resolve the paternity lawsuit; it reveals how Peepgass responds to one threat by reaching for another person’s vulnerability. The juxtaposition is pointed: as he sits exposed by the intimate details of his own conduct, he hopes to make Croker exposed to financial pressure.

Narrative function and limits

The deposition links two forms of pressure without making them equivalent. In the room, Peepgass faces questions, a stenographic record, a costly lawyer, and the audible presence of Sirja’s child; outside it, he sees Croker’s assets as bargaining instruments. His fantasies of financial rescue do not dispel his shame. Instead, the scene lets them coexist with his fear that the affair will empty his resources and become known to his family. Its final irony rests on that imbalance: Peepgass believes he may still have leverage over Croker, even as the cries from beyond the door make the consequences of his own choices impossible to keep abstract.