Lucas Loriman–Curtis Lewiston implied father-son relationship

Lucas Loriman–Curtis Lewiston implied father-son relationship is a deliberately unresolved possibility with urgent medical consequences: Curtis may be Lucas’s biological father, while Dante Loriman remains the man who raised him as his son. The novel never confirms Curtis’s paternity outright. Instead, it joins Susan Loriman’s hidden past to Lucas’s search for a donor, making a family secret surface through the practical question of whose blood might help save a child.

The Medical Disclosure

The possibility of another father first enters the story as a blunt disclosure to Mike Baye: Susan tells him that Dante is not Lucas’s biological father. Mike is stunned, but the revelation soon becomes more than a question of family history. Lucas needs a suitable donor, and medical compatibility gives the distinction between biological and social fatherhood immediate weight.

At a discussion of tissue matching, Ilene Goldfarb explains that Dante is not a good candidate according to his HLA typing. Susan is a better match, though not an ideal one. Ilene describes the odds among siblings: a one-in-four chance of an identical match, a one-in-two chance of a half match, and a one-in-four chance of no match. The clinical account establishes the logic behind seeking genetically related donors, even as it leaves the identity of Lucas’s biological father undisclosed.

Mike presses Ilene on whether she would reveal a serious medical finding about Dante, such as lymphoma, despite Dante not being her patient. Ilene’s answer exposes the ethical tension around what the adults know and what they owe one another. The question of paternity is not simply private information: in the setting of Lucas’s illness, concealed biological facts could affect both medical choices and the family’s understanding of itself.

Susan’s Concealed Past

Susan initially keeps the father’s identity out of reach. When Ilene asks who Lucas’s father is, Susan finally answers that she does not know. That answer accords with the history she has never told her family: after a rape, she killed her attacker, but she never learned or disclosed his identity. The account establishes the source of the uncertainty without identifying the attacker as Curtis.

At the time of the assault, Dante was away on a trip to Las Vegas. Susan had gone out with friends in West Orange and, after drinking heavily, was separated from them. She later remembered being taken to a motel and raped. When she found an opportunity to resist, she killed the attacker rather than escape and seek help. The novel makes clear that the man was dead, so Susan’s hope of asking him to help Lucas was impossible. It does not supply a confirmed name for him.

Susan had believed Lucas was Dante’s child. After the assault, she and Dante resumed sex, and when Lucas was born she trusted the likelihood that her husband was the father. She also notes that Lucas looked like her rather than either man. Those reassurances let her live with the assumption, but they did not erase what had happened. She returned to church and carried the secret while protecting Dante and their children; her parents, who knew of the assault, never spoke to her about it, and both later died.

Curtis and the Donor Search

The connection to Curtis becomes legible through timing and kinship rather than a direct confession. Susan tells Joe Lewiston that Curtis was her brother, that the two resembled one another, and that Curtis had been troubled throughout his life. She says he was murdered, probably in a robbery. The account places his death eleven years before the present, or nine months before Lucas’s birth. Those dates make Curtis a possible link between Susan’s assault and Lucas’s conception, but the text stops short of saying that Curtis was the rapist or definitively establishing him as Lucas’s father.

The donor search turns that possibility into a course of action. Susan and Dante work on a major donor drive at Lucas’s elementary school, where teachers support the plan to recruit people for the donor bank the following Saturday. The effort shows that the family is actively seeking help beyond the limited results from existing donor banks. Susan’s personal approach to Joe extends the search to a man who might be Lucas’s genetic uncle if Curtis was the father.

Susan has a donor nurse with her when she asks Joe to give blood. She appeals to his capacity to help Lucas and emphasizes that donating could be a constructive step amid Joe’s own troubles. She hopes he will agree without requiring her to expose the full family secret. But she is prepared to tell him that Lucas is ten and that Curtis died nine months before his birth; she reasons that a genetic uncle may offer the best odds of finding a suitable donor. Joe appears close to protesting, and Susan repeats her plea. The moment ends with the request still carrying both medical urgency and the unspoken weight of what it might reveal.

Biological and Social Fatherhood

The relationship remains implied because the evidence points in two directions without resolving them into certainty. Susan’s assailant is dead, and she says she does not know who Lucas’s father is; the novel never identifies that man as Curtis. Yet Curtis’s death shortly before Lucas’s birth, his connection to Susan, and Susan’s plan to appeal to his brother as a genetic uncle invite the reader to consider him as the likely biological father. That inference is strong enough to shape the donor search, but it remains an inference rather than an explicit confirmation.

The uncertainty also distinguishes genetic connection from lived parenthood. Susan’s private thought that Dante is Lucas’s true father expresses the family bond she wants to preserve, even as the donor search makes biological descent consequential. Dante’s poor match and Susan’s appeal to Joe reveal the practical limits of treating fatherhood as a single category: the man who raised Lucas may be his father in the family’s daily life, while another man’s possible genetic connection could matter in the clinic. Curtis’s absence therefore remains active in the present, not as a confirmed identity but as a question with consequences for Lucas’s chances and the family’s secrets.