by Fannie Flagg
Our office has received the following, and as requested, we are forwarding to your present address.
H. Wilson
The envelope attached was postmarked Matamoros, Mexico, and handwritten in an almost uneven and childlike scrawl. Sookie read the letter inside, which was in the same handwriting.
May 20, 2005
Dear Mrs. Krackenberry,
Hello. I am the daughter of Conchita Alvarez, who worked for you in Brownsville, Texas, during the war. I am sorry to say my mother passed away last spring at the age of eighty-five. When we were going through her things, we found these papers she was keeping for you. They look important. They look like you might need them. I do not know where you live. I am mailing them back to where they came from so they can send them to you. My mother liked you very much. She said you were so pretty.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Veronica Gonzales
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Sookie.
“What?”
“A lady in Texas that used to work for mother died and her daughter found some of Lenore’s old papers and is sending them back. Well, that’s very sweet of her.”
“What kind of papers?”
“I don’t know, yet. Let me see.” Sookie picked up another piece of paper.
The next thing Sookie knew, she was lying on the floor, and Earle was standing over her, fanning her with a newspaper.
“It’s okay, honey, you just fainted. Just relax and breathe. Don’t talk.”
Lying on the floor beside her was what she had just read.
October 8, 1952
Dear Mrs. Krackenberry,
Due to the military’s recent lifting of certain restrictions in the Children’s Medical Privacy Act, and in reply to your request of January 6, 1949, we are now at liberty to release photocopies of your daughter’s original birth certificate, including all birth mother medical records in our possession, up to the date of her adoption from the Texas Children’s Home. We hope this information will assist you and your daughter’s health care professionals in determining her risk of any hereditary conditions. Please contact this office if you have any further questions.
Sincerely,
Cathy Quijano
Director of Public Health Services
Please find enclosed the following:
Birth certificate
Medical records
Adoption papers
A few minutes later, Earle had helped Sookie to the couch, and she was lying there with a cold rag on her head, trying to comprehend what she had just read. All she remembered were the words “her adoption.”
Earle came back with a brown paper bag for her to breathe into, and a glass of brandy. “Here, honey, drink a little of this.” He looked very concerned and kept patting her hand.
“Did you read it?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yes, honey, I read it. What a hell of a thing to spring on somebody.”
“But what does it mean?”
He picked up the letter and read it again. “Well, sweetie … I’m afraid it means just what it says. Evidently, you were adopted from the … here are the papers … the Texas Children’s Home … on July 31, 1945.”
“But Earle, that can’t be true. It has to be a mistake.”
Earle looked at the papers again and shook his head. “No, honey … I don’t think so. It looks pretty official, and they have all the right information.”
“But it has to be a mistake. I can’t be adopted. I’ve got the Simmons foot and Daddy’s nose.”
“Well … maybe not.”
“Why? What else does it say? I don’t understand.”
“Honey … just keep breathing, and let me look at this again.” He sat there reading the papers while Sookie continued breathing into the brown paper bag, but she didn’t like the look on his face.
“Well?” she asked, between breaths.
He looked at her. “Are you sure you’re up for this? This is a lot of information to get in one day.”
“Yes … of course, I’m sure.”
“I’m not going to read anymore, unless you promise me you won’t get too upset and faint again.”
“I promise.”
“Well … your medical records look good. You were a very healthy baby.”
“What else?”
Earle picked up the birth certificate. “According to this, it says that your mother’s name was Fritzi Willinka … and I think the last name is … it looks like Juraaablalinskie. Or something like that.”
“What?”
He spelled it out.
“Good Lord! What kind of a name is that?”
“Uh … let’s see. Oh, nationality of mother … Polish.”
“What?”
“Polish.”
“Polish? I don’t even know anyone Polish.”
“Hold on … it says … birthplace of mother … Pulaski, Wisconsin … November 9, 1918. Religion of mother: Catholic.”
“Catholic? Oh, my God. What does it say about the father?”
Earle looked again and then said quietly, “Uh … it says here, father unknown.”
“Unknown? How can it be unknown? What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. It could mean a lot of things. Maybe she didn’t want to say or … I don’t know.”
Then Sookie said, “Oh, my God, Earle … I’m illegitimate. I’m an illegitimate Catholic Polish person!”
“Now, honey … calm down. We don’t know that. We can’t jump to any conclusions.”
“Well, Earle, if you were married to someone, he certainly wouldn’t be unknown, would he? Did she even give me a name?”
“Wait a minute. Yes, here it is. Your birth name is … Ginger Jaberwisnske or however you pronounce it … and you were born at 12:08 P.M., October fourteenth, 1944, weight … eight pounds, seven ounces.”
Sookie slowly sat straight up and said, “Earle, that’s not right.”
“What?”
“1944.”
“Well, honey, that’s what it says. October fourteenth, 1944. Look … there it is in black and white.”
Sookie looked stricken. “Earle, do you know what that means? Oh, my God, I’m sixty years old! Oh, my God—I’m older than you are! Oh, my God!”
“Okay, honey, now just calm down … that’s no big thing.”
“No big thing! No big thing? You go to bed thinking you are a fifty-nine-year-old woman, and the next day, find out you’re sixty!” Sookie felt the blood slowly begin to drain from her face. Earle caught her just before she fell off the couch and hit the floor again.
A few minutes later, after she had come to again and had had a little more brandy, Sookie, who almost never cursed in her life, looked at Earle and said, “And who in bloody hell are the Jerkalawinskies?!”
WHO INDEED!
PULASKI, WISCONSIN
STANISLAW LUDIC JURDABRALINSKI HAD ARRIVED IN CHICAGO ON JANUARY 5, 1909. During his first few years in America, he had worked hauling beer barrels for a local brewery and learned English at night. Sometime later, Stanislaw got a better job building the Chicago and North Western railroad that went from Green Bay, Wisconsin, through a small town called Pulaski.
At the time, Pulaski, Wisconsin, was a tiny village of Polish immigrants who had been lured there by a savvy German landowner. After purchasing the land, he had spread brochures throughout the predominantly Polish neighborhoods in Chicago, Milwaukee, and the Pennsylvania mining regions, hoping to sell plots of land to the large number of Polish immigrants wanting to establish a “little Poland” in America, complete with churches and schools. He had even named the town after Count Casimir Pulaski, the Polish nobleman who fought with the American patriots in the War for Independence, as an added incentive. When the first group of new landowners arrived in Pulaski, they found that the churches and schools the man had advertised in his brochures were yet to be built, so they got busy and built them.
In the year 1916, Stanislaw Jurdabralinski arrived in Pulaski, working for the railroad, layi
ng tracks. While he was there, he boarded with a nice Polish family who had a pretty eighteen-year-old redheaded daughter. In a few weeks, when the railroad moved on, Stanislaw did not. He stayed and settled down in Pulaski with his brand-new wife, Linka Marie.
Stanislaw, never afraid of hard work and always in a hurry to make money, held down a job at the local sawmill in the daytime and one at the pickle-canning factory at night. On Sundays after church, he began studying to become a citizen of the United States. As he sat in their little rented room above Glinski’s Bakery, studying the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, he would get so excited and would read out loud to his wife. “Linka, listen to this. It says, ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Imagine that, Linka. Our country wants us to be happy … and you will be. As soon as I get rich, I’ll buy you a fur coat.”
Linka laughed. “We have to buy a house first.”
“And after I become a citizen, I can say anything I want, and they can’t arrest me, and I can buy a house, and they can’t take it ever away from me never.”
Linka corrected his English. “Away from me, ever.”
“That’s right. And I can own my own business, like Mr. Spierpinski. Oh, just think, Linka, from now on, all our children are going to be Americans, and our grandchildren and their children, too.”
Linka, who at the time was two months pregnant with their first child, said, “Stanislaw … slow down, and study.”
THE PROUDEST DAY OF his life was the day Stanislaw went to Green Bay to be naturalized as a U.S. citizen. As soon as he was sworn in, he immediately grabbed his wife’s hand and ran over to the big courthouse next door so he could apply for his American passport. Linka, trying to keep up with him, asked, “Why do you need a passport so fast, Stanislaw? We’re not going anywhere for a long time.”
“I know,” he said. “But when I get back to Poland, I want them to see how long I’ve been a citizen.”
A few weeks later, when his passport finally arrived in the mail with his smiling photograph inside, he walked all around town, showing it to everyone he met. He would point to his height listed and ask, “Do you know who else was six foot four? Mr. Abraham Lincoln, that’s who.”
A few weeks later, Linka gave birth to their first child, a dark-eyed little girl with black curly hair they named Fritzi Willinka Jurdabralinski, who was her father’s pride and joy. To Linka’s dismay, he would sometimes come home from work, pick her up from her baby bed, and take her to town to the Tick Tock Tavern and show her off.
Two years later came a son they named Wencent Stanislaw Zdislaw Jurdabralinski, and then a year later, twin daughters. One was born a few seconds before midnight on May 31, and the other thirty seconds later on June 1, so they named the first Gertrude May and the other Tula June. Two years later, their youngest, another baby girl, Sophie Marie, was born.
The twins and their baby sister had red hair like their mother, and Wencent, who they nicknamed Wink, was a sturdy little blond boy. Stanislaw was proud of all his children, but his firstborn, Fritzi, remained the apple of his eye. When she was five, he put her up on his shoulders, and they walked up and down Main Street, showing everyone they saw the deed to the land he had worked so hard to buy. “Look at this,” he would say. “ ‘Sold to Stanislaw Jurdabralinski, two acres of land.’ So I own land now … what do you think?” People in town liked Stanislaw. He was always cheerful and was a good man and could be counted on.
A few years later, with a loan from the bank and the help of his friends, Stanislaw built a large two-story brick house with a big kitchen and a long, wide front porch. Within a few years, in order to make a little more money, Linka, who was a wonderful cook, started selling her Polish pastries and sausages to lunchrooms and catering for big church events, while raising her children at the same time. And it wasn’t easy. Her eldest girl, Fritzi, was turning out to be a handful. Always on the go, jumping and running here and there, playing ball with the boys, hanging from trees, jumping off twenty-foot ladders on a dare, she was, in fact, a show-off. But in her father’s eyes, she could do no wrong. He would laugh when Linka told him what Fritzi had done that day. Even when the nuns called them in to speak about Fritzi’s habit of getting into fights with the older boys on the playground, Stanislaw, being a good Catholic man, had nodded and looked serious. But later, he had said nothing to Fritzi.
So, what if she was a little wild? He had a feeling this girl of his was going to be something one day. He knew Linka was hoping one of the girls would be a nun, but Stanislaw was fairly certain it would not be Fritzi.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN POINT CLEAR
EARLE WAS STILL SITTING WITH SOOKIE, TRYING HIS BEST TO CALM her down, but he was having no luck.
“Oh, Earle … my life is over. I’ll never be the same as long as I live.”
“Oh, honey …”
“I’m not who I thought I was … and I never will be again.”
“I know it’s a big shock. It was to me, too, honey. But let’s try to look on the bright side.”
“What bright side?”
“Well, for one thing, aren’t you just a little bit glad that you are not a Simmons?”
“No, I’m not glad! At least when I was a Simmons, I knew who I was and what I had to worry about. Now I don’t know who I am … or what I have to worry about. I feel like I’ve just been abducted by aliens.” Sookie suddenly became short of breath and clutched her chest. “Oh, my God … I think I’m having a heart attack. Oh, my God … I’m going to die and never know who I am!”
“Sookie, just calm down. You are not having a heart attack. You are just fine.”
“No, Earle, I’m not just fine.… I’m a stranger in my own home!”
Earle had her breathe into the paper bag for a few minutes, and she calmed down a little, but her heart was still pounding, and she still felt dizzy. She suddenly grabbed his hand. “Oh, Earle, now that you know I’m not me … will you stop loving me?”
“No! You’re my wife, and I love you. You’ll always be the same wonderful person you always were. Nothing has changed.”
“How can you say that? Everything has changed. I’m an entirely different person than I was, even a few minutes ago.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am so! Yesterday, I was a Southern Methodist English person, and today, I’m a Polish Catholic person with an unknown father.”
“Oh, honey, think about it. If you hadn’t found out anything, wouldn’t you still be the same person?”
“But I did … and now I know I’m not myself. How can I ever be myself again? I was never myself in the first place! And I don’t know why you’re so calm about it. You’ve been married to me all these years, and you have no idea who I am or who my parents were.”
“Sweetheart, it doesn’t matter. You’re the one I’m in love with. Not your parents.”
“But … what about the children? I could be the daughter of a criminal or a mass murderer. You don’t know.” Earle laughed. “It’s not funny, Earle. You can laugh, but I’m the one with two complete strangers’ genes running all through my body. I know about DNA, and it does matter.”
“Oh, honey …”
“No, really, how would you feel if you didn’t know who you were?”
“But, sweetie … we do know. It says right here that you are the daughter of Fritzi—I can’t pronounce the last name—but that’s who your mother was.”
“Yes, but I don’t know her. I wouldn’t know who she was if I fell over her. She could be Doris, the tomato lady, for all I know!”
LATER, EARLE WAS FINALLY able to get Sookie to sit up and eat a little hot soup and a piece of toast, but she cried and blew her nose all through dinner. “I can’t believe I’m not a Simmons. No wonder I’ve never been pretty.”
“Sookie … you are very pretty.”
“Not like Lenore …”
“No, in a different way … but just as pretty, if not more so. I don’t know why you never believed me.”
But Sookie was not listening. “I’m not even a Krackenberry. No wonder I was never as smart as Buck.”
“Sookie, honey, you are smart.”
“No, I’m not. I failed algebra three years in a row. How smart is that, Earle?”
After she had her soup, Sookie sat up for hours reading and rereading the papers, feeling just like she was in the Twilight Zone. It all seemed so unreal. She knew that the baby girl with the strange name listed on the birth certificate was supposed to be her, but she still couldn’t quite believe it. Earle felt terrible and kept walking in and out of the room, asking what he could do, but there was nothing.
At about three-thirty, Earle came in and insisted that she come to bed. But even after Earle turned off the light, her mind was still racing a mile a minute. They say when you are dying, your whole life passes before your eyes. She supposed that was what was happening to her now. Every time she tried to calm down and sleep, something else from her childhood flashed before her eyes, and she’d think about all the things she had done to try and please her mother, trying to be what Lenore thought a Simmons should be. Her hair had always been dark red and straight, and she remembered all those mornings when Lenore had tried to fix her hair for school and how she always looked at it with disappointment and would say, “You don’t have an ounce of curl.” She thought about those hours she had spent at the beauty shop, getting all those horribly smelly permanents, having her hair fried into one big red frizz, trying to please her mother, or else her mother would get discouraged and have it cut in a short straight bob with bangs. All her life, she had either looked like Little Orphan Annie or the little Dutch boy on the can of paint.
Lenore hadn’t liked how dark Sookie’s hair was, either, and at least once a week, would always look at it and say somewhat wistfully, “Of course, when I was your age, I was more of a strawberry blond. I don’t know why your hair turned so dark. It was blond when you were a baby.…”
Sookie had even tried dying her hair strawberry blond, but it had turned a really unattractive shade of pink. She had spent a good part of her freshman year of high school with bright pink hair, long before it was fashionable to have bright pink hair. And for what?