What Was Mine

by Helen Klein Ross

  PRAISE FOR

  what was mine

  “In a tale ripe with opportunities for drama, Helen Klein Ross never puts a foot wrong. She lets the story tell itself, and in so doing heightens both suspense and emotional impact. Readers will be moved to understanding, but never to judgmentalism. A stellar performance, and highly recommended.”

  —Ann Arensberg, National Book Award winner

  “Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous, and always riveting, What Was Mine masterfully makes you question where your sympathy should lie at every turn. I couldn’t put down this fast-paced, fascinating psychological study of motherhood.”

  —Lynn Cullen, bestselling author of Mrs. Poe and Twain’s End

  “Helen Klein Ross has written a truly brilliant book. I’m obsessed by the change this book made in my thinking of what is, and what is not, forgivable.”

  — Abigail Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of A Three Dog Life

  “Helen Klein Ross—like Amity Gaige with Schroder, or Emma Donoghue with Room—takes a shocking premise and uses it to illuminate our human condition. A writer of compelling lucidity and vivid precision, she has compassion for all her characters.”

  — Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman Upstairs

  “Not only a terrific, spellbinding read but a fascinating meditation on the choices we make and the way we love.”

  — Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of The Rumor

  “Helen Klein Ross pulled me into her intimate tale of loss, love, redemption, and forgiveness that had me turning pages long into the night. You’ll fall in love with What Was Mine.”

  — Marci Nault, author of The Lake House

  “Ross’s prose is both readable and enjoyable, and she touches on interesting ideas about identity, family, and the malleability of the human psyche.”

  —Kirkus

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  For my mother, Margaret Whelan Klein and in memory of her mother, Helen Callaghan Whelan

  OLDE CELTIC LULLABY

  Fhuair mi lorg and eich’s a phairc

  Fhuair mi lorg na h-eal’ air an t-snàmh

  Fhuair mi lorg na bà ’sa pholl

  Cha d’fhuair mi lorg mo chubhrachain

  I found tracks of the horse in grass on the hill

  I found tracks of the swan on the shore of the pond

  I found tracks of the cow in the daffodils

  But I found no trace of my fragrant wee one

  part one

  I looked around, as anyone would, for its mother.

  Nothing was there. What did I know about lambs?

  Should I pick it up? Carry it . . . where?

  —ANNE STEVENSON, “THE ENIGMA”

  1

  lucy

  Kidnap. Parse the word. It ought to mean lying down with baby goats. Words can be so misleading.

  I can’t tell my story straight. I have to tell it in circles, like rings of a tree that signify the passage of time.

  Shall I start with how badly I wanted a child?

  I did try to have a baby the conventional way, although Warren and I didn’t pursue parenthood in the first years of our marriage. When we married, I was twenty-five, he was twenty-six. We thought we had all the time in the world.

  At first, we devoted ourselves to our respective careers. He: jostling ahead of other associates at a consulting firm; I: spending long, fluorescent hours at an ad agency searching for selling propositions unique enough to propel me from a drywall cubicle to a windowed office.

  After three years, Warren had secured a place toward the top of his “class” and I had been promoted from a cubicle to an office with a small but undeniable window. My name was etched in a metal bar affixed to the door, and sometimes, finding myself alone in the corridor, I’d polish the bar with the end of a sleeve, shining it as if it were a medal, which indeed it was.

  We lived in the city, which in that part of the world, in that century, meant Manhattan. We rented half of the top floor of a narrow brownstone only blocks away from the Central Park Zoo. East Sixty-Fourth Street was a perfect location in which to raise a child, I’d think on early-morning runs under the zoo’s clock tower. It marked the half hour with musical chimes and the twirl of bronze goats and bears and kangaroos. Perhaps it still does. I’d sometimes stop running to take in the show and imagine watching it someday with a baby in a jogging stroller. But we weren’t ready for babies, not yet. We couldn’t have a baby in that apartment. It was a fifth-floor walk-up and I couldn’t imagine being pregnant and walking up five flights of stairs several times a day. And no way could we make 540 square feet include life with an infant, or the well-appointed life with an infant we projected on mental screens constantly running the movie of our future selves.

  The suburbs were a better place to raise a baby, Warren insisted. He was from the Bronx, but spoke authoritatively. I had my doubts, having grown up in a suburb, but was eventually swayed by the abundance of space and natural light we discovered answering ads for houses for sale outside the city. Space and light were things we couldn’t afford in the heating-up market of 1982 Manhattan real estate. I assumed space and light were prerequisites for a happy childhood. But that was before I had a child.

  What made us ready to have a baby was that we both turned thirty and Warren lost his dad. We stopped feeling like kids ourselves and started wanting to have them. Also, ridiculous as it sounds now—Prince Charles and Lady Di had just had a baby, which added to the zeitgeist of procreation.

  We started to shop for houses in Westchester, but one train trip to Bronxville convinced Warren to switch our sights to New Jersey. “Everyone on the Metro-North platform wears the same raincoat,” he said. This surprised me. In fact, Warren wore the same raincoat they did, and the same ties, too: dark-colored silks striped or specked by rows of tiny geometrics. But I understood then, as I hadn’t before, that he wanted to be seen as a man who marched to a different tune. This should have been a warning to me.

  We bought an updated colonial in Upper Montclair, paying extra because the yard was just inside the preferred school zone. We celebrated the signed contract with a champagne-soaked dinner in Manhattan and took the subway back to our apartment, which now seemed even smaller. We began that night pursuing parenthood with purpose and exuberance. How freeing it felt to let what we called my Frisbee idle inside its pink plastic clamshell as we made love without it. Soon we were happily trying new things on our new king-size mattress in our new king-size bedroom in New Jersey. We had a goal and this suited both of us. We were goal-oriented people, it was one of the traits that had attracted us to each other in college. We’d met at Cornell, in a co-ed dorm, a new housing option where sexes were segregated by floor. There was a snack machine in the basement and all I first saw of Warren was his blond hair tinged green by its neon light. We were both taking breaks from all-night cram sessions. He kicked the machine into releasing a package of corn chips for me. Seven years later, we married.

  We assumed that having a baby would simply be a matter of trying. In fact, we’d gotten pregnant before without trying. I’d been “in trouble” with Warren during our senior year of college. It wasn’t a question for either of us whether or not I should keep it. We didn’t have money for a baby then, nor the inclination. He’d borrowed money from a friend who gave him the name of a doctor. It was 1975, abortion had only recently been legalized, and it sti
ll took care to find a doctor who wouldn’t kill you along with your unwanted baby. I was grateful to Warren for making the arrangements, but we were both surprised that, in the days leading up to my appointment, I began to wonder if I’d be able to go through with it. My second thoughts didn’t come from fear of the doctor or from my being religious, though I’d been raised a Catholic. I’d chuffed off religion while still learning it from the nuns in convent school. My change of heart about having an abortion came from a growing sense that something human was flourishing inside me and that I did not wish to assert dominion over the life of this other, no matter how small and nascent its stage of development. I’d been mesmerized as a child by photos of an embryo in Life magazine. The thing inside me had lips and toes and a brain.

  “It’s not a baby, it’s a lima bean,” Warren protested, pointing to a drawing in his premed roommate’s biology text. But I couldn’t think of what I was carrying, no matter how small, as something inanimate, a disposable object.

  Yet—what else could I do? I couldn’t take care of a baby and knew I wouldn’t be able to give birth to one and open my arms and give it away. I wasn’t that generous. I apologized to it for what I was planning to do. I spoke to it silently, words that I passed from my brain through my heart. “Come back in a few years,” I whispered again and again.

  Then, the day before my appointment, the baby came out of its own accord. There was blood in the toilet. It didn’t look like a baby, it looked like a clot, but I knew what it was and left it for Warren to see when he came over. We stared at it silently for a while, then flushed it together, his fingers curled over mine on the handle. As the swirl of red disappeared into white porcelain, I felt a cavern of sadness open up in me, which didn’t make sense, as what happened was the very thing we meant to have happened, only now we could cancel the expensive appointment.

  After some months of trying, Warren and I were both surprised that zealous effort hadn’t resulted in my getting pregnant again. I faithfully popped vitamins, gave up alcohol and sushi, swam strengthening laps at a health club before getting on the bus to work. Sometimes I’d feel a twinge deep inside when we made love, and be certain it was the feel of a baby being implanted. Afterward, I’d will myself not to move on the bed, so as not to dislodge the bud of our baby. But month after month, my body betrayed me.

  Books advised buying certain equipment and soon our bedroom resembled a chemistry lab: graph paper, colored pencils, a thermometer to take my temperature before I got up. Our experiments failed, though we didn’t know why—they always proved successful on paper. I began to fear something I never shared with Warren—that our lost baby had somehow warned others off me, spreading word that I was a hostile environment.

  After a year, we went to a fertility clinic and soon became fluent in its harsh language: harvested eggs, assisted hatching, embryo selection. The whole thing was ugly and complicated and hard on us both. Warren had to work himself up to giving me injections, which he learned how to do on an orange in shot class. I’d lower my pants and curl against him on the bed, closing my eyes and bracing myself for the jab. The first time he did it, the shot took so long in coming, I looked behind me to see what was the matter.

  After two tries at the clinic, Warren insisted we stop going because insurance wouldn’t pay anymore. Without insurance, the treatments were prohibitively expensive, more than we had put down on the house. Warren wouldn’t consider adoption. He said he didn’t want to inherit someone else’s problems. Problems are just as likely to happen to kids you give birth to, I told him, reminding him that plenty of people had problems with kids they hadn’t adopted. Agencies screen for health problems, I assured him. But Warren wouldn’t listen.

  Dealing with infertility means you’re always poised at a fork in the road, staring down two paths: life with a baby or life without. Warren was already setting off on the life without, accommodating himself to childlessness, acquiring fantasies that having babies precluded: exotic vacations, vintage convertibles—but these things stirred no desire in me.

  I was reminded countless times in the course of each day of my inability to accomplish what came easily to others. Things I’d barely noticed before now seemed fraught with accusation. Childproof caps. Family-size cereal. Car windows boasting Baby on Board!

  Some mornings before work, I’d stare out our front window, a bay window which I’d come to think of as pregnant, and see people in suits walking children to bus stops, children they ignored or tugged at impatiently. One mother dragged her toddler on a leash, jerking him from objects that caught his attention. So many people had children they didn’t deserve. Every day in the papers, newborns turned up in garbage dumps or parents left babies to care for themselves. One father grew so impatient getting his kids ready for school, he took a gun out of his sock drawer and shot them.

  As years went by and our childlessness continued, I tortured myself with how many images the word “barren” could conjure: a dried-up field burned brown by the sun. A frozen tundra. A dust bowl or desert where nothing can grow.

  A friend at the office suggested visualization, to which she attributed her house in Southampton. Picture it, she said, and it will come true. Why not? I thought. I had nothing to lose. I outfitted the spare bedroom with a crib, pine rocker, a cheerful border of ducks on the wall. I’d sit in the rocker and close my eyes, imagining a small weight in my arms, rocking back and forth, back and forth, as if I could rock myself to where I wanted to go.

  When Warren left me, I was thirty-five, the age grandmothers died in the Middle Ages.

  2

  warren

  Trying to get Lucy pregnant was fun at first, but soon the sex was like a part-time job. There were certain days, even hours we had to clock in. If one of us had to stay late at the office, we had to borrow an apartment. There wasn’t even the pretense of romance about it. It got so that even when we were in the middle of things, Lucy had her eye on the clock, worrying we wouldn’t make deadline. “Hurry up,” she said once, which had the opposite effect than the one she’d intended.

  Once we got started at the clinic, I had to do my part in a room marked Collections, a closet, really. I tried to relax in a fake leather recliner with a paper pad spread over the seat, watching TV, whichever porn video I’d picked out of the box, trying to ignore sounds of other guys waiting their turns outside the door. Needless to say, I preferred giving at home, but we lived in New Jersey. The clinic was in midtown Manhattan. Which meant that, to get to the lab in time—sperm is only viable for about an hour—I had to drive like mad, hoping there was no tunnel traffic, with a baggie taped to my abs, under a down vest to keep it at body temperature. This was before they figured out how to freeze it.

  The worst thing was having to give her injections. There was a reason I went into business instead of to med school. I’d hated needles since I was a kid. I’ll never forget the first time I had to give her a shot. She was kneeling on the bed, waiting, her trusting butt in my face. I was holding the syringe, when I turned and saw our shadows huge on the wall. I looked like a monster about to knife her. I hurried to do what I had to do with the needle before she looked up and saw that monster, too.

  At a certain point, I realized a baby wasn’t going to happen for us. But I couldn’t get Lucy to see it. And nobody but me was willing to put an end to the quest. Everyone else had a vested interest in keeping our hopes up. The leader of our counseling group at the clinic worked for the makers of Pergonal, one of the biggest infertility drugs at the time. The drugs made her look pregnant. Her breasts got engorged. She put on an extra ten pounds, not her fault, and began to waddle because the drugs hyperstimulated her uterus, making walking painful for her. Walking! Forget sex. We’d stopped having it if it wasn’t on schedule.

  I tried to reason with Lucy: We shouldn’t go on. We should resign ourselves to the fact we weren’t having a baby. She was enough for me. It made me sad I wasn’t enough for her.

  I didn’t realize how crazy the baby
thing was making her until one night, I came home from a business trip and saw she’d turned the guest room into a nursery. Completely outfitted: crib, rocker, even a border of ducks on the wall. When I saw those ducks—in permanent paper, not tester strips you can peel—it was like a cold hand slapping my face, waking me up, making me see how far out of control things had gotten.

  Lucy and I stayed technically married for a year after that, but we’d already separated, at least in my mind. By then, she wanted only one thing from me and I couldn’t give it to her. I met Sasha at work. She was a new hire and I fell for her the first time I saw her in the elevator. I’m not proud of that. But we’ve been married now for twenty-one years. I have to say it was a relief to be with someone with whom I didn’t share a giant problem. We had two kids right away. I put that pressure on. She’s ten years younger than Lucy, but one thing I learned going to all those fertility classes—putting off kids, for women, is like Russian roulette. The older the eggs, the higher the chances of problems.

  Lucy and I didn’t keep up, but I ran into her at our twenty-fifth college reunion. It was good to see her again. She had her daughter with her. Cute kid, doing cartwheels on the quad. Lucy said she was adopted. That was over ten years ago. We didn’t keep in touch.

  3

  lucy

  After Warren left, I toyed with the notion of sperm donors and even called for the literature. But my sister put me off the idea. Cheryl’s a nurse. She said my baby could have hundreds of siblings. I imagined the sperm donor as a Pied Piper, followed by midgets who looked just like himself. I didn’t want to do that to a child. In my experience, one sibling is plenty.

  I looked into adoption, but this was the late 1980s. The irony was, now that I’d separated from my spouse who didn’t want to adopt, I couldn’t adopt because I was single. I couldn’t get approval, unless I went to China, but I’d read up on Chinese adoptions—their process took years. My best bet was to do a private adoption. Private adoptions were beginning to be popular, mostly in the Midwest. I got an art director at work to help me place an ad in the Kansas City Star. I liked the idea of a baby from Kansas. I began to dream of a house twirling in air, bringing a baby to me.