The English American

by Alison Larkin

  “It’s not just some of the adoptive parents,” Pete says. “It’s also the Catholic Church. They’re deliberately distorting the facts. They know that in the states where records are open, abortion rates have actually dropped, but they pretend it’s the other way around.”

  “But why would the Church do that?”

  Pete’s laugh is tempered by something else.

  “Some say the bishops are nervous that priests who have been birth fathers will be in a whole lot of trouble if the birth mothers are found. Not just the bishops, either. There’s a lot of more-moral-than-thou political types who’d look pretty bad if the adoption records were opened. Find the birth mothers and that leads to the name of the fathers.”

  Of course.

  “America is full of adopted kids who will die earlier than necessary because they’re being stopped from finding out the truth about their own medical histories. Heck, it makes me mad!”

  “Yes,” I say, “I can see that.”

  The injustice of it takes me away from myself for a moment as I listen to this low American voice talking to me from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of the country from which I came.

  “And the crazy thing—the thing the people in power and the people who make money from adoption are trying to keep quiet—is that ninety-eight percent of birth mothers actually want to be found!”

  “There’s a relief!” I say. I’m sipping a cup of Darjeeling tea. My head is spinning as I try to take all of this in.

  “The two percent of birth mothers who don’t want to be found—well, they have the same right as any other American citizen to take out an injunction if they don’t want contact.”

  My heart tightens at the thought of it. My God. Treating an adopted person who just wants to meet her mother like a stalker would be the greatest cruelty of all.

  “I’m a Christian,” Pete says. “I read the Bible. And it says in the Bible, right there, clear, pure and simple: ‘The truth shall set you free.’”

  After I hang up the phone, his last words ring in my head as I drift into the first full night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks: “They think they’re doing God’s work in keeping you and your mother apart. But really they’re doing the work of the devil.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I’M NOT GOING TO WRITEwhat happened next, bit by bit. I could go into great detail, describing the trembling that just won’t stop, not even when Pete calls giving me Billie’s details, telling me he’s given her mine. The standing in the middle of the room unable to move. The whirlwind in my head. All that.

  People don’t want to know about the darkest bits, do they? They don’t want to know about the banshees dancing like furry black demons through your dreams in the night.

  I will say this: It nearly kills me, the waiting. The uncertainty. The fear that she will change her mind.

  But I’d rather write about the elation when she sends me an e-mail. Finally, at last, for the first time in twenty-eight years, I know who, and where, and how she is.

  DATE: July 25

  TO: pippa-dunn@hotmail.com

  FROM: BillieP@earthlink.net

  Dear Daughter,

  I named you Courtney when you were a tiny baby in my arms. Pete says they renamed you Pepper? It’s hard for me to think of you as anything other than Courtney, after so many years picturing you as Courtney, but I’ll do my best.

  I am trying hard to hold myself down long enough to write to you, but it’s hard, honey. I have a daughter! How blessed I feel! How full! How healed! I am so excited I can hardly breathe. This kind of excitement used to take me over when I was your age. It gets easier, I promise. People of our nature have difficulty in concentrating for a long time when we’re going through something intense—and this certainly qualifies as intense!

  I have longed for this moment my whole life, and now it’s finally here I feel so happy I’m going to have to be careful not to expire of ecstasy.

  It sounds as if your creativity knows no bounds! Writing plays, playing the piano, singing! I used to be an art agent, but I was spending all my time dealing with contracts. I wanted to work with the artists themselves, nurturing their talent, helping them be everything they could, and so I left the mainstream art world and set up a company called Art Buddies to do just that! We’re growing steadily and have already helped launch the careers of some very successful people. As you can imagine, when I learned that you had written a play, I was all the way to thrilled.

  I have one son—Ralph—by my husband. He’s nineteen years old and will be thrilled to meet you.

  I am fifty years old (which you must know) and I have never in my life received a message as welcome as the one that you have arrived in a state of readiness to meet me. I am here to be near my father. “Here” is a very beautiful spot in the Blue Ridge mountains of north Georgia. Other than the fact that the cancer’s only giving him two months or so to live, your grandfather is in fine fettle. Into the midst of all the sadness I feel at losing my beloved father, comes you.

  Oh Courtney, if you could come before he passes, it would mean so much to him, and to me. Would you come here? Before Daddy dies?

  Please put me out of my misery and just come.

  With all my love, Mother xxxx

  There is only one person with whom I feel I can share what I feel when I read this letter.

  DATE: July 25

  TO: NickDevang@bankglobal.net

  FROM: pippa-dunn@hotmail.com

  Dear Nick,

  She’s alive and well and wants me to come and see her. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. There’s a whirlwind in my head, circling round and round at top speed. I wish, wish, wish it would stop.

  I feel numb, then joyful, then afraid. I can’t move. Help me.

  And, because on this night everything is falling into place, he writes back immediately.

  DATE: July 25

  TO: pippa-dunn@hotmail.com

  FROM: NickDevang@bankglobal.net

  Pippa, hang in. Once I had made the decision to find him, I had no peace until I was able to actually touch the phantom father I’d longed for all my life. Only then could he move out of my imagination and become real.

  Go to her. As soon as you can. I’ll be thinking of you during the day, and no doubt dreaming of you at night as you embark on your adventure.

  Let me leave you with a few lines from Ayn Rand, if I may:

  “I’m waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “My kind of people.”

  “What kind is that?”…

  “I can tell my kind of people by their faces. By something in their faces.”

  Chapter Twelve

  ONE OF THE PROBLEMSfor a girl meeting her mother for the first time as a fully grown adult is what to wear. Billie’s the owner of a company. I don’t want to put her off. So the next day—another rainy London day—I go to Laura Ashley, where I settle on the dark blue dress with the white lace collar, as per Charlotte’s suggestion.

  When I get home, I find Mum in my kitchen. She has been at the flat all day, throwing out stale food, washing and ironing my clothes, and cleaning dirty ashtrays. Unspeakable chaos has been transformed into order.

  I’m so grateful, for a moment I can’t speak.

  Mum’s wearing the shiny plastic apron she gave me for Christmas, which she must have found at the bottom of my cupboard. It’s got a bowl of fruit on it.

  “Oh, darling,” Mum says. “You’re absolutely soaking wet. Don’t you have a raincoat?”

  “I couldn’t find it, and I was running late, so…”

  “It was under the bed,” she says, “I hung it up. You can wear it tomorrow if it’s still raining. Oh, darling. Come in, for goodness sake.”

  I don’t move. My throat aches with the strain of trying not to cry. I know this thing I have to do is hard for her, whatever she says.

  “I’m so sorry, Mum, about the birth mother thing,” I say finally. “I’m sorry I have to do it. You do know it
doesn’t mean I don’t love you, you do know that, don’t you?”

  I long to hug my mother, but I know she won’t like that. She’s wearing her light blue cashmere jumper, and I’m dripping all over the rug.

  Mum goes to the airing cupboard, gets out one of the towels she folded an hour before, and hands it to me. Then she goes into the kitchen, puts on the kettle, and takes out the roast chicken she’s cooking in the oven. Hugged or not, I feel calmed by her presence, and I eat my first full meal in days.

  “You did this when you were a baby, you know,” Mum says.

  “What?”

  “You stopped eating.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Soon after you were born. They took you to a foster home, because they weren’t sure you’d make it. Apparently there had been some sort of trauma at your birth, and you were reacting badly, and they didn’t want to give us a baby that might die, because it could be upsetting. It was probably nothing. You know how dramatic the Americans can be.”

  I smile. So does she.

  “Anyway, for whatever reason, they took you to a foster home and said we could either wait for you or apply for another baby if we preferred.”

  “God, I’m glad you didn’t take them up on that!”

  “So am I, darling.” Mum smiles at me and pats my hand across the table.

  We sit quietly for a moment. I’ve never heard this story before. I don’t want her to stop talking.

  “What was the trauma, Mum?”

  “They wouldn’t tell us,” Mum says. “Only that it was life-threatening. We didn’t feel it was our place to ask what happened. I told Mrs. Dillard that we would take our chances, and she said that in that case I could go and visit you at the foster home. I went every day.”

  “What was the home like?”

  “Small. And there were several babies, all lying in cots in the same room. I think the foster mother, who was very nice, had rather too many babies to look after, so she didn’t have time to pick you up much.”

  It’s dark outside now. The English rain is drizzling into the plant pot containing a long-dead cactus. The Abbey bell rings. The fridge hums.

  “When I first saw you, you were all scrunched up and you looked as nervous as I was. You were so tiny, and I felt so big, and I had no idea what to do with you. But when I did pick you up, it felt quite natural, and we both calmed down.”

  Just like today. I look across at the still, kind, wise face of the mother I’ve known all my life, and my heart hurts.

  “I went to the foster home every day after that, and fed you your bottle, and you’d stare at me while you were drinking your milk. I told you that everything was going to be all right, and you hung on to my finger for dear life.

  “Each day, when it was time for me to leave, I gave you a little kiss. And you clung to me, and I held your tiny heart against mine and felt it calming down until you fell asleep. Then I’d lay you down in your cot, creep quietly away, and come back at the same time the next day. The foster-care people said your condition started to improve after I started coming to visit you. Within six weeks you were home and our new family had begun.”

  As Mum talks, she’s a young woman again. She’s not with me in the kitchen. She’s with the baby that was.

  “Once a week, Deidre Martin, Sally Thorne, and the other expat wives would get together at somebody’s house and have tea. You wouldn’t let anyone pick you up except me, you know! Once I left you with Deidre while I popped out for five minutes. You were so cross, you turned blue and were sick all over the Dutch ambassador’s wife.”

  Her laugh is clear and young. I laugh too.

  “But then,” she says, “on your first birthday, something happened, for no reason I could ascertain. It was as if, after weighing everything up, you decided that the world was a safe place after all, and you stopped fussing and clinging whenever I went out and simply decided to be happy. You were a very easy child after that, and not just with me, with everybody.”

  I ache with love for this woman I can’t quite reach. Mum and Charlotte have always managed to click quite naturally. But not Mum and me. Perhaps it’s because Charlotte grew in her tummy and I didn’t. I don’t know.

  “Darling,” she says, “nothing can affect our feelings for each other, whatever happens.”

  We don’t say “I love you” in England. Not like the Americans do. I think the British find it embarrassing, generally speaking.

  Right now I wish Mum and I were American so I could tell her I love her. Straight. Just like that. But we’re not. And Mum would hate it. So I don’t.

  “The woman at the agency said I should take it slowly, not jump in.”

  “Nonsense!” Mum says. “You’re a jumper! Just like at the swimming pool. You’ve always preferred to plunge right in.” In some ways she knows me better than anyone.

  I don’t say anything—we both know that she and Charlotte pussyfoot around the sides of swimming pools that are eighty-five degrees, dipping their toes in and out, taking half an hour to get in up to their waists.

  I grin at her. She smiles back. She looks sad, for a moment.

  I rise and scrape the chicken bone off my plate. Mum puts on a pair of plastic yellow washing-up gloves, picks up the Fairy Liquid, and starts on the dishes. I dry and put them away in the cupboard. When we’re finished, there’s no clutter to be seen. The kitchen looks cleaner than it has in months, and I am greatly comforted by it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  FIVE DAYS LATER,Dad is driving at top speed down the narrow country roads that, after an hour or so, will lead to the M25 and Heathrow Airport. He doesn’t speak. Mum is reminding me to keep my passport zipped inside my purse, so it doesn’t get stolen, like it did when I came back from Rajasthan.

  Dad switches on Radio 4. Libby Purves is interviewing a man who crossed the North Pole on his own.

  “Must have been bloody cold,” Dad says.

  “Yes,” Mum says.

  We whiz past the post office in Pease Pottage, where I used to buy large round sherbet lollipops that lasted for hours.

  “I might hate her,” I say.

  “Libby Purves?” Mum says.

  “No, Mum,” I say. “Billie.”

  “Nonsense,” Mum says. “Of course you won’t hate her.”

  Libby Purves’s end-of-program theme tune fills the car.

  “I hope Marjory stops patting you on the back,” I say, trying to make a joke of it. Ever since Mum told her friends at the sewing club that I was about to meet my birth mother, people have been cornering her in odd places and asking in low tones if Mum’s “all right.”

  Mum’s voice has an unusual edge to it. “I think it’s best if we don’t tell anybody else. Do you know, Jilly actually came up to me in Waitrose and said, ‘You’ve been a terrific mother to Pippa, she’ll be back.’ I wanted to clock her!”

  I need some fresh air. I open the window a crack.

  “Don’t open the window!” Dad says. “You’ll let the cool air out!”

  Dad’s finally bought a car with air-conditioning.

  “Sorry.” I close the window again. Hedges, trees, green fields with cows and sheep in them seem to zoom past the window, like a film in fast-forward.

  “Everybody seems to think I’m feeling hurt and rejected,” Mum says. “Including you, Pippa. But I’m not! Honestly, darling. I’m not. You need to go and do this. You’re in a terrible muddle, and if going to find this woman helps you sort this muddle out, I’m all for it. Besides, you’re only going for two weeks! You traveled around India for six months!”

  “Ssssssh!” Dad says. “I want to hear the cricket!”

  If you think cricket is dull on television, try listening to it on the radio. Mum and I shut up anyway.

  The plane is delayed, so Mum, Dad, and I sit at the airport drinking lukewarm tea from Burger King cardboard cups. A man lights up in the smoking section, twenty feet away. Dad wrinkles his nose and coughs, loudly.

  “Alasdair!”
Mum warns.

  It’s too late. Dad’s up and moving. He marches over to the smoking section, heads straight for the young man with a crew cut, cigarette, and face that looks like a bulldog, and says, “Can’t you point that thing in the other direction? We’re choking in here!”

  The man is capable of knocking Dad into the next room. Instead, a kind of miracle happens and he stubs out his cigarette.

  Then, as if it’s news, Dad barks, “Don’t you know those things cause cancer?” and marches triumphantly back to our table.

  We drink half our tea and then carry my bags over to the check-in counter. My squashy red suitcase bursts open as soon as I put it down.

  “For God’s sake, Pippa,” Dad says. “How many times have I told you? If you pack your suitcase too full, the zip will break!”

  “Never mind, Dad,” I say, in a merry voice. Rummaging about in the bag I bring out a pair of striped tights. “These’ll do the trick.” I tie the tights around the bag and lift it back onto the scale.

  Mum takes Dad aside and talks to him quietly.

  Fifteen minutes later, we’re standing at the customs gate on opposite sides of the metal barrier.

  I turn to Mum, kiss her on the cheek, and pat her on the back. I can’t speak. She responds by kissing me on the cheek, patting me on the back, and saying, “Good luck, darling.”

  Dad is trying to smile. He reaches into the pocket of his maroon shirt with the lion on it and, patting me on the shoulder, hands me a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate. “Here you are,” he says.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “It’s for the flight, darling.” Dad’s voice is gentle. “And Pippadee,” he says, “try not to eat it all at once.”

  His eyes are twinkling and he’s smiling now. He knows the chances of the chocolate bar lasting for more than ten minutes after take-off are nil. I smile back.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  With a lump in my throat, I sling my handbag over my shoulder. I turn around to blow them a kiss, but they’re already walking toward the car park, with their arms criss-crossed behind each other’s backs.