That's My Baby

by Frances Itani

  Despite Billie’s memory loss, sparks of truth erupt. The detail she is capable of bringing forward from the past is sometimes astonishing.

  Hanora thinks about her own memory and wonders if it will fail at some future time. And how she will know if it does start to fail. For the most part, Billie is not aware of memory deserting her, at all.

  For now, Hanora will get things down the best way she can. Mariah Bindle’s diaries and journals beckon, partially read, from a corner of her office. A reminder of work to be done, a deadline to meet. A reminder that Hanora has a profession. That she is a writer whose work is on hold.

  During her second visit to the Bindle relatives, a family member, a triple-great-niece, retrieved a musty folder of papers that had been flattened under the lid of an old school desk in a spare bedroom upstairs, a discovery separate from that of the boxes stored in the shed. The desk, too, had been passed on to the family from the original homestead, which Hanora has not yet visited. In the folder, four drawings were loosely tucked inside a sketchpad. The family urged Hanora to select one for herself.

  After carefully examining the four, she chose a drawing of a mother with a small girl who is crouching over sand at the seashore. The girl has discovered a shell and is looking intently at her specimen. What Hanora loves about the drawing is the way the girl’s mother watches over her from behind. The drawing speaks to Hanora because of the look of love on the mother’s face, the look of wonder on the child’s. She had it simply framed, with a narrow border matching the colour of the sand. It hangs on her office wall. Sometimes, she feels a pang—regret? longing?—when she examines the drawing. Even so, she wants it nearby; she wants it in her space. She has never completed her own private search, but she has not given up, either. The search was set aside long ago, but never put to rest completely.

  Hanora has no intention of abandoning Mariah Bindle and the book she promised to her publisher. One way or another, she will stay with the written word. But first, Billie’s problems must be solved.

  SEPTEMBER 23, 1938

  LOST IDENTITY

  FRIDAY, HANORA’S BIRTHDAY, DEADLINE DAY. She was at the Post by noon and had the typed article in Calhoun’s hands before he could complain. He stood over his desk and carried on a running conversation with himself while he rummaged through the pages. She wondered if he believed he was communicating and decided that, in his own way, he was. One eyebrow, the left, was shaped like an arrowhead in flight, and this made him appear to be on the verge of asking a question, which kept her on her toes. She focused on a spot over his shoulder, the mostly pink world map he’d tacked to the notice board. Ivory-coloured shelves were in disarray along one side of the office. A wooden filing cabinet with locked drawers leaned into the back wall.

  Calhoun looked up. The arrow aimed higher.

  “National Cheese Week is coming up, Hanora. Kicks off the seventh of November. Cheese people will be coming into the area from all over hell’s half acre—pardon the language, glad your good mother isn’t present to hear. Hand over top writing and you’ll be paid top dollar. The Belleville paper and ours will run three articles, and we’ll share the payment—they’ll cover the lion’s share because their readership is so much larger. We need length, thousand words minimum, that’s for each article. Cheese is a million-dollar industry, and ads—I’m talking full-page—will be run in both papers over a three-week period. That’s saying something considering we’re coming out of a Depression, so get yourself to Belleville, start doing your homework. This county will be known someday as the cheese capital of the entire nation, so give the industry its due. You have a few weeks—I’m giving you plenty of time. Go out and interview workers in the cheese factories. Talk to . . . well, use your imagination, get into homes, talk to buyers, talk to dairy farmers. You know what to do. Do you have a friend with a car who can take you to a couple of factories?”

  He knew she would ask Tobe. There weren’t many cars in town. Anyone who owned a vehicle had to have money for gasoline. Nineteen thirty-eight wasn’t as desperate as the earlier years of the Depression, when more than a few families in town had suffered from real hunger, but gasoline was still a luxury.

  “One more thing, Hanora.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When you visit the factories, wear your clothes right side out, will you?”

  She looked down, mortified. Her skirt was inside out, seams showing, hem showing. She told herself she didn’t care.

  On the way home, she kicked at clumps of dried mud along the edge of the sidewalk. A week earlier, there had been rain; now there was nothing but heat. She was thinking over her assignment. As usual, Calhoun had left no room for interruption. Hanora had accepted, as he’d known she would.

  She carried on past Bogart’s, where brooms were tied together, bristles up. A washboard and mangle were stacked on the sidewalk outside the storefront windows. Her inside-out skirt clung to her thighs. The heat and humidity were unusual so late in September; not a wisp of breeze wafted in from the bay.

  I want the work, she told herself. I need the work. But why must I write about cheese?

  She could take the train to Belleville. Buses also travelled to some of the rural areas. Tobe would drive her to a cheese factory. He was the town’s nice guy, a favourite with the girls, though Hanora was the one who treated him—or pretended to treat him—like a brother. But he was more than a brother; she admitted that to herself. Much more.

  Tobe’s family owned two businesses, both under the Staunford name. In the middle of the Depression, despite the shrinking population of the town, Tobe’s father had offered temporary jobs to some of the unemployed men. That gesture had kept hungry families from starvation. Some said it was the Staunfords who kept the town going during the harshest years.

  In winter, families in need supplemented their food supplies by ice fishing out on the bay and trapping small game in the local woods; they earned extra quarters here and there by sawing wood and doing odd jobs around town. Anything helped. One man in town half-soled his children’s shoes, using a sheet of leather and a shoemaker’s last he had in his workshop. He did this for neighbours as well, charging ten cents. New shoes cost $1.99 at Eaton’s, and few families could afford the expense. Everyone compensated, substituted, made do. If an alien had dropped from above and asked about the expression “making do,” there’d have been as many explanations as there were citizens in the town.

  In summer, children and adults picked raspberries on berry farms and were paid a cent and a half per quart. Gooseberries, the same. Hanora could call up hours under the hot sun, an aching back, a stillness falling over the field as each berry picker withdrew into silence.

  A pound of hamburg cost twelve cents, and that was expensive. Boiled up in a pot of water, the pound of meat stretched a long way. Turnips, gnarled and shrunken, were boiled and made into soup. Farmers shared eggs, cream and butter, and traded at the stores for clothing. In late summer the previous year, Hanora’s uncle Jim and aunt Grania had brought in a bushel basket of greengage plums. She and her mother, Tress, worked two straight days putting up plums for winter.

  Tobe’s father, also the previous year, had purchased a second-hand ’34 McLaughlin Buick. The day the sport coupe made its debut along Main Street, several young people in town went to Tobe, begging for a ride. Tobe worked in his father’s office but had use of the car only after his father was satisfied that he could drive safely. Once past that hurdle, Tobe invited Hanora to sit in the place of honour next to the driver’s seat. Most evenings, they pointed the car in the direction of the nearest dance hall. Hanora had also taken her turn squashed into the rumble seat, flattened between bodies, wind whistling in her ears, legs stretched down into the cavernous, sheltered space. The car was designed for two passengers but could take four because of the rumble seat. Never more than five. Tobe’s father’s rule.

  Hanora paused in front of Naylor’s Theatre and crossed the street. People in town were faring better now. Ca
lhoun wrote optimistically about “recovery from the tough years” in his columns. But how many facts would Hanora be able to find out about cheese? More to the point, what did cheese have to do with the life she was trying to create for herself? For some time, she’d been attempting to convince herself that she was on the threshold of change. Details were vague. She desired travel, wanted to move to a city, go abroad; she craved adventure. She wanted everything her small town could not offer, but she wasn’t sure what that might be.

  During the summer, she had secluded herself in her room for days and worked on an article about the Spanish Civil War. She wrote the story of a young man from town, Julian—handsome, gentlemanly Julian—who in 1935 had chipped a front tooth in a crash during a cycle race and had an awkward smile ever after. She’d been attracted to him from afar when she was a student, but he was several years ahead, a senior, a leader. He was also editor of the school paper. Hanora would never know if, like her, he had ambitions of being a writer. He left town quietly, travelling to France and then to Spain to work as a medic for one of the International Brigades. He did not live to come home. He’d been killed in the Civil War, which was still under way. His parents had not yet learned the details of his death; they’d been informed only that he had died.

  Hanora’s story of Julian was published by the Star in Toronto, and she was paid enough to start a savings account. Two days after the article was printed, Julian’s parents came to thank her, a copy of the Star in hand. The father hung his hat on a chairback in the parlour. Hanora looked at him and thought of Julian’s handsome face, his chipped tooth. The mother, wearing black, picked at a thread in her sleeve and began to sob. When they left, her husband had to support her to keep her upright. The two were slumped, defeated by war, by death.

  Hanora wished she had known Julian better. Now there was talk of pulling the International Brigades back from the front lines in Spain. Her uncle Bernard, who ran her grandparents’ hotel at the other end of Main Street, had installed a table-model tombstone radio in the lobby, and she sometimes went there to listen to the news. People from town dropped in to see the new compact radio. A few owned floor models at home, if they had radios at all. Hanora also carried home extra papers and magazines from the hotel. She read everything she could find. She wanted to write more about people her age who had travelled to Spain. She wanted to write about what the decision meant to families left behind. Her own father had left Deseronto in 1914 to join up at the age of twenty, and he’d lived to return, though he was badly wounded in the war that swallowed his generation. She had stopped asking what he’d seen and done because he refused to reply. He read the same papers she did, every one that came to the house, but he would not enter a discussion about war.

  HER parents were standing at the front door when she arrived home. Had they been watching for her? Voices were tense as she stepped in.

  “Can you come to the veranda, Hanora? There’s something we want to discuss.”

  Come to the veranda to discuss what?

  Tress and Kenan went ahead while she kicked off her sandals and walked barefoot from the front of the house to the back. The floorboards cooled the soles of her feet. Sweat trickled down her arms. Her left palm was itchy. Her writing arm, her writing hand. Aunt Grania, her mother’s sister, would say, “Left palm itchy, promise of money.” If the itch was in the left foot, she’d say, “You’ll soon be walking in a foreign land.”

  Thursday’s child, Hanora reminded herself, and wondered what her parents wanted to tell her. I’m Thursday’s child and have far to go.

  Her parents had seated themselves side by side in the enclosed veranda. She plunked down in the one empty chair, which meant that the three of them sat in a row, looking out over the still waters of the bay. Was this something to do with a birthday surprise? If so, why did she suddenly feel trapped? Tress was speaking as if her words were being sucked into an undertow. Her hands were trembling. Kenan’s good eye studied the tiles of the veranda floor.

  A mumble, a declaration.

  “I’m what?” Hanora watched her mother’s face as she stumbled over the words.

  “We’re trying to tell you. We adopted you when you were a baby, two months old. Well, six weeks. We know your exact birthdate. You were born in Toronto, and that’s where you were adopted. We brought you home on the train the day we signed the papers. We were thankful, grateful to have you come to us. Our chosen child. We chose you. We chose you because you’re special.”

  Hanora stared.

  “What are you saying? Sometimes I look like you, sometimes I look like Father. How can I be adopted? I was born in Toronto because you went into labour while you were visiting your aunt. Don’t you remember?” She was aware of speaking wildly, of being on the verge of insisting that she could report the event of her own birth.

  Her parents exchanged a quick glance. More silence. Tress made a harsh movement, shoved her hair behind her ears. Hanora knew the signs. For eighteen years she had watched her mother push at her hair, tuck it back, the signal that she planned to avoid unpleasantness. But her mother was the storyteller of the family; she could spin stories from a slim thread, pull them out of air, alter details as needed, change endings. Surely this was one more story, spun out to entertain and amuse.

  Hanora tried again. Brazen. Daring. Demanding that Tress change the ending.

  “If I’m adopted, why didn’t you tell me before?”

  No answer.

  Kenan had begun to fidget, his own particular sign of discomfort. He tucked his dead hand into his dead-hand pocket. With his good hand, his expert hand, he lifted a brass paperweight from the side table and used its edge to trace invisible shapes onto the wicker armrest. He set it back on the table and drew a long breath.

  “From the time I was a young boy, I was told that I looked like Uncle Oak, who raised me. I was adopted, too. You know that. I was lucky to have an uncle who was so kind. He was good to you, too, when he was alive. He took damned good care of me when I was a child.”

  All of this was true.

  “No need to swear,” said Tress. She pushed her hair back again. “We have loved you,” she said. “Loved you so much.” She added, weakly, “That’s why we couldn’t tell you. We meant to . . . planned to—earlier, years earlier. When you were seven, or eight, or twelve. We’d look at each other and say, ‘Now.’ But there never seemed to be a good time. The right time.”

  At that moment, she saw that her parents had been afraid. Afraid that she would turn on them in some vile way, not being their real child. But she was their real child. They were about to celebrate her birthday. She was an adult. Several of her friends and classmates were already married. Two of her friends had children, babies.

  Their own babies, not adopted.

  Not given-away babies.

  She had a fleeting thought while her parents looked to each other for support once more. Perhaps at seven or eight, I might have found the news exotic.

  “Who are my real parents?”

  “We are your real parents.” Tress paused. “We don’t know who your other parents are.”

  “Which means I’ll never know?”

  “Adoption documents are sealed. That was one of the conditions. No one is permitted to see them once a child has been . . .” Tress stumbled. “Once the mother puts the child up for adoption.”

  Thrown away. Once the child has been thrown out.

  Hanora had begun to listen as if she were a fourth presence in the room. Was she angry? If so, she was aware of experiencing something beyond anger. A collapse of self, a collapse of identity. She might be someone “other” entirely.

  She was instantly depressed by the thought of being someone other.

  How dare you? she wanted to shout. She aimed a hard look at her parents. How dare you tell me I’m adopted? What about my hair? It’s like Aunt Grania’s, the same shade of red. I belong to this family and I belong to both of you, and you belong to me. That’s the way it’s always been. I grew
up in this town. We are all from this town.

  But she did not shout. She sat in the silence that had begun to settle over the room.

  Were her parents telling everything, or were they holding something back? Something she could not, at that precise moment, imagine?

  They must be speaking the truth. Why would they sit her down on her eighteenth birthday and blurt this out if it was not true? Not her parents, no. They loved her. She was sure of that. She did not know how to process the information. She wanted to leave the room. She wanted to leave the house.

  SHE waited until she was in her bedroom upstairs before daring to trace her fingers over the locket with the engraved letter, the cursive letter H, newly suspended from a sturdy chain. Before Hanora left the veranda, Tress had fastened the locket and chain around her neck.

  Her birth mother, she was told, had provided instructions that the gold locket be given to Hanora on her eighteenth birthday. Tress had hidden the locket away all this time. Hanora pressed it to her palm. Her birth mother had owned this, had worn it when she held her tightly.

  And frantically?

  Sorrowfully?

  She would have gazed into Hanora’s face. Beheld her, loved her.

  If she loved her when she was born, did she love her still? Was she alive? Did she give her away and move on? Was she forced to give her away? Who forced her? The letter H—did it stand for Hanora?

  The locket was oval, had a rich, warm lustre. Hanora opened the clasp: no photo. If photos had once been placed there—there was space for two—they had been removed. The back of the locket revealed age, wear. Had it belonged to her birth mother and to someone else? Someone before her mother?