That's My Baby
Page 4
She resolved to find out.
And what of her father? Who was he?
Where?
She sat on the edge of her bed. She knew that Tress and Kenan had not moved from the veranda since she’d come upstairs. She knew that Tress had noticed the inside-out skirt, and had not said a word. The skirt was not the concern. For the first time, Hanora wondered if Tress and Kenan were unable to have children. She wondered if they felt shame because of that. If that was why they adopted her.
There has to be a memory, she told herself. Something stored from infancy, something gathered into the cells. She closed her eyes and willed such a memory to surface. Tried to conjure a mother’s face she would never fail to recognize. A voice, a tone, the singing of a nursery rhyme, a lullaby. A voice that had accompanied her through life so far. One to which she had not yet paid attention.
She went to the bureau and scrutinized herself in the central bevelled mirror. Adjusted the wing mirror on either side and looked into three versions of herself. Features fell away one by one: broad forehead, rounded chin, green eyes, pale skin, a few freckles, red hair. She’d been told that her Irish ancestors had bestowed the red hair. There were redheads in the extended family. Aunts, uncles, her cousin Billie in New York. Thinking of New York, she wondered if she should leave town and move there to share an apartment with Billie. As cousins, they’d always been compatible, conspiratorial, even though Hanora was several years younger. Billie had come to Canada many times to visit; Hanora had never been out of the province, not even to cross Lake Ontario. They’d exchanged letters ever since they could print. Every summer during Billie’s childhood, her mother had escorted her across the Great Lake by steamer to visit. Billie assumed the role of leader, took charge, counted on Hanora to look up to her. Hanora was happy to take on the role of adoring cousin.
She stared into the mirror again. She saw someone with a slender figure, long legs, long stride. A not-too-bad singing voice. She had participated in school musical productions, but she planned to be a writer, not a singer. No one in the family had been either. Now she was not so certain.
Whose hands did she have? Facial expressions? Temperament, personality traits? Were her birth parents clever, practical, hard-working, intellectual? Were they like her? Was she like them?
Were they alive?
She understood with sudden clarity that she no longer had anyone to resemble. No outside definition of herself. Her story, the story of herself, had altered. Her known past had been wiped away.
She breathed deeply, lined up her thoughts.
She had a gold locket, no photo inside. She had a birthdate, a city, information that she’d been adopted at six weeks of age. A trail was beginning and would have to lead somewhere.
Where had she lived, and with whom, during the first six weeks of her life? What was she to do with this partial information when the key people were unknown?
I am Hanora Oak, she told herself. Hanora Oak and someone else. Someone who lives in the imaginations of a mother and a father I do not know. A shadow of myself.
No, she was the shadow of the other Hanora, the real Hanora, who had existed before her. The one whose existence had begun with a different set of parents.
She would follow the trail she’d been given, faint though it might be. She would find the other Hanora and make her real. She would merge the two. She would not stop looking, even if the trail disappeared. She vowed that she would never stop looking.
IN THE ROWBOAT
YOU NEED TIME TO THINK,” SAID BREEDA. “You’re in shock. I’m in shock hearing this. It’s so dramatic.”
Hanora hadn’t stormed out of the house, but she had left quietly. Breeda was a close friend, the only daughter of Calhoun, the editor Hanora worked for. Breeda was born on New Year’s Day 1920, shortly after midnight; Hanora was born September 23 of the same year. They had attended school together, same rooms, same teachers. They’d shared the same stretch of Main Street, same shore of the bay, same excitements, miseries, books, parties, and many of the same friends. Breeda had never tried to come between Hanora and Tobe. She understood, from the beginning, that those two had a different kind of friendship, special in its own ways.
The two young women were in Calhoun’s rowboat out on the bay. Hanora was at the oars, barefoot, rowing fiercely. She welcomed the resistance, the pull of the boat as it sliced through water. When they were far enough from shore, they tugged their skirts high above their knees and stretched their legs to the sun. There were puddles at their feet, and Hanora splashed her toes against the floorboards and watched the droplets settle back. She raised the oars and allowed the boat to drift while she repeated, again and again, the conversation she’d had with her parents.
“I’m sorry, Breeda. I need to keep talking.” She did not try to hold back the tears.
“Keep talking, then. What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? There’s nothing to do. This is something that happened when I was six weeks old. I was given away.”
“I’ll ask my dad. After all, he was editor of the Post the year you and I were born. He’s known everyone’s business for decades. His memory is remarkable.”
“Your dad wouldn’t tell us anything. This place keeps secrets. It always has. You and I both know that. Anyway, what would anyone here know? I was born in the city. I would have appeared on the scene, suddenly, to a mother who wasn’t pregnant. Or maybe she told people she was pregnant and travelled for months before going to Toronto to adopt me. Whatever transpired, people have kept quiet since that day.”
“Or minded their own business. That’s the line I’m always given at home. ‘We mind our own business.’”
“Despite your father putting out the news. Well, I don’t want him becoming a sleuth on my behalf.”
“All right, then. I won’t say anything. But you’re in shock. And now you have this wonderful old locket. Let me look at it again. Too bad there isn’t a picture inside.”
“A picture of someone who could tell me who I am.”
“We need to get out and do something. It’s Friday. The new dance hall in Belleville, the Trianon, has just opened. We could go there.”
“Not far enough.”
“What about Tweed? There’ll be a dance at the Pavilion. It’s all jitney dancing Friday nights. You haven’t been there yet. Canoes and rowboats glide in at the back, just below the dance floor. Some couples go out onto the lake in the afternoon and come in to dance in the evening. If we’re lucky there’ll be moonlight. We can ask Tobe to drive us.”
“I don’t know if he’s available.” But the thought of driving with Tobe made her feel better. At this moment she wanted nothing more than his calm presence beside her.
“He’ll make himself available. He’ll do anything for you, and you know it. You need to get away from home to think this through, Hanora. You and I could stay the weekend at my aunt’s house. You remember Aunt Marlo; you’ve met her at my place. Maybe Tobe will come back to pick us up on Sunday.”
“I won’t ask him to drive there twice.”
“We’ll take the train back, then. We have to change in Yarker and Napanee. That’s easily done.”
“And your aunt? On such short notice?”
“She’ll be overjoyed to see us. She loves to have me visit. Her house is across the road from the Pavilion, right across from Stoco Lake. We can stay out as late as we like and no one will be listening when we come through the front door. When I was ten, I used to sit on the wooden dock behind the Pavilion and swing my legs over the water. At my aunt’s, I slept upstairs on the open veranda and held my eyelids open so I could stay awake to listen to the music. If the weather stays warm, we can drag a mattress out there. We can talk all night if we want to. After we dance. We’ll dance first.”
Hanora laughed, but through her tears. “Dancing will be good. I could run fifteen miles without being tired. And I’m not going to hang around to see if my mother has planned a birthday supper.”
“I’ll ask if we can eat early. I’ll tell her I’m going away for the weekend. I need to get away from here so I can think. Why am I not grateful, Breeda? My parents gave me a home. Well, I am grateful. I’m in shock. What if my other mother lives right here in town?”
“That’s hardly likely. You were born in Toronto, remember? Row us back,” said Breeda. “I’ll start making phone calls to Tweed. You call Tobe. And wear your locket tonight. Are you sure there was no photo inside?”
“There isn’t a single clue,” said Hanora. But there has to be a clue, she told herself.
She pulled sharply at the left oar and pointed the bow toward shore. As she did, she became aware of a steady buzz in the sky, directly overhead. She paid little attention. She glanced down over the side of the boat and into her own image. Beneath the surface of the bay, her face was misshapen, the oar bent. She chopped at the water all the way back.
1998
NIGHTMARE
TWENTY STOREYS UP, HANORA’S OFFICE LOOKS over the river that flows through the middle of the city. Plants are lined up along the sill. A murder of crows spreads across the sky. A scattering of crows. How can so many marauding birds insert themselves into the sightlines of one window? From the kitchen, a radio voice explains windchill factor. On this March day, the temperature is minus thirty degrees Celsius. With windchill, the voice continues, the temperature feels like minus forty-one.
Every winter she tries to convince herself to move to a warmer climate. Especially during the first months of the year. So far, she has stayed. People in the building complain of brutal weather; she’s not the only one. A few travel south and stay there half the year. She thinks of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, set in Russia, where everyone waits and longs for the unsealing of windows, the announcement of spring. Ah, for the unsealing of windows!
She thinks of her own travels—alone and unofficial—to Leningrad and Moscow in 1965 during the Cold War, how she sailed at the end of April, driven by curiosity. She’d been a journalist for two decades by then, living out of hotel rooms, learning languages, making contacts in different parts of the world. But she had never before visited the Soviet Union. Readers west of the Iron Curtain were interested; the Sunday Times was interested, and paid an advance to fund her trip.
That was the time of spacewalks, the ongoing race for space travel, but no one, to that point, on the moon. Her job was to record her observations of ordinary men and women on the street, of social conditions, of the May Day celebrations, of the astonishing parade of military might. This was less than a year after the forced “retirement” of Nikita Khrushchev. From afar, Hanora had long been fascinated by the history and literature of Russia. As far back as 1938, when she was living in Deseronto, she’d read about one million people marching past Joseph Stalin through Red Square, in celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of what was called, by the reporter at the time, the Bolshevist Revolution. It wasn’t easy to envisage one million marchers across the same square in the same day, especially as her own country’s population at the time was only eleven million.
After making arrangements, she travelled by train from London to Tilbury, where she boarded the Soviet liner Baltika. She did her best to blend into the diverse but small group of passengers—Brits and Australians, a few French. Together, they were treated as a touring group, with few choices as individuals. The ship stopped briefly in Copenhagen along the way. An icebreaker cleared a channel through pack ice as the Baltika neared Leningrad, their final port.
Her passport was confiscated by Intourist as she stepped off the ship. Intourist, founded by Stalin, controlled every activity on the ship and off. When Hanora argued to keep her passport, she was told, brusquely, that it would be returned when she arrived in Moscow. Passengers hadn’t been told that their passports would be forfeited before they were permitted to step onto Soviet soil. Hanora had no choice but to follow the dictates of power.
On board, she had been assigned to a cabin as deeply buried as one could be below deck, a destination she had difficulty finding any time she tried to return. In that labyrinthine ship, where specific areas were barred to passengers and heavy steel doors were locked, she circled and circled, up and down short flights of stairs, ending at the doctor’s quarters every time. The doctor, a heavy, jolly man often reeling from drink, opened his door, patiently checked the number on her key, laughed and spoke to her in Russian—she knew only a dozen words—and no matter what time of day or night, escorted her through passageways available only to staff and into the corridor that led to her own section.
Because of the cheap passage she’d signed up for, she shared a cabin with three other women, two upper and two lower berths, metal frames, everything white. The room was cramped and narrow, overcrowded when all four were there at the same time. Exposed pipes that criss-crossed the ceiling were painted white to match the bed frames. Hanora banged her head on a pipe more than once while climbing the ladder to her upper berth.
While the ship proceeded at the slowest possible speed through heavy fog up through the Skagerrak and down into the Kattegat, while foghorns made eerie tunnelling sounds from their own ship and others that passed menacingly close, while the band performed in the lounge until midnight—large Soviet women playing tuba, French horn, trumpet, trombone and double bass—while all this was going on, one of the pipes in the cabin ceiling leaked, causing slow but serious seepage into Hanora’s mattress.
She had to be relocated to another cabin. The three women with whom she’d been sharing were uncommunicative from the outset, after learning that she was not committed to their cause. They attended talks on Communism every morning in the main lounge, and did not pretend to be sorry to have her gone. Hanora, cast out, was delighted to rise in status by two classes, from fourth to second, up out of the bowels of the ship, a distinct improvement in comfort. From then on, she shared a room with a woman with hacked-off iron-grey hair, narrow face, lean, muscular body. Her roommate identified herself as Flor. After a night sharing the same room, Flor confided that she intended to disappear inside the Soviet Union because she wanted to live there permanently. She was secretive but told Hanora she was certain that she would be able to merge into Soviet society. She did not disclose her plan. She was, however, genuinely glad to have company, because she’d been alone in her two-berth cabin until Hanora was unceremoniously deposited there. Hanora wondered, meanwhile, if she was the only non-Communist on board, and why she had undertaken such a trip. She reminded herself to do her job.
Flor was happy to share bitter coffee or strong tea any time of day. She had a habit of gnawing at her lower lip, her upper teeth scraping away, especially while in conversation. At night, she ground her teeth. Listening to the gnawing and grinding, Hanora wondered if Flor was as confident as she let on.
Any time Hanora tried to talk to cleaning women, stewards, women who changed linens, sailors on deck, she received the same answer: “No English.” Sometimes, a frightened shaking of the head. Cool response from everyone. It was apparent that the entire staff, whether able to speak English or not, had been forbidden to interact with passengers. Only the Intourist leader, a tall and efficient peroxide blonde named Anya, could and would answer questions. Anya was much in demand and not easy to find because problems erupted from one moment to the next on the Baltika. Hanora had no illusions about Anya’s awareness of her profession, but she kept her notebook in her handbag, her handbag at her side. At night, she pushed the notebook under her pillow.
After disembarking in Leningrad, passengers were taken about in controlled groups and then travelled, sans passports, by train to Moscow. Between Leningrad and Moscow, Hanora stared through the train window at a landscape rushing past, all birch and withering snow. The scene could have been late spring in her own country. She felt naked without her passport and decided she didn’t want to leave the train.
> In the capital, finally reunited with their documents, the passengers were taken to see the enormous red banners that covered the buildings enclosing Red Square. Lenin’s image presided. During the impressive May Day parade, Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, bundled in greatcoats, stood high upon the reviewing stand above Lenin’s tomb, surrounded by an entourage of uniforms. For hours, the armed might of the Soviet world rumbled past.
Hanora managed the best way she could during her time in Moscow. She toured a hospital, where she met and wrote about the entirely female physician population. She noted the terrible scarcity of men, the older women working as street sweepers, the absence of automobiles, the enthusiasm of Communist youth and their refusal to believe that travel to other parts of the world might be a good experience. (We have everything here in our great country. Why would we want to leave? Here, let us give you a postcard of our brave cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin.) She wrote about the sparsity of goods in the GUM department store, the uncurbed drunkenness of men in the streets. She wrote about elderly women bundled against the cold, sitting beside barrels and dispensing beer by the glass in the streets. She wrote about her tour bus being attacked one evening—police were on the scene in moments, before anyone was hurt—by several drunken, hostile men outside the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, the hostility aimed at the unwelcome and more prosperous westerners. She wrote of the feeling, the constant feeling, of looking over her shoulder.
The passengers had been assigned rooms in a large apartment-like hotel outside Moscow, which meant that no one could wander around the city without being bussed back and forth at designated times—that is, without being monitored. Hanora was again assigned to share a room with Flor. One afternoon, a number of their fellow travellers purchased cheap sparkling wine and stowed the bottles on windowsills in their rooms. A bottle burst in the middle of the night, wine and glass flying high. People ran into the halls because everyone was certain they’d wakened to gunshots. For the rest of the night, bottles were heard exploding, one after another, up and down the hall.