A Chance in the World

by Steve Pemberton

  “How are you?” I asked. Her chestnut hair was long and framed her features. Her skin was bronzed and flawless. She was even more striking up close, a natural and effortless beauty.

  She smiled and said, “I know you.” My first thought was: Now I understand why she has been looking at me so intently. My second one: How in the world can someone this beautiful know me without my knowing her? I couldn’t say that, of course. I wound up saying something else, something worse: “You do?”

  The minute I said it, I wanted to take it back. She recoiled, frowning and leaning away from me. I had come across as an arrogant playboy in constant pursuit of attention. My arched eyebrow didn’t help my cause. “I must be mistaken,” she said, turning to walk away. She moved with such grace and style that I felt even worse for not recognizing her. Then it hit me: Circuit Avenue . . . a light rain . . . a teacher . . . her smile. This was the woman I had met last summer, although she appeared even more graceful now.

  I touched her arm. “Are you still teaching?”

  “I am,” she said, smiling again.

  “I didn’t recognize you at first because your hair was pulled back then. But now I do. We were standing on Circuit Avenue, right near Mad Martha’s. You had on a blue sweatshirt and yellow shorts. Your friends were giving you a hard time because they wanted to get going. They called you T.”

  Her smile had grown even bigger. “You do remember, don’t you?”

  I laughed, surprised by my own recollection. “You were also engaged.”

  “I was,” she said, “but it didn’t work out.”

  We tried talking for a while, but the music was so loud we could barely hear each other. Coming in, I had noticed a small garden with a few chairs. We sat down, away from the pounding music, and spent the remainder of the evening talking about our college days, our careers, the importance of education, and her family. She hailed from New Jersey and had grown up knowing her grandparents and their siblings. She’d gone to the University of Maryland before transferring to Rutgers, largely because of the cost. She’d also been a model and competed in the regional Miss USA pageant during her college years, ending that career path because teaching was her passion and love. A biology major and premed student in college, she had returned to school to get her master’s degree in teaching.

  For my part I told her a bit about my own past but kept it as general as possible: I’d grown up in foster care, and after twenty-four years had finally managed to locate my biological family, changing my last name. It had long been my rule to offer people I met the shortened version of my life, deliberately stopping the conversation before it turned toward how my childhood trauma had affected me. To say more than that would have assumed, I thought, an extraordinary degree of understanding on the other person’s part. But I sensed those rules did not apply when it came to this beautiful stranger. After listening to me, she asked something no one had ever asked: “Does it still bother you?” Something in her eyes told me she was asking the question about herself.

  “Not really,” I said, shrugging my shoulders but not entirely sure this was the truth. “What’s done is done, and there really isn’t anything I can do to change it. You have to put the pain down or it will consume you. There just comes a time you have to move on.”

  She was sitting right across from me at a black circular table. Moonlight filtered down on us through wisteria leaves hanging off the white trellis.

  She was very quiet. The moment passed, and we spoke of other things. She glowed as she told me about her mother, Shirley, and her brother, Doug. The three of them were close, driven together by her father’s sudden departure from the family. As we continued to talk, I realized that it was Tonya’s inner beauty that made her so breathtaking. She didn’t define life by what she had or whom she knew. She seemed to see the world through the eyes of possibility. She struck me as the type of person who took a moment to enjoy the smell of a springtime flower or the quiet rush of a peaceful river. I was surrounded by cynicism and hopelessness for much of my childhood, and the search for my origins brought fresh battles that had exhausted me. But Tonya possessed a certain peace, as if life’s storms had barely touched her.

  For years I had wondered when I would meet the person I’d share my life with. I’d had a few relationships over the years—five years with Alicia, my first girlfriend; a year with Liz, from New Bedford; and four years with Andrea, from Chicago. While each of these relationships had been important to me, none rose to the level of a lifetime love. Ultimately we each went our separate ways, feeling as if we had met a good friend but not a soul mate. I hadn’t stopped searching, though. As I sat in the alcove across from a woman I had met briefly once before, the entire world seemed to shrink to this one small place, and I wondered if my search had come to an end.

  During the summer of 1996, I traveled almost every weekend from Massachusetts to New Jersey to visit Tonya. Often we’d spend the day in the picturesque tourist village of New Hope, Pennsylvania, located along the banks of the Delaware River and overflowing with restaurants, art galleries, and playhouses. Its tree-lined streets, modest homes, and antique shops spoke of a simpler time and offered an escape into a more romantic past. We strolled arm in arm, peeking into the charming shops and having dinner by the river. Early in our relationship, we both sensed there was more here than two people simply passing time. It was as if we had been traveling the same road for years. We talked more seriously about the future.

  “What matters most to you?” I would ask.

  “I have to be first in your life,” she’d say. “I wasn’t first to my father.

  And you? What matters most to you?”

  “I won’t live in the shadows,” I’d respond. “Don’t try to control me or dictate my path.”

  I began to tell her a bit more about my childhood: the battles with the Robinsons and the improbable discovery of my parents and the distance between their families and me. She listened quietly, interrupting only to ask a question here or there. She was especially curious about my early years. “How did you survive?” she asked one night, as we drove back to New Jersey from New Hope. “When my father left, I still had my mother and my brother and a large family. I knew people loved me. But you had no one—no mother, no father, no family. I can’t even imagine that—to have no one at all.”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” I said. “I took great pride in defying anyone who told me I didn’t have a chance. I also prayed a lot. I read a lot, too. I always thought the next day would bring another chance for me. I’d be one day closer to freedom, to finally finding my family.”

  “Have you ever seen anybody about this—you know, talked it through?”

  “No, not at all,” I said. “And I never will. I was forced to see psychologists when I was younger. They always questioned me as if I were the one with the problem. None of them identified what was going on at my foster home. All I really needed was just one person to intervene. Maybe it was the times—people just didn’t get involved. But, I’ve always found my strength in talking to God. He’s been my counselor.”

  During these day trips to New Hope, I realized that beneath Tonya’s gentle spirit resided a quiet resolve shaped by her own hardships. Her father—a New York firefighter—had been in a serious motorcycle accident, and it took him nearly a year to recover. He was placed on disability by the city, effectively retired at the age of thirty-three. The loss of his livelihood had been too much, and he turned to alcohol and drugs to cope. The deeper he sank into addiction, the more he vanished as a person, shattering the family. When Tonya talked about him, I saw an aching and longing in her eyes, a pain no one could heal. Yet that setback had steeled her, forging a desire for a new life not defined by loss and heartache—a life similar to the one I wanted. I think she saw in me someone similarly uncompromising: a resolute man bent on righting the wrongs he’d inherited.

  As we dated, I attended large family gatherings, laughing as her mother, brother, grandparents, cousins, uncles, and
aunts shared colorful stories of their childhoods. Despite her father’s absence, they had managed to find a new happiness. Their stories led me to daydream about my own family and whether it was possible for the Murphys and me to find our way forward, despite my mother’s troubles. Why hadn’t we connected? Maybe we hadn’t tried hard enough, I reasoned, and I’d had responsibility for that as well.

  During the late summer of 1996, I reached out again to the Murphys. My timing couldn’t have been better (or as it would turn out, worse). My aunt Josie; her husband, George; and their four children—Jane, Laura, Renee, and George; as well as my brother Ben were all going to be in Tuckerton in a few weeks time, a rarity given their hectic schedules. They asked if Tonya and I would like to come spend time with them.

  I hadn’t been back to Tuckerton since 1991, but I was eager to introduce Tonya to a part of my history. Driving again down Tuckerton’s Main Street, I was struck by the peaceful nature of this seaport community. The blue sky was open and cloudless. I rolled down my window and took in the cool air, the hum of traffic, and the occasional boat parked casually on a lawn. On the right-hand side was Stewart’s, a bright-orange drive-in eatery, and across from that was Lake Pohatcong. An old wooden bridge abutted the lake, and ducks and geese glided and landed in its waters. It seemed so at odds with my mother’s turbulent life. She once drove through here, I thought, and that familiar longing to feel connected to her resurfaced stronger than ever. Again I searched my memory, trying to recall something—anything—of my time with her. Once again, I turned up nothing.

  It was early afternoon when Tonya and I arrived at my grandmother’s. Her neighborhood sat right in the middle of a marina. Boats of different sizes dotted the landscape, more commonplace than trees. Down one of the small side streets was her home, a charming single-level powder-blue ranch. White awnings hung over two of the front windows and azaleas sat beneath them. At the base of one of the azaleas was a small American flag, faded but still fluttering in the early afternoon breeze. Small stones bordered her wide walkway, some of them seashells.

  Loretta, or Grandma Murphy as I had taken to calling her, greeted us at the door. She was petite with large green eyes. Her light auburn hair was cut short, and one curl fell perfectly across her forehead. I bent down to give her a long hug. “It’s so good to finally meet you,” she said, escorting us down a short, narrow hallway stacked with books and papers.

  “You too,” I said. “You were more helpful to me than you know.”

  Off a modest living room was a den, and I could hear several voices as we approached. I recognized my brother Ben immediately. His blond hair had darkened a bit, but other than that, he had not changed much since our meeting a few years before. My aunt Josie was tall and blond—similar in appearance, I imagined, to my mother.

  We shook hands with Josie’s husband, George, and her youngest child, George Jr., and introduced ourselves to her daughters—Jayne, Laura, and Renee. Our introductions were formal, and there was no sense that we shared a common bloodline. The den that abutted the living room was small and quaint, painted the same powder blue as the rest of the home. It had several windows, and I could see the marina that ran through the neighborhood. On the back wall hung a picture of several different kinds of birds. Overhead a white ceiling fan thumped and whirred.

  We sat down at a small table covered in a bright blue, cross-stitched tablecloth. Tonya and I sat shoulder to shoulder, and the Murphys sat in front of us. On the table my grandmother had placed a bag of Starburst candy, several glasses, and a tall pitcher of iced tea. Josie’s family was beautiful, almost as if they had appeared out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Physical similarities flowed easily between them, including a finely chiseled jawline that seemed sculpted from granite. Based on the pictures on the wall of my grandmother’s home, these features seemed to have originated from my grandfather Joseph Murphy. I’d not seen a resemblance between my mother and me in any of the pictures my grandmother had sent. I’d never noticed my own jawline and hadn’t given any thought as to whether it linked me to my mother or to the Murphys. I’ll have to remind myself to take a look, I thought.

  Our conversation began the way so many social conversations do. I could tell that Josie and her husband George were good people and wonderful parents who had built a solid foundation for their children. Updates about their children’s careers and college plans flew across the table. There was also a bond and an intimacy there, an understanding that if all else failed, you still had your family by your side. How wonderful that must be, I thought, to have grown up knowing where you’ve come from, or that you were loved, or where you belonged. A momentary pang of sadness overcame me as I once again realized that my opportunity to experience those things had long since passed.

  Tonya and I regaled them with the story of how she and I met. Soon, though, the conversation turned to my childhood and I shared with them the difficulty of those early years; the Robinson’s Rules, the long but ultimately successful battle to be free, the unanswered questions about my identity, the strange last name of Klakowicz. They listened quietly but intently and I could tell from the subtle shakes of their heads and nervous rubbing of their hands that they had not fully understood what had happened to Marian’s children. Despite their obvious empathy, there was a distance between the Murphys and me. A hundred questions floated through my mind as I tried to identify the source of that distance. Was it the shock of seeing one of Marian’s children, after all these years? Was it because I was black and they were white? Was it that they hadn’t tried to find me? Did they feel partly responsible for what unfolded? Did I hold them responsible?

  Those questions hovered like a dark cloud around the powder blue room and, to avoid them, we turned to more pedestrian things, including my career in college admissions. How the admissions process really worked was a source of some curiosity to the Murphys given that my cousin Jayne, who ultimately chose the University of Pennsylvania, had applied to some of the nation’s most selective colleges.

  But that conversation opened the door to the rather uncomfortable topic of affirmative action. Suddenly, Ben and I began sparring over the merits of this controversial issue. The Jesuits at Boston College had taught me there were good people who simply thought differently than you might on a particular matter, who are as wedded to their beliefs as you are to yours. Having a healthy debate was often the first step toward resolution. And in this brother I barely knew, I found a ready and enthusiastic opponent—one who seemed no more willing than I was to back away from a debate or a challenge.

  Still, I was decidedly uneasy. Affirmative action was a deeply charged topic and the lines of demarcation were as clear as black and white—in this case literally. In another time and place, this debate would not have been any different from the political discussions that sail back and forth across many family dinner tables. But on this unique occasion—meeting most of the Murphy family for the first time—a this-or-that, us-versus-them, seemingly black-versus-white confrontation made me increasingly uncomfortable.

  I thought I could convince Ben that there was more to the issue than was readily apparent. “Ben,” I said, “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than that. In fact, I would—”

  “Really,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Doesn’t seem like it to me.”

  “It doesn’t?” I asked, smiling. “And how would you know?” Ben was a very successful businessman whose career path had not taken him to college. As the debate between Ben and I went on, there was a silence in the room from the Murphys. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tonya lean back in her chair, surprised that our conversation had taken this direction.

  The discussion was beginning to exhaust me and I folded an orange Starburst wrapper, hoping the conversation would simply fade away.

  Tonya saw my retreat and laid her hand gently on the table. “I really don’t think Steve came here to have this discussion.”

  “Why not?” Ben said, turning
toward me. “Because I’m right?”

  “No,” I said quietly. “Because you’ve already formed your opinion, and you don’t seem to have any interest in another point of view. As I told you, it’s more complicated than that.”

  Across the marina, a boat horn sounded, breaking the quiet that had descended upon the small room. Tonya chimed in again showing that trademark grace and class I would come to know so well. “Well, I don’t think we are going to solve that issue today, at least not with you two in the room.” She gestured at Ben and me. We all laughed.

  Josie rose from her seat and picked up her glass of iced tea from the table, nurturing it with both hands. “Now, Steve,” she said sweetly, “these people who raised you, what were they?”

  “They were African American.”

  “And is that what you consider yourself?”

  “It is. That was the community I grew up in and even though I didn’t look like many African Americans around me, I still knew that’s what I was.”

  “But how is that? You do have Irish blood, too, you know. A little bit of German too.”

  The conversation about affirmative action had no sooner faded than another emotionally charged issue had sprung up—the issue of my identity. Like many biracial people, I had encountered the perception that because I identified with one race I was denying another. But this family reunion was about something a lot bigger than race, and I was frustrated that it had again entered the conversation, seemingly trumping family.