A Chance in the World

by Steve Pemberton

  My brother sensed I needed more convincing. “Our mother’s name is Marian,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” I said slowly. His use of the present tense told me he thought our mother was still alive. I knew what his next question was going to be. The bells from Gasson Tower had begun to ring loudly. I turned toward the sound, letting the breeze from the open window gently buffet my face. A lone student sauntered down the walkway toward the student center, her casual pace suggesting that her day of classes was over. “Bernard,” I said, closing my eyes. “Our mother . . . we lost her . . . a long time ago.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. I didn’t know much about his life, but I could imagine what he was going through, the pain he felt. Take as much time as you need, brother, I thought. I walked over and closed the door to my office. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely more than a whisper: “I was hoping that it wouldn’t be true, but I already knew.”

  It took a few minutes for him to collect himself, but then we spent some time getting to know each other. He lived in Florida as a mortgage broker. He was married and was the proud father of a two-year-old girl. His adoptive family’s name was Sanchez, so while he was growing up, everyone thought he was Hispanic. With olive skin and wavy hair, he certainly looked the part. “In truth,” he said, “I don’t really know what I am because I don’t know who my father is.”

  “Believe me, I know how you feel,” I said, nodding. I spent a few minutes describing my own quest to discover my father’s identity and learn about his life. “So your name is Bernard Sanchez?” I asked.

  He sighed. “Well, yes and no. You’re not going to believe me.”

  “At this point, I can believe just about anything.”

  He cleared his throat, like an old man of the sea getting ready to spin a yarn. “Like I said, the family who adopted me already had the last name of Sanchez. But shortly after I went to live with them, I asked them if I could change my first name. I was adamant about it. I wanted to get away from the name Bernard and any other reminders of the past. So my new foster family agreed. At that time, I had no idea I had any siblings, let alone what their names were. It came down to James or Steven, and I decided to go with Steven as a name.”

  I whistled loudly. You couldn’t make this up if you tried. My brother had no idea he had siblings yet had chosen the same name as the sibling closest to him in age. What were the chances?

  “Now you know why I was afraid to tell your assistant my first name,” he said. “I thought you’d hang up on me.”

  Outside my front door, I could hear the admissions office starting to shut down for the day.

  “What do you remember of our mother?” I asked.

  Again, a long silence followed. I sensed that if he had been standing in front of me, I would have noticed a faraway look in his eye, except that the emotions were not distant at all, nor perhaps ever would be. “I remember many things,” he said. “Living in a house that was half burned down, men in and out of her life. One time, when I was about six years old, I watched a man beat her. And when I tried to stop him, he started to beat me too.”

  A searing image passed before my eyes, one of a little boy fighting to defend his mother. Tears welled.

  “She was blond and was always focused on her hair,” Steven continued, “and she loved vodka. I can still remember the smell. I remember always being hungry. I remember her leaving me in a lot of different places, with a lot of different people. She always promised she’d return. She usually did, too, but only when the police came looking for her.

  One day when I was seven years old, she left me at an orphanage in Springfield. I kept waiting for her to come back. Two weeks later, she still hadn’t returned, but I still believed she was coming back, that this time wasn’t going to be different from the others. Then one afternoon . . . I can’t remember how it came up . . . I told one of the staff who worked at the orphanage that my mother was going to come back for me . . . he was mean, and I still remember when he snarled at me . . . ‘You don’t get it, do you? Nobody wants you’—and he smiled when he said it. But what I remember most is how much we were constantly on the move.”

  Outside my window the sun had begun to set, casting off a beautiful arrangement of oranges and purples and pinks, the rich hues blending in with the magnificent trees and Gothic architecture that framed the campus. Sunsets, the sheer majesty of them, have often struck me as God’s way of letting us know he is here. Some of them, like the one I saw that late summer day, are so majestic, so awe-inspiring, that it can only be God showing off.

  But God does not show off just in sunsets. He appears in quiet whispers and coincidences that bring new beginnings that change the arc of your life, awakenings so powerful that you mark time by them. My brother’s sudden arrival had brought such an awakening, so transformative and arresting that I had to lean against my office wall. For the first time, I fully understood that none of us had emerged unscathed from the storms that had engulfed our mother. My brother Steven had not. Nor had my older brothers, Ben and Marc. Joni certainly had not.

  Our mother had failed at nearly everything, but her greatest failing was motherhood. She brought six lives into the world, and the five of us who survived would each crash through our childhoods like bumper cars at an amusement park, spinning in circles, slamming into one object and then another, desperately trying to find a clear path. We would make it to adulthood, scathed and scarred, trying to convince ourselves that we were not the accidental offspring of a tortured woman who had forsaken us.

  My brother and I spoke for a few more minutes before hanging up. I gave him telephone numbers for Ben, Marc, Joni, Josie, and our grandmother, who I told him was actually our step-grandmother. I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I knew about Joni. Much as I had, he had spent his life trying to find out what had become of his family. I knew well the joy of finally having answers, and I did not want to intrude on that happiness by sharing the tragedy that encircled us as children.

  After we hung up, I sat in my office for a little while longer. During my conversation with Steven, Marci had slipped my itinerary under my doorstep. There was no one in the office save Mike, the elderly custodian. He knocked on my door, as he often did, looking for my trash barrel. I’d always made it a point to say hello and have a quick chat because he reminded me of the guys I’d worked with the summer after my freshman year of college. And I also loved his thick Irish brogue.

  “Working late, eh?” he asked, his hand on the doorknob.

  I came out from behind my desk. “I am. I have a trip to California tomorrow.”

  He turned to go.

  “Hey, Mike,” I asked. “Did I ever tell you I was half Irish?”

  He smiled and pulled up a chair.

  CHAPTER 38

  In January 1997, a few months after meeting Steven and some six months after my visit with the Murphys, I proposed to Tonya. To the degree that any marriage proposal can be, mine was anticlimactic. I knew almost as soon as I met her that she was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I proposed to her from the top of Boston’s Prudential Center, which offers a 360-degree view of this beautiful, historic city. Through tears of joy and much to my relief, she accepted. We set the date for late June and set about planning the wedding. Our relationship had been long distance, but as the date neared, I found myself often traveling back to New Jersey to assist with preparations.

  A new peace was settling upon me. Talking with my brother Steven had given me a broader and deeper awareness of my mother’s life. For the first time I began to feel for her and the long, hard road that had been her existence. Mother’s Day had always been a day for others to celebrate; it carried no special meaning for me. But Marian was my mother, the woman who brought me into the world. I decided I would go to her grave and place flowers there. I suspected I would be her only visitor that day.

  I needed to find out where she was buried, so I called my grandmother. After exchanging a few pl
easantries, my grandmother told me my mother was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Tuckerton. “Why do you want to know?” she asked, the rich tone of her voice crackling across the line.

  “Well, I’m going to be in New Jersey, and I would like to go place flowers on her grave.”

  There was a long pause. “When will you be coming, Steve?”

  “Around nine Sunday morning, Grandma. Tonya and I need to get back for a meeting in the afternoon.”

  There was a momentary pause. “Why don’t we join you?” she said quietly. “Your aunt Josie and her husband will be here, and I know your brother Ben wants to see you as well.”

  “I’d like that, Grandma. By the way, where is Marc?”

  She sighed. “Well, Marc is off again. Sometimes we hear from him, and sometimes we don’t. But he’ll turn back up. He always does.”

  Greenwood Cemetery is right off Route 529. There are several single-lane roads that serve as entrances to this nearly two-acre plot of land. A black wrought iron fence, no more than hip high, runs the entire length of the cemetery. Large maple trees stand like guardians at the entrances, and their branches, in the full bloom of summer, cast shadows over the entryway. This small quaint piece of earth is my mother’s final resting place. I didn’t need to look to find her gravestone. As soon as Tonya and I pulled into the cemetery, I could see my aunt Josie, her husband George, my grandmother Loretta, and my brother Ben huddled together.

  I stepped from the car carrying a basket of flowers, and I held it in my hand as I gave everyone a hug. We stood there in silence for a moment, staring at my mother’s gravestone. The sculpted stone sat above the earth, and it glimmered and shone in the early morning sunshine. Small blades of grass grew from the soil, and they cast small shadows on her marker. I pulled a few of them away, when Ben knelt down and began to remove the grass as well.

  I placed the basket of flowers down next to her stone, deliberately obscuring the date of her passing. Above her name, in capital letters, was the word DAUGHTER. Below her name were her date of birth, October 12, 1937, and her date of passing, January 30, 1978. On the stone, the space between those dates was little more than a couple of inches wide. But in life, that space had been filled with so much loss and suffering.

  Something else caught my eye: The last name I carried for nearly all my life—Klakowicz. Here, on my mother’s gravestone, it had been misspelled: Klakowitz. Rudolph Klakowicz, Marian’s first husband, had disappeared from the Murphys’ view some twenty years before my mother passed, and I understood why they would not have recalled the spelling of such a complex name. I was certain that no one but me knew her name was spelled incorrectly.

  Of her surviving children, I was the only one who had no memory of my mother. Absent those remembrances, this name had been the only thing connecting me to her. But it had not belonged to either of us. My relentless pursuit of my past had given me the opportunity to change my name, to finally shed that ill-fitting label. And that had given me a certain peace, a peace my mother never knew. The irony of my mother resting under a misspelled name, one that was never really hers, saddened me, and I felt anew all that had gone wrong for her.

  I rubbed my finger over the letter t, as if doing so would remove it from the stone. Behind us, traffic hummed down the street. A flock of birds flew overhead and settled in a nearby pine tree.

  Josie adjusted her sunglasses and began to talk in a low, hushed tone. I stood up so I could hear. “Your mother was my sister, and I loved her. But she was so very troubled. We tried everything we could to help her, but it was impossible because she fought us every step of the way. There were times when we thought we’d get her back, that she would come back to the family, but . . .” She choked out the last word and began to weep deep sobs of loss and regret. George rubbed her back, and she laid her head on his shoulder.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tonya nodding in complete understanding, recalling her own father’s battles with addiction. She, too, began to sob.

  I was not a complete stranger to the damage of addiction; I had seen it in my sister Joni. Yet I’d never truly known what it was like to lose someone you’ve known and loved your entire life to addiction— the helplessness you felt as they turned into a complete stranger, the overwhelming despair as you watched, powerless to stop their descent into an abyss from which they could not emerge. I’d had no comprehension of what my mother’s difficulties had done to her family, how they had forced brutal choices on them.

  Josie removed her sunglasses to reveal red-rimmed eyes. “I was so young when Marian was having all her trouble. George and I had just gotten married, and we just wanted to get our life started. When I look at what happened to all of you, I wonder if we could have done more. Could we have done more?” She asked it again as if she were asking for the first time. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  She raised a trembling hand to her mouth. “My father was never the same after she died. We had been through so much with Marian.” She turned to Loretta. “You were a saint. You went through so much after my dad came back from the war and through all the trouble with Marian. You did a great job of raising Ben.” She turned back toward me. “We wanted to put it all behind us, to just forget about what happened to her and to all of you. And I wanted to have a life that would be free of all those painful memories.”

  I recalled a similar moment a few years earlier with my uncle Warren, when he became overwhelmed with grief at the memory of his brother. The irony of now standing at my mother’s gravesite with my aunt and watching a parallel grief unfold was not lost on me. Though the Murphys and Pembertons had never crossed paths, the history of the families, one Irish and one West Indian, was strikingly similar. The loss of my parents had cast a painful shadow over both families.

  A gentle sun warmed us. Several cars had pulled into the cemetery since we’d arrived, but I’d barely noticed. Now as I turned to look, I saw families spilling out, flowers in hand, coming to pay their respects to their matriarchs.

  For years, the Murphys and I had been on two completely different missions: I had been furiously chasing the past, believing it would bring me the perfect family I had envisioned as a little boy. The Murphys had been trying to forget that same past, for there appeared to be nothing there but painful reminders of lost children and a family fractured beyond repair. There had been no manual to deal with our divide, and in its absence we saw one another through the clouded lens of labels and distance and difference. With no understanding of our common suffering, we had retreated to the worlds from which we’d come, staggering off to our respective corners like two spent fighters at the end of a final round.

  But now I think we both realized that families are not always made up of faultless parents, magnificent homes, perfectly manicured lawns, and white picket fences. Behind these idealized pictures of American life are often other stories of hardship and loss, pain and suffering. That, too, is part of every family’s history. Yet what makes a family is neither the absence of tragedy nor the ability to hide from misfortune, but the courage to overcome it and, from that broken past, write a new beginning.

  “Steve,” Josie said, “I thought a lot about what you said when you were here last, how difficult it was for you. You are a miracle; nobody should have survived what you did. But you’ve done so well for yourself. So have you, Ben. And knowing your mother as I did, she is probably looking down at both of you and saying, ‘Look at my sons, Josie. Look at the men they have become. You see, I did do something right.’ ” And a fresh wave of tears overcame her.

  We were all crying then. Tonya came to stand next to me and wrapped an arm around my waist. Ben came over and clapped me on the shoulder. We stood shoulder to shoulder, peering down at my mother’s grave, quiet weeping the only sound among us, crying for ourselves and for Marian too. After a few moments, my grandmother turned toward me.

  “Steve, when you were here last time, you seemed to think that we never looked for you. But that wasn’t tru
e. Your grandfather did look for you; he looked for all of you. He tried and tried.” A soft breeze ruffled her beautiful auburn hair. “But the agency in Massachusetts wouldn’t give us any information about you. They had a large case file, but they wouldn’t let him see it. You have to understand, your grandfather was orphaned when he was a little boy, and he knew what it was like, the questions the three youngest children would always have. The last time he called was right after your mom passed.”

  She gazed off into the distant cluster of maple trees that framed the back of the cemetery. “I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, but I remember he kept saying, ‘You don’t understand; these are my grandchildren.’ After a while, he realized they weren’t going to tell him. He got so angry that he hung up the phone right in the middle of the conversation. He walked out to the backyard and just leaned against the tree. It was a long while before he came back inside.”

  It was a stunning revelation, and I shook my head in amazement. My long-held perception that the Murphys had not looked for me was not true.

  Joseph Murphy is buried right next to his daughter. A small, faded American flag accompanied his headstone; it had likely been there since the previous Memorial Day. Just a few feet away is another memorial, this one a shining bronze plaque commemorating his heroism in service to his country. Years before my grandmother had given me a picture of my grandfather standing outside an enlistment center, handsomely attired in his World War II uniform. He looked to me like a younger version of Ben: tall and erect, handsome and square jawed. That had always been my picture of Joseph Murphy, the grandfather I’d had no memory of. Now it had been replaced by the image of a once-orphaned, suspender-wearing grandfather, a World War II hero with a mother hen complex, engaged in a futile quest for his grandchildren.