by Diana Altman
Four days later, the social worker wrote: “Secured Mrs. Adler’s signature on a release form executed by hospital. Dr. Jerome Levanthal was the person to pick up the baby and deliver it to the Baroffs. Mrs. Adler was most emotional at this point. She said that she had prepared herself for it, but it was hard to face. We had quite a bit of time before we were due at the chancellor’s office so stopped at the drug store where she talked at length about herself. She mentioned again her unhappy marriage. Her ex-husband is sixty-two years old. She mentioned that she apparently was looking for a father person. When I exhibited curiosity about this term, she told me that she had read many books about psychoanalysis and at last understood herself. Her husband tried to make her over. She brought out that her family were very busy people They gave her all the money she needed but not love. When she asked her father for a dollar, she got five dollars, when she asked her husband for a dollar, she got twenty-five cents. He lives close by the children, but they have no fondness for him. She wanted them to stay with him while she was gone but they refused to do so, so he does not know of her absence. She said that this love affair was a neurotic one, and she would not consider marrying the father. She told me at this point that she met a man in Florida, who was quite interested in her. She told him that she was going to Louisville for an ovarian operation. Just recently, he called her and told her that he knew it was not an ovarian operation but that she was pregnant. He loved her and could understand this and wanted to come and see her. He flew down for a day, even though she did not want him to come because of her looks. They reached a determination to marry in a year, as her divorce decree impels her to remain in Scarsdale for another year. Mrs. Adler brought out that money had never been one of her problems.
“She bought out a great many fears at this point about using her own name. She said that she had to do this to receive mail from her family and children. She spoke of what she did to keep occupied during this waiting period. She purchased two birds, she did some knitting, and was doing some fabric painting. Again she asked many questions about the adoption and our agency. We then took a cab to the Court House. Mrs. Adler again brought out her dread of the chancellor being a moralist, and I assured her that this was not so. She went into his chamber and came out very much relieved. She thanked me for my help and expressed a great deal of regret she had not had the benefit of our service earlier.
“Telephone call from Mrs. Baroff advising that the baby had arrived, and that he was a gorgeous baby.”
I sat for a long time at my desk, heart aching for my mother so young and all alone in Kentucky, so full of shame. Most touching were the fibs she told the social worker. By placing her parents in El Paso, the hospital could never find them. Her father was an inventor, if looked at in a certain way. He was one of the first to invent not only the idea of feeding vitamins to livestock but the way to do it. As for her mother being an “authoress,” Grandma Greenstone did write a lot of letters to her sisters and her grandchildren. As for Maurice Ravel being Violet’s uncle, I knew she liked Bolero but I didn’t know she liked it that much. She probably thought Maurice Ravel was Jewish.
The part about a suitor from Florida was baffling. She never went to Florida and didn’t know anybody there. Was the suitor with the three sons the same man as the one in Florida? She wanted to appear lovable to the social worker not knowing that even without the fibs the social worker found her lovable.
The social worker was not the sort of person who liked Violet because she liked everybody. There were plenty of people the social worker didn’t like and the new mother was one of them. “Visited the Baroff family. Franklin was propped up in a stroller watching television. He watches television for hours. He especially enjoys animated cartoons and Arlene Francis. He is a very beautiful child, who looks exactly like his natural mother. Mrs. Baroff is very smug about the way she cares for the baby. She told long tales of how friends observe her care. Mrs. Baroff brought out that she was with him so much that he refused to go to his father. She had many questions, which were mostly rhetorical to receive reassurance that she was doing the right thing.”
I phoned Joan to tell her that I had the hospital records. “Those files are private!” Joan said. “First of all, how did he get them, and second of all what’s he doing passing them around all over the place?”
“I’m hanging up, Joan. I can’t stand talking to you.” I was hurt that she did not appreciate the skill it took to get those records, how careful I had to be not to scare Franklin away, and how precious the records were for shedding light on that time in our lives.
“You have no respect for our mother. None.” This was her most strident big sister voice.
“What are you afraid of?”
“Afraid? I’m not afraid. I just think it’s wrong to go prying into our mother’s life. Just because she’s dead it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a right to privacy.”
“How come you don’t email him? Don’t you think it hurts his feelings to be ignored by you?”
“It’s none of your business. If I want to email him, I will. If I don’t, it’s got nothing to do with you. You’re being so mean.”
“I’m being mean? You’re being mean. You don’t appreciate how much work I’ve put into finding our brother. Now all you do is blame me. That’s all you do.”
“I don’t understand why you’re being so mean. You’re making such a big deal out of this, making it so unpleasant and horrible.”
We hung up, and I thought how strange it would be to gain a brother and lose a sister. A perfect example of unintended consequences. How strong was the bond between Joan and me? Could I get used to not having a sister? Would I trade Franklin for Joan? Didn’t her heart go out to him, rejected at birth then again when he tried to find his mother as an adult? Even though he could never actually meet his birth mother now that she was dead, didn’t Joan think it was time to end whatever suffering remained?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
At first there was a kind of ecstasy in my email exchange with Franklin, as if we were girlfriends at camp meeting up after a winter’s absence and were hugging while jumping up and down. Then the tone became flatter and we exchanged information about ourselves, his being mostly about his health. He reported having a cold, getting an EKG, having a stomach ache. He never described his parents or his childhood home or his feelings about being adopted. He never asked any questions about our grandparents or cousins or aunts or uncles. I wanted him to know some of our history, so I inserted a few items unasked in the emails. I mentioned that our grandmother knew Pancho Villa but even that dramatic little tidbit seemed to go unnoticed. Our emails became fewer, from once a week to once a month to only now and then. The honeymoon lasted more than a year. When I sought the answer, Lord Google told me this was typical of adopted sibling reunions. Big flurry, then nothing. I didn’t have a brother, after all. I had imagined that I was rescuing him, easing his sorrow but I’d misplaced my sympathy. He was not seeking a connection to me. Not once in our email exchanges had he asked about my children or my husband or my life as a writer. He had not asked about his cousins or grandparents. Now he had vaporized.
So it was a surprise, three years later, to receive an email from Franklin saying that he was going to attend a housing conference in Boston. Would I be in town and could we meet? He would be staying at the Copley Plaza for three days. “Don’t expect too much,” Leo said.
I phoned Joan. “He’s coming to town, and I’m going to meet him. Do you want to come too?”
“You’re going to meet him? Without me?”
“What do you mean? I just told you.”
“You arranged to meet him without me?”
“No! He’s coming to a conference. I didn’t arrange anything.”
“But you know I can’t come. You know I have to be in Stockbridge that day. You know those morons there need supervision.”
“How am I supposed to know you’re going to Stockbridge? Did you tell me? No you did not. No
t to mention that the day isn’t up to me. It’s up to him.”
“Well, I can’t come. So that should make you happy.”
I agonized about what to wear. Would someone brought up in Kentucky prefer the tucked-in cowgirl look, the polished corporate executive look, the beehive hair country singer look? Dressed just like myself in loose writer’s clothes, nothing binding, soft fabrics, autumn colors, I walked under the red awning of the Copley Plaza Hotel and into the glittery gold lobby, maneuvered around people waiting at the reception desk, and entered the dim old-world gentleman’s club atmosphere of the hotel bar. At night, the red curtains were closed but now, in the middle of the day, they were open with a view of the street and jaywalking pedestrians gingerly stepping over snow mounds.
Only two of the little round tables were taken, one by an elderly couple and the other by my cousin Wiley. What was Wiley doing here? How did Wiley know about Franklin Baroff? I walked over to the table intending to say, “Not funny, Wiley. Not funny at all,” but as I approached the man stood up and I saw it wasn’t Wiley. Wiley, though in his seventies, stayed trim by playing racquetball every day. This man, dressed in a plaid shirt and fleece vest, had the round belly of the sedentary and the slight sag of middle age. He had Wiley’s green eyes, full lips, cleft chin, and curly gray hair. The man said, “Sonya? I’m Franklin Baroff.” Was I supposed to kiss him? Were we supposed to clasp like long lost siblings in a movie? He didn’t know what to do either. A handshake seemed too cold, a kiss too intimate. We just stood there while I gawked at how familiar he looked. He extended his hand to me and smiled and that’s when I saw the gap between his teeth and I had to sit down because my stomach flipped over. It was Uncle Jack’s gap, the right tooth slightly turned in. The baby wasn’t the secret. The father was.
My mother’s secret that I so wanted to cough up would now be stuck in my throat for as long as Wiley was my cousin, which was forever. Should I spare him? Or should I just put my own comfort above his and say your father slept with my mother and they had a child. Your father slept with his sister-in-law and my mother slept with her brother-in-law and the resulting son is as much your brother as he is my brother.
“What’ll you have?” Franklin said, sitting down opposite me in the dim bar of the hotel. I ordered a Manhattan thinking that would give him permission to order a drink in the middle of a sunny day but he ordered iced tea. “I’m sorry, sir,” the waiter said. “We don’t have iced tea.”
“What do you mean you don’t have ice tea?” He pronounced it ahs tea.
“We don’t serve iced tea in the winter, sir.”
“The winter? What does the winter have to do with it? It’s ahs tea, not watermelon.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“I never heard of a place that doesn’t serve ahs tea.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Okay, okay. Bring me a Coke.” When the waiter left, Franklin said to me, “What kind of place doesn’t serve ahs tea? Don’t y’all drink ahs tea?”
My impulse was to say, listen baby bro, you’re in Yankee territory now, so man up. “In the summer mostly,” I said. My gaze must have burned because he lowered his eyes and indulged in what must have been a childhood habit. He chewed on his tongue. The edge of his tongue. This nervous habit was so reflexive he probably didn’t know he was doing it. He sat opposite me with lowered eyes while he rotated his tongue around in his mouth and clamped down on it here, then here, then here. It lasted less than a minute. Then he said, “We drink it all year round.”
I wanted the Manhattan to hurry up. “I wish I still smoked,” I said.
“Not good for you,” he said and he wagged his finger at me in a scolding way. “You should quit.”
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“But you just said you wanted a cigarette.”
“No, I said … How long will you be in town?”
“Just ‘til tomorrow.”
“Are you finding the conference useful?”
“I didn’t know it was going to be so cold. Is it always this cold here?”
“No. Sometimes it’s much colder.” I wanted to say your father was the son of a farmer in Colorado, and by the time the acreage was sold, Denver had sprawled to the edge of the farm so your father sold it for a fortune. You not only have two half-sisters, Joan and me, but you have three half-brothers, one of whom is Wiley who nowadays is taking his fashion cues from the Hells Angels, wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket and black boots, and his colleagues at Merrill Lynch allow for that violation of the dress code because he sells so many mutual funds to elderly widows who love his courtly attentions and don’t question him too closely about the fees. “Are you interested in hearing about your family?” I said. The waiter arrived. “Ah,” I said with relief as he set the drinks down on the table.
“My wife,” Franklin said, “is active in looking up genealogy on the Internet. She wondered about our connection to Maurice Ravel.” He put the accent on the first syllable, as in unravel. Maurice ravel up the yarn.
Should I continue the fib? Tell him he was from a musical family, that our family had original manuscripts with Ravel’s own notations on them and that Grandma Greenstone had Ravel’s same chin? Or should I blurt out, how could we be related to him, he was Catholic! I raised my martini glass toward him, he raised his tumbler of Coke, we lightly knocked the glasses together but I couldn’t say a word because now I remembered.
It was that time Uncle Jack came to New York without Dovey Lee and my mother came home late. I knew what train she had to catch at Grand Central in order to be home by eleven and also what train she had to catch to be home by midnight. I heard her key in the front door of the apartment in Scarsdale at three in the morning, then heard her bedroom door close. Next day she reported that she took her brother-in-law to Gallagher’s Steakhouse. “How come you came home so late?” Now her startled reply, which for years had been standing on tiptoe in my memory, settled into context. “Oh, you know Jack. Talk, talk, talk.”
Franklin said, “L’Chaim,” and took a sip of Coke. When I took a sip of Manhattan, he said, “Careful there. That’s a strong one.”
I had no idea what to say to him. “How are your children?”
“All I wanted,” he said, “was medical history. My son was going to have a baby. I needed to know if there was Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, maybe Bloom Syndrome. I would have cleared this up on the phone, but she didn’t give me a chance to tell her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Turned out all right. The child’s healthy.”
“Thank goodness for that.” I took another sip of alcohol, felt my insides loosen. Then what he just said sunk in. “On the phone? You spoke to her on the phone?”
Franklin chewed on his tongue while he stirred the ice around in his Coke with his index finger, then looked at me across the table. “The reason I wanted to meet with you, Sonya,” he said, “is to tell you I met our mother.”
“What? When?”
“She did not sign the contact veto form so I was free to search on my own. Took me years, but I finally traced her to a village in New York State incorporated in 1875 and located in a valley on the east branch of the Delaware River, population about six hundred. Used to produce most of the cauliflower consumed in the United States. Now seems like the farmers are selling out to retired folks moving up from New York City.”
“You found her?”
“She didn’t mention it?”
“No. Never.”
“Well, she was, I don’t know how to say this, but she was sort of out of it.”
“Did she tell you the name of your father?”
“No, she did not.”
“Did you ask?”
“No, I did not.”
“Why?”
“Because she didn’t know who I was.”
“How could she not know who you were?”
“Because she never learned the name of the family who adopted me. My name meant nothing to her.”<
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“Who did you tell her you were?”
“Friend of yours.”
“Of mine?”
“I phoned up and spoke to a Chantelle, some name like that.”
“Shanice.”
“Told her I was a friend of yours from college and wanted to stop by to say howdy.”
“But I went to a girls’ school!”
“She told me to come right along.”
“But why would Shanice let some strange man come into the house?”
“Violet thought she remembered me from when y’all lived in New Rochelle. Thought I was the neighbor boy.”
“Oh my god! She got you mixed up with Stevie Barash!”
“Maybe could be. The folks at the general store called her place the old Huntington place. Knew just where it was.”
“And they knew her?”
“They knew she lived there. Called her the Queen of the Alone People.”
“No!”
“Just a harmless way of saying she stuck to herself mostly.” We both took a sip of our drinks. Outside a siren was faint in the distance then screamed by then faded. “That was some entrance gate! Very nearly scared me off when I saw that thing. Didn’t know what to do at first, then saw that gizmo attached to it and spoke into it and the gate opened up. Creaky like. Opened a little, then stopped, then opened some more. Needed oiling I reckon.” Franklin signaled the waiter. “Bring me more ice.”
“What did she do when she met you?”
“She was sitting on a chaise lounge with a throw over her legs. Started talking about New Rochelle, the house there. Said her husband was in the movie business and made a screen test of her. Said all she was to him was a flower in his lapel. Then she says, I’m the luckiest person in the world. I have two of the loveliest daughters. Both so talented. One is an artist and the other is a writer. I’m so proud of both of them. And who are you, Sir? I tell her I’m Franklin Baroff, and we shake hands. She says I see you brought me some chocolates. I said yes I did. She says then let’s open them right up and have some. What d’ya say? So the maid takes the box from me, tears off the wrapping, and presents the assortment to Violet. She says, I hope I get a caramel. Shanice says not that one, Vye Vye. That’s going to be a cherry. You don’t like the cherries. Shanice plucks out a square one and says choose this one, Vye Vye, and she puts the candy into Violet’s mouth. Violet says, Umm. Delicious. Thank you, Franklin Baroff.”