A little while after going back to work when Damien was a few months old, I went to a luncheon with a new client. There were five of us in the magazine’s elegant dining room, four from the magazine, and Steve, the client, a sweet-faced man about my age. I had never met him before.
Before we finished our appetizers, Steve started telling us a story that had nothing to do with the conversation; the words just tumbled out of him as if he couldn’t possibly talk about anything else.
“I’m adopted,” he said. “I always knew I was adopted; it was never a big deal.”
I put down my fork halfway to my mouth. I had never heard anyone announce this before; I had never met another adult who had been adopted.
“I love my parents,” Steve continued. “They’re my parents, no question. I wasn’t unhappy growing up. But I always wondered about that other mother out there. Not the father so much, but the mother—who she was, where she was living…” He paused. “Why she did what she did—why she gave me up.”
My face felt hot and red, as if he were telling my dirty secrets in public. I tried to concentrate on my plate. But no one was eating; they were all staring at Steve. Now I felt embarrassed for him, too.
“A couple of years ago, I decided to look for her. I knew where I was born, and the date: November 15, 1954.”
I dropped my fork; that was my birthday. Everyone looked at me. “Sorry,” I said.
Steve went on quickly, in a rush to get it out. “The adoption agency wouldn’t give me any information. I went there—Louise Wise, it’s called. I even met with the same social worker my parents had when I was born, who still worked there, a Mrs. Tanner.”
My head jerked. I felt slapped.
“Mrs. Tanner?” I asked.
Steve looked at me. “Yeah, why?”
I had never told anyone I worked with that I was adopted. I hadn’t told anyone in years, since college. But Steve had been born on the same day as me, adopted through the same agency, with the same social worker. Could he be my twin?
“Nothing,” I said. “Where were you born?”
“Staten Island,” he said.
I breathed. At least he wasn’t my twin brother; I knew I’d been born in Manhattan, though I didn’t know how I knew.
“I hired a private detective,” Steve said. “He bribed someone and got the hospital records. They had my mother’s last name, a German name, a pretty unusual name. I went through the old Staten Island phone books at the library, but she wasn’t in them. The detective said maybe she was living with someone else at the time and didn’t have her own listing, which made sense if she was poor. She had to be poor, to give her baby away like that.”
He was filling in the cracks, sewing his story together like patchwork. He had his fantasies too, I thought.
“It took me a year to find her. Since I couldn’t afford a lot of the detective’s time, I went through newspapers and synagogue bulletins. Finally, the detective found her name in immigration records from the early fifties. Turned out she had been brought over after the war to work for a rich family as a maid. He helped me run some ads in German-language newspapers, asking if anyone knew anything about a woman with that name who had come to the United States in the early fifties. I ran the ads for months, in every big city, and then I got a call from a woman in the Bronx. It was her sister—my aunt—and she gave me my mother’s name and phone number. She had a different last name because she had been married, but now she was a widow, who’d never had any kids.” He paused to correct himself: “Any other kids.”
We had all put down our forks and knives and were just listening. Steve was leaning over his plate, his eyes shining with intensity. His hand, still holding an unused fork, was trembling.
“I got her address and went to see her. I couldn’t call; I couldn’t talk to her on the phone. I had to do it in person. I just went to her apartment one night, in this really old, run-down building in the Bronx. I knocked on the door and she opened it. She looked old, even though she’s younger than my mom, my adopted mom. She’s had a harder life, I guess.”
Everyone was staring at Steve.
“She knew who I was,” he went on. “Her sister had told her about talking to me, and she was just waiting for me to show up. She looked at me, and she knew. I didn’t have to say anything.”
“How did she react?” someone asked.
Steve thought for a minute. My mind raced. How does someone react when her abandoned baby shows up thirty years later—with horror, fear, terror, dismay? I had been raised to think that once the baby is given up for adoption, it’s over. The birth mother walks away as if it never happened. The baby goes on to live a happy life with new parents. It’s a second cutting of the umbilical cord: Sign the paper, and the old connection is no more.
“She was overjoyed, I guess,” Steve said, and smiled a little, then sighed. “She started crying. She took my hand and pulled me into the apartment and started hugging me and kissing me. She wouldn’t let go of my hand; she was holding it and stroking it the whole time I was there.”
“Did she tell you why she gave you up?” I asked.
“Later she did. She was ashamed to tell me at first. She got pregnant by the son of the family she was living with, the family that brought her over to work for them. She was only seventeen, and he was sixteen. They kicked her out. She had nowhere to go, no place to live, and no way to support a baby. The agency put her up at some facility they ran for unmarried pregnant women. After she had the baby and gave it away, she found another job. But she didn’t tell me that the first time I met her. She just kept crying and patting me, saying, “Mein Sohn, mein baby.” She made tea, gave me cookies. I couldn’t even eat; I was totally freaked out, and didn’t know what to do, or say. I hadn’t really thought it all the way through; I just wanted to find her.”
“Do you look like her?” someone asked.
He shook his head. “Not really. We have the same eyes, which was kind of weird, because both my parents have really dark eyes and mine are blue, like hers.” He paused, looked down at his plate.
“How come she never had other kids?” I asked.
“It just didn’t happen,” he said. “She worked for a while as a housekeeper for a rich family in Riverdale. A lot later, she married a man who worked in a bakery. They weren’t married all that long when he died. And now she works in a bakery and lives by herself. Even though she’s only in her forties, she looks old. She still has a pretty heavy accent. She told me she had been waiting for me my whole life.”
Steve looked down and spoke more softly. “Thirty years. She said she thought about me every single day and was sure that someday I would find her.”
“Didn’t she ever try to find you?” someone asked.
“When I asked her that, she just cried and shook her head and said that she didn’t have the right. I don’t know if she meant that she didn’t have the right legally because she’d given me up, or if she felt she didn’t have the right to be the one who searched. I don’t know.”
“How often do you see her?” I asked.
Steve didn’t answer right away. “I don’t,” he said finally. “I don’t see her anymore.”
We all asked at once: “Why not?”
There was a long pause. “I… I couldn’t take it,” he said, his voice low. “At first, I saw her a lot; I really wanted to get to know her. She wanted to see me all the time, too. It was intense, it was almost—”
He searched the ceiling for the right word: “It was passionate. She’d been alone, I guess, for most of her life. And she wanted a child so much.”
When he looked at me, there were tears in his eyes. “I felt terrible. She loved me so much. But I felt… nothing.”
“Nothing?” I repeated.
He shook his head slowly. “She wanted to be my mother. But she isn’t my mother. She wasn’t even a family member. I have a family. I tried to feel something. I kept seeing her, probably more than I should have—sometimes three or four t
imes a week, for months. I don’t even see my girlfriend that much,” Steve laughed ruefully. “She wanted to meet my girlfriend. She wanted to meet my parents, my sister. I thought that if I kept seeing her I would find a connection, I would see something in her that was in me. But I didn’t.”
There was a long silence.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
He looked at me. “I ended it.”
He smiled, embarrassed. “I didn’t know what else to do. She wanted me to be her son; but I’m not. She called every day, sometimes two or three times a day. She wanted me to help her pay her bills, to fix her shower. One time she called me to come kill a bug in her kitchen. She wanted me to love her. But I just couldn’t. She’s not my mother.”
He looked around the room, checking to see if we understood, or disapproved.
“I told her I couldn’t see her anymore. I felt horrible. She didn’t understand; she kept calling me. Finally, I told her that I was going to change my number if she didn’t stop. I felt like a monster. I mean, what’s wrong with me that I couldn’t feel something for this woman who gave birth to me?”
He felt it, too. There was something missing, something damaged. He knew we were defective.
I thought about Steve’s story for weeks. I took it as a warning not to open the door: Leave it alone, the warning said. Let it lie; don’t take the risk. You don’t know what you’ll find.
17. BUNNY
THE END AND
THE BEGINNING
That we cannot remember such things, that our memory,
which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible,
is also one of those important things about us,
like our inwardness and our reason.
Indeed it is the very essence of both.
IRIS MURDOCH
THE SEA, THE SEA
The Baby was born in November. Jake and I separated in May, on Mother’s Day, as life would have it. The six months in between were predictably unhappy.
The world didn’t stop turning as I stood paralyzed on the corner of Third Avenue and 23rd Street. Everything went on as it had before, except that I was no longer pregnant. Now the only way I could see to atone for having given up The Baby was to stay married to Jake. I was wrong.
I found a temporary job from December until March at a magazine that documented the social season for New York’s well-to-do, with stories and photographs of the goings-on at resorts in Florida and Virginia, and articles about travel and things to buy. What could have been further from my life? The editor was a man who seemed terribly old to me, though he was undoubtedly younger than I am now. He was having an affair with the assistant editor; she, too, was what I thought of as elderly.
At first, I didn’t realize they were having an affair; it didn’t take much to fool me. And I assumed they were too old. I typed up stories, ran errands, and took dictation from a Dictaphone, a strange machine that involved a disk and a foot pedal and earphones. It was clunky, but then so was I. There was another secretary. The magazine came out every few weeks during “the season,” and my name was one of the four on the masthead.
Like my boss at the society magazine, Jake was having an affair—with Anna, a young woman he’d met when she was going out with his friend Craig. We’d known Craig at Antioch. He was the school poet; not quite a mascot, but almost. The first time I saw him, he was leaning, not terribly steadily, over a jukebox at the bar, his straight blond hair falling down over his forehead as he muttered things to himself, all of which, since they were unheard, seemed enormously poetic.
Craig visited us several times at the Second Avenue apartment. When he and Anna decided to get married, he apologized for not being able to invite us to the wedding. Under the circumstances, he explained, he couldn’t.
Jake wasn’t home often. Of course, the less available Jake was, the more I wanted him to be there. But, in truth, I wasn’t happy either way.
On Mother’s Day, Jake refused to go with me to visit my mother. He just didn’t want to. I went without him but before I left, I told him I didn’t want to live with him anymore. When I got back that night, he was gone. After all that, after two years, after the pregnancy, after the loss of The Baby, after all my dependence on Jake for everything I needed, good and bad, it was me who said, “Enough.” Just like that, it all came to an end.
Reaching bottom has two related advantages. First, something solid is finally under your feet; I had floated down through a misty, foggy sorrow for so long. At last, there is something to push against; the first weak surge upward can begin.
Now there was just Hollis, the little gray cat, and me. Amazingly, we were enough. Hollis had been mine from the beginning, even though it was Jake who found her. I’ve had many cats since then, cats who loved me and that I loved, but I’ve never had one who was mine the way Hollis was, or who knew me as well as she did. She was always next to me when I needed her; I needed her often.
She was a wonderful cat: She stayed with me throughout the day when I was home; she slept in the crook of my elbow; and she never complained about anything. She played with everything, including shadows on the floor, and sometimes she looked as if she were smiling at me. She didn’t like many of my friends. She preferred a more solitary life and liked things best when we were alone.
In that apartment with Hollis, I grew up. I finally wept for my father there; I learned to be alone and to love it; I learned to cook; I learned to squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom; I learned to be painfully unhappy and filled with joy, and to feel every minute of both. I learned about sex—that it has to be learned and not just experienced. And I fell in love more than once.
After the society magazine’s publishing period ended for the year in March, I found a job at Harper & Brothers, now HarperCollins. Working there was perfect. I was in the children’s book department, working for Ursula Nordstorm, a gifted and wonderful editor. I loved the books: the Ruth Krauss books illustrated by Maurice Sendak, Tomi Ungerer’s first books, Margaret Wise Brown’s books, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, Goodnight Moon, the Little Bear books, and the first of Maurice Sendak’s own books. It was another way to grow up—through books, and the people who made them.
For the first time, I understood what the idea of a book meant: its permanence, its importance, its feel in the hand, its weight, its substance, the look and feel of its pages. For a while, I was first reader, reading manuscripts that were “unsolicited,” having arrived without benefit of an agent or a contact. They landed on my desk in great quantities. I read them and wrote very brief reports on each; the ones I liked went on to the second reader. In the process, I learned the difference between a nice, passable story and something that could become a book. I learned to know what I thought, and how to state those thoughts succinctly and clearly. I learned how to search inside myself for words. Later, I was an editorial assistant, and later still, director of publicity for the department.
For the first time in a very long time, I was doing something that mattered to me; it was definable, important, and fun, and I was doing it well.
I think that was a large part of why I was able to tell Jake I no longer wanted to live with him. I think that’s why the rest of my life could begin again—on Mother’s Day.
18. JIL
THE SECOND TIME
A few years after Steve’s warning convinced me that I should never, ever consider looking for my birth parents, I found myself wondering, often, about them—more specifically, about her.
What changed? A lot: A new baby, a new job, a new home, and then, a new friend.
The new home was perfect, two floors of an old brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, with a garden and a wall of windows. It was just where I’d wanted to live my whole life.
The new job was not perfect. I was working at Time Inc., but I hated it. Compared to the ad agencies and small magazines I was used to, Time was a bland, bloodless corporate machine, where every day I felt loud,
bushy-haired, and ethnic. I had a colleague who had never met anyone whose parents weren’t born in this country. Another fellow told me he thought the Star of David a friend of mine wore around her neck was a Christmas tree decoration. And when I asked if we could buy just one roll of holiday gift wrap that didn’t have wreaths and reindeers on it, the associate publisher said, sneering, “Why, for our Jewish friends? I don’t have any Jewish friends!”
“What’s this?” my boss asked one night, fingering the line of colored folders taped to my office door.
“They’re color-coded,” I said. “Because I’m always in meetings or out of town, no one can ever get time with me. So each person has their own folder and can leave me stuff to review or sign. Then I leave it in the folder for them to pick up. I got the idea from my son’s nursery school class.”
My boss’s look was icy. I knew he didn’t think much of me; I wasn’t the Harvard MBA-type manager he wanted. I took my staff to picnics and potlucks and celebrated birthdays with homemade cakes. We had the best morale of any department, the lowest turnover, and did great work. But I couldn’t configure a budget to save my life, and five-year plans were about four and a half years beyond my ability to project. He wanted a number cruncher, and I was a granola cruncher.
He grabbed the topmost folder, bright blue for our special events coordinator, and plucked it off the door. “Get rid of this nonsense,” he said, thrusting it at me. “This is not a nursery school.”
“But it works,” I said. “It makes everything go more smoothly.”
“I don’t care if it flies to the moon,” he spat as he stalked away. “It’s idiotic.”
I pulled the folders off the door one by one and piled them on a chair, fighting tears. The only reason I’d stayed in this job I hated was for the benefits. I’d been pregnant, had a miscarriage, and then tried to get pregnant again. I’d finally decided that, benefits or no benefits, I was out by June 1. But now, six weeks ahead of my deadline, I was pretty sure I was finally, finally, pregnant.
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