“I went to another ALMA meeting and discussed my investigation with one of their search assistants. I don’t know whether I impressed her with my sleuthing, my professional appearance, or what, but she agreed, in confidence, to tell me how to view the birth records at the Alameda County Clerk-Recorder's Office.
“I went to the courthouse in Oakland, followed her instructions and they gave me access to the microfiche. Then it was a matter of looking up the 200 names to determine if one of them was a boy whose birth date matched our son’s. That sounds easy enough, but the task was staggering. Just the first name on the list, “Abbott,” had hundreds of babies listed.
“I began by looking up the name I’d used, Bentley – I was reading a book of theater criticism by Eric Bentley during my pregnancy and it seemed as good a name as any – and I found the entry immediately: baby boy Bentley, no parents, the date of birth, and the signature of my obstetrician, Howard Milliken. I was still in the B’s and the office was closing when I came to Timothy Allen Bowen, son of Richard Bowen, one of the doctors on my list. The birth date matched and Dr. Milliken’s signature was on the form. I knew I’d found our son.
“Fortunately Dr. Bowen still had a practice in San Francisco; I wrote him a letter – it was so difficult – saying I hoped it wasn’t one he’d been dreading for 25 years, but I believed I was his son’s birth mother. In the letter, I mentioned working as a systems analyst at Central Pacific; two days later I received a call at work from Dr. Bowen’s wife. She said she wanted to meet me and suggested that she, her husband and I have lunch together at Trader Vic’s, a restaurant in San Francisco. Mrs. Bowen told me Tim was in his final year of medical school and that he was her greatest joy – then she corrected herself to say he was one of her two greatest joys – and that he was a genius. I think the latter was a bit of hyperbole, but she based her opinion on an I.Q. test they gave Tim when he entered grammar school. The test had a ceiling of 150 and he got a perfect score.”
David smiled. “Unless they’ve repealed the laws of genetics, that’s what I would expect.”
“The night before our luncheon a terrible thing happened. The computer room at C.P. called me around one in the morning with a problem that had to be resolved immediately, so I got dressed and took a taxi to San Francisco. I worked non-stop under great pressure and got the problem fixed about six. Normally under those circumstances I just go home and sleep for the rest of the day, but because I had the lunch appointment at noon, I stayed in the city. I was completely exhausted, mentally, physically, and emotionally.”
David took my hand. “I wish I could have there been with you.”
“I decided to go to the restaurant early and wait outside, hoping to recognize them as they came in. It was a ridiculous thing to do, but I wasn’t thinking rationally. I waited and waited, but the Bowens didn’t show up. Unknown to me, they’d arrived even earlier than I had and were already in the restaurant. When I hadn’t appeared by 12:30, they sent someone outside to look for me; he found me, told me the Bowens were already seated and I followed him in. I felt so stupid.
“The first person I saw was Tim – Mrs. Bowen hadn’t mentioned he’d be there – and while the Bowens were complete strangers to me, I recognized Tim at once.”
“He looks very much like you.”
“Ironic, isn’t it? He resembles me more than my own children do. But I saw more than a reflection of myself – I saw my father and, of course, I saw you. Tim looked at me and saw … nothing.” I turned away from David and a tear ran down my cheek.
“Do you want to wait and tell me the rest later?”
“I’m almost done. I thought if I told you upstairs I’d do nothing but cry. Here in public it’s actually easier. Anyhow, Mrs. Bowen couldn’t have been more gracious; she is a lovely person. Dr. Bowen was polite and reserved and Tim was remote. I know he was judging me and I didn’t come off very well. I think I’m usually articulate, but I was so tired. Mrs. Bowen was the one asking all the questions. Tim was obviously uninterested in either you or me. He’s Tim Bowen, not Tim Rosenau; he’s the son of a wealthy surgeon, not the spawn of some adulterous little slut. Meeting me face-to-face must have been an enormous blow to his self-image.”
“Kate,” David remonstrated, “I’m sure you misinterpreted his feelings. He’s still young …think how hard it must have been for him, too.”
“Next to you, Tim’s the most self-possessed person I’ve ever met. I’m not wrong, believe me. Mrs. Bowen gave me the pictures. Carlos is an excellent photographer; he copied them and made a set for you, so these are for you to keep.”
“I take it, then, your husband knows … about Tim, about me?”
“I told him a few years ago.”
“Do you regret finding Tim?”
“I don’t know what I expected. I never thought I’d play a part in Tim’s life, but when I met him I was hoping we’d feel some kind of bond, and we didn’t, or at least he didn’t, so in that sense I’m disappointed. Mrs. Bowen happened to say that Tim’s a big baseball fan; so was Daddy. He could recite every World Series statistic from the beginning of time. I wanted to mention this to Tim, I wanted to tell him your father was a doctor, but the words stuck in my throat. I think they would have sounded desperate, like I was trying to remind Tim of the link between him and us. Am I sorry? No, definitely not. When Daddy retired from the Navy, my parents bought a house in Oakland and a short time after they moved in, their next-door neighbors adopted a boy and a girl. One night the police received a call that the father was running around the neighborhood stark naked. A few months later his wife divorced him, and the children turned out badly. I guess I was always afraid the CHS might have placed our son in a similar situation. I’m sure the Bowens wanted to make a good impression, but I honestly feel they’re a loving family, and they’ve given Tim every advantage. They even sold their house in San Francisco and moved to Marin County just so Tim could continue studying advanced Latin when he finished grammar school. He’s a lucky young man.”
“The Bowens are exceedingly fortunate to have adopted our son.”
David’s reaction was so typical of him, and I couldn’t help smiling. He squared the corners of the pictures, returned them to the plastic bag, and put it inside his jacket pocket.
“Are you going to try to get in touch with him?”
David shook his head. “I think meeting Tim would be as painful for me as it was for you. I’m happy to have a resolution to something I’ve wondered about for 26 years, but I’m willing to let it rest there.”
When we finished the meal and David paid the bill, he turned to me with a smile, “it’s Friday on a beautiful summer evening. How would you like to go for a walk around Pioneer Square to explore the nightlife? Seattle’s changed considerably since you were here.”
“Daddy used to say Seattle was the world’s largest electrically lighted graveyard.”
“Not any more.”
We left the restaurant, strolled hand-in-hand up Yesler Way, and turned down Occidental, past antique stores, art galleries and bookstores, content to talk and be together. In Occidental Square Park an orchestra was playing, and couples were dancing on a wooden floor set above the mossy cobblestones. We stopped for a moment to watch them.
“May I have this dance?”
The fragment of a poem went through my head and I recited it aloud, “Dame la mano y danzaremos, dame la mano y me amarás.” (Give me your hand and we will dance, give me your hand and you will love me.)
David supplied the next line, “Como una sola flor seremos, como una flor, y nada más…” (We will be like a single flower, like a flower and nothing more).
“Gabriela Mistral.” We smiled at each other. I listened for a moment to the beat of the music. “It’s not a waltz.”
“No, it’s a foxtrot. Does it matter?”
“Remember when you were trying to teach me how to dance? The only step I ever mastered – sort of – was the waltz.”
“It’s not yo
ur fault. If I recall correctly, as soon as we I put my arm around you, we started getting other ideas. I don’t think we ever finished a single dance.”
At the memory of the aborted lessons in David’s office, we began to laugh. He gave me his hand and we danced until the orchestra took a break at ten. David went to speak to the bandleader, and returned with a smile on his face. “I told him I’m from Argentina and asked him to play a tango. The only one they know is ‘La Cumparsita’, but that’s fine; it’s an old classic.”
“A tango! Good grief, David, I don’t have the faintest idea how to dance a tango.”
“That’s the old Kate talking – ‘I can’t, ‘I don’t know how’- come on, just follow my lead.”
I put my right hand in David’s left and he held me close against him. David must have been an excellent dancer, for he made even me look good
We continued strolling along Occidental, ate ice cream cones, talked, turned down S. King, stopped for coffee, and talked some more. We were sharing a table at an outdoor café when I asked David the question that had been on my mind all evening.
“Are you going home after you take me back to the hotel?”
On the table in front of him David was constructing a building out of paper-wrapped sugar cubes. Instead of replying, he set down his coffee cup and carefully laid a final piece across the top. “A corbelled arch.”
I didn’t say anything, and waited for his answer, trying to keep from remembering the David of 27 years before who would have responded to a question like that with a mischievous leer.
Finally he looked up and our eyes met. “I was planning to.”
“Will you spend the night with me, instead?”
He hesitated for a moment and reached again for the sugar cubes. “I … yes, I can do that. I’ll drive you to the airport in the morning.”
David’s lukewarm response surprised me, and I wondered if he was having qualms because I was married, or if something else was bothering him.
At eleven, David hailed a horse-drawn carriage and we settled into the back seat. He told the coachman we wanted to tour the district for half an hour, and for a few minutes we rode in silence, enjoying the closeness and listening to the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves on the cobblestone pavement. David put his arm around me and I snuggled against his chest.
“You never told me how you and Carlos met. From your letters, I gather you knew each other for only a short time before you got married.”
I didn’t answer his question immediately.
“Is this a subject you’d rather not discuss?”
“No, I’ll tell you. I must have written you I was a pre-medical student at Berkeley; as you know, I always avoided the sciences at Washington because I’m weak in math, so I had a non-stop make-up diet of biology, chemistry and physics at Cal. I met Carlos in the fall of 1960, around the time I applied to medical school. I should have networked with the other pre-med students, I should have developed some sort of strategy for admission, there are so many things I ought to have done, but I didn’t, and I only applied to a few schools because the process was so expensive. I got A’s in my biology courses, B’s in chemistry, C’s in physics and did well on the MCAT, but it wasn’t good enough. Every school I applied to turned me down – me, the Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, the girl wonder of the anthropology department. Failing to be admitted was the most humbling experience of my life. Maybe I never mentioned before that Carlos is Chilean; he was here on a student visa studying at a small business college when we met. We’d only known each other for a few weeks when Carlos left school to work full- time; immediately he got a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service telling him he was under “docket control” and had 30 days to leave the country. I was so sorry for him. When I received my final rejection, I dropped out of the university, we got married, and he obtained his permanent residence visa.” I was staring at the carriage floor as I told my story; I looked up at David, who was regarding me intently.
“You married your husband because you felt sorry for him?”
“Marrying Carlos gave me an excuse to leave school without admitting failure. Carlos got his green card. It was a win-win situation.”
“Do you love him?”
“Carlos is a good person, honest, faithful, and hard-working, but … it isn’t fair of me to talk about him, even with you, when you’re only hearing one side of the story.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Picasso once said that in life you throw a ball; you hope it will reach a wall and bounce back so you can throw it again. You hope other people will provide that wall, but they almost never do. They’re like old wet bed sheets, and when that ball you threw strikes those sheets it just falls; it almost never comes back.
“I think that’s how relationships are, or mine, at any rate. With a few people – and I can name them on the fingers of one hand – I throw out an opinion or an idea, and it comes right back to me with a spin on it. With everyone else, the same thing just falls flat. I don’t make friends easily, but in the case of the individuals I mentioned, I knew instantly, from the moment I met them, that they were people with whom I’d forge a lifelong bond.”
“Norma…”
“Norma, Rosemary, you, of course, and … someone else I met a few years ago.”
“But not Carlos?”
“No. He’s like… no, not Carlos.”
The carriage drew up in front of the hotel and David asked the coachman to make another loop.
“Do you want to tell me about the ‘someone else’?”
I regretted my slip of the tongue; I should have known David would question me. But was it really a slip of the tongue or had I mentioned the other person intentionally? I’d always felt a need to confess to David, to unburden myself to the one friend from whom I had no secrets. Confessing to David was like a test of his love; if he could still care for me despite my transgressions, then my sins were truly forgiven.
“I shouldn’t have brought up the subject. It’s like when you and I were getting to know each other and we were talking about all the sadness in our lives – my mother, your marriage; we were torturing each other and ourselves. Was there any point to it?”
“There was for me; I wanted someone to confide in and I think you felt the same way. Yes, our conversations stirred up a host of emotions, but sharing our loneliness brought us closer together. If you don’t wish to talk about him, that’s fine, but I have the feeling you do want to tell me; the ‘someone else’ is a man, I assume?”
“Yes. David, it’s too painful.”
“For whom, you or me?
“For both of us, but especially you.”
“He meant a great deal to you?”
“Once. Not any more.”
“Then tell me. Did you write and suggest we meet after 27 years just so we could mouth platitudes?”
I shook my head. “A few years ago when Carlos and I were going through a particularly difficult time in our marriage and he’d moved out of the house, I met a visiting professor at Cal, a Danish physicist named Helge. Helge was witty, he was charming, he was brilliant - and he’d just separated from his wife. We hit it off immediately – and as I said before, that’s only happened a very few times in my life. We’d still be friends if I’d been satisfied with his companionship, but I wanted more. I wanted him to be you, David, but he could only be himself.”
“Were you in love with him?”
“No, I wasn’t in love with Helge, but I was in love with the idea of Helge, with the fantasy I constructed about him. To tell the truth, he had many qualities I didn’t like. He used people and he was so contradictory. He’d suggest something we could do together, or a trip we could take, I’d get enthusiastic about the idea, and then he’d turn around and, without explanation, say he’d changed his mind. His vacillation drove me crazy, but somehow I kept hoping against hope the next time would be different.”
“And it wasn’t?”
“No, but the fault was mine, not Helge’s. The biggest problem was that he never wanted a sexual relationship with me. It’s probably fair to say I seduced him, but in bed he was the anti-you.”
“What do you mean, ‘the anti-me’?”
“Helge didn’t like sex. For him intercourse was satisfying an urge, like scratching an itchy nose. But it was more than that – I mean he really didn’t like sex, the act repulsed him. He said I was the first woman he’d ever met who enjoyed making love; considering his only other point of reference was his wife, that’s not saying much. And when he told me this, it wasn’t a compliment; I disgusted him … “
“Oh, Kate, come on … “
“No, really. Whatever we did – and it was nothing kinky, not even remotely as exuberant as what you and I used to do – he agreed reluctantly and only to placate me. He told me he’d wanted to, but his wife was unwilling; I think it was the other way around. The last time I saw Helge he was yanking the sheets off his bed and stuffing them in his washing machine because the odor of sex nauseated him. After I left his apartment, Helge phoned his wife and told her he planned to commit suicide. She drove him to a psychiatric facility on campus. A few months later his year at Berkeley ended and he returned to Denmark.”
“Was he gay, by any chance?”
“It’s funny you should say that. Norma asked me the same thing. Helge said himself that some of his colleagues in Denmark spread a rumor he was. I told him his sexual orientation didn’t make any difference to me, but he denied it. He has two children … I don’t know.”
Letters To My Mother Page 29