The Mistress's Daughter

by A M Homes

  The desire to know oneself and one’s history is not always equal to the pain the new information causes. At times I have to slow down to accommodate a self that is constantly struggling to catch up, to recalibrate. I go to bed at midnight, and at 2 A.M. find myself at my desk—logging on. In the middle of the day I nap. My brain is constantly reshuffling the files and organizing and accommodating the new information. On the one hand I want to know my history, and on the other it is overwhelming to become aware of so many lives and to realize that most, if not all, of my ancestors are completely ignorant of my history and/or even my existence. There is a part of me that resents how hard I am working to locate information that they have lived with all along—information that is theirs for the asking.

  I am looking at the records of the Slyes of St. Mary’s County, who owned other people and who sold or gave them away. I am looking at these early settlers wondering, What were they thinking? Why, having come from such incredible privilege, did they not do more with their lives? They got here first, came with land and labor and power, and what did they end up building for themselves? Why did none become president, or direct a large corporation? Why did they not lay the railroad, or discover electricity? Why did they not start a nonprofit or fund philanthropy? I am frustrated with them for falling through the cracks of history. I think a lot about responsibility—did they take responsibility for who they were and what they did? What quality of people were they? And why does it mean so much to me? Why do I need for them to be good—better than good—need them to be great?

  These are my souls.

  I go to the New York City Municipal Archives at 31 Chambers Street. To get in, you have to show identification, tell them what you are there for, get a pass, and then go through metal detectors. I am stopped because somewhere in my bag I have a pair of tweezers. I leave the tweezers at the desk. In room 103, I sign in and pay $5 to use the microfilm machines. The people who work there have been there forever—they know the contents of each of the flat metal drawers, they know the Soundex system of organizing information, the difference between a marriage license and a marriage certificate. They know how to dig for buried treasure—but they are cranky about answering questions. It is like a civil servant episode of Taxi, with Danny DeVito playing the hostile clerk behind the counter.

  Still, there is an undeniable beauty to the things found in this room—reels and reels of microfilm, images of lives lived long ago, documents writ in an ornate Old World hand of variable legibility. I go through the reels slowly at first, not wanting to fast-forward, not wanting to miss anyone, feeling like each one of them is due a visitor, an appreciation.

  The room is full of people each piecing together their private puzzles and the first thing that occurs to me is they’re not all adopted—so what are they looking for? I remind myself that the quest to answer the question Who am I? is not unique to the adoptee. In this room everyone is looking for something that will help them either confirm or deny part of what they believe about themselves. They are looking for backup, support, for definition. They are all deep in it—buried in names, dates, codes—but most are also happy to render assistance. Some volunteer helpful hints, while others tell their stories. I often ask, “How long have you been at it?” “Seven years,” one woman tells me. “It started as a hobby, a birthday present for my husband,” another says. “It started when my father died,” another woman says. “Have you tried the Italians? They keep good records, even on the Jews.”

  Another woman leans over and whispers, “Have you been to Salt Lake City?” Salt Lake is “the mountain,” the mecca for genealogical information—home base for the Mormons, who go around the world collecting genealogical data. Every month five to six thousand reels of microfilm are added to their collection. Unbeknownst to much of the general population, the reason the Mormon Church has such wonderful genealogical records is that they’re collecting people—they hope to determine the genealogy of everyone in the world to prepare them for posthumous conversion. Basically they’re making Mormons from the dead—baptism by proxy. They have a purification ritual through which they claim you as their own. There has been outrage from the Jewish community because the Mormons took the information of Holocaust victims—people who were killed because of their religion—and made them Mormons. In 1995 the LDS church said it would honor an agreement to stop the proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims and other deceased Jews, and yet it continues. “And they are making more Mormons every day. I went once for two weeks,” the woman tells me. “It was heaven. Think about it,” she says.

  There is the whir of the machines, juxtaposed against the virtual silence in which everyone works—it is difficult to stay focused. Repeatedly and anxiously I lose track of what I am looking for. A guy in a white shirt is hogging the files; he’s got multiple drawers open, his arms filled with reels, and he’s blocking the way. The rule is one reel at a time—take it, look at it, and put it back—which also makes it harder to misfile upon return. “Excuse me,” I say, “it’s one reel at a time.” He ignores me. “Excuse me,” I try again. “Just a minute,” he grumps, digging through a drawer. I push my leg against the drawer, threatening to close it on his hand. “Excuse me—Is your dead person somehow more important than anyone else’s?”

  I find marriage certificates for David and Rika Hecht, my paternal great-grandparents, both born in Germany, and with each come the names of their parents, my great-great-grandparents: Nathan Hecht and Regina Grunbaum and Isaac Ehrenreich and Rosa Steigerwald. Within the hour I have birth certificates for Irving (born Isaac), Arthur Samson, and Nathan—my grandfather and great-uncles.

  I locate Moriz Billman, born in Gomel, Russia, in 1846, who came into America in 1888 with a second wife and children from two marriages, and who later petitioned to become a citizen of the United States as Morris Bellman of 466 Bergen Street in Brooklyn. I find Billmans who became Bellmans and then Ballmans. I get a copy of the marriage license of my maternal grandfather, Bernard Bellman, to my maternal grandmother, Clara Kahn, and find that Bernard was married before and in 1925 divorced a woman named Margaret R. Bellman. Did his children—my mother and her brother—know? Were there other children from the first marriage? The man at the desk tells me that if I am curious I can look upstairs on the seventh floor—if the divorce was filed in New York City, I might just find it there.

  With each name and date comes imagery. I start making mental pictures of who they were—who I might be. I am the granddaughter of an English Southern belle. I am the granddaughter of a Romanian/French immigrant. I am the granddaughter of the Lithuanian farmer girl, the granddaughter of the Russian bookie, the granddaughter of an Irishwoman. I am the adopted daughter of the guidance counselor and the left-wing artist and the biological daughter of the philandering adulterer and the wayward girl, the little girl lost.

  I am back in time, wading across a clear running creek. I am a farmer on a plantation, I am captain of a ship. I am the woman in a long white dress, my curly hair high up on my head; I am feeling the heat of summer—the Southern humidity, the thick stagnant afternoon air, the coming of thunderstorms. I am conjuring sea captains and drinking glasses of blood red wine. This is the stuff of poems and fever dreams. I am of a plantation and I can say I knew it all along at some preconscious level. I am imagining the lives of indentured servants and slaves—some of whom had the very same names as the people I am looking for. When were they freed and where did they go?

  What becomes clear is that all of this is about narrative—the story told. I can’t escape the oddity of how it happened that I, a person without a past, became a novelist, a storyteller working from my imagination to create lives that never existed. Every family has a story that it tells itself—that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates; some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family sto
ry. And in the absence of other narratives it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.

  As children we are all gullible by nature. It doesn’t occur to us to question the family narrative; we accept it as fact, not recognizing that it is a story, a multilayered collaborative fiction. Think of the variations, the implications in terms of time, place, social status and structure. You are from Topeka and have been for five generations; your grandfather was a preacher, your grandmother half Indian. Or your grandmother is from a small village in Italy; she came here after her entire family was killed in a flood of volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Your mother was married once before and had a child she gave away—somewhere you have a sister. Your mother was out walking one night and someone came up behind her—and the product was you.

  I take the elevator to the seventh floor. The smell of stale paper smacks you as soon as the elevator door opens; the hallways are filled with metal shelving units, packed with paper, precariously perched files that are threatening to tumble onto the floor. This is the history of New York, the history of America—and it’s as though I’ve plunged into a Coen brothers movie.

  It is a room of tables pushed together into a center square. There are current and not so current newspapers on the table and people sitting around, doing nothing—I am not sure if they work here or are people with nowhere to go. Maybe this is a historical day treatment center; maybe people are doing a certain kind of “time.” The room is absent of air, of the passage of minutes, hours, and years. “Where would I find a divorce from the 1920s?” I ask the entire room. One man perks up. “Might be over here in the card catalog,” he says, nodding toward the corner. There are huge metal cabinets, with cards for each lawsuit filed. Next to the card catalogs there is a large metal locker. Curious, I pry the door open. Old directories sigh and crumbling pages tumble out, dumping what looks like sawdust—or mouse bedding—onto the floor. Quickly I close the door and go back to the card catalogs. Again, I am flying blind, looking for anything and everything under any of the names on my list—Hecht, Bellman, Ballman, Billman.

  “What kind of case is this?” I say, showing the man the card for Hecht vs. in RE.

  “Oh, that’s going to be interesting,” the clerk tells me. Is he serious, or sarcastic? “The in RE cases usually mean that someone was either a minor or otherwise incompetent to represent themselves.”

  Just the phrase, “In Re:,” gets my mind going. I sing to myself, “In Re:, a drop of golden sun.”

  “If you want the files you have to fill out a request—the old cases are stored off-site.”

  “Great, where’s the form?”

  “Sixty Chambers Street. Room 114.”

  Sixty Chambers Street is impossible to find, even though it’s supposedly right around the corner. The narrow streets of lower Manhattan are dwarfed by large hulking buildings—some incredibly old, others more modern fortresses. Between the buildings there are police patrolling with machine guns in hand—this is our new world, post 9/11, and we seem to believe that people patrolling with guns makes us safer. There is a prison right there and a woman standing guard outside with a flak jacket and a big gun. “Excuse me, where is 60 Chambers Street?” She tells me, “I have no idea,” and in a minute I discover that it is just across the street, and I’m thinking it’s a problem that the guard doesn’t know where she is and doesn’t seem to care—especially if she had to tell someone where she was or which way someone went.

  The dissonance is shocking—on the outside there is the Jersey wall, men and women with guns, the bright wash of summer light, the incredible baking heat, and inside, the smell of age, of mold and dust and things not touched for fifty years. I am depressed as hell, reminded of how unattached I am, and how crazy it is to do this digging—nobody cares. Whatever I find, it’s only ephemera, the thinnest bits of information. I think of the papers that blew from lower Manhattan into Brooklyn when the World Trade towers fell, burned notes from people’s desks, and how people clung to these scraps as if they held the secrets of the world, of creation.

  At 60 Chambers the guard at the metal detector stops me and I confess that I have tweezers in my bag. He doesn’t care. All he wants to know is, “Do you have a camera on your phone?” No. Inside I file my requests. It’s noon. I am exhausted.

  From my apartment I am exchanging e-mails with strangers and with relatives I have known for the whole of my life. I pull the adoptive relations in a little closer. I have the sense of belonging to my adoptive family more than I did as a child—this comes from having shared the experience of growing up within a narrative that, while it is not my own biologically, is now mine socially and culturally. I write to my adoptive maternal relatives in Paris and London. From them I collect tales of Jacob Spitzer’s dairy farm on the Mohawk Trail in North Adams, Massachusetts—the dog, the cow, the horses, Nigger and Dick. There are stories about the children (the great-aunts and-uncles that I grew up with), Lena, Henry, Helen—who died in 1912 of diphtheria at fourteen—Maurice, Samuel, Solomon, (known as Charlie), Harold, Doris, and my beloved grandmother Julia Beatrice.

  I collect information about Simon Rosenberg and Sophie Rothman—my adoptive maternal great-grandparents, born in the 1870s in Braila, Romania, a town on the Danube. My grandfather, Bernard, their eldest child, was born there in 1896, and by 1898 the family moved to an apartment at 64 rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais district of Paris. In France they had a successful hat factory and a very large family. My great-aunts and-uncles there include Rachel, who burned to death at three when the children were left home alone and her dress caught fire—my grandfather and his brother tried unsuccessfully to put the fire out. Among the other children were Joffre (who died at six), Raymond, Etienette, Henriette (who lived for six days), Adele, Maurice and Julien (who both died at Auschwitz), Emmanuel (who died of wounds in World War II), and another brother, Leon. In 1972, when my grandfather died in Washington, I got two of his hats, a winter hat and a summer hat. Elegant and understated, he never went out without a hat. At thirteen, I visited Paris and met Adele and Etienette. We went to 64 rue Vieille du Temple—my grandfather’s family name was still on the buzzer, more than fifty years after the fact.

  Through my adoptive father, several aunts in Florida, and a cousin ten blocks from me in New York, I cobble together the story of my adoptive paternal grandfather and grandmother—Jacob Homes and Minerva Katz. Throughout my childhood they never spoke of their past—I knew them only as hardworking people with a fondness for cheese Danish and stewed fruit. Jacob Homes (Homelsky) was born in Russia in 1892 and had three sisters and a brother. In 1910 he walked from Russia to Finland and found work on a boat, which landed him first in Canada and then in Philadelphia—where he earned enough to bring his mother and siblings to this country. In 1916 he met Manya Kvasnikaya (Minerva Katz) from Ekaterinoslav, Russia.

  Minerva, the youngest daughter in a large family, was a late-in-life baby, rejected by her parents and largely raised by her oldest sister. She was educated for two years in a Russian school and then tutored by someone who gave her lessons while she sat atop a pickle barrel at the herring stall her sister ran. At home, Minerva slept above the oven on a bed of straw.

  As a young teenager she traveled to the United States with her sister and brother-in-law, and they settled in northern New Jersey. She worked as a cashier in Atlantic City, went to school through sixth grade, and later lived in Philadelphia with a woman who sold goods to immigrants. There Minerva slept on a board over the bathtub.

  In Philadelphia, Jacob Homes delivered meat from the butcher to the house where Minerva was living—he liked her because she could read and write. They married; a first son died at birth. In 1918 Joseph Meyer Homes, my adoptive father, was born, followed by five sisters. No one recalls whether Jacob’s father came to this country—but all believe he was killed in an accident, run over by a wagon.

  In 1929, when they were living in New Jersey, the family’s butcher shop burned down and they
moved to Washington, D.C., where Minerva’s brother lived. In Washington Jacob found a tank in a junk pile, filled it with gasoline, and took it to the farmers’ market—selling gas by the five-gallon bucket to the farmers for their return trips after the market. He progressed to selling gas on the streets for ten cents a gallon and grew the business into the Homes Oil Company.

  It was only when I started asking questions about the family history that my adoptive father told me one of the stranger stories of his youth—a moment where his own history collided with a particularly ugly and now forgotten moment in American history. In July 1932, he was working at his father’s gas station on Maryland Avenue in Washington, D.C., when generals Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton lead four troops of cavalry, four troops of infantry, a mounted machine gun squadron, and six tanks on a mission ordered by President Hoover to run the “Bonus Marchers” out of town. Soldiers on horseback with bayonets chased the Marchers—World War I veterans—out of their makeshift housing. Men and animals came charging right through the gas station. My grandfather grabbed my father and pulled him to safety. The story of my father and the Bonus Marchers—twenty thousand unemployed World War I veterans who marched on Washington, demanding payment of a cash bonus—is one that I hear for the first time when I am forty-four years old. I am thrilled to have it. I feel as though I’m slowly reconstructing an ancient lost tapestry.