The Mistress's Daughter

by A M Homes

  Later, in Washington, D.C., my grandparents started a successful wine importing company, and when she was seventy-eight, Jewel Rosenberg became a founding director of the first bank in the United States organized by women for women.

  Whatever I know about how to live my life, I learned from her. When I graduated from college and wanted to become a writer, she lent me the money to buy an IBM Selectric typewriter. I dutifully paid her back $50 a month, and when the debt was repaid, she wrote me a check for the entire amount. “I wanted you to know what it means to work for something.”

  Back at the table, she sighed. “I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t feel useful anymore.”

  “It’s your turn to rest and let others do things for you.”

  “I’m not a rester, I’m a worker.”

  “Let’s go for a ride,” I said, getting up from the table. We drove to a local farm, the place where my mother took me apple picking and pumpkin hunting as a child. I drove up a rutted road toward the berry patch.

  “Where are we? This is beautiful, it reminds me of North Adams.”

  I parked beside a row of blueberry bushes and opened her door.

  She made her way to the bushes and started grabbing at the berries and popping them into her mouth, her ninety-eight-year-old fingers suddenly nimble. Sweeping her hair back, she looked up at the sky and moved down the row, picking rapidly. She was a girl again, filling the basket with ripe, warm berries. “This is exactly how it used to be.”

  We drove home with the basket of berries on her lap. She squeezed my leg. “Buy your little house,” she said, and I did.

  I called her from the little house on Long Island. I stood in the small yard and told her what I was planting: rosebushes, tulip bulbs, seeds for carrots, beets, and squash. I had turned over a small square of land at the far end of the yard and began calling it “the field.” I told her about tilling the field, tending my crop—the enormous satisfaction in this work, in being away from the city, my hands deep in the dirt.

  She turned ninety-nine. “When are you coming home?” she asked several times in each conversation. “Soon,” I told her. “Soon, I am coming home.”

  And then she was gone, the only person I’ve known to die unexpectedly at ninety-nine. I hurried back to Washington. I went to her house. I moved from room to room. I sat at the table, waiting. I had the feeling that she too felt she left too soon. She seemed to still be there, hovering, floating, packing.

  I stayed for a while, just sitting, comforting myself with the echoes and objects that were like symbols, vessels of history.

  At the end of the summer I pulled my carrots out of the ground, as proud of them as I was of any story or novel I’d written. She was the person I would most want to share them with; she was the one who would understand when I held up the green grassy ends and proudly said, Look what I made.

  I see now that I am a product of each of my family narratives—some more than others. But in the end it is all four threads that twist and rub against one another, the fusion and friction combining to make me who and what I am. And not only am I a product of these four narratives—I am also influenced by another narrative; the story of what it is to be the adopted one, the chosen one, the outsider brought in. In the living room bookcase of my parents’ house there was a two-volume slip-cased set called The Adopted Family. One of the volumes was a book to be read to the adopted child, and the other was a book for the parents. I would often sit with that book not sure entirely what it was about but sure that it was of great import, that in some way it was quite literally about me. I felt like a doll whose package comes along with a book.

  As a child, I devoured biographies—in particular a set of biographies for children called Childhood of Famous Americans. I read each of them again and again; two in particular stuck in my mind: Eleanor Roosevelt and Babe Ruth. And at some point they conflated into a character of my own making, Eleanor Babe, a sort of early superhero—not only did she start organizations like Unicef, she had a mean curve ball. Thinking back on those two books, it’s clear why they lodged in my thoughts; both Eleanor Roosevelt and Babe Ruth were sent away by their families—Eleanor to live in London with aunts who had no understanding of her, and Babe to a children’s home in Baltimore after his mother died. It was their outsider experience, their loneliness, that I identified with. They were invisible adoption heroes—not only had they survived but they succeeded.

  It was the death of my grandmother that compelled me to try to have a child of my own. Motherhood was something that terrified me. I have a great fear of attachment and an equally constant fear of loss—I am not sure if this is true for everyone, but for me the ghost of the dead brother still and always looms. When I was younger I always thought I would adopt a child, but after Ellen’s death and then my grandmother’s, I felt I wanted a biological child, and so it was something that I decided to do. It had never occurred to me that it would be difficult to get pregnant. I started at thirty-nine, and in the end it took two years, thousands of dollars, the best of medical science, and two miscarriages before my daughter was born.

  “What’s the matter?” my mother asked. “Isn’t adoption good enough for you?”

  “Of course it’s good enough,” I said, but it wasn’t that—I felt compelled to try my hardest, to issue a biological echo, to see myself before myself, writ large and small and as fully related as one can ever be.

  Months after my grandmother had passed, my mother called and asked if I would like my grandmother’s table.

  “I know it’s big and that your house is small, but I think it would be nice if you had it.”

  The table came in through the side door, carried by four men, carefully wrapped.

  “These are tables of great weight,” one of the men said, and he was right, but the weight was not so much literal as emotional. I inherited much more than an object—it was a mandate to live and work as hard and with as much grace and style as she did.

  At first the table looked out of place, lost. I oiled it. I rubbed it with a soft cloth, moving my hands over the surface and noticing the richness of the tone—the lived-in marks that Nakashima called Kevinizing after his son Kevin. I thought of the spiritual life of the wood, what it gave beyond a surface.

  The first time I used the table, I invited a friend over for lunch. I took my usual spot. Instead of looking at a painting on my grandmother’s living room wall, I was now looking out a window at a bird feeder. I set two places at the table, hers and mine. My friend sat in my grandmother’s place and something felt strange.

  “I need to change places with you,” I said.

  The friend looked at me oddly—she didn’t understand.

  “Could we switch?” I asked, and then I slid into her seat.

  When the table gets dry—thirsty—its surface looks pale, parched. I rub it with oil; it drinks and then glows. And while it is only a table, an object made of wood, it is a perfect and constant reminder of how to live, how to stay connected. It was in this little house—which I wouldn’t have bought without my grandmother’s nod and a gift that helped with the down payment—that I got the phone call from my mother saying my mother had died. It was in this house that I first miscarried and that, a year later, I celebrated my child’s first Christmas and Hanukkah. It was in this house, at this table, that I sat alone unpacking the four boxes from my mother’s house in New Jersey. It was this table that could hold those boxes.

  The table is the centerpiece of our family life. It is where on the weekends my young family gathers—my daughter draws her pictures here; together we make cookies and decorate them. Each time I sit here I remember myself in my grandmother’s kitchen, in awe and admiring her spice rack, her jars of cookie sprinkles and cinnamon hearts. Now, sitting in what was my grandmother’s seat, I watch my daughter sitting in my spot to my left. I watch this girl, who more than anyone reminds me of my grandmother. She carries the same facial expressions, the same gestures, the same simultaneous compassi
on and judgment. I witness the way she moves through her life, the confidence with which she carries herself. Like my grandmother, she takes great pleasure in making sure that others are taken care of. And as I am thinking this, she gets up from her spot, comes over, and gently pushes me out of my seat.

  “I need your chair,” she says, climbing up, filling the vacated spot.

  I am my mother’s child and I am my mother’s child, I am my father’s child and I am my father’s child, and if that line is a little too much like Gertrude Stein, then I might be a little bit her child too. Most important, now I am Juliet’s mother, and that brings with it a singularity of love and fear that I have never known before, and for that—and she is truly a blend of all four family lines—I thank all of my mothers and fathers, for she is my greatest gift.

  Did I choose to be found? No. Do I regret it? No. I couldn’t not know.

  Acknowledgments

  With great thanks: Phyllis R. Homes, Joseph M. Homes, Jon S. Homes, Edith Dugoff, Dan Gerstein, Belle Levin, Rita Ogren, Buddy Rosenberg, Marc H. Glick, Alison Smith, Amy Hempel, Patricia McCormick, Marie Sanford, Paul Slovak, Ellis Levine, Sarah Chalfant, Jin Auh and the staff at the Wylie Agency, Amy Gross, David Remnick, Deborah Treisman, Peter Canby and the staff of the New Yorker, Sara Holloway, Ian Jack and the staff at Granta, David Kuhn, Lanny Davis, Harvey Schweitzer, Brian Frosh, Elizabeth Samuels, Linda Reno, John Gray, Maria Dering, Alice Evans, Erin Markey, Michael Oster, Trent Duffy, Elizabeth MacDonald, Bliss Broyard, Mary Fitzpatrick, Betsy Sussler, Hilma Wolitzer, The Writers Room, Elaina Richardson, Candace Wait and the Corporation of Yaddo.