by Scott Walker
Brenda and Robert were stunned.
“I think it was 1966 or ‘67, when the phone rang one day, and it was the police in California. They said Richard was in some kind of asylum out there and had given them our name and number. Well, Jim told them that we’d had all the trouble we could take with Richard and hung up the phone. That was the last we ever heard about him.”
Pilar returned the photograph to the box. She pulled out another, of her, Julia and their brother Manuel’s wife. “Oh, I love this one.” The buoyancy returned to Pilar’s voice, but Richard’s ghost seemed to hang in the air. “It’s from, let’s see, 1949. We had gone to get our hair done together and bought new dresses, and we were on our way to a big dance at the VFW hall. Oh, we used to have such fun together.”
Pilar’s descriptions of Julia were always limited to the platitudes one would expect from a devoted sister speaking to her long-lost niece about the woman’s long dead mother: “She was the sweetest girl I ever knew.” “I loved her so much.” “We always had the best times.” Robert already had two grandmothers he adored: Virginia, and Tom’s mother, Shirley. He was interested in information about Julia, but he felt no connection to her.
Brenda’s emotional reaction, as they looked at the photos and listened to Pilar’s stories, was more complicated. “I’ve always felt like a chicken hatched from an egg,” she had told Pilar during their first meeting. Now, she had a brother and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins. Her mother was no longer just a name on a piece of paper.
Yet finding her family and learning about Julia did not answer the question which had tormented Brenda from the day Sam told her she was adopted: why didn’t my mother want me? The revelations about Julia’s struggles, and that she had put another daughter up for adoption, helped Brenda understand it cognitively. But knowing some new facts did not relieve the pain nor repair the psychic damage of Julia’s abandonment.
Brenda had always felt hurt when she thought about her unknown birth mother, but Julia’s transformation into an actual person spurred a new, intense anger. Although it was a legitimate reaction, Brenda felt guilty about it. She suppressed her fury whenever it rose. “I just should be happy I found them,” she would tell herself, “and forget about Julia. She was a mess and is nothing to me.”
When she met her family for first time, on a crisp November afternoon in 1982, it seemed as if they had been standing watch every day for her return. Brenda and Tom were surprised to see such a crowd of people when they entered Pilar and Jim’s house. Mercedes and Antonio’s three sons were there with their wives, as well as Harry, Laura and Elizabeth, whom Pilar and Jim had adopted after Julia’s death.
At first, everyone stood there in the packed living room smiling anxiously. None of them had experienced such an emotion laden moment in their lives. Pilar’s brother Antonio, thick tears filling his big eyes, stepped forward and said: “You look so much like Julia, it’s like she just walked into the room after all these years.” Brenda’s apprehension and fear evaporated as they introduced themselves and each person hugged her tightly.
Then everyone started talking at the same time. Brenda whipped from one ongoing conversation to another, responding to a barrage of questions and comments and trying fretfully to keep all their names straight. The feelings racing through her were so intense that Brenda could hardly breathe. The entire scene unfolded like a fantastic dream, though its joy and beauty exceeded anything Brenda had envisioned over the years when she imagined such a reunion.
For decades, imagining it was as close as Brenda had come to finding them. She and Tom married when she was twenty years old. She felt that getting from under Sam’s roof finally gave her the license to look for her family. But Brenda was terrified by the prospect of finding them. Her mother had not wanted her, so why would any of her relatives, whoever they were? Her search never went beyond looking up the name Ribas in the telephone directory of every city she visited on vacations. She would read the names and touch them on the thin page, as if one would touch her back.
Brenda was thirty-four when her best friend Cathy decided to act, after another angst ridden conversation with Brenda about her constant sense of displacement and abandonment. Brenda knew only her mother’s name and that some of Julia’s siblings had lived in Clarksburg. Cathy got a copy of the city’s phone book at the library. Four Ribases were listed. She wrote down the names and numbers and started calling when she returned home. The first three had never heard of Julia. The last was Julia’s brother Luis.
Luis gave her Pilar’s name and telephone number in Ohio, and Cathy drove directly to Brenda’s house to tell her. The discovery was too important, it felt too powerful, to report over the telephone. As she left, Cathy said, pointing to the piece of paper Brenda still clutched in her hand: “I don’t know what you’ll do with that, but if I were you, I’d call.”
Brenda carried the paper around with her for four months. She could not muster the courage to call. She would take it out, unfold it and look at the name and number, nearly faint from anxiety, and stuff it back into the bottom of her purse. But the harder she tried to ignore it, the stronger the anxiety grew. Emotions are not like plants; they do not require the light of consciousness to grow.
Eventually, the stress became more than she could bear. Brenda was lying awake every night, thinking about the piece of paper in her purse. Her digestive system, always irritated, was a complete wreck.
One Saturday morning, Brenda closed and locked her bedroom door and picked up the telephone receiver. She put it down and sat for a minute looking at the name and number on the paper. She picked the phone up again and dialed. A woman answered. Brenda’s throat was clenched and dry, but she managed to ask, “Can I speak to Pilar Miller?”
“This is Pilar Miller,” the woman said.
“I’m Brenda Stevens.” She tried to swallow. “Julia’s daughter.”
“Oh, my,” Pilar said.
“I don’t want anything from you,” Brenda added quickly. “I just want to know any important family medical history, for me and my kids.”
“Oh, honey,” Pilar said, sniffing and wiping her eyes, “I thought you’d never call. I’ve been waiting ever since Lou told me your friend called him. It’s been months.”
Brenda had so steeled herself that Pilar’s response only made her more confused. “I … I … wasn’t sure about it … about calling. I still … I ….”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Pilar said. “Hold, hold on a second.” Brenda heard her call away from the phone, “Jim! Jim! It’s Brenda! Yes, Julia’s girl!” Pilar returned to their conversation. “I’m sorry, honey, I had to tell my husband. We were afraid you’d lost the number or didn’t want to talk to us.”
Didn’t want to talk to them? Brenda almost laughed at the irony. “I’ve wanted nothing more than to talk to you, well, to my mother or somebody, for most of my life. I always thought you wanted nothing to do with me. “
“Of course we’ve wanted you, to have you back in our lives. You’re part of our family, and family is the most important thing in the world.”
Brenda began to sob so hard that she had to put down the telephone and lie back on the bed. Pilar sat down in a kitchen chair and wept. She held the receiver to her ear and painfully listened to thirtysix years of agony pouring out of her niece.
Chapter 27
August 1984
As a child, Brenda longed for something—material or emotional—nearly every day. The deprivation coloured most of her adult attitudes, desires and actions. Shopping became her favorite form of recreation. She was determined that her children, Robert and Marilyn, would receive a surfeit of the parental love that Virginia had shown her when she could summon the energy amid Sam’s relentless tyranny. Brenda showered her children with presents, whether she could afford them or not. Every August, their closets swelled with new clothing for the school year. Her heart was large. Her love was deep. Her inner woe was vast.
From the week after she turned e
ighteen, Brenda had worked fulltime for the telephone company. In those days, there only was one: AT&T. Additionally, every November and December, their house turned into a ceramics cottage industry. Each day after work, until late into the night, Brenda painted angels, crèches, trees and Santas by the carload to sell for the cash to buy dozens of Christmas gifts for Robert, Marilyn and Tom. There were so many that the children grew weary of unwrapping on Christmas morning, and Brenda had to prod them to remain focused on their task.
Other than Christmas, Brenda’s great passion was the summer vacation, and Robert adored these far-flung excursions. Brenda, Sam and Virginia never had taken one. Accordingly, she, Tom and their children took one every year without fail, for the full two weeks she had off from the telephone company and Tom from the bank where he worked making loans.
Brenda could have made a career in logistics. The scope of these summer trips often stretched the bounds of physical ability. She crafted them to the smallest detail, mapping driving routes, reserving hotels at every stop, purchasing as many entry tickets as possible in advance by mail.
She funded these grand excursions with another round of springtime ceramics: summer planters shaped like frogs and baskets, and eggs and bunnies of all sizes and configurations for Easter. Tom, more or less, enjoyed the trips once they were underway. But he made it clear from the start that they were Brenda’s project. He would have been equally content to spend the two weeks off work at home, golfing and tossing a baseball in their yard with Robert.
Brenda’s vacation expeditions reached their apogee in the summer of Robert’s fifteenth year. To her regular income and the seasonal ceramics sales, she had added selling cosmetics at home shows. Brenda worked as tirelessly and obsessively at the makeup business as she did in every other venture she undertook. Not only was she flush with cash by the start of summer, but she would be honored for her voluminous sales totals at the company’s annual convention in Philadelphia in July. Sam never acknowledged anything she did as she was growing up, and Julia’s abandonment had hobbled her selfconfidence. Brenda craved public recognition. The anticipation of the convention filled her with ecstasy.
The trip contained enough activity for three vacations. They would drive from their home in western West Virginia to Niagara Falls, then on to Toronto, Montreal, New Hampshire, Boston, Cape Cod, Cape May and Philadelphia. In two weeks.
It was nearly midnight as they approached Montreal in their enormous, light blue Pontiac station wagon. Marilyn was stretched out on the back seat asleep, but Robert was too excited to rest. He perched as far forward as he could, hanging halfway over the back of the front seat, and peered intently at the city lights in the distance.
A dense string of multicolored incandescence hugged the ground along the horizon. In the center rose a dark hill topped by a huge pointed dome. It gleamed in white light against the black sky. Robert could not take his eyes off it. “What is that?” he asked his parents, pointing toward the dome.
“Have no idea, Buddy,” Tom replied, exhausted already from the endless driving. “We’ll find out tomorrow.”
They learned from the hotel desk clerk the next morning that they had seen the Oratory of St. Joseph, a nineteenth-century Catholic basilica and the largest church in Canada. Robert insisted they visit. Brenda added it to their itinerary.
Robert had never set foot in a Catholic church. When he did on that day, he experienced a sense of peace and holiness he had not known in his life. And he had never seen anything so beautiful. He walked through the Neo-Gothic nave with his mouth gaping open and gazed up into the soaring dome. The Baptist church they attended was typical: low-ceilinged and devoid of grandeur. This place transported him to a different world.
Robert read in the guidebook that the thousands of crutches they saw hanging along the walls and stuffed into every recess were left by the pilgrims who had arrived physically impaired and walked away on their own power. They had prayed for intercession from a priest called Brother André, who had preached and healed at a small chapel on the hilltop in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century.
The church and the story were a revelation for Robert, but they also felt like a dangerous flirtation with the Devil. In their doctrinally strident Baptist church, most other Christian denominations were condemned as false, and the Holy See most of all. They believed that a Pope would one day be the Antichrist. Just that spring, his church had withdrawn from an interfaith boys’ basketball tournament on dogmatic grounds. “What if the Episcopal priest wanted to say the prayer before the game?” the youth minister had asked the disappointed team. Well-indoctrinated, the boys required no further explanation.
Now, however, Robert was thrown unexpectedly into a crisis of faith, though he did not really recognize it as such. He just felt tremendously confused.
Doubts had begun to squirm in the back of his mind for the first time when they met his mother’s family. They were the first Catholics he knew. He questioned, though only to himself, how such good, loving people could be headed for eternal damnation. Now this kindly looking Canadian priest in the little black-and-white photo in the brochure, who had apparently helped heal all these people. How could he be in Hell, burning forever? And what about this strange inner comfort he felt in the Oratory of St. Joseph? It gnawed at him for the remainder of the day.
Robert did not mention any of this to his parents as they toured Montreal. They never discussed religious matters, or much else of any significance. They were an openly affectionate family, and they spent most evenings and weekends together, but Brenda and Tom were not ones for talking about personal things. The lack of reflection and communication did not consciously trouble Robert. They never had those sorts of discussions, so it didn’t occur to him that things could be otherwise. It would have been like an aboriginal child in the jungle suddenly wondering why they had no electricity. Robert accepted without a second thought that this new religious quandary was his to sort out alone.
But for the moment, the wonders and pace of the vacation distracted him. The experience at the basilica in Montreal slipped into the recess of his mind as they followed the tourist trail through Boston. The Revolution was the only part of US history which interested Robert, and he was astonished by the age of the buildings they saw.
They had taken a summer vacation for as long as he could remember, but they usually went to the beach, professional baseball games and amusement parks. This was their first visit to New England and the first to include so many historical sites. Huntington, where they lived, was founded in 1871. To Robert, a hundred-year-old farmhouse seemed ancient. Here he saw buildings from the seventeenth century. Robert could not drink in enough to slake his thirst.
Chapter 28
Dear Aunt Pilar,
Thank you very much for the money and the card. It always makes me happy that you think of me, and I am so glad we found you.
I got lots of great things for my birthday, the biggest being a car! I sure am glad I passed that driving test last month. I opened this little package from Dad, and it was a Volkswagen key. I didn’t know what to think, and he told me to look out the window, and there it sat on the street in front of the house. It is a silver Scirocco. Dad bought it from one of his friends and had it painted and it looks like new. I love it. Maybe one day Mom and Dad will let me drive to visit you.
I am enclosing two calligraphies I did for you. They are prayers I got from a Catholic devotional book I found at the library. I joined a calligraphy club at the museum a few months ago, and I like it very much. I can sit in my room for hours at night, with just candles for light, and work on it. I feel like a monk at some monastery in the middle ages. Mom gave me a really nice set of pens for my birthday, and I bought the parchment with the money you sent me.
I hope you’re well, and I’m looking forward to us visiting you at Thanksgiving. Your turkey is the best, and I can’t wait to have some of Aunt Elizabeth’s chocolate chip cookies. I have to get the recipe from her th
is year.
Love,
Robert
* * *
Huntington, West Virginia
September 1985
Robert looked around nervously as he ascended the steps to the open doors of St. Joseph’s, Huntington’s primary Catholic church. His parents would have been no more horrified had someone told them they saw him entering a strip club. He slipped inside quickly and sat in the back pew.
The Gothic Revival nave was illuminated only by the early evening sunlight coming through the stained glass windows and by the two spotlights shining on the large crucifix in the apse. It was aesthetically more pleasing than the Baptist church he attended every Wednesday night and twice on Sundays with his parents, but St. Joe— as everyone in the town called it—had none of the grandeur of St. Joseph’s Oratory. A year had passed since that day in Montreal, but the same sense of peace and stillness rose again within him as soon as Robert entered the silent nave.
After half an hour in the stillness, a tall, burly, slightly hunchshouldered priest plodded from the vestry. He stopped, bowed at the waist and crossed himself before the spotlighted crucifix and then finished tidying around the altar from the Saturday evening mass. As he came up the center aisle, the priest noticed Robert. “Say one for me,” he called over as he passed.
A bit startled, Robert said: “Excuse me?”
The priest stopped and looked back. “A prayer. Say one for me.” Then he continued with his work, stacking and straightening the missalettes, brochures and offering envelopes on the table in the vestibule. As he passed again, this time down the side aisle next to Robert, the young man asked: “Is it okay if I come back in the morning, for the mass?”
The priest crunched his brow and looked at him curiously. “Well, of course. Why wouldn’t it be okay?”