American Daughter

by Stephanie Thornton Plymale

  “Dominic had cancer,” she might say on a different day. “Leukemia. He was in the hospital and had all the best doctors, and they did everything they could, but they couldn’t save him.”

  This also rang false. My childhood memories were hazy in places and blurred in others, but if my brother had been hospitalized with cancer, I was sure I’d remember something of it.

  “Dominic was kidnapped,” went the third and most frequent explanation. “He vanished without a trace. How was I to know, that morning he went out to play, that I would never see him again? I called the police, of course, and detectives spent months looking for him. But the clues that came in about him led nowhere.” Sometimes she added, “I cried myself to sleep every night after he went missing.”

  My mother always brightened when offering these accounts of his disappearance. It was clear that she enjoyed the tragic role and knew her lines. She invoked every cliché of the desperate or grieving mother when she talked about him, as if she were trying on a story she’d read in the tabloids.

  Growing up all I knew for sure was that Dominic was gone, and despite the soap opera script she might trot out on any given day, my mother did not mourn him. I’d heard grieving mothers talk about their lost children. It’s the worst pain a woman can ever feel, and it never goes away, they said. You learn to live with it, but it’s always there.

  My mother was not in pain. She wasn’t suffering over her missing son. On the issue of his disappearance, I had the sense it was best not to press her too hard, lest I disappear too.

  It was also best to be needed, indispensable. Best to do her bidding in all things and to be of use to her at all times. So that my place in her orbit would be assured. So that I would not vanish as my brother had.

  I was thirty years old before I learned the truth. My brother Allan called one day without warning and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I found Dominic.”

  I couldn’t make sense of this sentence. Found Dominic? What did that mean? Had Allan found his police report, his file, his underground cell, his grave? If I’d never quite believed the tales of his illness or abduction, these were still the images I’d come to associate with his absence.

  “Dominic?” I repeated. “You mean our brother?”

  “Yes, our brother. I found him, Tef.”

  “Found him where?” I asked, my voice going high-pitched and frightened.

  “He’s living in New York City. In the South Bronx,” Allan told me. “He just got out of prison.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Then Dominic is alive?”

  “Alive and well,” Allan said. “At least, he’s well as far as I know.”

  “What happened to him?” I demanded. Where in God’s name had he been all these years?

  “Louie’s sister Alma adopted him soon after he killed himself,” Allan said. “She wanted a child and couldn’t get pregnant.”

  I stood clutching the phone with both hands, stunned and breathless, as Allan filled in the details. Alma was devastated over her brother’s death, and she pined for a baby, so when she and her husband came to pick up Louie’s ashes, they decided to raise his infant son as their own. She’d always told Dominic that his real mother was crazy. She supported this claim with a true story: Just after he was born, our mother had run down the street naked, holding him and screaming, You can’t kill me because I’m already dead! Dominic grew up believing he’d been rescued from a madwoman.

  At the end of this long explanation, I had one more question. “Did Mom know where he was the whole time?”

  “Of course she knew. She let them take him. Just like she let Uncle Allan and Beth take me that time,” Allan told me. “She didn’t care.”

  MY MOTHER HAD lied about Dominic and a thousand other things, and I’d long since come to believe she was lying when she said her rapist was my father. According to her own story, the rapist was pale with bright green eyes. My mother was pale with bright blue eyes.

  My eyes and skin and hair are dark. My mother’s fair skin has always burned without protection, whereas the walnut color of my skin only deepens in the sun. For most of my life, I believed I was half Puerto Rican, even though I look very different from Isabella, Pablo, and Dominic. In any case, I thought it most unlikely that two pale-skinned, light-eyed people had created me.

  Do-it-yourself genetic testing had swept the nation that year. It seemed that everyone I knew was bent on discovering all the facets of their ancestry, even without the central question of a parent’s identity. So I too sent away for a kit, spit into its saliva collection tube, returned it in the prepaid mailer, and waited for my results to arrive.

  IN THE MEANTIME, I began a search for William.

  William, my mother’s first love, her true love—the one she called the love of her life. The one who represented the last true happiness she’d ever known. It was her quest to find William that drew her to New York from her mother’s home in Florida, only to find upon her arrival that he’d gotten engaged to another woman that very morning. This engagement did not keep him from succumbing to her charms that day any more than his marriage would in the future, whenever their paths might cross.

  With so many trysts over so many years, wasn’t it possible that I’d come from one of them?

  He wasn’t hard to find. The last my mother knew, he was in Minnesota, and that’s where I found him in the first nationwide directory I tried online. The age matched—he was an old man now—as did a previous residence in Smithtown, New York. Jim sat next to me on our living room sofa and held my hand as I made the call.

  William answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

  My heart was banging in my chest as I said, “Hi, my name is Stephanie, and I’m looking for William.”

  “Well, you found him.”

  It was hard for me to read his voice. He sounded proud, tired, and wary.

  “I’m trying to track down an old friend of my mother’s,” I told him. “Have you ever known a woman by the name of Florence Agnes?”

  There was a startled silence on the line for a moment. Then in a guarded tone, he said, “Yes, I have.”

  I sank back into my corner of the sofa and nodded at Jim. “Then you’re the right William,” I told him. “I’m her daughter.”

  “Well, isn’t that something,” he said. “Forgive me for asking straight out, but has she passed?”

  I heard it, then, unmistakably: the fear in his voice. God knows how long it had been since he’d seen or heard from my mother. It had likely been many decades. Even now, she mattered to him.

  “Not yet,” I said. “She has end-stage lung cancer, and she doesn’t have much longer to live, but she’s still with us.”

  There was a barely audible sigh of relief.

  “You’ve kind of caught me at a funny time,” he told me then. “Would you mind if I take down your number and give you a call back tomorrow?”

  * * *

  “I COULDN’T SAY much with my wife in the room,” he said the next day when he called me back. “She’s always been jealous of Florence. And, well, I can’t say I blame her. I’ve given into temptation a time or two, and God help me, I could never resist your mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to create any trouble between you and her.”

  “We’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ve been through worse. I had an affair with Florence early on. I don’t know if she ever said anything about that.”

  “My mother says a lot of things,” I said. “Some of them are true and some aren’t. That’s why I’m looking for people who knew her. It’s hard to know what’s real.”

  “I hope I’m not giving away any secrets of hers, but we were together a few times even after I got hitched. I’m not proud of that, but like I said I found her irresistible.”

  William and I talked for twenty or thirty minutes. He sounded lit with the reminiscence of his younger years and the memory of my mother’s beauty.

  “Florence was the lovel
iest woman I ever knew,” he told me. “The kind of girl you’d see in an advertisement for Ivory soap: innocent and pure and high-class. Oh, I loved walking around town with Florence on my arm. I knew I was the envy of every man I saw.

  “I was sixteen, going on seventeen that first summer. She was eleven but she told me she was fifteen, and she looked fifteen. She was at least five-foot-two and she was all filled out. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. Some girls grow up early, I guess, and your mother was one of them.”

  I felt a little squeamish, hearing these details. At eleven, my own daughter looked nothing like a fully developed woman, nor was she interested in dating yet. It was hard to think about an eleven-year-old lying and running around with a young man almost out of high school, with no responsible adults the wiser. Where were her grandparents?

  “Do you know what happened to my mom the summer after you met?” I asked.

  Here his voice dropped a register, as if the subject of rape was as unmentionable now as it must have been then. “Are you talking about . . . how all those men had their way with her?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We never really talked about it,” he said. “She told me it was over and that I was never to mention it in her presence. I never did, but it just about ripped my heart out. Those guys were lucky I wasn’t in the courtroom when they went to trial.”

  “What was it like to see her afterward?” I asked.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “She wasn’t the same. She wasn’t any different to look at, but that girlish, innocent sweetness was gone.”

  In some terrible way, it was reassuring to hear testimony from a stranger that reinforced my mother’s story. Allan had corroborated her account, but it was still good to have reinforcement from an outside source. If nothing else came of our conversation, I would still be glad I had contacted William.

  “Listen,” I said, toward the end of our call. “My mother told me that you and she were lovers for years. I’ve been looking for my father, and I’m wondering whether he might be you.”

  There was dead silence on the line. I could almost feel his panic gathering in the space between us.

  “What year were you born?” he asked after a very long pause.

  “1967,” I told him. “July 2.”

  In his exhalation I heard pure gratitude.

  “It’s not me, honey,” he said gently. “It couldn’t be. I was overseas from the summer of ’66 straight through to the next spring. I came home on Easter Sunday in ’67. You can ask your mother. I did two tours back to back over there, in Vietnam.”

  I didn’t blame him, but it was still wrenching to hear his relief as he repeated, “I’m not the one, honey.”

  * * *

  FOR WEEKS AFTER finding William, I was unable to shake a sense of sadness. The fear in his voice had depressed me. In my fantasy of finding my father, we were both overjoyed. He was thrilled to have a daughter like me. The man in my daydreams considered me a miracle and a gift.

  “Listen, Steph. The way William felt, it had nothing to do with you,” Jim told me. “You have to know that. He’s married, and he was cheating on his wife every time he went to bed with your mom. It could blow up his marriage if he suddenly had a daughter with another woman. At the very least, it would be the kind of drama no man wants to deal with at home.”

  I knew Jim was right. I knew it wasn’t personal. I knew my mother had likely been a sore point between William and his wife for decades, and this would have been the last thing he needed. Yet I couldn’t help wondering: If I were lucky enough to find my real father, would he feel the same? Would I be the bastard child, casting a shadow over his chosen family?

  This sadness lingered until the afternoon a link appeared in my email inbox and one of the mysteries that had been with me for nearly half a century was resolved.

  I was not Puerto Rican. Or Portuguese or Greek or Catalan, or any of the other “exotic” nationalities that people had guessed over the years.

  I was 38 percent Italian.

  MY MOTHER WAS in a hospice facility in Southeast Portland, a place called Gracelen Terrace. For the most part, the staff was gentle and caring. They greeted me warmly whenever I came in, knew each patient by name, and were responsive to calls for help around the clock.

  Even so, there were echoes of every other institution my mother had been in. The odor of human incontinence hung in the air. Screams tore the quiet at regular intervals. The demented, the sick, and the dying were at every turn, and some were in agony that no level of attention could relieve.

  As always, I’d done my best with my mother’s room. I’d made up her bed with a pink velvet coverlet. I brought decorative pillows for the padded seat along the window. A purple orchid plant presided over the end table by her bed, and around it, I’d arranged beautifully framed photos of her grandchildren.

  When I came into her room an hour after receiving my ancestry results, she was sitting up in bed doing a word search puzzle.

  “Mom, I need to talk to you,” I burst out.

  She looked up and met my wild gaze with no apparent alarm. “What is it?”

  “I took a DNA test so I could get a genetic analysis,” I told her. “Everything I’ve learned over the past few months has been about your side of the family. But the other half of my ancestry has just been a blank. You don’t know what it’s like, Mom. You know where you came from, who your people are, who your father was. You can’t imagine how much it hurts not to know.”

  She stared at me from beneath her bluish eyelids.

  “I’m half-Italian,” I told her. “My father must have been Italian. I need to know who he was, Mom.”

  “Really?” she asked. “Italian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that changes things,” she declared. “That certainly narrows it down.”

  “Did you have an Italian lover?” I asked. I was holding my breath.

  “Yes, I did,” she said, a little grandly. She was enjoying this. It was a game to her, and she held all the power.

  “Mom!” I all but howled. “You have to tell me who he was!”

  “All right, all right, don’t make such a fuss,” she said, pleased to be in possession of something I wanted so badly. “Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

  I sank into the nearest chair and pressed my fist hard against my mouth. “What was his name?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember that.”

  I wanted to seize her by her bony shoulders and shake her. I wanted to fall on my knees in front of her bed. I wanted to scream.

  “Who was he?”

  “There was an Italian diaper salesman at the hospital where I gave birth to Isabella,” she said. “Morrisania Hospital in the Bronx. He would get to know the new mothers and sign them up for his delivery service. Then he’d come around once a week. He came around to see me more often, though.” There was a sly note in her voice as she said this, as if savoring her own naughtiness even now.

  “You went to bed with this man several times a week and you can’t remember his name?”

  “It was so long ago,” she said, without a hint of apology. “He was a lovely man, though, that I can tell you. He was clean and he dressed nicely. He smelled like Old Spice and his clothes were always pressed. He made me feel good, and he had an Italian accent all the new mothers loved.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He had tan skin and dark eyes like you. His hair was dark too, and he kept it slicked back from his forehead. He whispered Italian in my ear whenever we made love and it drove me wild. He called me bella, carissima.”

  “This is more than I need to know.”

  “His wife was pretty when they got married,” she went on, ignoring me. “But after she had their two kids, she let herself go. I felt sorry for him.”

  “You remember all this, but not his name?”

  “I’ve always been better with faces,” she said. “And he was a handsome man. Congratulations, Stephanie. Yo
u should be happy.”

  Chapter 27

  IT WAS A relief to know my father was not the dumpster rapist—to bring a definitive lid down on the lie that had dogged me my whole life. Though I hadn’t fully believed it in some time, it was still a mercy to have my mother finally disown it.

  I liked hearing my father described as handsome and charming and courtly. I liked that his eyes and complexion resembled mine.

  But I hated that he was nameless and would remain nameless. I hated that I couldn’t even imagine how to seek more information about him. A few years ago, I’d learned that Morrisania Hospital had closed in 1976. Even if it hadn’t, there would never be a record of a random diaper salesman from decades ago. I would never know who he was.

  Relief, pleasure, intrigue, loss, and desolation: I felt like a stone skimming the surface of the water, flitting from one emotion to the next.

  AT HOME AGAIN, I headed for my office, resolving to catch up on email while I had the house to myself. As soon as I opened my inbox, I saw it: a notification from the ancestry site. It had found a relative of mine: Lucia Fiore. Her page on the site listed a residence in Staten Island.

  Predicted Relationship: Second Cousin

  Confidence: Extremely High

  I stared at her name for almost a minute before I opened Facebook, typed her name into the search bar, and clicked on the lone profile that surfaced. The moment I saw her page, I felt my heart clench: The city beneath her name was indeed Staten Island. At least three generations were accounted for in her profile photo. I took in the dark-haired, dark-eyed smiling faces of several beautiful young women, a couple of children, and one older man.

  The two children were Lucia’s. The older man was her father, and everything about him was lovely. He had a lean, trim figure and high-boned, clean-shaven face. His silver hair was swept straight back to reveal a gentle widow’s peak. There was laughter and kindness in his eyes, and he held himself with a simple dignity.

  Within moments, a family drama unfurled before my eyes: The patriarch of this clan was in the final stage of kidney disease, and they were searching for an organ donor. To this end, they had created a slideshow, a two-minute montage of the older man doting on his family. There was grandpa with the kids: at the beach, in a park, on a boardwalk. In every photo, he was cuddling them, buying them ice cream cones, or teaching them to ride bikes.