“It’s so hot in here,” I said. “Can I open the window?” I leaned over the kitchen sink and opened it a few inches, feeling immediately refreshed by a rush of cold air. Outside in the backyard, my father was hammering nails into a fence post, and the little girl, wrapped up now in a hat, scarf and coat, was playing with a woman I didn’t recognize. The child’s face was striking and remarkably familiar.
“Who did you say the little girl is?” I asked, not taking my eyes off her.
My mother clanked about, opening the tin, spooning the tea into the pot, getting the cups down from the cupboard. The kettle began to whistle, and she seemed to let it go on longer than necessary.
“Who is she, Mother?” I asked, more insistent now.
“Your cousin,” she said in a low voice. Then she finally looked at me. “Your aunt adopted a little girl.”
I felt my stomach drop, and a wave of chills coursed through my whole body. I went back to the kitchen window and leaned toward it. She was laughing now, playing hopscotch in front of the lady. Adeline. It was a beautiful name.
I looked back to my mother. “She’s mine, isn’t she.”
“Keep your voice down,” she scolded.
“She is. I could see it the minute you opened the door. How? How could she have my baby? How could she not tell me? I signed the papers. I left Birdhouse Lodge without her. Aunt May wasn’t even there. I don’t understand. Mother, please!”
My mother grabbed me by the wrist and took me back to the living room.
“I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, Olive!” she said in an urgent whisper. “I don’t know why she would do such a thing. It was wrong of her. She lived like a hermit, and that is no way to raise a child, and she knew we had made a specific plan. A specific plan!” she said, hitting her fist into the open palm of her other hand. “I told her back then that she shouldn’t have done it. She said she couldn’t stand to let some stranger take a newborn baby away.”
“Wait a second, you spoke to her about this? You knew?”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, exasperated by my persistence. “Yes, Olive, I knew. She told me a few weeks after she brought Adeline home.”
“What?” I yelled this time. “You knew about her the whole time, and you didn’t tell me? How could you not tell me?”
My mother looked at me, furious. “First of all, lower your voice or I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Your father doesn’t know about any of this, and I don’t want him to find out. And secondly, why would I tell you? You didn’t want that baby—you made that very clear.”
“I was nineteen, Mother! I didn’t know what I wanted. You made that decision for me! I was scared. All this time I’ve been thinking about her, wondering if she’s okay, if she’s loved, wondering where she is. And you didn’t think I ought to know?”
“I’ve seen what you’ve been up to, drinking, and dancing, and out all night. I hardly think you’ve been losing any sleep over this poor child. Anyway, there’s no point raking all that up now, what’s done is done, and Aunt May is gone.” She narrowed her eyes and glared at me. Was she suggesting that this was my fault? Had the whole plan to involve Aunt May in my pregnancy secret been too much for her heart?
“We’re going to bring the child to Brooklyn, and your father and I will raise her. We’ll tell everyone that May had adopted a child and, following her untimely death, it makes sense that her only sister will bear that burden.”
I sat on the arm of the chair, weak. I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach, repeatedly. A thousand questions ran through my head. Why hadn’t Aunt May told me, would I have tried to stop her? Was this her plan all along? Was she doing this to fulfill her own desires to become a mother? I had so many questions that would never be answered.
I slid into the chair and put my head back.
“Oh God, are you going to faint?” my mother asked, irritated. “If your father sees you, he’s going to wonder what’s going on.”
“I’m in shock, Mother,” I said. This onslaught of information left me weak. I felt my mother lift my limp arms and hoist me up.
“Come on, Olive,” she said, her voice softening. “Let’s get you upstairs.”
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just let me be.” But she’d already pulled me up to standing and was walking me to the narrow staircase.
Holding on to the banister, I made my way upstairs, my mother following, and sat down on the edge of the small bed that I’d slept in when I was staying with Aunt May. When I looked around the room, I realized that it was Addie’s room now. There were building blocks stacked in the corner, knitted dolls lined up on the windowsill. Squeals of laughter rose up from the backyard.
“I need to see her,” I said.
“You need to get some rest and pull yourself together.” My mother sighed, shaking her head, and left the room.
Addie was running, arms out in front of her, chasing the birds. She seemed so happy. I couldn’t believe she was mine. I opened the window so I could hear her better.
“Look, look,” she was saying to the woman who was outside with her, urging her to look at the birds, too. “Birdies,” she said, then more squeals as she chased after them again.
I picked up one of the knitted dolls. It was a cream-colored bear wearing a hat and gloves and dark green pants. Someone had knitted this for her, and I felt so incredibly thankful. She had been loved. Aunt May had given her a start in life. And whether she meant to or not, Aunt May had given me a gift, too, one beyond what I could have imagined. This was an absolute miracle.
* * *
Once I’d taken some time to collect my thoughts, I drank down the water my mother had left by the bed and went back downstairs. Outside, I sat on the ledge of a low wall in the backyard near Addie and the neighbor.
“What are you playing?” I asked.
“Birdies,” she said, pointing at them as I’d seen her do from the window.
“Big birdies,” I said. “They look like they might be crows.”
She clapped her hands together.
“I’m Maria,” the woman said, “I live next door. You must be Olive. I was a friend of your aunt’s.”
“It’s nice to meet you.” I remembered her now. I’d seen her a few times when I stayed with Aunt May, but I didn’t think we’d ever spoken. I had been hiding myself back then, while Aunt May purposefully avoided people, saying it was too hard to meet new people after her husband died.
“I have two girls, they’re seven and nine. They love playing with Addie. And we all adored May. She was such a kind, quiet lady.”
I nodded. “She really was. I can’t believe she’s gone.”
Maria shook her head. “Me neither, such a shock. My girls came over to visit Addie that day, and when no one answered we got worried and came in through the back door. We found her in her bed. Addie had been trying to wake her.”
“Oh, Lord,” I said. “How awful.” I looked over to Addie, who was pulling a little wooden dog on a string. She was only two and she’d already been through so much. My heart ached for her.
“It’s very kind of you to have the reception at your home,” I said. Maria had insisted, since their house was bigger than Aunt May’s, and in return my mother was attempting to cook enough pies to feed an army.
“Of course,” she said. “It’s the least we can do.” She paused. “What will you do now?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. But from the way she was looking at me, I realized she knew about me and Addie.
“Your mother said they’d take her to New York.”
I nodded.
“She really is the most darling little girl,” she continued. “So happy all the time, so well behaved, so easy.”
I nodded again. What else could I add? I had no idea if she was well behaved, if she liked to take a bath, if she was a picky eater, a good sleeper, if cats made her sneeze the way they did for me.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s none of my business
. We just care for her so much.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I honestly don’t know what I’ll do. But thank you for caring about Addie, for being a friend to Aunt May. It’s what they needed, I’m sure.”
“We could keep her,” she said suddenly, almost nonchalantly, as if we were discussing who should keep the leftover pies. “With us. She’s known the girls since she first came home.”
I was stunned by her offer and studied her face, taking in all that she had said, unable to respond right away.
“Well, you don’t have to say anything now. Just think about it and know that we would be more than happy to take her in.”
* * *
That night Maria, her husband and their two girls joined us for dinner, but I barely said a word. In a matter of a few hours everything I thought I knew had turned out to be wrong, and I was trying to absorb it all. Addie sat in a wooden high chair at the end of the table, and Maria’s two girls sat on either side of her, while the adults sat at the other end of the table. My mother and Maria mostly discussed preparations for the next day, that my mother would bring the pies over to Maria’s house the next morning before we all left for church, how Maria’s husband would set out drinks, and another neighbor would bring lemon cake. I didn’t attempt to partake in the adult conversation—I so desperately wanted to be seated with the children.
I couldn’t take my eyes off Addie, the way she picked up her buttered bread and ate it, her lips and cheeks getting greasy from the butter. The way she grasped her fork in her hand and ate her carrots. I wanted to hold her fleshy hand in mine and walk her around the backyard, just the two of us, to spend time with her away from everyone else, to hear her high-pitched voice respond to things that I said. And then, as if she knew we shared a secret, she looked up at me and smiled.
* * *
There must have been fifty or sixty people at the funeral the next day, paying their respects to my aunt. I was surprised. She had barely interacted with anyone when I’d lived with her—but these were friends, church patrons, store owners, other parents from the neighborhood. It seemed that having a child in her life had coaxed her to mingle with humanity again. Several people spoke at the funeral about what a kind and generous person she was, how she helped others, how she’d watched other neighbors’ children alongside Addie when they’d needed to run an errand, how she’d brought food to one family for a week straight when their child fell ill. I had seen this kindness in her when she took me in, but I’d known then that to others she was just an odd lady, the woman at the end of the street who kept to herself. The May they spoke of at her funeral had flourished. She’d reclaimed her life with Addie in it. My mother saw it, too. She wept quietly in the pew. I reached out and took her hand.
“This was how she used to be before Henry died,” she whispered. “She was back to being May again.”
It was a moving tribute. I imagined my own eulogy. Whom had I cared for or loved unconditionally? How had I helped people? Who had relied on me? I thought of Archie, how I’d been so cruel and cowardly to not tell him the truth, how I’d convinced myself that hurting him and abandoning him with no explanation was better than being honest with him. And now he was gone. I regretted it all.
That night when everyone had left, I told my mother that she should put her feet up and I would read Addie her bedtime story and put her to bed. My mother looked at me uneasily.
“That’s all right, Olive, you don’t have to,” she said.
“I want to. And besides, you both must be exhausted after today. Let me help.”
“You’ve been on your feet all day, Doris, let her help out for once,” my father said as he settled into the armchair in front of the fireplace. I had noticed throughout the day that any time I’d tried to spend with Addie had been interrupted by my mother. This time I didn’t wait for her to discourage me.
“Are you ready for story time?” I asked Addie, who was sitting in the middle of the living room stacking three egg cartons on top of one another. She nodded, so I picked her up and carried her upstairs.
I helped her into her pajamas in Aunt May’s room, where she’d been sleeping in a makeshift bed next to my parents since I’d been staying in her room. I unfastened her two miniature pigtails and brushed her hair, and when I did, she grabbed my face with her two small hands.
“Pretty hair,” she said, pulling gently on mine.
“Thank you,” I said. “We have the same color. Look!” I swished my head from side to side, letting my short bob fly away from me. She did the same, laughing. In that moment, everything—the theater, the singing, the dancing, the nights on the town—everything seemed so frivolous and unimportant. How could I have not known how this would feel, to be sitting here talking to my daughter, seeing myself in her and her in me?
I read her a story, then I tucked her into bed, and by the time I was finished she was already asleep. Reluctant to leave, I kissed her forehead, noticing the softness of her skin, her innocence. I tiptoed out of the room and turned off the light, but as soon as I stepped outside the door, she was sitting up, crying.
“What’s the matter?” I rushed back to her.
But she only closed her eyes, opened her mouth and wailed.
“You were asleep, Addie. Please, don’t cry,” I whispered, knowing my mother would be upstairs momentarily.
“Mama!” she cried loudly. “I want Mama!”
“Oh, I know, sweetheart,” I said, crouching on my knees and hugging her.
“Mama!” she screamed even louder, swatting me away. “I want Mama!”
She’d seemed so content all day, so compliant with me when I read her a story. How had this suddenly taken such a turn? I wondered. Was it the darkness?
As I’d expected, my mother appeared at the door, rushed past me and picked up Addie, who continued to cry. But within a few moments she became quieter. She’d stopped screaming “Mama!” and had her thumb in her mouth, still sobbing, more softly now. I backed out of the room quietly, feeling foolish for having thought I would know how to comfort her. I had no idea how to help.
I sat down in the dark on my bed. In the course of twenty-four hours, everything that I thought I knew about the adoption had turned out to be wrong. The story I’d been telling myself, the secret I’d been keeping, it was all a lie. Here she was, my flesh and blood, sleeping in the room next to me, suddenly in need of a mother more than ever, but she didn’t know who I was. And I didn’t know how to be her mother. My life was a shambles—but whether she meant to or not, Aunt May seemed to be giving me a second chance.
Addie was quiet now. I heard my mother leaving her room. Before I could talk myself out of it, I walked down the stairs and into the living room.
“Mother, Father, I have something I need to say,” I announced as soon as I entered the room. “Adeline is my daughter. All you need to do is look at her to know it’s true. I became pregnant just before you moved to New York. I know it was a terrible thing to do, out of wedlock with someone I didn’t even know, but it happened.”
A look of horror came over my mother’s face, but I looked away.
“I stayed with Aunt May during my pregnancy and gave her up for adoption through the church.” No one said a word. My mother now had her head in her hands, and my father’s mouth was agape. “It was a terrible thing to do, to make an innocent child pay for my mistakes, I can see that now, but it was the decision I made. I didn’t know until a few days ago that Aunt May had adopted her, but now, deep down in my heart, I wonder if she knew or hoped that I would come back for her.”
I waited briefly for someone to say something. No one did.
“Well,” I continued, “I have decided I will take her back to New York with me when I leave tomorrow, and we’ll be together.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Olive,” my mother said. “Look where you’re living. I doubt they’re going to let a single show girl bring up a bastard child in a Catholic boardinghouse.”
I cringed at the use o
f such vulgar words to describe Addie, asleep now right above us.
“I’ll work something out,” I said. I thought of the club. How would I make this work? The money was decent, but I could make the money only if I was working five nights a week. How could I do that while caring for a two-year-old? I hadn’t thought it through, but I was angry now.
“Hold on a second!” My father’s voice boomed over both of ours as he stood. “Doris, you knew about this?”
“Yes, I knew. My sister told me. Now sit down, Ted.”
My father sat back down again and stared at the fireplace. It was the first time I’d ever heard my mother speak to him that way, and I’d never seen him so obedient.
“What will you work out?” my mother continued. “With what money?”
“I’m performing again.”
“Where?”
I paused and glanced at my father, but he was motionless, looking stunned, staring straight ahead. I didn’t want to tell them, but I didn’t want to lie anymore either. “The Three Hundred Club, it’s a speakeasy, it pays well.”
“Well, that’s exactly my point. How are you going to raise a little girl if you’re out all night at a club? What are you going to do? Bring the girl to your shows, keep her in a cot backstage?”
“If I have to, I will,” I said, realizing how ridiculous that sounded.
“Don’t be absurd. Admit it, Olive, you’re not fit to be a mother. You were unfit then, and you’re unfit now. You’ve made your choices, now you have to live with them.” She rubbed her temples and took a deep breath.
“Mother, that’s unfair,” I said quietly, questioning myself, questioning her. Was she right?
“We are fed up with your impulsive ways. Honestly, we’ve had it up to here.”
I didn’t know what to say. This was how they thought of me, this was how they’d always thought of me. I pictured them sitting at the dinner table at night, discussing how disappointing I had turned out to be, how I simply sought pleasure, thrills and happiness, nothing more. Putting my own interests first, before everyone else.
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