Christmas, 1992, I go home to Washington, D.C., to visit my family. The night I arrive, just after dinner, my mother says, “Come into the living room. Sit down. We have something to tell you.” Her tone makes me nervous. My parents are not formal people—no one sits in the living room. I am standing in the kitchen. The dog is looking up at me.
“Come into the living room. Sit down,” my mother says.
“Why?”
“There’s something we need to talk to you about.”
“What?”
“Come and we’ll tell you.”
“Just tell me now, from here.”
“Come,” she says, patting the cushion next to her.
“Who died?” I say, terrified.
“No one died. Everyone’s fine.”
“Then what is it?”
They are silent.
“Is it about me?”
“Yes, it’s you. We’ve had a phone call. Someone is looking for you.”
Silence.
After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I grew up knowing one thing about myself: I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young and single, my father older and married, with children of his own. When I was born, in December of 1961, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, “Your package has arrived, and it’s wrapped in pink ribbons.”
My mother starts to cry. “You don’t have to do anything about it—you can just let it go,” she says, trying to relieve me of the burden. “But the lawyer said he’d be happy to talk with you. He couldn’t have been nicer.”
“Is he sure she’s the right woman?”
“I think he’s fairly certain that it’s her. Do you want her name?”
I shake my head. “Where does she live?”
“New Jersey.”
In my dreams, my birth mother has always been a goddess—the queen of queens, the C.E.O., the C.F.O., and the C.O.O. Movie-star beautiful, extraordinarily competent, she can take care of anyone and anything. She has made a fabulous life for herself as ruler of the world, except for one missing link—me.
In the morning, my mother comes into my room with a scrap of paper; she sits on the edge of my bed and asks me again, “Do you want the name?”
I don’t answer.
“It’s the same name as a friend of yours,” she says, as if trying to warm it up, make it more palatable.
“You can just leave it on the desk,” I say.
Her name is Helene. (I have changed some names and locations to protect privacy.)
I call the lawyer. “I’d like a letter,” I say. “I want information: where she grew up, how educated she is, what she does for a living, what the family medical history is, and what the circumstances of my adoption were.”
I am asking for the story of my life. There is an urgency to my request; I feel I have to hurry and ask everything I want to know. As suddenly as she has arrived, she could be gone again.
Ten days later, her letter arrives with no fanfare. The postman doesn’t come running down the street, screaming, “It’s here, it’s here! Your identity has arrived.” It comes in an envelope from the lawyer’s office, with a scrawled note apologizing for not having got it to me sooner. It’s clear that the letter has been opened by the lawyer, presumably read. Why? I am annoyed but don’t say anything. I don’t feel I have the right. This is one of the pathological complications of adoption—adoptees don’t really have rights, their lives are about supporting the secrets, the needs, and the desires of others.
The letter is typed on Helene’s stationery, simple small gray sheets of paper, her name embossed across the top. Her language is oddly formal, less than artful, grammatically flawed. I read it simultaneously fast and slowly, wanting to take it in, unable to take it in. I read it and then read it again. What is she telling me?
At the time I was carrying this little girl it was not proper for a girl to have a child out of wedlock. This was probably the most difficult decision of my entire life to make. I was 22 years old and very naïve. I was raised very sheltered and very strict by my mother.
I remember being in the hospital with her and dressing her the day we both left the hospital. I have never forgotten the beautiful black hair and the blue eyes and the little dimples in her face. As I left the hospital with the lady who was picking up the little girl, I can still see myself in the taxi and her asking me to give her the baby. I did not want to give her the child, however I did realize, I did not have the wearwithall to take care of her myself. Yes, I have always loved this little girl and been tortured every December of my life from the day she was born that I did not have her with me.
She writes that watching television shows like “Oprah” and “Maury” gave her the courage and the confidence to come forward. She lists the facts of where she was born, what street she lived on as a child, how she grew up. She includes the names of her parents and when they died. She says how tall she is and how much she weighs.
Each bit of information swims through me, then takes root, digging in. There are no filters; there are no screens. I have no protection from this.
She closes her letter by saying, “I have never married, I have always felt guilty about giving this little girl away.”
I call the lawyer and ask for another letter, with more information, a medical history, a more detailed explanation of what happened, what she’s been doing since, and a photograph of her.
A day later, in a panic, I call the lawyer again. “Oh,” I say, “I forgot. Could you ask her who the father is?” Not my father but the father. “What is his name?”
Within days, a second letter arrives.
I suppose now, I should tell you about Stan. This is difficult for me because to me it is turning back the hands of time. I went to work for Stan at his shop in downtown Washington D.C. when I was 15 years old. I worked for him on Thursday night and on Saturdays. During the summer, I worked fulltime. Stan as you know was much older than I. He was very nice to me. This relationship started very innocently. He would offer to drive me home and we would talk about many things on the way. Then one day while we were working he asked me if I would like to go to dinner with him. This was the beginning. At age 17, he called my mother and asked if he could marry me. My mother said, “she is too young.” Hung up the telephone, turned to me and said, I do not want you to see this man ever again. At this time, I was in love and nothing she said would stop me. I have always been a very determined person. Stubborn if you will. This is me.
Stan is married at that time and promises to get a divorce and marry me. This was not my idea, but his. Time goes on, I become pregnant with the young lady. He thinks I should go to Florida, says he will buy a house for the both of us. About three months later, I am very unhappy, I return to Washington. Stan and I start to have disagreements.
During the last three months of the pregnancy I stayed with my mother in Virginia where her home was. Shortly before the baby was born, Stan again said he would marry me. He asked if he could come and pick me up and take me to buy things for the baby. I told him no. I did not call him when the baby was born.
To the best of my knowledge he lives in Virginia. He has four children. All of his children were born prior to the birth of our child. He was an all American Football Player. To the best of my knowledge his father was Jewish, his mother Irish. I knew only his mother. She was a little, chubby lady. Very kind and very nice to me.
You asked about my general health. I periodically do have a problem with bronchitis. This is treated with medicine. Damp weather is not for me. I do take pills for high blood pressure. Other than that, I am fine. I am nearsighted and do have soft teeth. Both inherited, my eyes from my father, my teeth from my mother.
She ends her second letter: “I have a great fear of being disappointed with what I am now doing.”
I follow up with a call. Her voice is low, nasal, gravelly, vaguely animal. I tell her who I am and she screams, “Oh, my God! This is the most wonderful day of my life.” Her voice, her emotion, comes in bursts, like punctuation—I can’t tell if she is laughing or crying.
The phone call is thrilling, flirty, like a first date, like the beginning of something. There is a rush of curiosity, the desire to know everything at once. What is your life like? How do your days begin and end? What do you do for fun? Why did you come looking for me? What do you want?
Every nuance, every detail, means something. I am like a recovering amnesiac. Things I know about myself, things that exist without language—my hardware, my mental firing patterns, parts of me that are fundamentally, inexorably me—are being echoed on the other end, confirmed as a DNA match. It is not an entirely comfortable sensation.
“Tell me about you—who are you?” she asks.
I tell her that I live in New York. I am a writer. I have a dog. No more or less.
She tells me that she loves New York, that her father used to go to the city and always brought back presents from F.A.O. Schwarz. She tells me how much she loved her father, who died of a heart attack when she was seven, because “he liked rich food.”
This causes an immediate pain in my chest: I now have to be careful; I could die of a heart attack early in life.
She goes on, “I come from a very strange family. We’re not quite right.”
“What do you mean ‘strange’?” I ask.
She tells me about her mother dying of a stroke a couple of years earlier. She tells me about her own life falling apart, how she moved from Washington to Atlantic City. She says that after she gave birth to me her mother wouldn’t come to the hospital to pick her up. She had to take the bus home. She tells me that it took all her strength and courage to come looking for me.
And then she says, “Have you heard from your father?” (When the lawyer opened the second letter, he saw my father’s name and called Helene: “If you’re going to pass on this information, you’d better contact him and tell him what you’ve done.”)
“It would be nice if the three of us could get together,” she says. “We could all come to New York and have dinner.”
She wants everything all at once, and it is too much for me. There is a deep fracture in my thoughts, a refrain constantly echoing: I am not who I thought I was and yet I have no idea who I am.
I am not who I thought I was, and neither is she the queen of queens I imagined.
“I can’t see you yet,” I say.
“When can we talk again?” she asks as we are hanging up. “Will you call again soon? I love you. I love you so much.”
Our conversations are frequent—I call her a couple of times a week, but I do not give her my phone number. The calls are seductive, addictive, punishing. Each one shakes me; each requires a period of recovery. Every time I tell her something, she takes the information and holds it too close, reinventing it and delivering it back to me in a manner that leaves me wanting her to know nothing.
She tells me that she never got along with her stepfather and that her mother was cold and cruel. I feel that there’s more to the story than she’s telling me, that something was happening at home involving the stepfather, and that the mother knew and blamed her for it—which would explain the animosity between them, and also why Helene, a young girl, was so easily propelled into the arms of a much older, married man. I never ask her the question directly. It seems intrusive; her need to protect herself is stronger than my need to know. Her lack of sophistication leaves me unsure whether she’s of limited intelligence or simply shockingly naïve.
“Did you think of having an abortion?”
“The thought never occurred to me. I couldn’t have.”
Pregnancy, I gather, was a way out of her mother’s house and into my father’s life. It must have seemed like a good idea, until my father refused to leave his wife. He tried. They got an apartment together; for four days, he lived with Helene. Then he went back, claiming that “his children missed him.” Helene had him arrested, under an old Maryland ordinance for desertion. At the time, his wife was also pregnant, with a child who was born four months before I was.
“At one point, he told me to meet him at his lawyer’s office, so that we could figure out a way to ‘take care of everything,’” she says. “I sat down with him and his lawyer and the lawyer drew a diagram and said, ‘There’s a pie and there are only so many slices of the pie and that’s all there is and it’s got to go around.’‘I am not a slice of pie,’ I said, and walked out. I have never been so angry in my life. Slices of pie. I told my friend Estelle I was expecting a baby and didn’t know what to do. She told me she knew someone who wanted to adopt a baby. I told her the baby must go to a Jewish family who would treat her well. I couldn’t take care of you myself—young ladies didn’t have babies on their own.”
She interrupts herself. “Do you think one day we might have a portrait painted of the two of us?” Her request comes from another world, another life. What would she do with a portrait? Hang it over her fireplace in Atlantic City? Send it to my father for Christmas? She is living in stopped time, filled with fantasies of what might have been. After thirty-one years, she has returned to reclaim the life she never had.
“I have to go,” I say. “I’m late for a dinner.”
“O.K.,” she says, “but, before you go out, put on your cashmere sweater so you don’t get chilly.”
I don’t have a cashmere sweater.
“We’ll talk again soon,” I say and hang up.
I am losing myself. On the street, I see people who look alike—families where each face is a nuanced version of the others. I watch how they stand, how they walk and talk, variations on a theme.
A few days later, I try Helene again.
In the background, there is a flick, a sharp suck of air—she is smoking.
“Why won’t you see me?” she whines. “You’re torturing me. You take better care of your dog than you take of me.”
Am I supposed to be taking care of her? I wonder.
“Don’t be angry with me forever,” she says. “If I’d known where you were, I would have come and taken you away.”
Imagine that—kidnapped by your own mother, the same mother who gave you away at birth. For years, Helene lived less than two miles from the house I grew up in, not knowing who and where I was.
“I’m not angry with you,” I tell her, and it is true. I am horrified at the way I see myself in her—the loose screw is not entirely unfamiliar—and appalled that in the end I may end up rejecting the one person I never had any intention of rejecting. But not angry. Not unforgiving. The more Helene and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up. I can’t imagine having grown up with her. I would not have survived.
“I’m surprised your father hasn’t been in touch,” she says.
It occurs to me that “my father” may be having the same reaction to her that I’m having, that he equates me with her, and that that may be one of the reasons he’s keeping his distance. It also occurs to me that he may think that she and I are somehow in this together, conspiring to get something from him.
I write him a letter of my own, telling him how surprised I was by Helene’s appearance, and suggesting that although this is something that neither he nor I asked for, we try to deal with things with some small measure of grace. I tell him a little bit about myself. I give him my name and a way of contacting me.
I go to the gym. Overhead, there is a bank of televisions—CNN, MTV, and the Cartoon Network. I am watching a cartoon in which a basket containing a baby bird is left outside a wooden door carved into the base of a tree. The words “Knock, Knock” appear on the screen. A large rooster opens the door and picks up the basket. A note is pinned to the fabric covering the basket:
Dear Lady,
Please take care of my little one.
Signed,
Big One
The rooster looks inside, and a small but feisty baby bird pokes up. The rooster gets excited. An image of the baby bird in a frying pan dances in the rooster’s head. A chicken wearing a bonnet comes into the house and shoos the rooster away. The rooster is disappointed. I am on the treadmill, in tears.
There is a message on my machine, the voice raspy, coarse: “Your cover is blown. I know who you are and I know where you live. I’m reading your books.”
I dial her immediately. “Helene, what are you doing?”
“I found out who you are, A. M. Homes. I’m reading your books.”
It is the only time in my life that I regret being a writer. She has something of mine, and she thinks she has me.
“How did you get my number?”
“I’m very clever. I called all the bookstores in Washington and asked them, ‘Who is a writer from Washington whose first name is Amy?’ At first, I thought you were someone else, some other Amy, who wrote a book about God, and then one of the stores helped me and gave me your number.”
She stalks me. Every time the phone rings, every time I call in for messages, I brace myself.
“Do you live with someone on Charles Street? Is he there? Does he not like it when I call?”
“How do you know I live on Charles Street?”
“I’m a good detective.”
“Helene, I find this very upsetting. How do you know where I live?”
“I don’t have to tell you,” she says.
“Then I don’t have to continue this conversation,” I say.
“Why won’t you see me? Do I have to come up there and find you? Do I have to come to Columbia University and hunt you down? Do I have to wait in line to get your autograph?”
“I need to be able to do my job. I need to teach my classes and go on my book tour and do all the things I’m supposed to do without worrying that you are going to hunt me down. You can’t do that. I have to be able to lead my life.”
The day my second novel is published, I accidentally poke the Times into my eye and shred my cornea. The pain is searing. I fumble for the eye doctor’s number and go rushing off to his office, returning hours later with what looks like a maxi-pad taped over my face. There is a message from my publisher letting me know that my book has just been reviewed in the Washington Post, a message from my mother saying that she’s arranged for brownies and crudités to be served at my reading tomorrow in Washington, and a message from “the father.”
“It’s Stan,” he says, his voice tentative, weak. “I got your letter. Why don’t you give me a call when you have a moment?”
It’s been more than a month since I wrote to him. If the review hadn’t appeared in the Post, would he have called? If I’d been flipping burgers in a McDonald’s instead of writing books, would I ever have heard from him?
“Well, what do you know,” he says. He’s a swaggering big shot, but there’s something to him, some half-a-heart, that I instantly appreciate.
“Have you spoken to the Dragon Lady lately?” he asks, and I assume that he is talking about Helene.
“No,” I say. “She’s a little crazy.”
He laughs. “That’s the way she always was. That’s why I had to do what I did.”
Stan, a former football hero and combat veteran, for some reason feels compelled to give me a pep talk. Fifty years after the fact, he quotes what his coach once told him about staying in the game, about not being a quitter. No one has ever spoken to me this way before; it’s comforting, inspiring. He couldn’t be more different from the father I grew up with, an intellectual, an artist. If I told Stan that I spent every Saturday of my childhood going to museums, he wouldn’t know how to respond.
“I’ll be in Washington tomorrow for a couple of days on a book tour,” I say.
“Why don’t you meet me at my lawyer’s office and we can talk?”
I think of Helene: “I am not a slice of pie.”
The next day, I give a reading in Washington. The bookstore is crowded with neighbors, relatives, my fourth-grade teacher, friends from junior high. I haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about the eye injury in advance. When I get up to read, they’re shocked.
“It’s fine,” I say. “It’ll be O.K. in a couple of weeks.” I crack open the book. My field of vision is a circle about two inches wide. I hold the pages directly in front of my face. My good eye is half closed in sympathy with the injured one. I perform as much from memory as possible.
When the reading is over, a line forms: people wanting books signed, aspiring writers with questions. In the back, I see a stranger, a woman, standing nervously, twisting an umbrella around and around in her hands. Instinctively, I know it is Helene. I continue signing books. The line begins to thin. Just as the last person is leaving, she steps up.
“What did you do to your eye?” she blurts in that rough voice.
“You’re not behaving,” I say. The store is packed with people who don’t know what ghost has risen up.
“You’re built just like your father,” she says.
Later, when I try to remember what she looked like, I have only a vague memory of green with white polka dots, brown hair piled high on her head. I remember seeing her arm and thinking how small her bones were.
In the distance, another shadow emerges. My mother and a friend of hers are coming toward me. I imagine the two mothers meeting, colliding. This is something that can’t happen. It is entirely against the rules. No one person can have two mothers in the same room at the same time.
“There are people here whose privacy I have to protect,” I say to Helene. She turns and hurries out of the store.
In the morning, I take a taxi downtown. I am going to meet the father.
At the lawyer’s office, I present myself to the receptionist. A man comes through the interior door. I have no idea who he is—is this the lawyer, my father, or just someone who works here? Anyone could be him, he could be anyone—this is what it’s like when you don’t know who you are.
“Are you Stan?”
“Yes,” he says, surprised that I don’t already know. He shakes my hand nervously and leads me into a large conference room. We sit on opposite sides of a wide table.
“My God,” he says, looking at me. “My God.”
“I cut my cornea,” I say, pointing to the patch on my eye.
“Reading a review of your book?”
“No, the obituaries,” I say.
“Fine thing. Would you like a Pepsi?” On the table in front of him is a Pepsi bottle, sweating.
I shake my head.
The father is a big, pink-faced man, in a fancy suit, with a collar pin and a tie. His hair is white, thin, slicked back.
We stare at each other. “Fine thing,” he keeps saying. He is smiling. He has dimples.
Having grown up without the refracted reflections of biology, I have no idea whether he looks like me or not. I’ve brought my camera, a Polaroid.
“Do you mind if I take a picture of you?” I ask.
I take two, and he just sits there, flushed, embarrassed.
“Could I have one of you?” he asks, and I allow him to take a picture.
It’s as though we’re making a perverse Polaroid commercial right there in the lawyer’s office—a reunion played out as a photo session. We come around the table and stand side by side, watching our images appear. It’s easier to really look at someone in a photograph than in real life—no discomfort at meeting the other person’s eye, no fear of being caught staring. Later, when I show friends the pictures, it is obvious to everyone that he’s my father—“Just look at the face, look at the hands, the ears, they’re the same as yours.”
Are they?
Stan hands me a copy of my book to sign. I autograph it for him and suddenly wonder what kind of meeting we are having. I feel like a foreign diplomat exchanging official gifts.
“Tell me a little bit about you,” I say.
“I’m not circumcised.”
O.K., maybe it wasn’t the first thing he said, but it was certainly the second. Maybe he said, “My grandmother was a strict Catholic; she had me baptized. I’m not circumcised.”
It is strange information to have about your father. We’ve just met and he’s telling me about his dick. What he’s really telling me, I guess, is that he’s distanced himself from his Jewish half and that he’s obsessed with his penis. He goes on to tell tales of his great-grandmother, a nineteenth-century East Prussian princess, and relatives who were plantation owners on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—slaveholders. He tells me that I’m eligible for the D.A.R. He says that a family member, a British admiral, came over on either the Arc or the Dove, and that there’s also a connection to Helmuth von Moltke, who, according to Stan, said, “We will leave them with only their eyes to cry with,” when leading Prussian soldiers into France in 1870. Then he goes on about our connections to the Nazis, and the “Death’s Head troops,” as though they were something to be proud of.
“And the Dragon Lady isn’t Jewish, either. She likes to think she is, but she went to Catholic school.” They are both half Catholic, half Jewish. He identifies as one and she as the other.
He tells me how beautiful Helene was when she came to work in his store. When I mention the age difference between them—when she was in her mid-teens, he was thirty-two—he gets defensive, saying, “She was a slut who knew more than her years, things a young girl shouldn’t know.” He blames her for his lack of self-control. I ask if it ever occurred to him that something might have been going on in her mother’s house, something with the stepfather. He shrugs it off, and then, when pressed, says yes, she tried to tell him something, but he didn’t really know what she was talking about, and yes, he probably should have tried to find out.
I ask him about their relationship: How often did he see her? Did he ever really think he might leave his wife?
He is sweating, stuffed into his good suit.
His wife knew about the affair. Helene has told me that. Helene has also told me that Stan sometimes brought along his oldest son when they went out. She met the younger ones, too, but she never knew them very well.
Did Stan think he was such a big guy that he could have it all? I picture the affluence of the early sixties, highball glasses and aqua-blue party dresses, Cadillac convertibles, big hair: Helene doing a kind of demented Audrey Hepburn thing; Stan, the football hero, the veteran, with a wife at home, a young girl on the side, thinking he’s got the good life.
“What did you do for fun?” I ask and he just looks at me. The answer is evident. Sex. The affair was about sex, at least for him. I am the product of a sex life, not a relationship.
“She had a problem,” he says. “She was a nymphomaniac. She went out with other men, lots of men.”
Here I believe Helene. How much of a nymphomaniac could a schoolgirl be? She was clever, crafty, probably trained by an expert—her mother. (I have a mental picture of Shelley Winters playing Charlotte Haze in the original film version of “Lolita.”) But what Helene looked for in Stan was comfort.
It is clear that Stan is still taken with her, obsessed. He asks me about her in great detail. I feel like the child of divorced parents—except that I have no idea who these people are or what they are talking about. What they are most interested in is talking about each other.
Stan tells me that he and his wife wanted to adopt me, and that Helene wouldn’t allow it. “I wanted to take care of you,” he says. “After it happened, after she’d given birth, I heard that you were a boy.” He looks at me as if there were something to be said.
“I’m not,” I say.
“I guess it’s good we didn’t adopt you. My wife might have taken it out on you. She might have treated you badly.”
“Yes, it’s good.”
“She told me she was pregnant the day my mother died.”
Later, I ask Helene about these things and she is furious. “He was never going to adopt you. He never even suggested it. I made the arrangements myself and never told him what I was going to do.”
“Did you tell him you were pregnant the day his mother died?”
“Yes,” she says, and there is the defiant suck of a cigarette.
I change the subject. “Helene told me about her father,” I say to Stan. “She was very close to him and he died of a heart attack.”
“He didn’t die of a heart attack,” Stan says indignantly. “He was the White House bookie and he died in a shoot-out with another bookie.” It makes sense. It explains a part of the story that Helene couldn’t really explain, something about men carrying her father into the house, him dying upstairs, and the whole family having to stay at a fancy hotel for a while. I remember an early school field trip to Ford’s Theatre—the image of Abe Lincoln being shot and then carried across the street to Petersen’s Boarding House to die.
I am relieved that Helene’s father didn’t have a heart attack. There are criminals in my past, but at least their hearts are strong.
“Tell me about your people,” Stan says. He asks about “my people” as though I’d been raised by wolves.
My people are Jews, Marxists, socialists, homosexuals. “My people,” I tell him, “are lovely. You couldn’t ask for better.”
I owe him nothing. There is nothing about me, about my life, that he would understand.
We are winding down. I am exhausted.
“I’d like to take you into my family, to introduce you to your brothers and sister,” he says. “But before I can do that my wife wants everything to be clear. She wants a test to prove that you are my child.”
I get the feeling that Stan has got into trouble before; that Helene may have been the first, but she certainly wasn’t the last; that infidelity is something his wife has put up with for a long time.
“Would you consider a blood test? You wouldn’t have to pay for it.” It’s the “You wouldn’t have to pay for it” that throws me. Is this what I get as my big reward, the reparation for all the wrongs of the past—a DNA test? And what’s behind Door No. 3? Insulting as this is, on some level I can’t blame him. Throwing it all to science may be a good idea—it may make fact out of what feels like fiction.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
Fine thing.
In the middle of July, 1993, Stan and I make a plan to meet at a lab in D.C.
It is less a lab than a collection center, the most generic, standard-issue office ever made. The fluorescent lighting is like an X-ray, revealing everything.
Stan is there waiting—the only white man in the room. We sit down next to each other and wait.
They call Stan’s name. He tries to give them a personal check, but they won’t take it. There are signs everywhere detailing how payment is to be made: all checks must be certified. He offers to get them the cash, but they can’t accept cash, only certified checks. He goes to the bank downstairs and for some reason is unable to get one. He returns, flustered, humiliated. He’s on the verge of a tantrum, but it’s all to no avail. The check and the blood must be sent together. Because this kind of test is often part of a lawsuit, the lab insists on being paid in advance, in order to avoid the complication of collection. This is the stuff of murders, rapes—proof. Are you or are you not my father?
The next morning, we try again.
“Long time no see,” I say.
“What if we get in there and the nurse is the Dragon Lady? She’ll come at us with a square, blunt-tipped needle,” Stan jokes nervously. I laugh, but it isn’t funny. We have a tacit agreement not to tell Helene what we are doing. What we are doing is insulting to her.
As Stan walks up to the counter, I notice that his butt looks familiar; I am watching him and I’m thinking, There goes my ass. That’s my ass walking away. His blue sports coat covers it halfway, but I can see it broken into sections, departments of ass, high and low, just like mine. I notice his thighs—chubby, thick, not a pretty thing. This is the first time I have seen anyone else in my body. I am fascinated. I stare as he turns and comes back to me. I look down at his shoes, white loafers, country-club shoes, stretched out, fading. Inside the shoes, his feet are wide and short. I look up; his hands are the same as mine, square like paws. He is an exact replica, the male version of me.
“Fine thing,” Stan says, seeing me stare.
I go first. I roll up my sleeve. The technician pulls on his gloves, assembles his tubes, and ties the rubber tourniquet around my arm. Stan is watching. The needle goes in, a sharp metal prick.
I look back at Stan. It feels strange. I am giving blood for this man; I am letting my flesh be punctured to prove that I am of him. It is beyond sexual.
I have allowed this because I understand the need for proof, for some true measure of our relationship, and also because I have a fantasy that there is something in it for me: that Stan will keep his word, that he will take me into his family, that I will suddenly have siblings.
“Please sign here,” the technician says as he hands me the tubes of my blood, one at a time.
“What?”
“You have to sign the tubes.”
They are warm in my palm, filled with the chemical sum of who and what I am. I sign quickly, hoping not to faint. I am holding myself in my hands.
Stan is next. He takes off his jacket, revealing short shirtsleeves, sad-old-guy style. His arms are plump, pale, almost fluffy. I am suddenly sickened by it all. I wait in the hall. I do not watch him holding his blood, signing his tubes. He comes out of the room, puts his jacket back on, and we are out the door.
“I would have liked to take you for a nice lunch if you’d worn something better,” he says when we are in the hallway.
I am dressed perfectly well—in linen pants and a blouse. DNA testing is not a black-tie occasion. I am tempted to say, That’s O.K.—I would have liked you to be my father if you weren’t such a jerk. But I am so stunned that I become stupidly apologetic. I am not wearing what he wanted. I am not wearing a dress. I am not living up to his idea of a daughter.
We go to a less than mediocre restaurant down the block. People seem to know him there. He introduces me to the maître d’ as though that meant something. We sit down. The tablecloths are green, the napkins polyester.
“You don’t wear jewelry,” Stan says.
I am single. I live in New York City. I am not wearing a dress. I know exactly what he is thinking.
I say nothing. Later, I’ll wish that I’d said something. I’ll wish I’d told him the truth: I have no jewelry, but if you want to throw me some diamonds I’d be glad to wear them. I come from a family that doesn’t do that sort of thing. I grew up boycotting grapes and iceberg lettuce because they weren’t picked by union workers.
What kind of father makes his child travel to another city to prove that she is his child and then criticizes her for not wearing the right clothes to the lab, for not wearing jewelry she doesn’t own to the lunch she didn’t know she was having?
“How will you feel if the test comes back and I’m not your father?”
You’re my father, I think. I wasn’t positive before, but now, seeing you, seeing your ass, my ass—I’m sure.
The heat outside is stupefying. I walk as though I had been hit with something, blasted. I have become a stranger to myself. To be adopted is to be adapted, to be taken apart and sewn back together again. Whether or not you regain full function, there will always be scar tissue; there will always be hot spots, flareups that take you by surprise.
Over the next few months, we meet several times. We meet in hotels. We meet at Holiday Inns, Marriotts, Comfort Inns, Renaissance Hotels; in the odd spaces that are between spaces, the there that is never there.
We greet each other in the lobby, awkwardly kiss hello, and then move to the glass atrium, or the inner courtyard, or the café, looking up at a surround of numbered doors, housekeeping carts making their rounds. We come from the outside and are plunged into a temperature-controlled environment where the potted plants are watered automatically and rotated seasonally like crops, where everything is suspended in time—hermetically sealed.
Ever since Stan’s comment about my clothing, I worry about what I am wearing, how I look. I continually feel that I am being evaluated. I want his approval.
There is something sleazy about it, meeting in the middle of the afternoon in these middle-of-the-road hotels. Does he think that these are safe places, where no one will see us? Does he have something in mind? It is never clear to me why we are meeting.
“You don’t know what it does to me to look at you,” he says.
He doesn’t mean “The resemblance is amazing,” or “I’m so proud of what you’ve done with your life.” He says it in a lascivious way. He is looking at me and seeing someone else.
He never does anything to push it further, but I am always thinking that he will. I imagine him saying, “I’ve got a room, I want to see you naked.” I imagine undressing, as part of the procedure of proving who I am, part of the degradation.
I imagine him fucking me.
I imagine being Helene and being fucked by him thirty-one years ago.
I imagine something profoundly sad.
It is the strangest set of imaginings, and I can tell that he has them, too.
I have read about this; it is not unusual for the primal experiences of parent and child to morph—the intensity, the intimacy of the sensations is often expressed in adults as sexual attraction. But, while the attraction may be common, obviously it cannot be explored.
He asks me if I’ve spoken with her recently.
“Yes,” I say. “Have you?”
He nods.
“She wants to visit me,” I tell him. “She sends letters with fantasies about going to the Central Park Zoo, for walks by the ocean, out to dinner. She has no understanding of how strange this is for me. And she’s unrelenting—she could take over my life, she could swallow me whole.”
He smiles. “She’s a stubborn lady.”
“She wants to know when the three of us can have dinner together.”
He nods and says nothing.
“Maybe you two should have dinner sometime?”
Stan blushes. “I don’t think so.” He shakes his head, as if to say, You know what would happen. If he so much as saw her again, they would be back at it. He is still afraid of the power she has over him. I have the sense that he has promised himself or, more, that he has promised his wife that he won’t see her.
He shifts in his chair. He is always uncomfortable.
“Old injuries,” he says. “From the war, from football. I can’t sit still for very long.”
There is a pause.
“My wife is jealous of you,” he says.
I nod.
On the rare occasions when I call Stan and his wife answers the phone, she never acknowledges who I am. She never says anything beyond “Hold the line,” and then goes off in search of him.
There are times when I’m tempted to say something to her, something simple, like “And how are you?” or “I’m sorry for all the trouble,” but then I remember that it is not my responsibility. I can’t do all the work.
“Hold the line.”
Helene thinks I’m her mother; Stan thinks I’m Helene; and Stan’s wife thinks I’m the mistress reincarnate.
I am in the emergency room with my grandmother, who has fallen and broken her hip. I’m checking my messages while waiting for the radiologistto read her X-rays. Stan has called.
By the time I get back to my parents’ house, it’s late.
Stan answers the phone. “How are you?” he asks.
I tell him about my grandmother.
“I have some information for you,” he says.
I say nothing. I am not in the mood for games.
“The test results,” he says.
“Do you want to tell me something?” I ask.
“Should we meet at the hotel?”
“Which hotel?”
“The one in Rockville.”
“Sure,” I say. “But why don’t you just tell me what the results are?”
“Everything is fine,” he says.
“What does that mean?”
“Everything is fine. We’ll talk when I see you. Tomorrow at four?”
Everything is not fine. My patience is running thin. All of this is a game, a game that Helene and Stan are playing, and I’m the ball in the middle, being tossed back and forth. He’s only making it worse, throwing in a night of suspense for me to spend wondering. More than wondering if he is or isn’t my father, I wonder why I keep going back for more. I will never know the whole story. There is an enormous amount that no one is telling me.
I meet him at the hotel. We are in the fern bar, the glassy atrium—the scene is like something from a science-fiction movie, a futuristic bio-environment.
“I have the results of the DNA test,” he says.
“Yes.”
The waitress arrives and takes our order.
“I’m fine,” I tell her.
“Not even some tea?” Stan asks.
“Not even tea,” I say.
“Water?” the waitress asks.
“No.”
Stan waits until his ginger ale arrives before he says anything.
“The test says it’s ninety-nine-point-nine-per-cent likely that I’m your father.” There is a pause. “So what are my responsibilities?” he asks.
I am not a slice of pie.
“So what are my responsibilities?” he asks again.
I don’t reply.
Stan doesn’t tell me how he is going to take me into his family, or give me the large gift behind Door No. 3. He sips his drink and stares at me.
“Now that I’m your father, I think I have the right to ask—are you dating anyone?”
“No.” I am unsure whether I am answering the question or refusing to answer.
“Have you told your children?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he says.
I’m wondering if he meets his other children for tea in cheap hotels.
We leave without saying goodbye, without a plan for what will happen next.
Just after New Year’s, 1994, Helene calls and asks, “When will you see me?”
I say, “Saturday.”
She is shocked. So am I. But, in some way, it feels inevitable. How much longer can it go on: When will you see me? Why won’t you see me? We need to meet in an agreed-upon way—and not a kamikaze attack like the scene in the bookstore. There is no good time, no right time. I am repelled, but I am also curious.
Helene gets too excited. “Where will we meet? What will we do?” She envisions the meeting as a fun-filled day in New York: horse-drawn carriages, ice-cream sodas, tickets to a musical.
I’m thinking an hour, maybe two. I’m thinking a little bit will go a long way.
“Let’s meet at the Plaza,” she says. “At the Oyster Bar.”
The Plaza is a part of the fantasy—home of Eloise, four-o’clock tea, a tourist attraction. The last time I was there, Zsa Zsa Gabor was trying to talk the man at the lobby candy store into giving her free chocolates.
“Will you let her kiss you hello?” a friend asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say, and then feel bad. “If she wants to kiss my hand, she can.”
I would like to go as myself—not my best self, or even my most average self, but my worst self. In the end, I dress up. I am once again compelled to try to make a good impression. In a fantasy of my own, I want her to see how well I turned out, to be proud of me.
In the hallway outside the Oyster Bar, she is wearing a fluffy white fur jacket, a printed silk blouse, and slacks, her hair piled high on her head in a post-beehive bun. She looks like someone from another decade—a woman who believes in glamour, who listens to Burt Bacharach and Dinah Shore to cheer herself up. I suspect that this is how she used to dress to meet my father—probably also in hotels—but now she’s fifty-five years old, and a lot has been lost to time.
“Is that you?” she asks, breathless.
I nod.
“I can’t believe it,” she says, her voice escalating beyond giddy and into a husky sort of mania. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you.”
She takes my hand and kisses it.
I follow her into the restaurant. She orders a Harveys Bristol Cream. I order a Coke. I have never seen someone drink Harveys Bristol Cream. I know it only from ads—suave couples in front of a fireplace, drinking Harveys.
I feel suddenly defensive; under her gaze, I sense that I am not measuring up. She is sitting there in her old rabbit jacket, and I am across from her in my best clothes. She never graduated from high school, and I have multiple master’s degrees. I tell myself that it is not about surfaces. I tell myself that everything will be all right.
“I’m having lobster,” she says.
“And what will you have?” the waiter asks.
“Nothing. I will have nothing.” I have nothing. I am nothing. Nothing suits me fine.
She talks about Atlantic City. She says that she has left her job—I don’t know if that means that she quit or was fired—and is going to open a beauty parlor with a couple of “wonderful operators.” She talks and talks, without seeming to be aware that the person sitting across from her is both her only child and a complete stranger.
Her lobster arrives. She pulls meat from the claw, dips it into a silver pot of butter, and pops it into her mouth. She brings the claw to her eye, looking to see if there is more. I wonder how she can eat. I can barely breathe.
“Did your father send you something for your birthday?” she asks. “He was going to send you something very nice.”
He sent me a ten-dollar gold-plated locket that would have been appropriate for an eight-year-old. The gift, apparently, was her idea—they discussed it beforehand.
“I have to go soon,” I say.
Her lobster finished, she removes her bib, takes out a cigarette case, and extracts a long, thin cigarette. “Will you ever forgive me?” she asks.
“For what?”
“For giving you away.”
“I forgive you,” I say. “You absolutely did the right thing. Really. I have to go.” I flee, leaving the woman in the rabbit coat alone with her Harveys Bristol Cream.
I will never see her again. Somehow I know that.
On Valentine’s Day, the phone rings. “You can just go to the roof of your building and jump off.”
“Helene?”
“I’m angry with you, can you tell?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t send me a valentine,” she says.
“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” I say. “I didn’t send anyone a valentine.”
“Well, all you had to do was go to the store and pick one out.”
“I’m not really sure why you’re so angry.”
“You don’t take good care of me. You should adopt me and take good care of me,” she says.
“I can’t adopt you,” I say.
“Why not?”
I don’t know how to respond. “You’re scaring me” is all I can manage.
By that fall, Stan still hasn’t told his children about me. He is selling his house, moving to Florida. I write to tell him how disappointed I am that he has not done what he promised. My life has been painful enough—I have worked too hard to get where I am in the world to be kept a secret, to be something that he is embarrassed about.
The letter is intercepted by Stan’s youngest son, prompting a family crisis. Stan never mentions the letter to me. We drift—estranged.
In the middle of the winter, Helene calls—“You’d better call your father. I don’t think he’s going to last.”
They now have more of a relationship with each other than they do with me, the intensity of their ongoing interest a testament to the power of the attraction.
I send Stan a note, I get no answer. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.
In December, 1997, a week before my birthday, Helene sends me a birthday card—it’s a putrid pale-pink with roses, the color of femininity, of a box of sanitary napkins. I have now come to loathe my birthday, to live in fear of whatever it might bring.
Dear Daughter
This card is being sent early as I am not sure that I will still be here on the 18th of December. I go to Jefferson Hospital on December 4 for a kidney procedure. What the outcome will be I don’t know. I am very scared about the whole situation. I have Chronic Renal Failure. Jefferson is in Philadelphia, PA.
Printed on the card—one of Hallmark’s best—is: “I remember the first time I said, ‘I love you’ to your face (I meant it for the rest of you as well). You had just been born, and I thought you were the most beautiful thing on earth. And in that little face of yours, I thought I could see the future. It looked beautiful, too.”
I call her.
“I cancelled the procedure,” she says, explaining that it was some sort of diagnostic kidney test and that she was scared to do it alone.
I know I am supposed to offer to go with her. But I don’t. She asks if I’ve heard from my father. I say no. We talk briefly and then I find an excuse to get off the phone.
For her birthday, the following April, I send flowers—I have done this every year since she found me. This year I get no thank-you call. I call the florist to be sure that the flowers were received. I’m told that she sent them back and exchanged them for a plant.
It is summer, 1998. I am on Long Island in a small rented house. It is early evening. I am talking to my mother when her call waiting beeps. She is gone a long time. “Hold on to your hat,” she says, coming back onto the line. “Helene is dead.”
I am on the phone talking to my mother when she gets a call telling her that my mother is dead. It’s a little too much like a Gertrude Stein line.
The woman who delivered the news was a friend of Helene’s. I call for more information. She tells me that it was kidney disease. Helene was in the hospital for dialysis, but apparently she checked herself out, against medical advice, went home, and was found “moribund” on her sofa. She tells me that Helene’s brother was notified of her death and left the body in the Atlantic City morgue for five days, because he was busy at the U.S. Open, in Flushing Meadows.
“He wasn’t playing in it, was he?” a friend later asks.
I call my lawyer and ask him to let Stan know. I don’t want to be the one to break the news or deal with his reaction to it. The lawyer, ever professional, reports back that Stan “appreciated the news, asked after you, and said to tell you that he’d like to talk to you whenever you’re ready.”
I drive to Atlantic City with no idea what to expect. Helene wanted a Jewish funeral. Instead, she gets a rent-a-minister in gray polyester pants presiding over a grave in the cheap part of an Atlantic City cemetery, close to the airport. There are only four seats set up. Her brother, my uncle, arrives with his wife. I extend a hand toward him.
“Remind me,” he says, knowing full well who I am. “What’s your name?”
I ask if any other relatives are buried in this cemetery.
“No,” he says.
The minister does his thing, and I find myself nodding along, saying Amen to everything, and trying to make a good impression on my uncle. The grave is open, waiting, the casket next to it, unadorned. I realize that I was half expecting a large show of flowers from Stan, something in the shape of a horseshoe.
After the funeral, I buy a map and drive around Atlantic City, going to each of the addresses on Helene’s letters in chronological order. It is a downward spiral, ending in a prefabricated, semidetached town house. At each location, I take photographs—I collect information, images to organize, to comfort myself.
At the last house I get out; I go to the door; I ring the bell—why? There are tomato plants growing outside, filled with ripening fruit. There are lights on inside. Through the kitchen window, I can see an inhaler on the counter, some cans of Ensure, a lighter, bottles of pills, packages of food. In the living room, there is something green: a plant decorated with blinking out-of-season Christmas lights. Is that the plant?
A week later, Helene’s lawyer and executor, who was absent from her funeral, agrees to let me into her house and tells me that I can take whatever I want. I rent a car and bring some boxes, some plastic bags, and two friends. The house seems to have been ransacked—it’s clear that the executor has already gone through it. There are candles but no candlesticks, plates but no silverware, and the copper pots and pans I saw through the window are gone. The place is filled with stuff, cheap stuff: crocheted afghans, weird plastic dolls with music-box bases, supplies from the beauty shop, which failed. In the front closet, I find another fur, a stole, with her initials sewn into the underside. I imagine that it was her prize possession, that Stan gave it to her. It must have seemed glamorous when she got it. Now it looks old, mangy. I leave it there. Instead, I take pieces of paper; a receipt for a diamond ring from 1963; an old packet of what look like birth-control pills; an arrest warrant; a package from Saks that must have arrived recently; two pairs of rubbery “slimming” underwear with the tags still on, one in black, one in flesh color.
In her bedroom, her pants are hanging over a chair—black jeans, not unlike the ones I often wear. They still hold the creases of her body. I put my hand in the pocket. There is a wad of money, loose bills. This is exactly the way I keep my money. It’s the one thing my mother is always on me about: No one keeps their money like that. Don’t you want to keep it in a purse? The wad is thick, jammed down into the bottom of the pocket. It creeps me out, this indescribable subtlety of biology.
When I leave, I put four boxes of assorted paper into the car. I have no idea what it might add up to. The boxes come back to New York and I put them straight into storage, knowing that at some point I will open them and once again the great calculator of fact and fiction will begin to whirr—the picture will shift and there will be new pieces to plug into the story.
A couple of months later, I call Stan. It’s the first time we’ve spoken since Helene’s death. He tells me that he saw her in Washington not long before she died. I have no idea if this was the first time they’d seen each other in thirty years or if they’d been seeing each other repeatedly since their independent “reunions” with me. He tells me that he knew she was sick. The doctor had told her that she needed a kidney and, according to Stan, Helene wanted him to ask me for one. He says he told her that they couldn’t ask me for any favors, on account of how they’d never done anything for me. I have no doubt that he’s lying—odds are that Stan, unable to deal with Helene, simply agreed to ask me and then told Helene that I’d said no. That would explain a lot. It would explain why I didn’t hear from her before she died.
I tell Stan that I’ve had enough, that I can’t do this again, that I don’t want one day to get a phone call summoning me to another church, where I’ll stand in the back and witness friends and family mourning the passing of a man I never really knew but was somehow a part of.
“I understand,” he says. “Call me. Call me in the car. My wife isn’t in the car very often. We can talk.”
“I’m not your mistress,” I say. “I’m your daughter. And I’m not calling you in your car.”
“Fine thing,” he replies. 
artin Scorsese hates to fly. But merely popping a Valium or two before takeoff would not be enough for someone known for obsessiveness.
HRISTMAS trees, it can be agreed, are dangerous objects. They are annually the source of freakish but tragic house fires, pet mishaps and emotional conflagrations involving the deployment of tiny colored bulbs. Yet we love Christmas trees, or anyway I do. Kitsch they may be, but also sentimental, garish, probably Druidic in origin, Teutonic in their modern form and emotionally loaded no matter how one interprets the history. They are the perfect totem, but of what? Well, I’m not sure, but at a guess I would say of collective memory.
ACK says I’m behaving like Deirdre. We are facing each other on opposite beds in a motel room in Louisiana. It is after 3 a.m. and all he’s wearing are white briefs with upbeat multicolored stripes. This is no Calvin Klein advertisement. This is a baggy pair of cheap underwear on a 34-year-old with a belly. Ten days ago, I would have called him the love of my life.
EW York has its first celebrity bird. Not a mere curiosity, like the dancing chicken in Chinatown, but a player. 
f there are skeletons in your closet – from unpaid taxes or debts to a run-in with the law to the messy details of a broken marriage – you must disclose them to the White House and be prepared for the possibility that they may become public knowledge.”