Authors: Rachel Ingalls
Once he was talking about it to her and he started to sound so
vicious that she said, ‘It makes me feel bad to hear you talk like that. It’s tearing you up. Maybe you should go see somebody about it.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. A doctor, maybe.’
‘Why should I go to a doctor? What’s wrong was wrong with them, not me. Did it help you to go to that doctor?’
‘I didn’t get so wound up about everything.’
‘Sure, you did. You only show it in a different way. I’m just fine. Don’t come up with any more dumb suggestions like that.’
‘I don’t like to see you getting upset, that’s all. I can listen, but I don’t know how to help.’
‘You help by listening. That’s the whole deal. Don’t worry about me.’
‘Sometimes I think you want to kill them.’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be writing a history essay at the moment. You know what they tell you – great history is great interpretation. There’s no other way to examine it. You can plot it all so intricately, and then there are these sudden upheavals that there’s no reason for. You can’t even see them coming. You can only start tracing it back and then say to yourself: Well, that was a sign. But that would be the kind of clue you’d get from talking to someone who’s insane. It wouldn’t help to predict what he’s going to do next. It doesn’t point out where any future burst of power is going to come from. That’s the secret. I can really understand why politicians go crazy for power. It’s the urge to be able to change history, to guide it or redirect it. Imagine if you could do that. You’d change the world. If you could get people to follow your ideas, you could reshape the world in your own image. Couldn’t you?’
Alma said, ‘What would the world be to me, if it was only myself? The world is other people, Bud. It’s the outside. It isn’t home.’
‘Sometimes I just don’t feel that I belong here.’
‘Of course you do. We all love you.’
‘I mean, I don’t feel that I belong anywhere. That I belong anywhere on this earth.’
‘If you’re alive, you belong here. Everybody does.’
*
He was the hero of the school playing fields and the star of every class play. He was a good actor, both for serious and comic parts. He also had a fine singing voice. In his junior year he was running the school paper. In the summer he worked hard at different jobs, mainly on construction sites, where he earned a lot of money. Parents who might not have liked his fast reputation with girls approved of his diligence and initiative. When he suggested to Alma that she should come on a tour of hospitals with him to demonstrate dance steps to the patients while he played the violin, the community was astounded by his sense of civic responsibility. No one in town had ever thought of such a scheme. He said that he got the idea from reading about nineteenth-century mental asylums that held regular concerts for their inmates; the music, he’d read, soothed and delighted the audience. Just recently he’d also heard somewhere that hospitals in Scandinavia maintained the practice. The school principal and the board became enthusiastic about his idea. They took the entire school band on a charity tour of hospitals. Meanwhile, once a week, on his own, he played the fiddle while Alma danced and Merle explained the steps to their audiences. In Bruce’s last year a boy named Richard was added to their group; he wasn’t an especially good dance partner but he was strong enough not to drop Alma and he didn’t mind the idea of playing to a roomful of confused, crippled, dying or possibly insane onlookers.
Alma loved the hospital sessions because of Bruce. She knew how the idea had come to him and why: because he recognized the irrationality of his obsession and perhaps feared that there was something in his own inheritance akin to the conditions suffered by many of his listeners. He treated the patients as if they were normal. He was absolutely relaxed with them. She wondered why he’d never thought of becoming a doctor. Bruce laughed at the idea. He didn’t want to help anyone, he said: he wanted to have their attention, that was all.
He won a scholarship to the college he’d set his sights on. He told Alma, and no one else, that he’d gambled with a large part of his savings and had won, making so much money that he could travel all over the world, if he had to. That meant that if his real mother turned out to live in China or India or Australia, he’d still be able to get at her.
*
Last
night
I
had
a
dream
that
I
was
sitting
at
my
desk,
reading
one
of
my
history
books:
one
that
I’d
never
seen
before.
It
was
full
of
colored
illustrations,
like
the
books
we
used
to
have
when
we
were
children.
I
was
turning
the
pages
and
looking
at
scenes
from
ancient
Egypt,
from
classical
Greece
and
Imperial
Rome.
And
as
I
looked
at
them,
each
page
became
like
a
kind
of
box,
inside
which
a
scene
of
history
was
being
acted
out.
They
were
like
little
theaters
that
you
could
look
into
and,
as
you
watched
the
plays
going
on
inside,
you
could
listen
to
them
too.
While
I
was
turning
the
pages,
the
scenes
became
more
and
more
fascinating
and
beautiful
and
real,
until
suddenly
I
was
in
one
of
them
myself.
I
was
in
a
medieval
castle,
where
there
was
eating
and
drinking
and
some
music
playing
from
the
gallery.
People
were
helping
me
to
put
on
a
chain-mail
shirt
and
metal
shinguards.
Then
I
was
in
a
courtyard
with
the
other
knights.
We
got
on
our
horses
and
rode
off
to
battle.
The
ride
was
terrific
–
fast
and
breathless,
and
we
went
thundering
through
a
forest
of
gold
trees.
I
thought
that
I’d
entered
a
fairytale,
but
the
man
next
to
me
pointed
ahead
at
a
large,
dark
mountain
in
the
distance.
As
we
neared
it,
I
could
see
that
it
was
coming
at
us
with
a
speed
greater
than
ours.
The
man
said,
‘It’s
The
Tide
of
History.’
As
soon
as
we
got
close
to
it,
it
reared
up
and
went
over
us
like
a
wave.
It
was
thick
and
smothering
–
a
horrible
kind
of
mud.
But
you
could
cut
it
with
your
sword.
So
we
kept
hacking
all
around
us,
kicking
wedges
of
the
stuff
away
from
us.
But
it
was
also
pulling
us
down
into
itself.
It
was
trying
to
grab
hold
of
me.
I
got
scared.
And
then
I
saw
that
it
wasn’t
mud.
It
was
blood.
It
was
the
blood
of
all
the
people
who
had
ever
been
killed
and
of
all
the
ones
who
weren’t
born
yet.
It
was
uncontrollable.
I
wanted
to
get
away
from
it,
but
I
couldn’t.
And
I
woke
up,
staring
into
the
darkness.
*
The adoption agency was housed in a one-story building of municipal brick. It looked as if it could have been a bank, a firestation or even a chapel. He thought it was fitting that everything about the place should appear anonymous.
He’d written ahead and he’d dressed for the part: neat, respectable, mature. He was good at interviews: they gave him a chance to display his acting talents. And he wasn’t going to make any mistakes. He’d told himself that if the bastards saw he had a hair out of place, they’d probably refuse him the information, or just lie and say that they didn’t have it.
The woman who interviewed him was in her early fifties and not good-looking, although she too had taken care with her appearance, mainly with her hair, which looked almost sculpted. She had his file on the desk in front of her. It crossed his mind that if she really said no, he could knock her out, grab the file and just run. Why not? This was going to be his only chance to get his hands on the records. No court would convict him because a jury would understand a man’s need to know the truth about his past. And an adoption agency would be very careful about getting into a tangle with the law, maybe hitting the headlines.
The woman’s name was Mrs Whitlow. A sign on her desk said so, as did a plastic card pinned to the cardigan she’d draped over her frilly blouse. ‘Well, Bruce,’ she said, ‘why do you want to find out about your natural parents?’
‘Just because of that,’ he told her. ‘Because no matter what, they are my parents by nature. I guess you could say I feel that things have got to be settled. My parents have been great. If I’d never known, it wouldn’t have made any difference to me. But when they did tell me, I knew then that I’d always want to know more about the others.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see.’
He could tell that he’d made a good impression. She put her hand on the file and turned the cover. His breathing speeded up a little.
‘There isn’t too much we can tell you,’ she said, and stopped.
He gritted his teeth and waited. She seemed to be reading. He
concentrated on keeping his voice right, and asked, ‘Were they married?’
‘No.’ She looked up. ‘I’m afraid we have no information at all about the father.’
‘Well,’ he said gently, ‘anything you can tell me.’
‘The mother’s name was Joanna Elizabeth Henderson. She was sixteen.’
Despite all the possibilities he’d gone over in his mind so many times, he’d expected to hear that she’d been in her thirties, or possibly late twenties: a woman – someone who could take care of herself and who knew what she was doing. Not a young girl.
Mrs Whitlow continued, ‘Fifteen, when her parents first came to us, in 1962. It seems that there was an unsuitable alliance, with a married man. Yes. We talked to the girl. She was hostile but not hysterical. She agreed that adoption was the best course. She knew that without the help of her parents, she’d be in the hands of the courts. Underage, no means of support …’
He felt sick for a moment as he wondered if the interview could have taken place in that very room, where the low ceiling added to the sense of claustrophobia. It was certainly possible that other rooms down the corridor held pregnant girls and worried parents, who didn’t want to become grandparents. He would have liked to know if anyone in the family had expressed regret about giving the baby away. It wasn’t a question for asking eighteen years later.
Mrs Whitlow said, ‘That’s all I can tell you.’
‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to know quite a few practical details. Medical history, that kind of thing. Have I inherited anything that I should know about?’
‘Everything was perfectly normal, so far as we could tell.’
‘On my father’s side, too?’
‘That we don’t know, but we did receive an assurance from the family doctor that there was nothing out of the ordinary in his history.’
‘His family doctor? Or hers?’
‘It’s the same name on both reports.’