The Mistress's Daughter

I
remember their insistence that I come into the living room and sit down and how the dark room seemed suddenly threatening, how I stood in the kitchen doorway holding a jelly doughnut and how I never eat jelly doughnuts.

I remember not knowing; first thinking something was very wrong, assuming it was death—someone had died.

And then I remember knowing.

 

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.”

“Tell me now, from here.”

“Come and we'll tell you.”

“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.”

After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I've been exposed. I get up knowing one thing about myself: I am the mistress's daughter. My birth mother was young and unmarried, my father older and married, with a family 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.”

“Tell me again—what happened?”

Details, minutiae, as though the facts, the call-and-response of questions asked and answered, will make sense of it, will give it order, shape, and the thing it lacks most—logic.

“About two weeks ago we got a phone call. It was Stanley Frosh, the lawyer who took care of the adoption, calling to say that he'd gotten a call from a woman who told him that if you wanted to contact her, she'd be willing to hear from you.”

“What does that mean, ‘willing to hear from you'? Does she
want
to talk to me?”

“I don't know,” my mother says.

“What did Frosh say?”

“He couldn't have been nicer. He said that he'd had this call—the day before your birthday—and he wasn't sure what we would want to do with the information, but he thought we should have it. Would you like to know her name?”

“No,” I say.

“We debated about whether or not to even tell you,” my father says.

“You debated? How could you not tell me? It's not your information. What if you hadn't told me and something happened to you and then I found out later?”

“But we are telling you,” my mother says. “Mr. Frosh says you can call him at any time.” She offers Frosh as though talking to him will do something—like fix it.

“This happened two weeks ago and you're just telling me now?”

“We wanted to wait until you were home.”

“Why did Frosh call you? Why didn't he call me directly?” I was thirty-one years old, an adult, and still they were treating me like an infant who needed protection.

“Damn her,” my mother says. “It's a lot of nerve.”

This was my mother's nightmare; she'd always been afraid that someone would come and take me away. I'd grown up knowing that was her fear, knowing in part it had nothing to do with my being taken away, but with her first child, her son, having died just before I was born. I grew up feeling that on some very basic level my mother would never let herself get attached again. I grew up with the sensation of being kept at a distance. I grew up furious. I feared that there was something about me, some defect of birth that made me repulsive, unlovable.

My mother came to me. She wanted to hug me. She wanted me to comfort her.

I didn't want to hug her. I didn't want to touch anyone. “Is Frosh sure she is who she says she is?”

“What do you mean?” my father asked.

“Is he sure she's the right woman?”

“I think he's fairly certain it's her,” my father said.

 

The fragile, fragmented narrative, the thin line of story, the plot of my life, has been abruptly recast. I am dealing with the divide between sociology and biology: the chemical necklace of DNA that wraps around the neck sometimes like a beautiful ornament—our birthright, our history—and other times like a choke chain.

I have often felt the difference between who I arrived as and who I've become; layer upon layer piling up until it feels as though I am coated with a bad veneer, the cheap paneling of a suburban recreation room.

As a child, I was obsessed by the
World Book Encyclopedia
, the acetate anatomy pages, where you could build a person, folding in the skeleton, the veins, the muscles, layer upon layer, until it all came together.

For thirty-one years I have known that I came from somewhere else, started as someone else. There have been times when I have been relieved by the fact that I am not
of
my parents, that I am freed from their biology; and that is followed by an enormous sensation of otherness, the pain of how alone I feel.

“Who else knows?”

“We told Jon,” my father says. Jon, my older brother, their son.

“Why did you tell him? It wasn't yours to tell.”

“We're not telling Grandma,” my mother says.

This is the first important thing they've elected not to tell her—she is too old, too confused to be of help to them. She might do something with it in her head, conflate the information with other information, make it into something entirely different.

“Think of how I feel,” my mother says. “I can't even tell my own mother. I can't get any comfort from her. It's awful.”

My mother and I sit in silence.

“Should we not have told you?” my mother asks.

“No,” I say, resigned. “You had to tell me. It wasn't a choice. It's my life, I have to deal with it.”

“Mr. Frosh says you can call him anytime,” she repeats.

 

“Where does she live?”

“New Jersey.”

In my dreams, my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens, the CEO, the CFO, and the COO. Movie-star beautiful, incredibly 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.

 

I say good night and drift off into the spin of the story, the myth of my beginning.

My adoptive mother and father didn't marry until my father was forty. My mother, eight years younger, had a son, Bruce, from a previous marriage who had been born with severe kidney problems. He lived to be nine and died six months before I was born. Together my mother and father had Jon—during his birth my mother's uterus ruptured, and both she and Jon nearly died. An emergency hysterectomy was performed and my mother was unable to have more children.

“It was lucky any of us survived,” she said. “We always wanted more. We wanted three children. We wanted a little girl.”

When I was young and used to ask where I came from, my mother would tell me that I was from the Jewish Social Service Agency. When I was a teenager, my therapist often asked me, “Don't you think it's odd that an agency would give a baby to a family where another child had died just six months before—to a family still in mourning?” I shrugged. It seemed like both a good idea and a really bad one. I always felt that my role in the family was to heal things, to make everything all right—to replace a dead boy. I grew up doused in grief. From day one, on a cellular level, I was perpetually in mourning.

There is folklore, there are the myths, there are facts, and there are the questions that go unanswered.

If my parents wanted more children, why did they build a house with only three bedrooms—who was going to share? I assumed that they knew Bruce was going to die. They may have wanted three children, but they planned for two.

When I asked my mother why an agency would give them an infant so soon after a child had died, she said nothing. And then when I was twenty, on a cold winter afternoon, I pressed her for more information, details. I would do this at weak moments, special occasions such as Bruce's birthday, the anniversary of his death, or my birthday—times when she seemed vulnerable, when I sensed a crack in the surface. Where did I come from? Not from an agency, but through a lawyer; it was a private adoption.

“We put our name on agency lists but there were no babies available. We were told that the best thing to do was ask around, to let people know that we were looking for a baby.”

Each earthquake of identity, each shift in the architecture of the precarious frame that I'd built for myself, threw me. How much was still being kept from me and how much had been forgotten, or lost with the subtle erasure, the natural revision of time?

I asked again. “Where did I come from?”

“We told everyone that we were looking for a baby and then one day we heard of a baby that was going to be born, and that was you.”

“How did you hear about me?”

“Through a friend. Remember my friend Lorraine?” She mentioned the name of someone I met once, long ago. Lorraine knew another couple that also wanted to adopt a baby, but it turned out that in a roundabout way they knew who the mother was—this was told to me as though it explained something, as though knowing who the mother was made everything null and void, not because there was something wrong with the mother, but because there was something wrong with knowing.

As an adult I asked my mother if she would call Lorraine, if she would ask Lorraine to call the people who in a roundabout way knew who my mother was and ask them, who was she? My mother said no. She said, what if the couple has other children that don't know they're adopted?

What does that have to do with me? And how incredibly screwed up that someone wouldn't have told their children that they were adopted.

My mother finally called Lorraine—who said, “Let it go.” She claimed to know nothing. Who was she protecting? What was she hiding?

My mother remembered something about real estate, something about a name, but she didn't remember enough. Why didn't she remember? It would seem like the kind of thing you wouldn't forget.

“I didn't want to remember. I didn't want to know anything. I felt I had to protect you. The less I knew, the better. I was afraid she would come back and try to take you away.”

“Okay, back to the beginning—you heard of a baby who was going to be born, and then what?”

“And then PopPop's lawyer was able to get in touch with the woman and they met and he called us and said, she's wonderful, she's healthy, except for some problems with her teeth—I think she hadn't had good dental care. We set up a post office box and some letters were exchanged, and then we waited for you to be born.”

“What did the letters say?”

“I don't remember.” Everything is prefaced with “I don't remember.”

I lean in and the subtle pressure causes some slight discharge of information. “Just some basic information about her background, about her health, about how the pregnancy was going. She was young, she wasn't married. I think that the father was married. One of them was Jewish; the other, I think, may have been Catholic. She cared about you very much, she wanted what was best for you and knew she couldn't take care of you herself. She wanted you to go to a very special home—a Jewish home. It was important to her to know that you went somewhere where you'd be loved. She wanted you to have all the opportunity in the world. I think she may have been living in northern Virginia.”

“What happened to the letters?” I imagine a precious short stack of delicate letters tied in a ribbon and buried at the back of a drawer deep in my mother's dresser.

My mother pauses, looks up and off to the side, as if searching her memory. “I think there was even another letter after you were born.”

“Where are the letters?”

“I think they were destroyed,” my mother says.

“Didn't it occur to you that I might want them, that they might be all I ever had?”

“We were told to be very careful. I didn't save anything. We were told not to. No evidence, no reminders.”