The Mistress's Daughter (3 page)

She ends her second letter, “…I have a great fear of being disappointed with what I am now doing.”

 

Later, she will tell me that Frosh, reading the letter, recognized the father's name and called her saying that if she was going to give the father's name, she'd better let the father know what she was doing. She will tell me that she called my father and that he was shocked to hear from her, horrified at what she was doing, and told her that watching Oprah and Maury was beneath her.

Frosh is driving me crazy with his tinkering. It is an intrusion and interruption of the events—whose side is he on, what is he looking for, who is he trying to protect? I don't want anyone reading my mail. I get a post office box. I call Frosh and ask him to pass my new mailing information on to Ellen. I purposely do not give her my last name, or my phone number. Having had no control over this situation for thirty-one years, I need to measure things out, moderate the amount of contact.

The father, another name to look up in the phone book, another set of blanks to fill in. What did his name mean to the lawyer? Why did he recognize it? Who is my father?

I call a friend in Washington, a native, a man who knows things.

“Does this name ring a bell?”

There is a pause. “It does. He used to come into one of the clubs.”

“Anything else?” I ask.

“That's all that comes to mind. If I think of anything I'll let you know.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, is this someone you're thinking of writing about?”

 

The next week, without warning, my parents visit me in New York.

“Surprise, surprise.”

They are being incredibly nice, warm and loving, as though I have a terminal disease—six months to live.

“We'd like to take you out to dinner,” they say.

I can't go and I can't tell them why. I send them to dinner, knowing that while they are gone, I will call her.

 

Hers is the most frightening voice I've ever heard—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. In the background there is a flick, a sharp suck of air—smoking.

The phone call is thrilling, flirty as 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 and find me? What do you want?

Every nuance, every detail means something. I am like an amnesiac being awakened. 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 come to New York and would always return with presents from FAO 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: the idea that I might die of a heart attack early in life, that I now know I need to be careful, that the things I enjoy most are dangerous.

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 tells me 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? 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. I am talking to the woman who has loomed in my mind, larger than life, for the entirety of my life, and I am terrified. There is a deep fracture in my thoughts, a refrain constantly echoing: I am not who I thought I was, and I have no idea who I am.

I am not who I thought I was, and neither is she the queen of queens that I imagined.

“I can't see you yet.”

“Why can't I see you?”

I am tempted to tell her, You can't see me right now, because right now I am not visible to anyone, even myself. I have evaporated.

“When can we talk again?” she asks as we are hanging up. “When? I hope you will forgive me for what I did thirty-one years ago. When can I see you? If you said yes, I would come there right now. I would be at your door. Will you call again soon? I love you. I love you so much.”

 

My parents return from dinner. I am looking at a picture of her, a Xerox of her driver's license that the lawyer forwarded to me. Ellen Ballman, strong, thick, fierce, like a prison matron. There is another photo in the envelope—Ellen with a niece and nephew, with stuffed animals in the background. There is something about the way feeling moves across the face—something vaguely familiar. In the cheeks, the eyes, eyebrows, forehead I see traces of myself.

“How did she have Frosh's name?” my mother wants to know.

“She said she'd heard it once and never forgot.”

“Interesting,” my mother says, “because Frosh wasn't the first lawyer; the first lawyer died and we got Frosh after you were born, when we were having some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“She never signed the papers. She was supposed to sign them before she left the hospital and she didn't. And then we arranged for her to go into a bank to sign them, and she never showed up. She never signed anything and when we first went to court the judge wouldn't let us adopt you because the papers weren't signed. It took more than a year after that and then finally a second judge allowed us to adopt without a signature. For an entire year, I lived in fear. I was afraid to leave you alone with anyone except dad and Grumama, afraid if I turned around she'd come back and you'd be gone.”

I think of my mother having lost a child six months before I was born, having ushered him into and out of the world. I think of her having received me as a kind of get-well gift and then worrying that at any moment I too would be gone. I don't tell my mother one of the first things Ellen Ballman said to me: “If I'd known where you were I would have come and gotten you.” I don't tell my mother that it turned out that all along Ellen Ballman wasn't far away—a couple of miles. “I used to look at children,” Ellen told me. “And sometimes I followed them, wondering if they were you.”

 

Our conversations are frequent—I call her a couple of times a week but I don't give her my phone number. They are seductive, addictive, punishing. Each one shakes me; each requires a period of recovery. Each 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 to tell her less, wanting her to know nothing.

 

She tells me that she never got along well 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. I get the sense that something was happening at home involving the stepfather, and that the mother knew and blamed her for it—which would also explain the animosity between them and why Ellen, as a teen, was 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. There is an odd and anxious unknowing to much of what she says that makes it difficult to get the story straight. She reminds me of Tennessee Williams's Blanche DuBois, moving from person to person, desperate to get something, to find relief from unrelievable pain. Her lack of sophistication leaves me unsure whether she's of limited intelligence or simply shockingly naive.

“Did you think of having an abortion?”

“The thought never occurred to me. I couldn't have.”

Pregnancy, I gather, was the perfect 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. He sent Ellen to Florida saying he'd join her there—and never showed up. Three months later, homesick, she returned to Washington. They got an apartment together; for four days, he lived with Ellen. Then he went back, claiming that “his children missed him.” Ellen had him arrested under an old Maryland ordinance for desertion. At the time his wife was also pregnant, with a boy who was born three months before I was.

“At one point he told me to meet him at his lawyer's office,” she says, “so we could figure out a way to ‘take care of everything.' 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 Esther 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 referred to you as ‘the baby.' I didn't know if you were a boy or a girl. 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 seems to come 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 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'm late for dinner,” I say.

“Okay,” 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.

“When can I see you?” she starts again.

“Ellen, this is all new for me. You might have thought about it for a long time before you contacted me, but for me it's only a couple of weeks. I need to take things slowly. We'll talk again soon.” I hang up. The sweater is Ellen's fantasy, an image of an experience that is not my own, but one that has meaning, import elsewhere—in her past.

I am losing myself. On the street I see people who look alike—families where each face is a nuanced version of the other. I watch how they stand, how they walk and talk, variations on a theme.

A few days later, I try Ellen again.

“Ruggles slept in the hall,” she says. Ruggles is the stuffed animal I sent her, in a gesture of kindness. Tonight Ruggles is me.

There is the flick of a lighter, the suck of a cigarette.

“I'm angry with you, can you tell?”

“Yes.”

“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? Is that what she's come back for?

“You should adopt me—and take care of me,” she says.

“I can't adopt you,” I say.

“Why not?”

I don't know how to respond. I don't know if we're talking in fantasy or reality. What happened to “in the best interests of the child”? Who is the parent and who is the child? I can't say I don't want a fifty-year-old child.

“You're scaring me,” is all I can manage.

“Why won't you forgive me? Why are you always angry with me?”

“I'm not angry with you,” I tell her and it is entirely true. Of all the things I am, I am not angry with her.

“Don't be angry with me forever. If I'd known where you were I would have come and gotten you and taken you away.” Imagine that—kidnapped by one's own mother, the same mother who had given you away at birth. She lived not two miles from where I grew up, and luckily didn't know who or where I was. I cannot imagine anything more terrifying.

“I'm not angry with you.” 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 Ellen 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.

“Have you heard from your father? I'm surprised he hasn't been in touch.”

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 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.