The Mistress's Daughter (4 page)

I write him a letter of my own, letting him know how surprised I was by Ellen's appearance, and suggesting that, while this is something 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 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.

The rooster looks inside; 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.

 

A couple of months pass. It is a cold night between the end of winter and the beginning of spring, and I am in Washington, D.C. I have spent an hour circling my father's house, wondering why he hasn't answered my letter.

I am a detective, a spy, a bastard. The house is large; there is a pool, a tennis court, and a lot of cars in the driveway. I sit outside under the cover of night, imagining him with his family, his wife, his other children.

I am on the outside looking in, the interior lights lay bare their lives. The lit windows are like light boxes illuminating X-rays.

From the outside, it looks as though he has it all and then some. The walls in one of the upstairs rooms are painted a deep forest green, with white trim around the edges. I imagine it as a library.

I see a girl pull back the curtain and look out—is she my sister?

There is a For Sale sign in the front yard. I imagine calling the realtor and taking a tour, moving from room to room like a true ghost, unseen, unknown, gathering information, looking in closets, cupboards, acquiring false intimacy by passing over their things, witnessing how they live, which way they unroll the toilet paper, what books are by the side of the bed.

I sit outside the house until I have had enough and then crawl back to my parents' house.

 

There is a message on my answering machine at home in New York—the voice raspy, accented, 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. “Ellen, 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 have regretted 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. I stop answering the phone. 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.”

“Ellen, I find it 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 up 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.”

“I need to see you.”

There are no limits. It is all about her need, incessant and total—she wants more and more. I am not allowed to have any rules. I am not allowed to say no.

 

Sometimes as a child, I would cry inconsolably. I would bellow, a primal cry, so deeply guttural, cellular, and thoroughly real that it would terrify my mother.

“Stop, you have to stop. Can you hear me? Please stop.”

If I was able to speak at all, the only thing I would say was, “I want my mom. I want my mom.” Again and again—an incantation. I would repeat it endlessly, comforting myself by rubbing back and forth over the words. “I want my mom, I want my mom.”

“I'm right here,” she would say. “I'm your mother. I'm all the mother you've got.”

After Ellen came back, I never cried that way again. I was longing for something that never existed.

The lack of purity became clear to me—I am not my adopted mother's child, I am not Ellen's child. I am an amalgam. I will always be something glued together, something slightly broken. It is not something I might recover from but something I must accept, to live with—with compassion.

I want my mom.

“Do you wish she hadn't come back?” my mother asks. “Do you wish we hadn't told you?”

“It wasn't your secret to keep.”

Do I wish she hadn't come back? Sometimes. Yes. But once it happened, I wouldn't have wanted to stop the flow of information. It is about fate, the life cycle of information. Once I know something, the amount of effort it takes to deny it, to suspend knowledge, is enormous and potentially more dangerous than to simply move along with it and see where it takes me.

 

Blindness—May 1993. The day my novel is published I accidentally poke the
New York 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 been reviewed that morning 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 Norman,” he says, his voice wobbly, tentative, choking on itself. “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 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 have ever heard from him?

“Well, what do you know?” he says, when I return the call. 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?” he asks, and I assume that he is talking about Ellen.

“She's a little crazy.”

He laughs. “That's the way she always was. That's why I had to do what I did.”

Norman, a former football hero, a combat veteran, for some reason feels compelled to give me a pep talk. Fifty years after the fact, he quotes what Coach once told him about staying in the game, about not being a quitter. No one has ever spoken to me this way before; there's something I like about it—it's comforting, inspiring. He couldn't be more different from the father I grew up with, an intellectual type. If I told Norman 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 Ellen:
I am not a slice of pie.

 

The next day I read in Washington; the bookstore is crowded with neighbors, relatives, my fourth-grade teacher, old friends from junior high, from early writing workshops. 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 okay 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 finished, a long line forms, people wanting books signed, aspiring writers with questions. In the soft distance I see a stranger, a woman, standing nervously, twisting an umbrella around and around in her hands. Instinctively, I know it is Ellen. 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 Ellen. She turns and runs out of the store.

“We spotted her during the reading,” my mother's friend says.

“I knew who she was immediately,” my mother says. “Are you all right?” she asks—she seems shaken.

“Are
you
?”

 

I'm scheduled to meet with a reporter after the reading. We sit in the basement of the bookstore, the reporter's cassette recorder on a table between us.

“Is your book autobiographical?”

“It is the most autobiographical thing I have written, but no, it is not autobiographical.”

“But you are adopted?”

“Yes.”

“I heard something recently about you searching for your parents.”

“I have not searched for anyone.”

There is a pause. “Do you know who your parents are?” It seems like a strange question, like the kind of thing you'd ask someone who'd bumped their head against a wall and just regained consciousness.

 

In the morning, I take a taxi downtown. I am going to meet the father. I take a taxi because I am blind, because my mother is at work, because I can't ask my father to drive me to meet my father. I am out of time, outside of myself. It feels like something from long ago when women didn't drive. It is as though I am in a remake, a dramatic reenactment of a role originated by Ellen—the Visit to the Lawyer's Office—the scene in which the pregnant woman goes to the lawyer's office to find out what the big guy “might be able to do for her.”

At the lawyer's office, I present myself to the receptionist. A man comes through the interior door. Is this the lawyer, my father, or just someone who works there? Anyone could be him, he could be anyone—this is what it's like when you don't know who you are.

I am reminded of the children's book
Are You My Mother?
—in which a baby bird goes around asking various other animals and objects, “Are you my mother?”

“Are you Norman?”

“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 honestly.

“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, collar pin, tie. His hair is white, thin, slicked back.

We stare at each other across the table. “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.”