Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  But Annie was absorbed in what she was trying to explain. She said, “The real, actual truth is that when Kathleen first said she wanted to find her birth mother, I was very upset. Frankly, I was scared to death.”

  “I thought that was my department.” I tried to speak lightly. Just let me not cry any more, I prayed to someone. “What were you afraid of?”

  She glanced up in surprise. “Of losing her, of course. An adoptive mother always feels kind of insecure. She’s never the real thing. I was terrified.”

  “I guess I can imagine that.” It was true. If there was one thing I could imagine, it was losing a child.

  “I don’t know if I can explain what it meant to me, when Bill and I adopted Kathleen,” Annie said. She stirred her coffee slowly, frowning, weighing her words. “When I was growing up in Georgia a million years ago, I always imagined I would have a daughter of my own someday. I don’t know why that was—I mean, why a daughter instead of a son, and why just one. Lord knows, I came from a family of six.” She laughed. “Well, maybe that explains why I craved a peaceful kind of household with just one pretty little girl in it. Then of course I found out I wasn’t going to be having any children at all, not even that one. I have a congenital abnormality in my uterus. I knew from the time I was a teenager that I was barren. That was hard, I’ll tell you. That was real hard.” Annie stared out the window a moment, nodding her head. “But then we were able to adopt Kathleen. That sweet curly-haired baby. Exactly the daughter I had wished for.”

  It was oddly unnerving to realize that all that had gone on without me—another country existing next to my own. I had driven home from Boston with my mother. My stitches had healed, the hair grew in where I had been shaved, my figure gradually returned to normal, I went back to school, and all that time, somewhere in Ohio, this person had fed bottles to my baby, sung to her, taught her to say Mama and Dada. I think in that moment, sitting there across the table from Annie Erling, in the midst of my gratitude that it was this kind, cheerful, pleasant woman who had been Kathleen’s mother, I felt more cheated, more bereft, than I ever had before.

  Annie continued. “Then she decided she wanted you—that other mother. At first I felt like she had run over me with a truck. I really fought the idea. But Mark and I talked about it.” She grinned suddenly. “Someone who only knew him in high school might not believe it, but my husband is a very sensible guy. Very smart. And the more we talked about it, the better I felt about the whole thing. It began to seem wrong not to know you, and I knew it would always bother Kathleen. I decided it was better to face it—to bring you into our family if we could. After all, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have had Kathleen in the first place. And I decided that if you took her away from me—a lot or a little—well, I’d just have to live with it.”

  I tried to think of whom she reminded me, and I realized it was Mark: Mark as a teenager on the phone, begging me for information, saying how he regretted he hadn’t seen the baby, letting himself—a seventeen-year-old boy, a jock, a heartbreaker—weep openly, without shame. How did anyone get to be so honest, so unafraid?

  Annie was surveying me fondly, as if I were an old college chum. “You look overwhelmed, Wynn. Not that I blame you.”

  “You terrify me,” I managed to say.

  She paused with her coffee mug halfway to her lips. “Me?”

  “How can you just do this? How can you be so nice about it? I don’t know how to react.”

  She let out a bark of laughter. “I’m not that nice. I had plenty of evil moments, believe me. But in the end I only wanted my daughter to be happy. I was just like you, Wynn. That’s why you gave her up to be adopted, because you figured she’d be happier.”

  “I hope that’s true, Annie,” I said. “I hope I wasn’t just being selfish.”

  She stared at me. “Wynn, you were a child!” She reached over and squeezed my arm. “Honey, you’ve been blaming yourself and thinking you should have kept that baby and raised her and—well, you’ve got to get over it. You did absolutely the best thing for her, and everybody knows it. And I’ll tell you something else. I think it’s fate, Wynn, I think it’s meant to be that you turned up right here in West Dunster, looking for Mark. He told me the story, by the way—about that poor child who was murdered. God, what an awful thing.” Then she smiled again, awkwardly. “You know, as long as we’re being honest, I have to say what a relief it is that you’re—well, you. Because the other thing I thought was: This woman is going to be some kind of force in my daughter’s life. What if I don’t like her? I mean, aside from the fact that she’s—what? Six years younger than I am. Probably disgustingly glamorous. And she was involved with my husband all those years ago.”

  Moonlight on the lake, sand in my clothes. “I wouldn’t call it involved, Annie—”

  She waved her hand. “Whatever. It was a zillion years ago. But what really bothered me was what if she was someone who would—I don’t know—hound us for money. Or someone who would try to turn our daughter against us. Or just someone I’d rather Kathleen didn’t know. Someone—you know—unsuitable, as my mother-in-law would probably say.” She paused and sipped coffee. “You find out a lot about yourself in times of crisis. Those weren’t pretty thoughts, and I’m not proud of them.”

  Annie’s candor gave me courage to say what I felt should be said. “I’m not very good at talking about things sometimes. Difficult things.” I thought again of my mother’s letter, her reluctance to say aloud the things that were in it. “But I’m trying to get over that,” I said.

  “Well, I hope we can talk freely to each other, Wynn. I mean, I’ve told you what a snob and a coward I’ve been.” Annie bent down to pet Reggie, who had wandered into the kitchen. “And I know that if I were in your place I’d feel very odd.”

  “When I see those old photographs,” I said, and then I stopped, not quite knowing how to go on.

  “You feel like shit,” Annie said bluntly. She lifted Reggie to her lap, where he sat and stared at me. “How could you not be jealous of us—right? Our happy little nuclear family. You’d have to be a saint.”

  I felt my face flush. “Looking at the pictures, seeing what I’ve missed—I have to envy you all those years. She’s had this vast family, all these experiences. And she’s had you. I’ll never be anyone’s mother—not even Kathleen’s, really. You’re her mother. You’re the one she calls Mom. No matter how close she and I might become, I’ll always be Wynn.”

  Annie shook her head. “I think it’s much more complicated than that. There really isn’t any word for what you are to her. You gave birth to her, after all. And she does feel that you’re her mother, in a way that’s hard to explain. She told me that last night, before she went up to bed. She feels a real bond, a real connection. She says it was there from the minute she first saw you. It wasn’t like meeting a stranger, she said. It was as if, somehow, she had always known you.”

  “Yes, I felt that, too,” I whispered. I was pierced with happiness at her words, but behind the pleasure remained the thin, bitchy little thread of envy. They had talked about me. In the end, my presence was something that brought them even closer, this ideal mother and loving daughter.

  Annie said, “So I guess I have to say I’m a bit jealous of you, too, Wynn. For just walking in on this. Getting it all for nothing. Being the answer to my daughter’s goddamned prayers.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment. Then, slowly, we began to smile, and all the bad feeling went out of me. “Look at us, Annie,” I said. “Two nice respectable ladies having coffee at the kitchen table and hating and resenting each other like crazy.”

  Annie’s laughter broke out. “We need a how-to book or a support group or something. I’ll tell you what.” She held out her hand across the table. “I’ll forgive you if you’ll forgive me.”

  We shook hands, smiling into each other’s eyes. Then, embarrassed, we both looked down at Reggie, who had jumped to the floor and was washing his whiskers at
our feet. Annie chuckled. “It’s all so weird,” she said. “Isn’t it? Who would believe this crazy story? The whole bizarre thing is a kind of ventilator, really.”

  I thought I had misunderstood her Southern accent. “Did you say ventilator?”

  “Yeah. Kathleen used to say that. She was such a funny kid. When she was six or seven, she fell in love with certain words. Ventilator. Optimist and pessimist. Massacre. She used to call really good dinners massacres, and she used to alternate between being an optimist and a pessimist. Thought it was hilarious. And whenever anything unexpected and wonderful and sort of—I don’t know—far-out happened, she’d call it a ventilator. Like when Reggie was the only calico in a litter of coal-black kittens. That was definitely a ventilator. Kids are strange little critters. Anyway, I think that’s what we have to call this.” Annie looked at me. Her eyes were bright. “This great adventure we’re having, Wynn. This amazing thing that’s happened to us all.”

  • • •

  It was an Erling ritual to eat a huge meal on Sunday morning, and so we gathered around the kitchen table for omelettes and sausages and fruit and toast and a coffee cake Annie had made the day before. Then Kathleen and Nick had to get back to Portland.

  “I’ll call you,” Kathleen said to me at the door. We clung to each other. “And I’ll write. And Nick and I will come to Boston to see you. Or maybe you could come up to Portland.”

  We made plans, wrote down addresses and phone numbers. “This has been the most amazing weekend of my life,” Kathleen said. She looked into my eyes. “Thank you for finding us. Thank you for having me, Wynn.”

  I had to search my pockets for a tissue. “One of these days I’m going to stop crying, I really am.” We embraced again, and Nick hugged me, too, and then they got into their little blue car and pulled away down the driveway, waving. Watching my daughter’s bright face framed in the car window, I had a thought that staggered me. For most of my life, I had been wishing that none of it had happened: Deirdre’s stupid party, the half hour on the beach with Mark, the bleak months at the Edna Quinlan Home.

  Now I felt only gratitude. Now I could wish none of it undone.

  • • •

  That would have been enough to last me forever, the meeting with my daughter and her family when I knew myself to be not only blessed but also absolved.

  But there was more.

  I drove back to Boston on a day glittering with sun and checked into a hotel near Harvard Square. Over the next few days, I called the movers and arranged to have my things delivered, I went to the new apartment, took measurements, made a list, and went shopping for small necessities.

  These simple tasks soothed me, and I sorely needed soothing. Huge chunks of my life had been chipped away, and the events of the last week had rushed in to fill the empty spaces. The business of divorce, the visit to West Dunster, the shock first of Mark, then of Kathleen. I felt like someone who had been left in a prison to starve, and who, suddenly released, eats too much, too fast. Or like an unaccustomed drunk who needed to walk it off, to spend some energy in a quiet way in order to restore myself to the person I had been. Or some version of the person I had been.

  I called Marietta and told her what had happened, and she said, “This is the best thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. My God, what a movie plot! Promise I can have the rights.” Then she laughed her cackling laugh and said, “Hey—didn’t I tell you that you should leave Alec and become a mother? And that’s exactly what you did!”

  When I called Hannah she wept. “Oh Wynn, it’s like those wonderful scenes in Shakespeare where the child abandoned on the mountaintop is alive after all, rescued by shepherds or something!”

  “This one was rescued by a software entrepreneur,” I said, laughing.

  “But why didn’t you ever tell us about this before?” she asked me. And I had no answer.

  I dug out some old family photos and mailed them to Kathleen—my parents in front of the house on Brewster Road, in Florida on their boat, the picture of Anna Rosa in the thirties in a fox-collared coat, one of my grandfather behind the counter of the store, ancient pictures of my mother’s parents who died before I was born. Kathleen sent me some of her bylined pieces for the Portland paper—lively accounts of the dedication of a homeless shelter, a case of election fraud, a councilman accused of bribery. I talked on the phone to Annie, who kept me posted on plans for the wedding, coming up in August. Yes, she said, I must definitely take part. These days, anything was possible, the world was full of weird family situations, and who cared, anyway?

  I moved into my new apartment on a sunny Saturday, a characterless modern place on Commonwealth Avenue. It was only two blocks, oddly, from Haskell Graphics, the firm that had made greeting cards from my mother’s photographs for so many years. The apartment was not ideal, but I had been in a hurry. At least it had good light, and a room I could use as a studio. I hadn’t completed a painting in over a decade but, perhaps irrationally, I knew I had to have a studio, and not only for teaching in. The first thing I did was to set up the painting table I had used since I was in school. I hung my old smock on a hook. I found the easel and got out my brushes, the box of paints, my ancient turpentine jar. Then I tacked to the wall some sketches I had made in the Rickerts’ garden, of Jay weeding the bean patch and Hannah, in one of her long dresses, sitting in an old metal chair with a cat on her lap.

  I stared at the sketches for a long time, seeing their possibilities, feeling a rush of excitement. My painting had changed when I lost my daughter, changed again during my years in New York, and then the ability to paint had deserted me entirely. What would it be like now to pick up a brush and apply paint to canvas? What would be the effect of this miraculous reprieve? I looked forward to finding out—to digging down and discovering what was there, to struggling up from the bottom again and teaching myself as I taught my students. Patiently, with kindness. But I wasn’t quite ready. For the moment, it was enough to anticipate it.

  On a shelf in my studio, I lined up some of my father’s old toys, and I ran my hand over the smooth maple, thinking that some day I would give them to Kathleen and Nick for their children. The trucks and buses, the cars with their little red wheels. And my old high-sided bed. The crazy quilt. A pine doll’s cradle stenciled with a pattern of birds, my green bookcase. I had assumed those things would die with me. Now I had a daughter. Not dead but living. It was one of the times when I was numb with joy, and I sat there with the old wooden toys as an animal might sit, a cat or a cow, content in the sunshine.

  I also did something I hadn’t done in years: I unpacked some of my mother’s photographs and hung them on a wall. I’d lost my hostility toward her. It had evaporated the way a bad dream does when you wake up, and looking at her photographs—those spare and rigorous shots of black fences against white snow, the stillness of sunlight on a garden bench, a hawk soaring above a bank of clouds—my grief over my mother’s death returned to me untainted by anger.

  I began to think about her often, realizing how imperfect my knowledge of her was. She wasn’t a woman who had let herself be known. Life is complex enough, she had written in her letter, and I wondered why she had felt that, where it came from in her own childhood, and why she’d felt compelled to devote so much time trying to reduce life to something simple and controllable. That was her peculiar mission. It was clear from her photographs, our perfectly run house and manicured garden, even her short, crisp hairdo. An artist can’t work in chaos, was of course her chief maxim. And I remembered her coming into the room where I painted and quoting Yeats in mock horror, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world!”—and I knew it was time for me to wash the paint off my hands and pick up the books and papers that littered the floor. Order from disorder was how she described housework: I’d heard her say that more than once, down on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor or ironing tablecloths on a broiling August day, her face shiny with sweat. And saying it cheerfully. It made her happy to rein in all the
tag ends of her life. It satisfied her.

  Thinking of all this, I saw how difficult I must have been for my mother. She loved me above anything, and I was always a mess—never more so than when I begged for that baby.

  I wished she were still alive so I could take her by the shoulders, shake her, look her into her eyes and tell her to lighten up, chill out. And hug her. And quote to her Patrick’s manifesto from Tolstoy, that the artist’s task is not to solve problems, but to show us how to love life in all its disorderly mystery. And we could talk about it, openly and honestly. We could learn from each other.

  All this only intensified my grief that she was gone. I had become a mother, and it had made me, I felt, a better, more understanding daughter. Too late, of course. And yet this affectionate, impatient regret, all I had left, was better than the bitterness that had gripped me for so long, and I cherished it.

  I had a vague, sudden memory of a photograph of hers. It had been a big hit with Haskell, I recalled, part of a series of animal photos that had sold spectacularly well, but it was one that I’d never paid much attention to, never framed and hung on the wall. Now, though, it was something I had to have. I spent part of an afternoon searching through storage boxes, and finally dug it out. She had printed a date on the back: 3/20/1969. A few weeks before Kathleen’s birth. The photograph was taken the spring I was pregnant, while I was at Edna Quinlan. I had to smile. Maybe life was neater than I’d thought.

  It was an extraordinary image, taken on a bright spring day, of a doe and a very young fawn in a clearing in the woods. I imagined my mother sitting, perfectly still, on the little portable stool she carried, waiting. The deer come into view, unaware, upwind from her. They stop, and the sunlight falls on them between the budding trees. They’re only twenty-five or thirty feet away. The doe’s flanks ripple with muscle, the fur on the fawn’s back is still rough, puppyish. The fawn stays close to the doe’s side, always touching her. My mother hesitates until the moment is right, and then she releases the shutter. The deer disappear instantly, bounding out of sight at the tiny sound, but the image remains: the fawn raising its head to its mother, the doe bending down to nuzzle it, the two of them oblivious to everything except what they are, a mother and her child.