Lightbulb time! I remember, I remember—he’s a stage designer!
“—but here, let me give you taxi fare…”
“Oh, no, forget it, we’ll take the subway back—”
He crams a pair of twenties in my hand. “You will do no such thing,” he says, and I decide that much of a fool, I’m not. Then, with a wink, he backs away, swiping his hair off his face as he calls out goodbye to Starr.
Is this an Audrey Hepburn movie moment or what? Man, oh man—when was the last time I intrigued a man? Confused them, yes, but intrigued? This is good stuff.
On the taxi ride home (a real sacrifice), I tell Starr that Alan’s asked me out, which apparently prompts nothing more worrisome in her mind than my needing to do something about my hair. In any case, I’m feeling pretty damn mellow when we get out of the taxi and climb up the steps to our house.
Until Jen grabs me the instant we set foot inside and shoves a tattered manila envelope into my hands.
“You’re not gonna believe this,” she says.
The way my life’s been going lately? Try me.
chapter 24
However, Jen’s right. I don’t.
But there it is, in black-and-white. Or, since the documents are so old, charcoal gray and beige:
Dad’s adoption papers.
Along with what must be an amended birth certificate with my grandparents’ names on them.
Suddenly, thoughts of Alan and dimpled smiles and an actual date (where the guy pays and everything) get knocked right out of the ballpark. Not to mention the hundred and one other worries that have been traipsing after me all summer like a bunch of stray dogs.
“Do you think he even knew?” Jen whispers, handing me a glass of iced tea. Starr’s gone up to her room; Jen and I are in the kitchen, the shades drawn against the late-afternoon sun. This is, without a doubt, the closest I have ever felt to my sister. Would that it were under more auspicious circumstances.
“I have no idea. Although I doubt it, since nobody ever said anything. Lemme see the rest of the papers,” I say, shuffling again through the brittle documents until I find Leo and Judith’s wedding certificate. Jen busies herself by bolstering her tea with a good-sized dollop of Canadian Club. Since it doesn’t appear she’s been boozing it up all afternoon, I let it go. Especially since I’m half-tempted to indulge in some bolstering of my own. Jesus. And Mary and Joseph and Abraham and anybody else you want to get in there. “According to this, Dad was born only four months after the wedding.”
“And adopted when he was three days old.”
We blink up at each other. “Which begs the question,” I say, “why would a newly married couple adopt a baby?”
As if we both haven’t leaped through hoops to the same conclusion. Jen raises her glass in a surprisingly cheerful salute and says, “Is this family fucked up or what?”
You might say. I glance down at the documents, shaking my head. “I suppose we could ask her…”
“I’ve already invited her for dinner,” Jen says, taking a swig of her tea. She glances up at the clock, then back at me. “You’ve got three hours to prep.”
Terrific.
Since we have no proof that Dolly was Dad’s birth mother, she could have easily dismissed us as two crazy women with overactive imaginations. But although Jen’s and my craziness is a given, the woman we now know is our biological grandmother hasn’t denied a thing. If anything, she seems relieved that it’s finally all out in the open.
We didn’t bring it up until after dinner, although how either Jen or I got a crumb of food down our throats, I’ll never know. Once Starr was safely ensconced in the living room watching the latest teeny-bopper movie (Jen really did think of everything—I’m beginning to think there’s hope for the girl yet), I brought out the papers and presented them to Dolly.
Who cracked like an overripe walnut.
She’s been telling her story for several minutes now, caressing the adoption certificate over and over, as though it’s an old, beloved pet. At first, her words emerged haltingly, cautiously, like disbelieving prisoners newly released after decades of wrongful incarceration in a dark prison cell. But the longer she talks, the more secure she sounds, someone who’s turned her burden into a strength.
She’s told us how she and Leo became lovers when he was only twenty-one, she seventeen. But their families were adamantly opposed to the relationship because she was Catholic and he Jewish. Never mind that Leo wasn’t practicing even then: his parents were convinced a good Jewish girl would straighten him out. Naturally they were horrified when he started seeing Dolly. But as appalled as my great-grandparents were, that was nothing compared with Dolly’s family, who wouldn’t hear of her being involved with a Jew.
“If he had been willing to convert,” she now says, “there might have been some hope. But your grandfather’s disaffection for organized religion wasn’t limited to his own faith. He thought all of it was bunk. However, he’d already said I could raise our children any way I liked.” A sad smile crosses her lips. “From the beginning, he wanted to have babies with me. Although…not the way it happened.
“When I discovered I was pregnant, I foolishly thought my parents would have to let us marry. I was very wrong. Your grandfather wanted to elope, but I was too young, and too scared, and we didn’t have a cent between us. So my parents sent me away to cousins in Buffalo to have the baby. Then…give it up for adoption.”
Her head moves slowly from side to side, her brows sinking behind her glass frames as she rests the side of her face in one palm, once again skimming her index finger over the papers. “I hear the words come out of my mouth, but they don’t sound quite real. As if it’s not my story, but something that’s familiar because I’ve heard it over and over again so many times.” Her gaze lifts to mine. “But it did happen to me. All of it. Including your grandfather’s pestering everybody we knew until he found somebody finally willing to tell him where I was. And what my parents planned.”
Her shoulders, suddenly delicate and insignificant-looking underneath a brightly patterned blouse lift, then drop. “If he couldn’t have me, he was determined to at least have our child. As I’m sure you understand, my parents very much wanted to keep my embarrassment a secret. It was bad enough that I dated a Jewish boy, but to then get pregnant on the wrong side of the blanket…” She shakes her head. “Things were so different then. My family enjoyed some social standing in the community. People trusted my father and admired my mother. So my parents saw me as their failure. Your grandfather knew this, knew how little they wanted their shame to become public knowledge. So he…made a bargain with them—that they would let him adopt our baby, in exchange for his keeping his mouth shut.”
My eyebrows shoot up a full inch. “He blackmailed them?”
Dolly smiles. “I think damage control is a better term, don’t you?”
“Still, you had to give up your baby—”
“Better that than have him go to strangers and never have any idea where he was or how he was doing. Remember, there was no such thing as open adoption then. This way, I would at least know he was with his father. Maybe even see him, from a distance at least, from time to time.”
“But…” I frown. “To stand by and watch Leo marry someone else…”
“Nearly killed me,” she says. “But there was no other way he would have been allowed to adopt. Not then. And I knew he wasn’t in love with Judith.”
Jen and I exchange glances, then Jen says, “How do you know that?”
“Leo had told me about Judith when we were still seeing each other, that their families wanted them to marry, that he suspected she had feelings for him. Feelings he couldn’t return. When he found out about the baby, however, he knew he had to marry quickly. So he proposed to Judith, but with two conditions—that she understand it was solely to help him raise his baby, and that she could never tell a soul who Norman’s real mother was.”
From the living room, I hear Starr’s laugh
ter, a bizarre counterpoint to the sadness that has suddenly swamped me like a dense fog. My ginger-encrusted salmon from dinner is boogeying in my stomach.
“But…” My sister’s voice sounds furry and distant. “People knew you and Leo had been seeing each other. Wouldn’t somebody have put two and two together when Leo adopted your baby?”
“The story was that the child was an orphan, born to a young widow—a distant friend of the family—who’d died in childbirth, and that Judith and Leo had taken on the child so soon after their marriage as an act of charity. A mitzvah, he later explained to me.”
“And people actually bought that?”
“Apparently, disgrace brings out a family’s creative side.”
“Jesus.”
The disgust in Jen’s voice leads me to believe her salmon’s having a high old time, too. But at this point, I’m perfectly willing to let her ask the questions. A burden she seems perfectly willing to accept.
“Why on earth would anyone agree to such a horrible arrangement? Nana, especially. It wasn’t like she was ugly or anything, that she couldn’t have eventually found someone else.”
“She didn’t want someone else. She wanted Leo,” Dolly says matter-of-factly. “And apparently, she was willing to do whatever she had to to get him. She saw the marriage as an opportunity, that being a mother to his child would eventually win him over. And that someday they’d have babies of their own, and his feelings for me would fade.”
Jen collapses against her chair back, her arms folded. “How would you know—?”
“She told me.”
“Wait—our grandmother talked to you?”
“Only once. Shortly before her death, right after my husband died. We ran into each other in the supermarket. I tried to avoid her, but she made a beeline for me, offering her condolences, asking if she could take me to lunch. Stupid me, I thought she was extending an olive branch, that she’d finally reconciled herself to something none of us had any power over. Instead, she…” Dolly inhales deeply. “It was like having all the old wounds torn open all over again. On both sides. You tell yourself, you’ve made your bed, but…” Her eyes lift to ours. “Who could blame her for being bitter?”
Not me.
Hey. I adored my grandfather, so I’m probably not the most objective person to be sorting through all this. And I personally never witnessed him being anything less than considerate with my grandmother. Judith, I mean. But if there was never anything more between them than consideration…well, hell. No wonder my grandmother had a bad attitude. Yeah, I understand that in order to not lose his son, Leo’s choices were limited. But the fact remains that someone else suffered greatly because of the choice he did make.
And it’s making me sick.
From what seems like a great distance, I hear Jen ask Dolly about her own marriage, then Dolly’s response—about her desperate need to have more babies after giving up Dad, that in spite of everything, she hoped she’d made George a good wife.
“He was a kind man,” she says. “Very generous, crazy about his kids. I missed him terribly when he died, the way you’d miss a wonderful friend.”
“Did he know about Leo?” Jen asks.
“Only that I’d been deeply in love before, and that it ended badly. George seemed to…honor my feelings, is the best way I can put it. And in a way, that made me more fond of him, you know?”
“But you cheated on him?”
She recoils at Jen’s accusation. “I saw Leo from time to time, yes. I wasn’t strong enough to give him up entirely. But I swear to you, we weren’t…intimate while our spouses were alive. I made sure, the few times we met, that it was someplace where nothing could happen. At a restaurant in Brooklyn, or Coney Island in the middle of the day. It was torture, but I’d made as full a life as I could with my husband. I wasn’t about to jeopardize that. Not after what I’d already lost.”
Do I believe her, that they were never lovers while they were both still married? But then, what does it matter? Especially now. It’s all over and done with.
Or is it?
I finally pull together enough brain cells to ask, “So how did Liv come to be Leo’s tenant? And after he died, and you volunteered to help with me with the dresses…” I pause, not even sure what I’m trying to ask.
Dolly smiles. “The first was a coincidence, believe it or not. And your grandfather wasn’t happy about it when he found out. Except once she was in…” She shrugs. “Well. You know your grandfather.”
Do I? Did I?
“As for the other…” She looks down at her hands, then back up at me. “I never got to know my son. I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to get to know my granddaughter.”
“But you weren’t going to tell me—us—who you were, were you?”
“Probably not.”
“Why?”
“Because of exactly what I’m seeing in your eyes right now. All that anger and hurt…” Her head moves from side to side. “Oh, years ago, after both George and your grandmother were gone, I wanted to get this out in the open. But Leo wouldn’t hear of it. Too afraid of somebody digging around and discovering the whole truth, I suppose. And eventually, I began to think maybe he was right, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, maybe it was better in the long run to leave the truth buried. If you hadn’t found those papers, I probably would never have said anything. But when we met, and I realized you needed help with the sewing, and then Jennifer came home, too… Well, I thought maybe this was some small reward for keeping my mouth shut for more than fifty years.”
I swear, I think my heart is going to break.
Not long after, the little party breaks up, leaving the hows and whens—and ifs—of breaking this news to our families for another discussion. Jen offers to give Dolly a ride home, while I do the good roommate thing and clean up after dinner. But once in the kitchen, putting things away in assorted plastic dooflatchies, I realize just how tenuous is my hold on my already stretched thin emotions.
My grandfather was a fraud.
No matter how I, or anyone else, might try to justify it, the fact remains that his actions made not one, but two women miserable. Judith was stuck in a loveless marriage, saddled with a child that reminded my grandfather every day of what he’d had to give up. But at least he got to see my father every day— Dolly never saw him at all.
The leftover salmon I’ve just scooped out of the baking dish blurs as my eyes fill with tears: How was that a good thing for any of them? What was the freaking point?
“So. What was that all about?”
I spin around at the sound of Starr’s voice, sending the salmon flying off the spatula and onto the floor. Frito pounces on it, only to rear back and hiss at me when I yell at him to get away. Wiping my eyes, I squat to clean up the splattered fish.
“What was what all about?”
“Dolly and Leo.”
I look up to see her give me The Hands. Palms up, fingers spread. She has clearly been hanging around the Scardinares too much lately. “You were supposed to be in the living room,” I say.
“You guys talk too loud.”
Shit. I finish picking up the fish, tossing a piece of it into Frito’s food dish. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
“But—”
I whirl around a second time, advancing on my daughter so fast she stumbles backwards. “I said I don’t want to talk about it right now! For God’s sake, Starr—give me a freaking break!”
I have never yelled at her. Ever. And when I see the stunned, hurt look in her eyes for that instant before she takes off, I die inside. I run after her, catching her before she hits the stairs.
“Let go of me!” she screams, sobbing.
“Oh, God, Starr, I’m so sorry, baby, I’m so sorry…” I sink onto the stairs and pull her awkwardly into my lap, wrapping my arms around this kid I didn’t have to give up, that I chose to have, and keep.
“You yelled at me!”
“I know, Twink.” Sh
e’s all jutting limbs and frizzy hair, her skin so soft I can barely feel it. “It’s not your fault, I was upset—”
But she’s way too upset herself to hear me, I realize. “I want L-Leo!” she says on a wail, throwing her arms around my neck and plastering herself against me. “I w-want him to come b-back! I hate that he’s d-dead and I’ll never see h-him again and I hate G-god for taking him away from m-me!”
“Oh, sweetie…” I hug her even more tightly, my shirt getting soaked in the tears she’s held in so valiantly until now. Who knows, maybe my yelling at her finally gave her permission not to feel she had to be tough for her basketcase mother. But as I sit there, my own tears running down my cheeks, I realize I feel the same way, angry at God or who/whatever for taking away my grandfather. Not his body, but my idealized notion of who he was.
For the next several minutes, we just sit there, weeping, me saying whatever mothers are supposed to say at times like this. Gibberish, mostly. Lots of apologies. Except when she tries to elicit a promise that I’ll never yell at her again, I tell her I can’t do that.
What I can do, however, is tell her as much of the truth about her grandfather and Dolly as I think she can handle. Which basically boils down to letting her know that Dolly is actually her great-grandmother, that Liv and the boys are her cousins. And I tell her (because this just occurs to me) that maybe someday Dolly can tell her stories about her grandfather from when he was a young man that might help her not miss him so much.
Because it occurs to me that I don’t know what was going on in my grandfather’s head, that it’s quite possible his choices made him miserable, too. And who the hell am I to judge him? You know, all that stuff about casting the first stone. After all, as Alan so succinctly put it, everybody fucks up.
Something I sincerely hope this little girl remembers when she eventually finds out a few things about her mother.
As she’s done since she was tiny, Starr has opted to be by herself for a while, until, she says, “I feel like me again.” So I’m alone in the living room, feeling appropriately morose and moody, when Alan calls.
Hanging by a Thread Page 32
