Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  I didn’t recognize my son in the same way, but I adored him, too. When we came home from the hospital, his sister refused to acknowledge us.

  The first time I felt that fear, the terror of loss, had to do with a babysitter. I had to leave for an afternoon to do some freelance work. Though I trusted the babysitter, I didn’t want her to leave our apartment, even to go to the playground. The playground was nearby, and it was a beautiful spot, near the harbor and with a view of downtown Manhattan, She knew that both children would be happy to be there. But I was afraid: Leaving the children inside the apartment was one thing. Knowing that they’d be gone was another, and I couldn’t deal with it.

  Worse, from the babysitter’s point of view, was that I couldn’t explain my reluctance to let the children out of the apartment. I could leave them—but the idea of them leaving me (and being taken from the apartment) was impossible. I barely recognized the fear; it was simply there. Clearly hurt and puzzled, the babysitter did as I asked; they stayed inside until I got home. But she never agreed to work for me again. She thought I didn’t trust her. It was life I didn’t trust.

  That didn’t change after we left the city and moved to a small town in the Hudson Valley, to a house with a lot of grass, on a very quiet street. The children grew older, but my fears remained the same. A friend’s parent wanted to take his son and mine to Coney Island for the son’s birthday—impossible.

  Why not? my son begged.

  It’s not a good idea, I said, explaining nothing. It happened over and over— with variations. I didn’t approve of this, and said no to that.

  On another level, I made deals with fate. If I don’t do this—whatever it was— they’d be safe. And they always were. The deals worked. But I never articulated my fears to my children, or to anyone else. I moderated them as they got older, but I was still haunted by unspoken—and worse, unknown—fear.

  This was one kind of betrayal: not a sweet and helpless one, like leaving my daughter so that my son could be born. This was insidious, because I never allowed it to surface—at least not deliberately—and I chose not to investigate or understand it. In my mind, that would be harmful to these two children I loved so much.

  There were other betrayals—there always are. Every mother betrays her children, as all children betray their mothers.

  I only betrayed The Baby once, when I gave her away. I betrayed my other children more times than I can bear to think of. I wasn’t the perfect mother I thought I was. I did a lot of things I regret, and there are things I didn’t do that I regret. But for the woman I still thought of as The Baby, the betrayal was primal: I gave her away.

  I didn’t hold her hand on the way to nursery school. I didn’t take her temperature when she was sick. I didn’t play the piano while she sang, or write down her words when she told me a story. I didn’t comfort her after a bad day at school, and I didn’t watch her while she learned to swim. I wasn’t there for the good times. I wasn’t there for the bad times. I wasn’t there, period. Yes, somebody else was; but I wasn’t. I was exactly what my label says: I carried her for nine months, and then went into labor: I was her birth mother.

  I was much less of a mother than the woman who adopted her, who was there for all those things, who picked her clothes up off the floor, and taught her to say “Please” and “Thank you” and who sang lullabies at night. I hoped she sang lullabies.

  But if love counts—and it must, at least a little—then I am also her mother, because I loved her. I loved her for four days, and for forty-two years, and forever.

  20. JIL

  MEETING RUTH

  Louise Wise Services looked as if it had seen better days. The building, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, had most likely been a private home, a mansion built for a Carnegie or a Vanderbilt. But the white stone façade had faded to gray, and the marble steps bowed in the middle where thousands of pregnant women and hopeful couples had walked nervously into their futures.

  I was nervous myself as I climbed the well-worn steps. I felt as if I were walking into darkness, maybe trouble, and I half-hoped Ruth Hubbartt would tell me my records had been lost in a fire or washed away in a flood.

  She met me in the reception room and walked me up a flight of carpeted stairs to her office. Dark-haired and fiftyish, she had a professionally pleasant, sympathetic manner.

  Her small, narrow office was packed with floor-to-ceiling file cabinets. A long window at one end spilled August sunlight onto a desk piled with papers and folders. Did each folder represent one adult adoptee, I wondered? I wondered, too, if Ms. Hubbartt spent every day meeting with the people those folders represented. Because of legalized abortion and better contraception, there were no more adoptable Jewish babies for Louise Wise to manage. Maybe all that was left for them to do was answer questions about what they had done in the past, moving forward by looking back.

  Nervously I sat down in an old wooden chair next to her cluttered desk. She pulled a thick folder from the pile and put it on her lap.

  “I have regards for you from someone,” she said.

  Who could we possibly have in common?

  “Mrs. Tanner,” she said.

  Mrs. Tanner? I was shocked. The caseworker who had handled my and my brother’s adoptions seemed like an old woman way back in the sixties. I tried to think of a polite way to say, “How could she possibly be alive?”

  Ms. Hubbartt smiled. “She finally retired last year. She’s in her seventies now. But she remembers you and your brother. I still talk to her often. She wanted me to be sure to send you her regards, and find out how you and your brother are doing.”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. It hadn’t occurred to me that she wouldn’t know about Kenny’s death.

  “My brother died in 1981,” I said, and her smile vanished. I wanted to forestall further questions. “He killed himself.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said gently. “That explains something.”

  She opened the folder. “There are calls from your mother throughout the years,” she ran a finger down a sheet of paper, “letting us know how you and Kenny were doing. Let’s see: 1972, your brother’s Bar Mitzvah, your high school graduation; 1974, your marriage, 1976, your college graduation. It looks like the last call was in—” she flipped a page, “1977, your brother’s graduation from high school.”

  “My mother called you?” She kept in touch with Louise Wise? It was like finding out that my mother had had an affair. I felt as if I’d been secretly shadowed, reported on, by spies.

  Ruth looked through the folder more carefully. “Yes,” she said. “It looks like she called fairly regularly, sometimes with questions, sometimes to tell us something. When you were a teenager, I guess you two were having some problems. She called to ask advice.”

  My mother didn’t ask advice; she gave orders. She never shared family problems with anyone—even her closest friends. She’d called the agency and asked for help? How exalted, how wondrous and wise they must have seemed to her at Louise Wise.

  Ruth continued to flip through the pages. “A lot of adoptive parents keep us informed about the babies’ lives. But she never called to tell us that your brother had died.” She looked up at me. “Had he been ill?”

  “For about a year,” I said. “One doctor diagnosed him as schizophrenic. He said it was often hereditary.”

  Ruth nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

  Then she got down to business. She took some stapled sheets from the folder and put them in front of her on the desk. “Let me give you some information about your adoption,” she said.

  I took a deep breath. This felt really frightening, like opening the door to a dark, forbidden room. But Ruth’s voice was completely calm, as if she were giving me driving directions.

  “Your birth parents met in college,” she half-read, half-talked. “They got married after only knowing each other for a month—that was in February 1953. Your birth father left for Army duty a little while after they married, and soo
n after that they realized the marriage wasn’t going to last. Right about the time they decided to divorce, your birth mother found out she was pregnant. So they agreed to put the baby up for adoption.”

  So far, this was pretty much the story I knew. But finding out it was real was, to my surprise, shocking, like finding out that a recurring dream you’d had all your life wasn’t a dream at all, but reality.

  “It looks like they came in for some counseling throughout the pregnancy,” Ruth went on. “Your birth mother was depressed and confused, unsure about what to do. There isn’t much here about your birth father.” She handed me several sheets of paper. They were forms, the official documents of nonidentifying information. The first two pages were about the birth mother. “Age: 21,” it read. “Race: Caucasian. Religion: Jewish. Marital status: Married (discussing separation). Occupation: Part-time typist. Interests: Piano, guitar, reading. Education: Two years college.” The physical description said only, “Brown hair, hazel eyes.” And then it added, “Intelligent, confused, unhappy, and depressed.”

  I stared at the paper in shock. She was real. I realized that I was sweating. My head felt light. She was real?

  Ruth filled in a few more details: My birth mother was from a Russian-Jewish family. (“Like us,” my mother had said all those years ago. She was like us.) Her father, a pharmacist, had died of a brain tumor four years before my birth. Her mother (“dark hair, blue eyes, olive complexion,” the sheet said) was a housewife. She had an older sister, with “brown hair, hazel eyes.”

  Page three was about the birth father. He also had two years of college. An “unemployed photographer,” his interests were writing and acting. Writing and acting? Those were my interests. His description: “Six feet, dark hair, dark eyes, intelligent.” His mother, a college graduate, was a chemist; his father, described as “tall and dark,” was an advertising executive. His parents had divorced when he was ten, and both had several subsequent marriages. His older sister died in a tobogganing accident at the age of sixteen.

  “What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a line that said the birth father’s mother was half-Jewish, his father was Protestant, and he had been raised Protestant. “I thought you only took Jewish babies?”

  “Babies born of Jewish mothers are Jewish,” Ruth said.

  I knew that, of course: But how could I only be a little more than half Jewish?

  I couldn’t make these pieces come together. I quickly turned the page, headed “Adoptee.” The baby: weight at birth, date of admission to the agency, weight at admission, even the time, developmental milestones, date of placement.

  “What’s date of placement?” I asked, pointing to the line.

  “The date you were placed in foster care,” she said.

  “Foster care?”

  “From the agency you were placed into foster care until the time you were handed over to your parents.”

  “When did that happen?” I asked.

  Ruth ran her finger down the page. “April 6, 1955.”

  I calculated. I was five months old before I went to live with my parents? What about my story about the rows and rows of little bassinettes? “We’ll take that one,” they say. “This is our chosen baby.” I am lifted out and placed into their arms. Ruth’s papers told another story.

  My reality was not real, Ruth’s papers were telling me. The past I believed was mine was not. A piece of my puzzle had been taken away, and now a new piece needed to be forced into place.

  Ruth continued. “The pregnancy was full term and normal, labor was fourteen hours and eighteen minutes, forceps delivery. The baby was placed with a foster mother in Queens until placement was decided. Apparently she was a little overzealous. It says she fed the baby too often. The agency’s doctor had to instruct her not to feed the baby so much.” Ruth pointed to the agency checkup report for March of 1955, when the baby was four months old. “Relaxed baby,” it read: “Responsive, bright-normal range.”

  Ruth said the baby was healthy. The baby had regular checkups. The baby, the papers told her, was alert and attentive.

  The baby was me.

  None of this made sense. How could these papers know things about me I had no knowledge of ? It was like finding out I had done amazing, incredible things while sleepwalking or hypnotized.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m having trouble believing you’re talking about me,” I said, sounding crazy even to my own ears.

  Ruth chuckled. “Everyone says that,” she said. “It’s hard to put this information into any context.”

  Hard—how about impossible, insane, inconceivable?

  I couldn’t even decide which piece was the most improbable. My birth father wasn’t Jewish? But being Jewish was part of my identity: How could it not be part of my DNA? It was like finding out I was half-black, or Asian. I was shocked, and shocked again at how shocked I was.

  I was in foster care for the first five months of my life? Suddenly I remembered an odd comment my father made when Damien was just a few weeks old, and I put his first grandchild into his nervous arms. “I’ve never held a baby this small,” he said. “You weren’t this little when we got you.” He’s confused, I thought. Maybe he’d forgotten how small I once was, or maybe I never seemed small to him. Now I knew what he meant.

  I looked at my birth parents’ interests, listed on the form: reading, writing, acting, photography, theater, music. Though I grew up in a home without books, as far back as I could remember, I read and wrote constantly. My parents rarely listened to music, never went to the theater, and hardly ever even watched a movie. But from early childhood I adored movies, especially musicals. I took acting classes all through high school, and auditioned for acting school in college with a hilariously inappropriate monologue from The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. I didn’t get in, but later, in film school, I loved acting in other people’s films.

  As a teenager I went to every Broadway show I could. I kept a journal of poetry I wrote, and one of poetry I loved: Millay and Dickinson and Eliot. I memorized entire scenes from Shakespeare, and longed to play Juliet and Beatrice and Shylock, who had the best lines.

  I thought I had cooked myself up from scratch, invented myself from thin air and wishes. Listening to Ruth in her overheated office, I started to wonder if that were true. It made complete sense, yet no sense at all. It made me sad. Sad because of what I had missed; and sad because I didn’t even know the story of my life. The pieces fit and yet couldn’t possibly go together. I was Jewish but I wasn’t. I had made my own way to books and music, but really they had been there before me, pointing the way, these people I didn’t know, didn’t understand, didn’t even really believe existed. I’d always felt I didn’t fit in—and believed it was my fault. But maybe I wasn’t meant to fit in.

  Then Ruth handed me another new puzzle piece.

  “Did you parents ever tell you your birth name?”

  I stared at her.

  “The name on your original birth certificate?”

  I realized I had to be called something during those first five months in foster care. I knew I was born with another last name—my birth father’s last name, I assumed. But in my story of the babies in long rows of white bassinettes, I didn’t have a first name until my parents stopped and picked me up. “This is our chosen baby,” they said in the movie in my mind. “This is Jil.”

  But a secret identity I wasn’t even aware of ? It was as if Superman didn’t know Clark Kent existed. Is this what people with multiple personalities feel like?

  “They never told me,” I said. “What was the baby’s name?” I asked. “My name,” I quickly corrected. The pronoun was nearly impossible to choke out.

  “I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that. But you’d be surprised how often an adult adoptee’s favorite name is her birth name. Often it’s the name she gives her own children.”

  “My favorite name as a child was Jessica,” I said.

  She didn’
t respond.

  “But I also like Christina, and Emily. And biblical names like Rachel and Rebecca.”

  “I can’t tell you what it was,” she said, ending the guessing game.

  I was disappointed. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Where they lived or where they grew up?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t say—just that it was in the New York area.”

  I must have looked downcast.

  “Well, I can tell you one more thing,” Ruth said. “I’m not supposed to, but… In New York State a person’s birth certificate number doesn’t change, even after an adoption. The number on your amended birth certificate—the one that was issued when your adoption was finalized in—” she looked down at her papers.

  “1956,” I said. I had a hazy memory of a huge, wood-paneled room and a scary but friendly man behind a big high desk.

  “Yes, 1956,” she confirmed. “The number of the amended certificate you got that day is the same number as on your original birth certificate.”

  She looked at me expectantly as I struggled to put two and two together. Much as I’d never thought I had a name before I was adopted, it never occurred to me that I had another birth certificate. I know that every baby gets one at birth, and I knew my amended birth certificate was dated two years after I was born. But I’d never questioned what record existed of my birth for the first two years of my life. I wondered if all adoptees just accepted what they were given without asking questions; or was I unusually lacking in curiosity? I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I didn’t think to ask.

  Ruth was still waiting for me to get to where she was leading me.

  “So the original…?” I finally asked.

  “Is in the birth records at the public library,” she said.