Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  “And it has my birth name on it?”

  “Yes. I don’t know if it will lead anywhere. But it’s something.”

  I thanked her and stood up.

  “If you want more information,” she said, “or if you would like to know about support groups for adoptees or search groups, please get back in touch with me.”

  I already had more information than I could comprehend, more than I ever dreamed existed. I had no intention of looking any further. This was it, done, finito.

  Before the door of the agency closed behind me I was already planning my visit to the library.

  Bunny at the window of her apartment on Second Avenue around the time Jil was born. (Courtesy of Jil Picariello)

  Jil and her mother, shortly after she was adopted.

  Jil in the backyard with her mother.

  (Courtesy of Jil Picariello)

  Jil at about twelve, visiting her Uncle Sam in the Catskills, in upstate New York.

  Jil at seventeen, with her brother at his bar mitzvah.

  (Courtesy of Jil Picariello)

  Jil leaving her parents’ house with her new husband after their wedding. (Courtesy of Jil Picariello)

  Jil’s son Damien as a baby.

  Jil’s son Alex as a baby.

  (Courtesy of Jil Picariello)

  Jil cruising the Danube with Lenny.

  (Courtesy of Jil Picariello)

  Jake with his camera, photographed by Bunny.

  Bunny, about two years old.

  Bunny and her mother, with the same rascally glint in their eyes. (Courtesy of Bunny Crumpacker)

  Bunny, fourteen, at the beach—her favorite place in the world—making castles in the sand.

  Bunny and Jake with their red 1938 Ford sedan convertible.

  Bunny and Chick at their wedding, April 1961.

  (Courtesy of Bunny Crumpacker)

  21. BUNNY

  HOPE

  Hope is the thing with feathers—

  that perches in the soul—

  and sings the tunes without the words—

  and never stops—at all—

  EMILY DICKINSON

  POEM 254

  Dear Mrs. Crumpacker: As per our conversation, a caseworker at Louise Wise Services wrote me on August 31, 1983, I have checked our records and can now assure you that your birth daughter has not contacted us requesting a reunion.

  That’s the whole note. The letterhead gave an address on East 94th Street; I remembered the agency as being on the Upper West Side, but I wasn’t sure my memory was correct. I could almost see the front door in my mind, but certainly not the street sign. And it was no longer the Louise Wise Service for Jewish Young Women but simply Louise Wise Services. No mention of religion or age, though undoubtedly the clients were all premenopausal.

  I folded the letter and kept it in its envelope.

  I think that was the first time I tried to find The Baby. I also asked that the agency’s records indicate that I wanted to be found, should The Baby ever search; but the letter from Louise Wise didn’t note my request.

  My attempts to search were hesitant; I took one tiny step after another, and there were great intervals between each one. I learned later that my slow pace is not unusual; it’s the halting gait of many birth mothers who begin searching for their children. Everything that made our babies’ births a secret is at stake.

  I wanted to find The Baby, to know that she was healthy, that she had survived unscarred; even that she might be happy, but at least that she was still in this world, and that she was well. And I wanted to let her know I was hoping she’d want to meet me. But the very possibility of finding her brought fears. I assumed that she’d want to know something about her heritage, a family medical history at the very least. Beyond that, I might have wondered what she’d be like, and whether we’d like each other. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t like her, even if I ever reached the point where I could differentiate between like and love. How could we not like each other? No, what was involved was the peril of secrecy lost, and the touching—and opening—of those dangerous emotions. It was pain, revelation, shame, and risk. It was immensely frightening.

  I went very slowly.

  I registered with several of the agencies that help birth parents and adopted children find each other. The agencies maintain directories, listing as much information as they’ve been given. In theory, those who are searching can find each other by recognizing birth information in the directory, especially birth dates and places of birth.

  I have so many tattered clippings: a small one, first, that lists “how natural parents can trace their children—and vice versa.” It notes three places to contact: Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Association (ALMA), Concerned United Birthparents (CUB), and Origins, with addresses for each. It adds only, “Enclose a stamped, self-addressed, legal-sized envelope.” The last is an e-mail, dated May 1, 1995 (twelve years after the letter from Louise Wise), from a woman I found on the Web, who wrote that most of her experience was helping adoptees find their birth parents; she was glad to hear from a birth mother who was searching for her child.

  “Making yourself easy to find is a good step,” she wrote, though a paragraph later she went on to say, “In general, the laws on records access are even more restrictive for birth parents wishing to search than for adoptees.” She didn’t know where I lived, but suggested that my state might have a registry that simplified the search process; but only if both birth parents and both adoptive parents consented to be listed (which would have meant not only finding Jake, but also the unknown adoptive parents). She also suggested CUB and ALMA, where I’d already registered.

  ALMA had sent me a welcoming letter, a registration card, and an instruction sheet with “Searching Do’s and Don’ts”—mostly for adoptees: “Don’t share your search techniques with anyone, including friends, relatives, and especially social workers/county clerks.” And “Don’t mail personal checks—always use U.S. Postal Money Orders.”

  When ALMA’s newsletter announced a Manhattan meeting to focus on how to use the New York Public Library for the first step in searching, I attended. Later, I received a letter about ALMA’s Reunion Registry: “The Registry is of particular importance to natural parents as well as to other natural relatives of adoptees because it represents one of the few opportunities available to find their children. In addition, the chances of an individual natural parent being matched are greater than the chances of an individual adoptee being matched, because there are more adoptees than natural parents searching.”

  Down at the bottom of the letter, in a different-color ink, someone had written: There is an Index of Births in the City of New York located in Room 315N, N.Y. Public Library, 5th Ave. & 42nd St., Manhattan, NYC. You can use this index to verify the date of birth. What was unsaid, but what I learned at the meeting, was that using the index meant finding the original birth certificate.

  The Genealogy Room at the New York Public Library is a small room behind the general reading room, a large and splendid space that doesn’t even hint at the tiny space behind it. The Genealogy Room is small and silent, with one person at a desk who wasn’t terribly encouraging, but was willing to show me where the registries were kept. I was the only other person in the room. The registries are huge books, kept in chronological order in bookcases. The birth certificates within each book are not filed by number, or by date, but rather by last name.

  I found the birth certificate fairly quickly. It was incredible to see that official piece of paper—so impersonal and so powerful. It felt as if I were seeing a piece of The Baby. It was proof that she had existed, that she had once been mine.

  I still have the sheet of paper on which I wrote down all the information the birth certificate held: her last name, and “female,” in the space where her first name should have been. Why didn’t it say “Jessica,” along with her birth date and place, and most important, the birth certificate’s number? With that number, it might be possible to find
her new, altered birth certificate, and thus her adopted surname. If she had married, and now used her husband’s name, I wouldn’t know what to do next.

  But along with my ALMA and CUB papers, and newspaper clippings about other agencies and searches, I also had the names of private detectives who specialized in finding people (in those pre-Google days): missing husbands and fathers, lost friends and lovers, birth mothers, adopted children.

  I had written the information from the birth certificate on the top sheet of a pad of paper. On the next sheet I listed Americans for Open Records, People Search News, and National Adoption Clearinghouse, with addresses and phone numbers for each one. At the bottom, I wrote: Original birth certificate: Court of Jurisdiction. I thought that meant I had to contact that court in order to see the amended birth certificate, which would give me her adopted name, and the names of her adoptive parents.

  On the next page, The State of New York Department of Health, Birthparent Support Network, and The New York State Adoption Information Registry, Vital Records Section. On the last page was written Louise Wise Services, with two addresses, one on East 94th Street, and another—yes!—on West 68th.

  Finally, I called Louise Wise again. I remember standing in a phone booth almost trembling as I dialed the number. I told whoever answered that I was a birth parent searching for my child, and that I wanted her file to state that I wanted to be found. Yes, I was told, we’ll note that in the file. Thank you for calling.

  Why didn’t I write down the date of that call? The name of the person I spoke to? For that matter, why didn’t I write a letter instead of calling? I have no idea. But I remember that the voice on the phone sounded neither particularly interested nor especially helpful. Or perhaps nothing that could have been said to me would have sufficed, unless it was simply my daughter’s name and address— and that was something not likely to have been given.

  22. JIL

  FINDING FAITH

  The day after my meeting with Ruth, we left for a three-week stay on Cape Cod. Our rented house was a ranch, a simple, compact L with a big garden on a cool, sunny hilltop in Truro.

  But despite the charm of the house, the garden, and the Cape itself, my head was spinning. Maybe I had never had a really clear picture of myself; maybe I had always been confused about who I was. But now I had no sense of myself at all: It was as if I’d just awakened from a coma, with a bad case of amnesia. All this new information! I felt as if I were trying to incorporate actual physical pieces of myself—a new arm or an extra foot—and there wasn’t any place to put them.

  I was obsessed with every shred of information I had learned from Ruth. Somewhere around the twentieth time I brought it up, Lenny announced that he needed to get off my hamster wheel.

  “You’re just saying the same things over and over,” he told me.

  “But it doesn’t make any sense! I just can’t believe it!” I cried.

  “You’ve said that—a lot.”

  “But it doesn’t!”

  I had a shadow life that might have been, that ran alongside my life like an alternate reality, with a different mother, another father. If there were so many possibilities, then which one was real?

  I thought about that as I sat on the beach at Head of the Meadow, staring at the cold waves. I thought about it while biking from Wellfleet to Nauset, walking the cranberry bog, eating fried oysters at Clem and Ursie’s.

  Janey came to visit, and I told her the story, sitting on the curb in front of George’s Pizza as the annual Provincetown Gay Carnival parade marched by.

  “I wonder if either of them ever had more kids? Maybe I have half-sisters and half-brothers.”

  “Um, hmm,” she said.

  “Do you think they could still be in touch with each other? I mean, they were married once—lots of married people stay in contact after they divorce.”

  “Maybe,” she said, distracted by a float of bearded Marilyn Monroes.

  “Do you think she would want to hear from me? She didn’t register at Soundex, although maybe that’s because of him. Maybe he didn’t want to register. So she couldn’t. Do you think I should register at another place?”

  “Maybe,” she said again, as ten men in evening gowns drifted by, tossing Mardi Gras beads.

  But no matter how much I talked or thought about it, the story of “the baby” refused to become the story of me.

  The two famous stone lions in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street are called Patience and Fortitude, named by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in the 1930s for the two qualities he believed New Yorkers would need to survive the Great Depression. I had walked past the lions hundreds of times, but I’d never been inside the majestic building until a warm day in early October, 1996.

  In the six weeks since we’d returned from the Cape, I’d found reason after reason not to go. I had kids to get started in a new school year. I had clients to connect with, freelance assignments to write. But most of all, what I had was ambivalence. I had ambivalence the way Midas had gold. I was terrified of finding more pieces of me floating around, pieces I would somehow have to incorporate into myself. These pieces of me felt like thick shards of glass that I would have to swallow.

  I found out later, while reading every book I could find about adoption and reunion, that very few adoptees move through the search smoothly. It was usually a matter of fits and starts, an awkward stumbling, picking up a piece of information, trying to incorporate it, slowing down, swallowing it, digesting it, waiting, moving ahead, stopping, going forward again.

  I walked to the information desk in the lobby. I was frightened of asking questions. Questions were forbidden. Answers were locked away: They were not mine to access. Trying my best to look like a disinterested journalist, I approached the desk.

  Me (nervously): Where are the birth records for the 1950s?

  Library Lady (without looking up): Third floor, room 315B.

  Saying “Thank you,” I beat a hasty retreat, before she could change her mind and call security.

  Room 315B was behind the main reading room, the grand space where writers and researchers work. Room 315B was smaller, and mustier, and the librarians behind the desk were busy, and very intimidating.

  Me (nervously, again): I’d like the birth records for 1954, please.

  Library man (brusquely): You have to fill this out.

  Oh no, I thought. This is where I reveal why I’m here and sirens go off and library security escorts me from the building.

  I looked down at the many-times-copied form. There were two lines. Information requested, it said. Then: Name.

  “Birth records, New York City, 1954,” I wrote, adding my name, and slid the paper back.

  His eyebrows rose. “All of them?”

  Was that against the rules? “Yes,” I answered, my voice going up at the end, like a question.

  He shrugged, “Okay,” and vanished. A minute later he returned, struggling with two enormous volumes in cracked blue leather. “Here you go,” he said.

  I staggered to the nearest chair, at a long wooden table with a green-glass shaded lamp, and stared at the two huge books in amazement. Birth Records, New York City, Department of Health, the covers said. A thrill ran up my spine. I had gotten away with it!

  I opened the top book and almost choked.

  The page, about two feet long and so thin it was nearly transparent, was covered, top to bottom, in tiny type. There were seven columns: last name, first name, gender, birth month, birth date, borough of birth, birth certificate number. There were at least a hundred listings per page, hundreds of pages per book. And there were two books: A–K and L–Z.

  The tiny type spun in front of my eyes. The listings were alphabetical by last name. I had assumed they would be organized by either date of birth or birth certificate number, both of which I knew. But I was looking at thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of babies born in New York City in 1954, all of them listed by
last name.

  And I didn’t know my last name.

  I was going to have to look through the birth certificate numbers on every single listing until I found the one that matched my own. I put my head in my hands and stared at the books. Then I took a deep breath and thought about it. Looking at the numbers would be dizzying and far too slow, and it would be very easy to miss the right one. Looking at only the borough of Manhattan births would not narrow it down enough, since it seemed logical that a very large chunk of the births would have been in Manhattan. Looking for November births seemed like the smartest way to approach it: It would eliminate eleven-twelfths of the births, assuming they were distributed evenly throughout the year.

  Since I’d spent my life in the back of the alphabet—my maiden name began with S, my married name with P—I decided to start with Z and work my way forward. I put my amended birth certificate next to me, so I could refer to the number, opened the back cover of book two, and began.

  First I ran my finger down the column labeled “Month.” If I hit a November birth, which was often, I slid my finger over to the “Day” column, which eliminated roughly twenty-nine out of thirty entries. But if it read “15,” I moved on to the “Borough” column—that weeded out about 80 percent more. If that read “Manhattan,” I inched over to “Gender,” which eliminated about half of those. If that said “female,” then, holding my breath, I looked at the birth certificate number.

  The first ten or twenty times I hit a November birth I got excited. Then I began to realize just how many babies had been born in New York in November 1954. By the hundredth time I found a baby girl born in Manhattan on November 15, I stopped feeling anything but the pain in my eyes from squinting at the tiny type for so long.