That’s what we did. We began, and went on from there.
24. JIL
FOUND
He answered on the first ring. Just hearing his voice, I almost fainted from excitement, nerves, and fear. In my bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed, I stood up and sat down, over and over, unable to keep still, unable to figure out what to do with myself, with my tingling nerves, my shaking hands.
“John? John Aylford?”
“Yes.” His voice was deep and rich, leathery, a smoker’s voice. “Jil?”
“Yes.”
Silence: What do you say to a father you have never met?
And then we both started talking, and it was simple, easy, and wonderful.
We talked for an hour and a half. Mostly he talked, and I listened. I wanted to know everything about him: where he grew up, who his parents were, who he loved, what he hated.
Luckily, John (“Jake,” he said. “People I like call me Jake”) loved to talk. He was a born raconteur. Even the simplest, most off-the-cuff stories had an arc, a shape, funny lines, different voices. He was an actor, a performer, charming and self-possessed.
He was a photographer, he told me, living in Maine. He was on his third wife (who was about my age), and he had two young children with her. He also had a daughter from his second marriage. He spoke movingly of her work with abused children. At one point, it seemed he was near tears.
“I’m impressed,” I said. “You sound so… sensitive.” I wasn’t used to men, especially men of his generation, being so emotional.
“I credit my wife,” he said. “Or I blame her, I’m not sure.” He laughed. “She’s helped me come to terms with a lot of things. She’s here right now, in the room with me. She wanted me to call you.”
“Wouldn’t you have, without her wanting you to?” I asked.
He hesitated. “Sure,” he finally said. “When I got your letter, my first thought was to jump in the car and drive to Manhattan and meet you in person. But I held myself back. And then I started to get nervous.”
“Why?” I asked, although I was incredibly nervous myself.
“Oh, there are so many reasons,” he said and chuckled. “There’s so much to tell you. And there are a lot of things I can’t tell you yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not yet. I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time now that we’ve found each other.”
I was curious, but I didn’t feel the need to push for more. It was already too much to handle.
He told me about how he and Faith met in college, at Antioch, but didn’t really get to know each other until they met again at a New Year’s Eve party in Manhattan. He was in the Army, stationed in New Jersey, while she was doing some sort of work-study job, also in New Jersey. They married just one month later, February 1, 1953. Soon after, he got shipped overseas to Germany as an Army photographer. Then she followed. I was conceived in Stuttgart (I was made in Europe, a German postwar product!).
“Things weren’t right from the start,” he said, his voice regretful. “We knew by the time she got pregnant that we were going to split up. It was definitely a mistake.” He paused. “I hope this isn’t too upsetting for you?” he asked gently.
“No, no,” I said quickly. I was way past “upset.”
“I told her I would stay with her until the baby was born. Until you were born,” he said. “We came back to New York and she had the baby there. And we made all the arrangements with the agency. I don’t really remember much about it. It’s a long time ago and it’s not one of the happier times in my life. I’m not proud of anything I did.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“So many things, so many wrong things,” he said, sadly. “But I want you to like me, so I’m not going to tell you now.”
“I already like you,” I said. I did; he was funny, smart, and charming. As terrified as I was when the conversation started, I felt wonderful, but completely exhausted, in that crazy depleting way you feel when you’ve worked yourself into a state of shivering excitement, and then it’s done. I was so tired I could barely speak, but I had one more important question.
“Why didn’t you and Faith give me a name?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“On my birth certificate it just says ‘Female Aylford,’” I said.
“That’s impossible. Of course we gave you a name.” He sounded angry. “We thought long and hard about it, even though we knew whoever adopted you would probably change it. We named you for my grandmother.”
“What was my name?” I asked.
“Jessica. Your name was Jessica Anne.”
My head spun: Jessica? Jessica? Jessica like my baby doll, the one I took to the agency when we adopted my brother? Jessica, like my Barbie; Jessica, the name I picked for a daughter if I had one; Jessica, my favorite name since I could remember?
“What a nice name,” I said, nearly breathless. “I’ve always liked that name.”
“Me, too,” Jake said. “You see, we have the same taste.”
After we hung up I lay down on the bed and watched the ceiling go around. I closed my eyes and almost drifted off to sleep. But my mind wouldn’t rest. Jake told me Faith wanted to speak to me (he had gotten her number from a recent Antioch directory and called her as soon as he received my letter). But I told him I couldn’t call her then: I was too drained. He said he would let her know I’d call in the morning. We said good-bye, and then I got up and went to help my children with their homework.
The next morning I felt shell-shocked, like someone who’s drunk too much and slept too little. I got the kids off to school and retreated again to the bedroom to make another terrifying, strange, surreal phone call. Like Jake, she answered on the first ring.
Her voice was soft and deep, musical, warm. The first thing she said to me, after “Hello,” was: “I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”
“For what?”
“For giving you away.” She sounded as if she might cry.
“I don’t feel there’s anything to forgive.” And I didn’t. Being adopted was my life; it was part of me. She might as well apologize for my not being born winged, or French.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” I said. “I’m not unhappy. I don’t think about having a different life. It seems inconceivable.”
We talked for an hour. She lived in Rockland County, just across the river from where I grew up. I thought of all the times we’d driven across the long, elegant Tappan Zee Bridge when I was a kid, going to visit my aunt and uncle in Rockland County. I could have passed her house, seen her walking on the street—my other mother, my shadow life.
She told me about her husband, a musician and recording industry consultant. She told me about her work: She was a writer and editor, working on her first solo book. A writer! A writer!!
She told me about her kids, her daughter (I have a sister!), who lived in Manhattan and was a poet, and her son (I have a brother!), who was living at home and going to school. She had never told her children about the baby she gave away long ago.
“I couldn’t tell them. I was so scared they’d be afraid I would give them away— that if I’d done it once, I could do it again.” She paused. “And I was so ashamed of what I had done. I didn’t want anyone to know about it.”
“Do they know now?” I asked.
“Well, a strange thing happened—an incredible coincidence. In her junior year of college, my daughter became friends with a girl in her creative writing class. My daughter knew I’d been married before, and she knew his name. She figured out that this girl’s father was my first husband, Jake. Her friend knew her father had been married before, and she also knew the story of the baby that he’d given up. She told my daughter about it. That’s how she found out.”
“Was she upset?”
“Yes, though she didn’t tell me about it right away. I suppose she was angry that I’d kept it secret from her. She didn’t understand.
So she kept her knowledge secret from me. She didn’t tell me she knew for two years.” Faith sounded sad. “She still doesn’t understand why I never told her.”
“What about your son?”
“I told him last night,” she said, her voice growing lighter. “He was angry at first, and a little suspicious, too. How could I be sure you are who you say you are, that sort of thing. But after we talked, he understood. He’s very happy for me.”
She told me she’d signed up with several registries, but didn’t want to go any further, not really feeling she had a right to intrude on my life. She made herself available in case I was searching.
“When Jake called yesterday,” she said, “it felt like a door had opened in my life. I felt like I was at peace for the first time in a really long time.”
She told me more about her life, her interests, and her family. But she also asked me lots of questions. She asked me what I was like as a baby, what kind of childhood I had, what my husband was like, and if I was happy. She asked me what I looked like.
I told her my height, coloring, and added, “And I’m overweight.”
“Oh, I’m not overweight,” she said. “I’m fat.” And I loved that, I loved that.
Talking to her was just as easy as it had been with Jake, but different. It felt more like a real connection was being made. I wasn’t listening and appreciating; I was sharing. She felt like an old friend rediscovered, and when I finally had to get off the phone to go to work, I was almost reluctant, although I needed some peace, and some time to make sense of everything.
She asked when we could meet. “I want to get in the car and drive into the city right now,” she said, echoing Jake, but when I hesitated she added, “But I understand if you need to go slower.”
“I do,” I said. “It’s a lot to take in.”
I must have sounded nervous, because she quickly added: “You set the pace. I won’t even call you. You call me.”
“Thank you,” I said.
But she called the next day. “I know I said I would wait for you to call, but I just wanted to tell you one thing,” she said.
“Okay.”
“For the last forty-two years there hasn’t been one day that I have not thought of you. Not one.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you,” was all I could think of.
I certainly hadn’t thought of her every single day—how could I, when I never believed she existed? But I was real to her, because she carried me inside her for nine months. She saw me, held me, and fed me. I was real to her in a way she had never been to me. She has other children, which is normal. A mother can have more than one daughter. But a daughter can only have one mother. And I already have mine. Faith said there has always been something missing from her life. Maybe there has always been something missing from mine. But she knew what was missing, because she saw and touched it. I never knew what was missing. I never saw it at all.
Two days later I wrote her a letter and sent her some pictures of myself and my sons. In our third phone call, I explained that I wasn’t going to tell Damien and Alex about finding her.
“I can’t tell my boys because I’m not going to tell my parents,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“I think it would be too upsetting.”
In fact, I thought it might be devastating to my mother. It’s not like we had a warm, close relationship, the kind of bond that meant I could tell them and they’d be happy for me. Our relationship was strained, and I feared this would only make it worse. And I felt sorry for them: My mother had never recovered from the loss of my brother. After he died, she removed every photo of him from the house, closed the door of his room and never cleaned it out. Even all these years later, she never spoke about him. I worried that this new revelation would make her fear that she was losing another child.
If I wasn’t going to tell my parents, I couldn’t tell my children. They were very close to their grandparents, and I couldn’t ask them to keep a secret from them. So I only talked about it to Lenny, Janey, and a couple of other close friends. I talked about it obsessively, over and over, in long phone calls and letters and e-mails. I was crazy about it, itching and agitated and exhilarated all at once, a lunatic. I hadn’t felt like this since I was much younger. It was like the crazed intensity of college, of falling in love, of drunken dancing, full of newness and excitement.
I told Faith I was sorry I was keeping her a secret.
“I understand,” she said. “But I was going to be such a wonderful grandmother.”
She told me she thought I was being very generous, not hurting my parents. I didn’t feel generous; I felt confused and uncomfortable keeping secrets from my children. But I didn’t know what else to do.
Though I was trying to take it slow, in the next week Faith and I spoke on the phone nearly every day. She wanted to meet, but I wasn’t ready. I was on emotional overdrive, swinging wildly from one mood to another. Slow down, I kept saying to myself, take breaths, and stop spinning.
In between phone calls and e-mails to Faith, I spoke to Jake. He was planning a trip to New York to meet me, sometime in the next few weeks.
One night on the phone, Janey asked me if I could go back to when I mailed those letters (three weeks ago! impossible to believe! ), would I stop myself from doing it. I almost said yes. It was all so very scary and unknown, so turbulent. But how can you deny yourself knowledge about yourself ? How can you not take the risk?
I read an article in Newsweek written by an adoptive mother whose grown daughter had found her birth mother after a long search. The author and her husband had supported their daughter in her quest, but when their daughter found the woman she called her “other mother,” the adoptive mother was caught off guard by the intensity of her emotions. She was jealous, hostile, and felt terribly threatened. Eventually, they worked it out, although she still had pangs of jealousy. Her point: Think long and hard before you act. Make sure you analyze where this might lead and what you might feel about it, because otherwise your emotions may shock and swamp you.
But I could have thought until my head fell off my shoulders, and I would not have been able to conceive of the feelings I was experiencing: joy, fear, anger, sorrow, excitement, terror, happiness, and confusion, coursing through me, knocking me sideways. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, and could barely stand still. I looked in the mirror ten times a day and asked, “Who are you? Who are you?”
It was time to meet. We chose Sarabeth’s, a restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue near my house. A gemütlich café with yummy pumpkin muffins and a country-cheery charm, it seemed like a safe spot for a very dangerous enterprise. I wasn’t ready, but I didn’t think I ever would be. I had come this far, almost by accident. I had to see it through.
On a cold January day, only a week or so after that first phone call, I walked down Amsterdam Avenue to meet my mother. I was having some trouble with my legs. On 91st Street and 88th Street and 84th Street I had to stop and lean on a building or a mailbox so I wouldn’t fall down. My heart was racing, and I seemed to be having difficulty breathing. A ten-minute walk took me nearly half an hour. I was terrified.
I wanted to get there early, so I could arrange myself and be sitting calmly when she arrived, but all the stopping to catch my breath and recalibrate my legs had eaten up a lot of time. I swung the door open and walked into the restaurant. There were only a few people there, and none of them were women sitting alone, looking expectant.
A waitress approached. “Are you meeting someone—an older woman?”
“Yes,” I said hesitantly, wondering if she’d left, almost relieved. Maybe I could just go home and be normal.
“She’s in the ladies’ room downstairs,” the waitress said. “But that’s your table.” She pointed me toward a little round table against the wall.
I took off my coat and hat and squeezed myself into a corner seat, trying to slow my breathing. I looked around the room nervously. I saw a hand on the ba
nister of the stairs. A hand, then an arm, then a small, round woman who looked nothing like Maude. She was wearing a dark skirt and a tan sweater, and her hair was white and soft. No vests or long tunics, no big chunky statement necklace—nothing Bea Arthur about her at all.
Was this her? Could it be? She was walking toward me. I stood up. What do we do now, I thought frantically: Are we supposed to hug? Cry? How could I not have thought about this, made a plan? She looked not one bit like my fantasy image. She was small, soft, and gentle-looking. She walked up to me and put out her hand, a small, plump hand, with short fingers, and dimpled knuckles.
That’s my hand, I thought, my little chunky child’s hand; my tiny fingers, my hand. I took it in my own, our two small round hands together.
“Jil,” she said. “I’m Faith.”
And she was.
She brought pictures, thank goodness, a whole pile of them, which gave us something to do: her son as a little boy, with curly hair, looking remarkably like my son, Alex; her daughter, dark-haired, against a wall of books. My sister!
There were pictures of her younger self: in a sculptor’s studio, looking at the bust of a head—her head, she said; a lovely portrait, taken by Jake, of her leaning on a windowsill, light from outside buttering her face. But the strangest picture was of her pregnant with me. Although it didn’t show in the photo, she said that here, curled up in a big chair in her living room, smiling, she was a few months’ pregnant. This was inconceivable.
She said, “When I was pregnant with you…” and it was the strangest thing I’d ever heard.
I showed her photos of myself as a child, a teen, in my twenties and thirties, and then photos of my children and my husband. I avoided photos of my parents, it was just too strange.
We talked; it was easy. Although my chest felt tight and my hands shook, I had no trouble speaking. There was so much she wanted to know, and she was a very good listener. She stared at me hard, but it was a tender stare, like she was soaking me up. She held her head to the side slightly, her pointy chin (my pointy chin!) upturned. She listened hard and asked good questions. It felt nice to have someone care so much about what I said—like being stroked.
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