After we left the restaurant where we met, I told Jil that I felt I had an A branded on my forehead, for “Adulteress.”
“No,” Jil said. “A is for Adoption.”
Though Jil and Jake had spoken on the phone several times, they hadn’t met yet. Before they did, Jil asked me to visit her house. No one else was there; I loved the house—lots of bright colors, warmth, a feeling of family and of love. There were drawings and paintings by her children, Alex and Damien, everywhere, big, bold, bright colors, done by happy children.
Afterward, as I drove Jil to Alex’s school where she was to meet him, she said, “I’m really sorry I didn’t feed you,” because we hadn’t had lunch. Without thinking, I said, “I’m really sorry I gave you away.” It just came out of my mouth, without a moment’s thought. I meant it, though I knew she wouldn’t be the marvelous person she was if the adoption hadn’t happened.
Jake drove down from Maine to spend a weekend in the city. He and Jil liked each other enormously, as they had on the phone. For Jil, Jake was “decent, warm, charming, and romantic.” She didn’t see the other side; but then, for a long time I hadn’t, either.
They talked about the possibility that he was not her father. They decided that the only thing to do was have a DNA test.
The next day, after they’d had the test, but before there were results, the three of us met at a bar near Jil’s house. Jake and I got there first so we could talk for a few minutes alone; we hadn’t seen each other in decades. “If we were still married,” I thought, “we’d be Mr. and Mrs. Jack Spratt—he’s so thin! (And I’m so not.)” I teased him about the toothpaste tube—the only thing we’d ever really argued about. He didn’t like being teased.
On her way to meet us, Jil stepped on a piece of paper folded in half on the sidewalk. It stuck to her shoe. She unpeeled it, and read in a large headline: “They are your parents.” It was a flier advertising a play. She was delighted. The results of the DNA test seemed like destiny.
Jake told a lot of our stories to Jil, who seemed to love hearing them. He remembered different things than I did, which is one of the great things about remembering together; you get to see more pieces of the puzzle. But he also seemed to have forgotten many things that had stayed in my mind: the name of our hotel in Paris, or the name of the street where we changed our money: Rue du Roi de Sicile. He remembered Pierre, though, and that his place was called Pierre’s Coca Cola Bar. I wondered how Pierre had ended up. Did he make a fortune? He certainly had been a schemer—a survivor, a charmer. He had probably been arrested for something or other, and had died in jail. No! He escaped! He paid someone, bribed someone, knew someone, and escaped. He had offered to find me an abortionist! What would have happened if I had said yes? No Jil, for sure. And no me, maybe.
About a month after the day Jake had called with the message about a letter from a stranger, my husband and I had dinner with Jil and her husband, Lenny. Though I had a raging cold, and sneezed my way through dinner, I loved being there. I liked Lenny enormously. He has a great face, and beautiful eyes. He seemed kind and smart and sweet. He’s also funny—an irresistible combination. They make a good couple: He’s thin, wiry, and dark, and Jil is plump—soft and zaftig—and fair. They seem right together.
There we were, the four of us, in the middle of Queens, eating good Greek food in a restaurant with white lace curtains. “Who wrote this script?” I asked in my journal the next morning.
“I still don’t want to stop looking at her. I have to pull my eyes away, stop myself from memorizing, implanting every line in the lineaments of this face.…
“What richness! I feel so fortunate. She could have been anybody, and instead, she’s Jil.”
Less than two weeks later, Jil wrote me with the DNA test results: Jake was definitely not her father. She sounded upset and disappointed, but, she said later, not surprised.
I was surprised; in fact, I was shocked. Then I realized I would have been surprised either way. If Jake been her father, I would have been both glad and sorry, and that’s how I felt now about Quint, too; I’d rather leave all that behind me. On a very different level, because Jil is so much fonder of her father than her mother, I was afraid Quint might easily eclipse me. He’s a well-known writer now, and comes with an aura of glamour and success. I knew not all of this thinking was rational; that it was, at the very least, very self-involved. But there it was.
Jil and I e-mailed each other almost daily. For a long time, I saved our notes. I have them still, a tall pile of paper that was another kind of beginning, through the written word rather than on the phone or in person. At first, the e-mail notes were an exploration, and a reaching out and a revealing of self, part of getting to know each other in ways both trivial and profound, the first cement applied to our growing relationship. Our e-mail conversation continues, and still gives me an enormous amount of pleasure.
Through all of it—the first telephone calls, the meetings, and the e-mail notes—it wasn’t terribly long before I realized that it would never be possible near the end of my life to find the daughter I’d lost close to the beginning. The Baby is what I lost, and The Baby could never be given back to me; I could never find her, no matter how long or deeply I searched. But it was thrilling to get to know Jil, even so.
She can never take away all the pain and all the loss that I felt about The Baby. Nor can I take away her sorrow and anger. Those feelings were real; they were there. They’re considerably softer for me now because of Jil, but when I look at the photographs she gave me of herself when she was a baby, there is still, and always will be, a profound sense of loss. Though I can be joyful at her presence in my life, nothing can completely erase the memory of what was.
It must have been the same for her. Getting to know her was indeed a healing process, although it didn’t always feel that way. Often, it felt more like a gift, an enormous gift, unconnected to all that had gone before—and to the pain that had now become only a memory.
26. JIL
FATHERS
A week later, Jake came to New York. Since he wouldn’t arrive until late in the evening, we planned to meet for breakfast the next day; but when he called to say he’d arrived, and to confirm our breakfast plan, neither of us could wait. We decided to meet at the bar of a restaurant on my corner.
I hadn’t gone out at 10:00 p.m. since college. I was so excited I all but ran down the street. From the phone calls and letters, I felt I knew him already. I’d even seen pictures—he did look like Jason Robards! I loved his letters, so dramatic and intense. Even his handwriting was romantic. I’d gotten an envelope filled with photos of him and his family just a day or two earlier.
“I want to say the right thing,” he wrote, “but I have so many conversations in my head with you I sometimes get to feeling presumptuous. It is also partly that it has been so easy to talk with you on the phone—astounding, really, when you think about it—that I feel I am writing to someone I do know.”
Sometimes he sounded like a long-lost love: “What we need badly is to meet— to talk about us, and about a thousand other things.” But he also warned me: “Hyperbole is my middle name. I promise to try to curb it, at least until you know me better.”
When I walked into the restaurant, there he was: tall, lean, with wire-rimmed glasses and a dark moustache. He looked like Jason Robards crossed with Kurt Vonnegut. He had a great smile, crooked and flirtatious, and a seductive way of leaning in and locking eyes. We hugged madly, like two old, dear friends, then sat and talked and drank and smoked and laughed. It was a continuation of the long, rambling, easy conversations we’d been having on the phone, and the connection was palpable. We loved the way we made each other feel. At 1:00 a.m. they put the chairs up on the tables, and sadly, we said good-night.
He was only in New York for a few days, and I spent nearly every minute with him. After breakfast on the second day, we went for the DNA test, which was a simple swipe of the inside of our cheeks with a swab. We’d have t
o wait a few weeks for the results. But by lunch on day two, we were convinced we didn’t need any test to tell us what we were to each other: This connection had to be based on something: blood, genes. It was fate.
“It has to be, right?” I asked at least ten times a day.
“Of course,” he answered every time. “It has to be.”
We joked about it: If it turned out he wasn’t my birth father (and he would be, of course), he would adopt me. I’d been adopted before, I could be adopted again.
Or I would adopt him. We pondered the possibilities.
The next afternoon, he and Faith met at a bar in my neighborhood. I decided to give them some time alone first. Both of them said they wanted me there, to ease the tension, but I insisted on coming a half-hour into their reunion.
Walking there, nervous, feeling as awkward as the first time I met Faith, I stepped on a piece of paper that stuck to my shoe. I pulled it off just outside the entrance to the bar; it was a leaflet advertising a local play. “They’re your parents, for heaven’s sake,” it said. Fate? Clearly.
The meeting felt awkward. What a trio we made: mom and dad and adult daughter—insta-family. I could tell that Jake was nervous; he told long meandering stories that didn’t seem to be about much: children on a bus, going to school, their expectant faces like sunflowers; mothers fixing buttons, tying shoes; the loveliness of New York in winter. Faith was quiet. I was uncomfortable. I wanted to have my relationships with them, but I didn’t want to be part of their relationship. It seemed like they were disappointed with each other, and their disappointment disappointed me.
The next day at lunch at a little Mexican restaurant, Jake told me the story of his sister’s death. It was a tobogganing accident, he said, when she was sixteen and he was nineteen. Though he wasn’t there, Jake knew so many details—the moon on the snow, the friends calling to each other, the car that came around a corner too quickly—that I began to wonder how he could know all this, and remember it fifty years later. He began to get choked up, and then to cry. I watched him as he dabbed his eyes, rubbed his jaw, stared mournfully out the window, and then glanced back at me, as if checking the audience’s reaction.
This is a set piece, I thought, he’s done it before. I was engaged by his performance, but not moved by his story. I could never imagine talking this way of my own sibling’s death. I told people about my brother’s suicide, but I’d never gotten this emotional in the telling. It felt wrong to me, showy and fake.
Jake had brought some of his work. Later on, in my apartment, he laid out portraits, wedding pictures, and headshots for newspapers. He seemed both proud and hesitant: proud that he’d chosen his best work to display, and hesitant because he wanted me to like it, to approve of him. At one time he’d had big dreams. Though he was doing good work, it wasn’t the work he’d planned. Was all this—me, Faith, the history—pulling him back to a time in his life he didn’t really want to remember, a hopeful time that made the reality of the present seem disappointing?
He looked around my living room, at the pictures of my kids, our families, places we’ve traveled.
“You took all these?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “except for that one,” pointing to a smiling shot of Alex on the beach taken by a friend.
“They’re very well done,” he said appraisingly. “You’ve got a good eye.”
I was inordinately pleased. A pat on the back from my birth dad!
“Must be genetic,” he said. I agreed.
When he left for home the next day, I gave him a Valentine’s Day present for his wife, and an old book of poetry I’d had since high school.
A few days later I got a letter from him with more photos.
“As I headed north,” he wrote, “I had the constant feeling I was making a big mistake, that I was headed in the wrong direction.”
We talked on the phone and wrote long letters to each other. He didn’t have e-mail yet, and he loved writing letters. He was good at it. He thought I was, too. He wrote, “I feel positively exalted reading your letters,” and I nearly swooned. And then, he promised, no matter what the DNA test said, “I’m not going away.”
In another letter, he told me of his reaction to the first letter I’d sent him, the letter I sent to all the John Aylfords. He picked it up and looked at the return address: He didn’t know anyone named Picariello in New York. Was it from a former student? He opened it and at first he wondered if the letter was a con. Then he got to the next-to-last paragraph and began to pay attention.
“It was truly like waking up from a very complicated and confounding dream, and I said the word ‘Jessica’ out loud. Then I was instantly out of my chair, bursting with joy and gratitude and curiosity and awe and many unnameable feelings that maybe only you and Bunny could name. The last word, the only word in the whole letter in italics; I stared at it over and over in admiration.”
It seemed a million years ago that I’d written that letter. But, in reality, it was only a couple of months earlier that I sat staring at my computer, changing “know” to “know” and back again. I was a completely different person then, I thought.
He sent photos of me taken when he visited, and wrote, “These snapshots are not exactly memorable. I had to have something, though, even though it wasn’t the time or place. Sometime I hope you’ll let me do it right.”
And then: “I could make a career of writing to you. Your letters are so astounding, so rich with everything you are. ” But it was hard, he wrote, to find the time to write. “Maybe the answer at the moment is to try to write frequent short letters instead of infrequent long ones. Can you please be a little patient with me as I try to work this out?”
Was I already a burden? But how could it be? I was “astounding,” he said. “What I would like best of all is to live around the corner from you,” he wrote. “Jil, I miss you so.”
I wrote back and mentioned walking the dog early one morning and seeing all the buildings along Central Park West gleaming in the sunlight from the east. He sent me a yellowed copy of a local newspaper from 1960 called the Brooklyn Heights Press. Above the logo on the front page it said, “A Photographer’s Affair with Brooklyn Bridge—Page 9.” Inside were four faded photos of the bridge, and a quote from Jake, saying that dawn was when he loved the bridge the most, “when it looks like the city is burning up in the rising sun and the tops of skyscrapers catch the light first like flares on Wall Street.”
In the letter he wrote, “I am sending you this because of the thing you saw when you were taking your dog for a walk in the park, the flaming tops of the buildings. Even though it’s something that happens all the time, I don’t think I ever heard anybody else ever mention it like that. I felt as though I’d written the line…. I told my friend Tim about it, kind of as an example of our instantaneous attraction and ease with one another (you and me, I mean), our being on the same wavelength, our thirst for talk, as if we had known each other all our lives. I claimed you might have heard me talking through the womb, and he agreed…. We had to find each other, and we did.”
A few days later, the doctor called with the DNA results: There was no possibility that Jake was my father.
How could it be? How could we feel this way about each other and not be connected? I called Jake. He had little to say, just disbelief—but not disappointment. Disappointment would have implied that this made a difference, and we were resolute that it would not.
That night I wrote him: “What it boils down to for me is fear that our feelings will change with this change in ‘status’—fear that my feelings for you will change or (the bigger fear) that yours for me will change. This may seem strange to you, but I would like you to promise me that if your feelings do change, you will tell me, to free me from wonder and doubt. Besides whatever you are to me in my heart, you are, officially, my birth stepfather. You cannot imagine how I felt when I saw your name in the 1954 book of records. These moments are like totems, or charms. They have incredible po
wer. I say my birth name to myself over and over. It means a great deal to me.”
A few days later, Lenny and I went out to dinner with Faith and her husband, who looked like a ’50s movie star, one of those crew-cutted boy-next-door-handsome guys like Glenn Ford or Van Johnson. I was nervous; Faith was more nervous. Thank goodness for Lenny, who could meet the pope and the president (simultaneously) and not blink. Over halloumi cheese and skordalia at a little Greek restaurant in Astoria, Queens, we chatted about food and travel and books and movies. At one point, I asked the men if they saw a resemblance between Faith and me, and they both nodded vigorously.
Lenny noticed Faith staring at me; she grinned. “It gives me so much pleasure just to look at your wife,” she said. I felt bathed in warmth.
The thought of meeting Quint Phillips did not bathe me in warmth. But having come this far, I was determined to go all the way. Surprisingly, I found an address for him in the Manhattan phone directory, as well as a telephone number, though I was much too nervous to call. What would I say? Hi, Quint—er, Mr. Phillips—this is the baby that you may remember being told you might have conceived in Stuttgart in 1954.
I wrote what I hoped was a gentle letter, explaining who I was, and that thanks to the modern miracle of DNA, I was sure he was my birth father. I asked him to call me. One sunny cold afternoon, I took it to his building on the Upper East Side. It wasn’t what I expected: modern, showy, with two doormen and a concierge. It looked like a building for rich transients and wealthy foreigners, not lifelong New Yorkers. The concierge was friendly to me, an obviously nervous woman. Maybe he thought I was a recently released mental patient, or one of the people who stalks famous men, like the woman who kept moving herself into David Letterman’s house.
“Does Quint Phillips live here?” I asked. What a stupid question, I thought, there’s no way they’re allowed to say who lives in a posh building like this.
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