by Joanna Scott
It’s the fifteenth of September 2006. Dear Sally. I’m beginning a new tape. Do you recognize my voice? Do I sound the same? How long has it been since I last spoke into this machine? Too long. The trouble began with a migraine I couldn’t shake. I even ended up in the emergency room for a night back in the spring. Then a few days later I had a setback. The doctor sent me for tests. And then while I was waiting for the results from the tests, I got a call from Marcia. She’d been in a car accident. She wasn’t badly hurt, thank God, only a broken wrist, but it was her left wrist, and she’s left-handed, and she needed surgery. I flew out to LA on a Thursday and stayed with her for two weeks. I told her about you. I’d never told Donna or anyone else about you, and in the spring I told Marcia and Tracy that I have another daughter. I said that I’d been thinking about getting in touch with you, though I didn’t tell them about these tapes. They’d think I was crazy, making tapes for you. I am crazy. But they said they want to meet you. Anyway, Marcia’s doing fine now, the cast is off. My migraines, well, they weren’t migraines, it turned out. I thought they were migraines. There were some days when I was out in LA when I’d close my eyes, and I’d see, I’d see the northern lights. I’d see quivering flames of light, violent, I mean violet-tinted light. I’d see electrons colliding with air. There’s a video I show my students about auroras. I call it the northern-lights-in-a-tube video. It shows scientists making auroras in miniature, in a tube in a lab. Anyway, it wasn’t migraines making all the trouble, as it turned out. I had a tumor, a small tumor lodged right behind my optic nerve. I tell you, hearing news like that.… Well, I came through the surgery, and the tumor, the biopsy was clean, there’s no malignancy to worry about. But what a summer. Tracy and Marcia helped out, they took turns staying with me. And at one point I realized that I’d missed your birthday. I’d been hoping to finish these tapes and send them to you by your birthday. Here’s a late happy birthday, dear Sally. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. A day to make a wish, a whole year to make it come true. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the gift of this story for your birthday. I had to go on sick leave in the spring, I couldn’t finish the year. You know what I heard when I saw my students last week? They said that the substitute for my classes told them that girls don’t have an aptitude for science and math because of, because of hormones. The boys got a kick out of that, for sure. And one of the girls asked me if she could have special privileges for her learning disability — the disability of being a girl. It will take me a while to undo the damage. But, well, here I am, back on my feet, talking to you again. I’m alive. For a while there… I’ll say simply that I’m glad to be alive. Alive, alive, alive. There’s much to add to the earlier segments of this story. But, you hear that? There’s the doorbell. Wouldn’t you know.
It’s the twentieth of September. I’ve been absorbed with a friend’s troubles. It’s a terrible situation. His wife died of ovarian cancer last spring, and his son, his son has a drug problem, he’s been in and out of jail. And now my friend thinks he’s going to lose his job. He works for a nonprofit foundation, and because of cutbacks… oh, if I start telling that whole story I’ll never stop.
Where was I? Let’s see. Way back in the spring. I’d better look at my notes. I don’t have notes. I mean, I’m not following a script here, believe me. Okay, okay, I need to get back to the point where I’d left off. I’ve listened to the tapes to catch myself up. It’s true, huh, that I’m not so good with words, am I? But I’m more comfortable speaking aloud, that’s a plain fact. I like to say something as it comes to me and not think about it twice, not stop and think about how there might be a better way to say it. There’s always a better way to say it, isn’t there? I hope that doesn’t keep you from making progress on your book. I sure look forward to reading it, you know. I’m looking forward to most everything these days, after this summer. It’s good to be able to finish what I’d started. The thought occurred to me when I was in the hospital… if I couldn’t reach you, if I couldn’t tell you the truth about me… I almost picked up the phone and called you. But I thought it would be too hard to make you understand. Do you understand why I’m telling you the truth this way, the way I learned it, and not all at once? I told you why I left your mother, yeah, and went to Detroit. I told you about Donna and our divorce. I’ll tell you now about how I went back to Long Island early in 2001. At that point, I thought I knew what was what. I thought I knew that I was your grandmother’s son and had been adopted and raised by June and RB, and I’d grown up and unwit—, unwit—, unwittingly, excuse me, I’d fallen in love with your grandmother’s daughter and, ha, knocked her up. For nearly thirty years, that’s the story I thought was true. So anyway I was back in New York for a conference, and I took the train out to Roslyn and had lunch with the sister of one of my childhood buddies, Tony’s sister. Tony lives in Florida, but his sister Angela still lives in Roslyn, so we had lunch. We were talking, and I said something about my parents, and she reminded me that June and her mother had been friends, good friends. Well, we talked, I joked about the way we called them, called her family the Minestrones. Then she said she was going to visit her mom, who had Parkinson’s, she was living in a nursing home at the time, but she was still lucid, as clear as a bell, Angela said. I asked if it would be appropriate if I went along and said hello to her mother, and Angela liked the idea. So she drove us over to the nursing home, and it was nice to see her mom, I remember that theirs was always the house with a sauce simmering on the stove, and I told her that, she liked hearing that. We talked about Tony. We talked about my parents. She was real friendly with June, especially after my father died. They used to go out to dinner and a movie once a month at least, June and Mrs. Minestrone, Mrs. Minastronti, I mean, they used to go out with some other ladies. Well, I mentioned then that I’d met my birth mother a while back. Mrs. Minastronti looked at me in a strange way, with her head shaking like a bobbly doll. I could tell I’d surprised her. I asked her if she’d known that I was adopted, and she said sure. And then the nurse came in with medicine for her to take, and I had to catch a train back to New York, so I didn’t get to follow through. It seemed that there was something she’d wanted to tell me, but she didn’t have time to go into it. I went back to New York, and then I went home to Vergonia, and soon after, you know, September eleventh happened, and I gave up wondering if there was something important Mrs. Minastronti had wanted to tell me. There were other stories to hear, more important stories to hear and tell. I didn’t think it would do any good to know more about where I’d come from, to clear up my own personal history. But that’s not exactly true. It was gnawing at me. I mean, the sense that there was something hidden, something I needed to look for in the rubble of the world. And it was more than that. I’d been thinking about your mother, and I found it impossible to think of her as your grandmother’s daughter. I got used to thinking of myself as your grandmother’s son, but your mother, she couldn’t have been my sister, not the woman I remembered loving. Therefore she couldn’t have been your grandmother’s daughter. And my resistance to the truth left me with a vague doubt, a haunting doubt that there was something I didn’t know. Then in October of 2002 I got the notice from Tony and Angela that their mother had died. I was on a field trip with my students that weekend, so I missed the funeral. But in the months that followed I found myself remembering our conversation in the nursing home and I felt an awful sense that I’d missed an opportunity. She’d wanted to say something to me, to correct me. That’s what it was. She’d wanted to correct a misperception, but I hadn’t given her the chance. And then it was too late. Speaking of late, look at the time. My eighth graders are in the bacteria unit. I’d better brush up on my knowledge of the bubonic plague. That’s usually their favorite slide, the plague bacteria. I’ll sign off for now.
I learned today that my name is on a list at a foundation that funds teachers in space. There’s a group trying to buy seats for teachers on suborbital flights, and I’m on the list, so may
be someday, someday soon, I’ll be looking down at our steamy planet from space. And there’s another organization I’ve been in contact with. They have a proposal in at the NSF to fund trips to the Arctic. They want to bring middle and high school teachers to the Arctic as part of an effort to educate Americans on global warming. Speaking of, will summer never end this year? I couldn’t keep up with the watering, I let the impatiens in my window box dry up. Here we are in early October, and there’s no rain in the forecast. When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. They might as well be dead. By the way, I hope you’re a Democrat. I can’t imagine that a child of mine would be anything other than a Democrat. Really, that’s a quote from your grandmother, from a letter she wrote to me a while back. She was asking me about the election, about who I was supporting. It was Bush, the senior Bush against Dukakis, and your grandmother wrote to me, I can’t imagine that a child of mine would be anything other than a Democrat. I still have the letter. I miss her letters. I could tell I made her happy with any good news I sent along. The only wrong thing I ever let myself tell her was to admit, to admit that I’d jumped off the bridge. I wrote to her, in my first letter to the PO box address she’d given me, I wrote to her to tell her that I had nothing to live for, I told her that I’d tried to drown myself in the river. You can be sure that she didn’t like that. She wrote back to me about God and angels and miracles, she came up with some wild explanation, a bizarre concoction of a story about how angels hadn’t let me drown because I was supposed to live. I realized that she couldn’t stand hearing about my despair. I never could bring myself to write to her with any news about my troubles from then on. Once I was settled in Detroit she sent me more money, a check for fifty dollars each month. The checks kept coming, but after I started teaching I really didn’t want her money, it didn’t seem right to accept her money, so I told her to save it for you. Every time I wrote to her I assured her that all was well. Sometimes, you know, I, I’d make up the news, I’d tell her I got a raise, or my students had won awards, or the girls had done something spectacular. She never knew that I got divorced. It was important for her to think, or at least I assumed it was important for her to think that I would always be happily married. She wanted me to be happy. If I wasn’t happy, she was to blame. You can understand that when I started to feel an urge to find out things, I wasn’t about to ask your grandmother. Here’s a secret: I saw her once toward the end of her life. I snuck into town and came to visit your grandmother when she was in the hospital with pneumonia. She was sleeping. I never spoke to her, and she never knew I was there in the room with her. It was a risk to visit, for if I’d run into your mother there… what would I have said? But I stayed for just a few minutes, I gave your grandmother one last kiss on the forehead, and I left. I didn’t have any way of checking in on her, since I was her big secret, the son who wasn’t supposed to exist. Back home, I wrote to her and waited, hoping to hear that she’d recovered. Eventually my letter to her was returned. At some point she’d stopped the payments for her PO box. I had no other address for her. I started checking online for news. You know, you can find information about anyone, and eventually, well, there was her online obituary. Sally Bliss, 1930 to 2003, born Sally Werner of Tauntonville, Pennsylvania, survived by her daughter, Penelope Bliss. I was pleased to see your mother had gone back to using her maiden name, and also her granddaughter, she was survived by her granddaughter, you, Sally Bliss. Your mother couldn’t give you my name, so she gave you your grandmother’s name. Sally Werner Bliss, her namesake. Sally the second. Dear Sally. To your grandmother, you know, you were an angel, perfect just by virtue of the fact that you were normal and healthy, despite, despite, you know, your parents, your mother and father being brother and sister. I’ll tell you right out that we — no, I won’t, I’ll disclose what I came to learn by telling you how I learned it. The truth is sturdier when it comes with evidence. Just keep listening.
Hello, hello, here I am, your favorite Martian, alive, alive, alive. It’s raining finally, a glorious rain. Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather, uh-huh. I bought a box for these tapes. A box and some packing materials. It won’t be long now. Are you still listening? If you’re hearing this, then yes, you’re still listening. Good. Are you ready? But, oh fuck, there’s the doorbell.
What trouble. First it was Harry, my friend, the one with the son in jail, he came over to tell me that he’d lost his job, he’d been let go from the nonprofit. He doubts he’ll find another job. He has practically nothing saved up for retirement. I told him he can use the back bedroom of my condo. But no, he said he’s not ready to sell his house. Oh, and then Donna called. She’s upset. Her brother-in-law, her younger sister’s husband, dropped dead of a heart attack. He was only fifty-seven and had no previous heart trouble. Life is delicate and brief and we must take advantage of our time here on earth, we must live fully, generously, productively, and leave the world in a better condition than it was in when we arrived. There, that’s a father’s sentimental advice to his daughter.
I dreamed last night that I was in a race. Oh, it was one of those classic dreams, a textbook dream. I was in a race, but my legs felt like lead, I couldn’t make them move. I woke up in a sweat. And all day long I’ve felt an urgency to hurry up, to get going, to finish what I’d started. All right. Dear Sally. Sally Werner Bliss. Here’s what happened. After I learned about your grandmother’s death from the online obituary, I decided to take a weekend’s trip to Tauntonville. I wanted to find out something about my father. I wanted to meet the Werner family. I waited until the end of the school year, and then I got in the car and drove to Pennsylvania. My daughter Tracy was home for the summer, dividing her time between Donna and me. I told her, I told Tracy that I wanted to find my mother’s family, and she offered to come with me. Together, we drove from Vergonia to Tauntonville. It took us three days because we went off the route and stopped to see the sights. The Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland. Niagara Falls. We reached Tauntonville on the Fourth of July, pulled into town just when the parade was passing along the main street. We sat on the hood of the car and watched the parade. There was a fire truck, a school band, a couple of floats, 4-H girls on ponies. Let’s see, what else? A contingent of beagles, half a dozen Shriners driving miniature cars, the county beauty queen. The parade passed slowly, but it wasn’t more than a couple of blocks long. We sat on the hood of our car and watched, and I wondered if I was related to anyone in the parade, if I was looking at cousins and second cousins. I looked for redheads. I thought that maybe the beauty queen resembled your mother when she was young. I thought that the selectman who passed by, he looked like William Randolph Hearst, like pictures I’ve seen of William Randolph Hearst, and those pictures have always reminded me of RB. But that didn’t make sense, RB wasn’t related to anyone in Tauntonville as far as I knew. Okay, Tracy and I, we watched the parade, then we went to a coffee shop for lunch. And in the coffee shop, it was Tracy who took the initiative. She was into it, she was on a mission to find our family relations. She asked the waitress if she knew any Werners. The waitress said no, but she’d ask the owner. When she brought our cheeseburgers, she said that the owner didn’t know any Werners. But then when we were paying the bill, Tracy asked the woman tending the cash register if she knew the Werners, and the woman, she was about seventy or so, with a thick German accent, she said sure she knew that name, da Verners, she called them. Were we looking for da Verner family? I didn’t hear her correctly, so I said no. Tracy said yes. The woman said, Gud, gud, there was Loden Verner on County 34, and Clem Verner on Mosshill Lane. I wasn’t sure she was talking about the same family. But Tracy thought she’d given us useful information. And she was right. We followed the woman’s directions. We must have taken a wrong turn, we ended up at a dead end, at a gate for a salt mine company. It took us an hour to find Mosshill Lane, but we found it, we found the house. It was a run-down place, a two-story shingled house blotted with chipped blue paint. Well, we r
ang the doorbell, we rang it several times, and no one came, no one answered, though we heard a dog barking inside. So we decided to try the other address. It turned out to be a farmhouse surrounded by barren fields. When we drove up, a woman hanging laundry on the line looked at us and went inside without bothering to say hello. We knocked on the door. There was no bell. I started to walk back down the porch steps, but Tracy grabbed my arm because a man had appeared behind the screen door, a heavy man, bald, with a gray beard. He looked grim. It was easy to guess that he viewed us as intruders. But he was polite enough at first. He asked us if he could help us. Tracy spoke. She asked him if he were Mr. Loden Werner. She said Werner, not Verner. And he said yes. And she said, she asked, the brother of Sally Werner? The man didn’t answer. He still hadn’t opened the door. And so Tracy went on in a friendly way to explain that Sally Werner was her grandmother, and here was Sally Werner’s son, the son that had been adopted in 1949. She pressed the man in her friendly way to answer. Right? Right? she kept saying, to get him to confirm the fact of our connection. The son that Sally Werner left behind in 1947 had grown up, and here he was, and Tracy was Sally’s granddaughter, and we’d come, she said, to meet our family. But the man, Loden Werner, your grandmother’s brother, he eyed us from behind the screen, he wouldn’t open the door. And I noticed he was shaking his head slightly, like he didn’t believe us. The woman we’d seen in the yard, I thought she was his wife, she moved up beside him. I guess she’d been standing in the foyer listening and she came up beside Loden, who was still shaking his head. But he wasn’t speaking, and he wasn’t opening the door, and for a while, after Tracy had finished explaining who we were, we all stood there in silence. I remember hearing chickens in the area, the squawk, squawk of chickens. It felt like that was the only sound left in the world. Squawk, squawk. Until the woman said softly but clearly, Why, that’s impossible. You couldn’t be Sally’s son, she said. And the man, he said, That’s right, good day. And he closed the wood door over the screen. Well, that wasn’t the reception we’d expected to get. We went back to the car. We sat in the car for a while. We sat there looking at that tired farmhouse with its lopsided chimney, and I thought, This is what my mother ran away from. But then I’d just been told she wasn’t my mother. And I thought, I knew that. I’d known all along that she wasn’t my mother. Sally Werner wasn’t my mother, and she wasn’t Tracy’s grandmother. We sat there thinking about this and looking at the house. We sat there for a long while. Finally Loden Werner came out and stood on the porch, and he waved at us, he was waving at us to get out of there, to get off his property. Well, I put the car into reverse, and I pulled out of the drive and started heading down the road. We hadn’t gone more than a short ways from the driveway, when at a bend in the road we saw the woman, the same woman I’d thought was Loden’s wife. It was like she’d transported herself, zapped herself in an instant from the house to the road. She must have come running through the cornfield in order to catch up with us. We pulled up beside her. We had the air conditioner going, and the windows were closed. Tracy opened the window, and the woman, she finished what she’d been trying to tell us through the screen. She said, You couldn’t be Sally’s son. Sally’s son is dead, she said. She whispered it, as if she were afraid that Loden Werner would hear her all the way across the field. Sally’s son, she whispered, Sally’s son has been dead for fifty-four years. That’s what she told me.
