The Mistress's Daughter

by A M Homes

  “Will I see you again?” she calls after me.

  I pretend I don’t hear. I don’t turn around. I walk out of the restaurant and cross to the other side of the hotel; I don’t breathe until I am safe on the other side.

  My friend is in the Oak Bar. Several minutes pass before I am able to say anything.

  “Well, what was she like?”

  “I have no idea.” In retrospect, I think I was in shock.

  “All you all right?” the friend asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me,” she says.

  Someone else, another mind, might extrapolate from her demeanor, her gestures. All I can say is, “Dusty Springfield.”

  “What would you have liked from her?” the friend asks.

  “Literally? I would have liked it if she’d looked at me and asked, Is there anything you need, anything I can do for you, anything you want to tell me?”

  “Did you make a plan to see her again?”

  “No.” I will never see her again. Somehow I know that.

  On Valentine’s Day the phone rings. “You can just go to the roof of your building and jump off.”

  “Ellen?”

  “I’m angry with you, can you tell?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t send me a Valentine,” she says.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to,” I say. “I didn’t send anyone a Valentine.”

  “Well, all you had to do was go to the store and pick one out.”

  “I’m not really sure why you’re so angry with me.”

  “You don’t take good care of me. You should adopt me and take good care of me,” she says.

  “I can’t adopt you,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  I don’t know how to respond. “You’re scaring me,” is all I can manage.

  “Are you still there?” She asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you hold on while I get a drink of water?” Water. Her accent, her pronunciation long, a Maryland twang infused with the flavor of the Jersey Shore. Hold on while I get a drink of water. Was it water or was it Harveys Bristol Cream?

  April 27, 1994, the mother’s birthday. Against the advice of friends who say that following the Valentine’s Day massacre I should do nothing to encourage her, I should keep my distance, I should be careful about sending mixed messages or any message at all, I feel I must do something. I want her to know that I care and am struggling with all of this, and that for the moment this is the best I can do. Not knowing the name of any florists in Atlantic City, I call FTD and try to send the very best.

  “What is your name?” the woman asks. “Your name, address, and phone number?”

  I give the FTD operator my name, my address, my phone, and realize that I am sweating profusely. I feel as though I am being interrogated. How many years went by when I didn’t know Ellen’s name, her address, her phone number?

  “Yellow, pink, or red?” I am hating the operator.

  “Red.”

  “We can deliver this tomorrow.”

  “No, it’s for next week. I want it delivered on the twenty-seventh.”

  I’m ordering ahead, I want to be prepared, I don’t want to miss the date.

  “Deliver on the twenty-seventh,” the operator says. “And the card?”

  “The card?” Just asking me about the card makes me livid.

  The card. “‘Happy Birthday, Ellen’—signed ‘A.M.’” I can’t bring myself to say “Love.”

  “Just ‘A.M.’?” the order person asks. “Not, ‘Love, A.M.’?”

  “No.”

  “How about ‘Fondly’ or ‘Sincerely’?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say, “you’re good at this. ‘Fondly.’ That would be great.”

  “Sincerely” sounds like a business letter. “Fondly” sounds slightly authoritarian, slightly condescending, like someone trying to be warm. Later someone tells me I could have said “Warmly,” but that too is flawed, like you’re intentionally holding back.

  “Well,” the operator says, “it’s for a friend, right?”

  And I think about it. I think about the difference in ordering flowers for a parent—“Happy Birthday, Mom.” That’s clean and clear, no confusion there. I think about ordering flowers for a loved one in glee, in passion, in slight regret.

  “‘Fondly’ it is,” the operator says. “Hold for your total.”

  It is more than I want to spend on a variety of levels. I hang up exhausted.

  Over the summer, I am invited to meet Norman’s wife—like a date with the queen, only she is also the archetypical stepmother. Norman makes the arrangements. I will meet them at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington—yet another hotel, this time one of the oldest, most historic, known as “Washington’s second-best address.”

  I arrive early, again auditioning, always auditioning, for a role that is never clear. The hotel is crawling with Secret Service—men in blue suits and red ties talking into their lapels. The external tension, the twittery buzz, humming headsets and walkie-talkies adds a surreal edge—a peculiar psychological reality—to the situation. A bomb-sniffing dog is led past me and into the ladies’ room. Maybe she really is the queen?

  Norman is in the lobby, arms open, welcoming me as if this were his own home. He tells me he’s sorry but his wife will be late—there was a problem with the daughter, something vaguely medical and disturbing. We exchange small talk about traffic and parking. She arrives, he goes to her, like her footman, her servant, her guilty suitor, an alley cat dragging in his bastard surprise. She is not what you would expect a queen to be—she is dowdy and dour, a short, middle-aged woman—and from the moment we say hello, it’s clear that this is just a formality, that she is not interested in anything about me. She has already made up her mind.

  Norman leads us not into the restaurant but into the pub that is part of the bar. We sit at a small round table, too small for a table of strangers. Norman is between us. The waitress comes. His wife orders half a sandwich and it is clear that this will be brief, this is all that any of us are getting. We each order half a sandwich and Norman has a drink.

  “You seem like an awfully nice person,” she says.

  I nod. I am nothing if not totally polite and respectful despite what I might be feeling—which is in part fear, the need for her approval, her welcome, some stamp of acknowledgment.

  “Norman would like to take you around and introduce you to people, but you know he can’t,” she says.

  Because it will embarrass you, I am thinking—because you will have to admit what happened.

  Norman is sitting between us—I am more of him than she. He says nothing.

  Later he tells me, “You and my wife didn’t hit it off,” as though it is my responsibility.

  Meanwhile I get letters from Norman’s eldest son, his namesake—someone I describe as Mr. Christian Adoption. He has two children from Korea and prides himself on being a good guy, doing the right thing, telling me stories about what a great guy his (our) father is, asking if I want to see pictures of the others—playing the rebel offering to slip me contraband.

  This is the boy who used to go out with Norman and Ellen. He is the one witness to it all. He was ten when everything fell apart. He thinks we have something in common—the fact that we share our father’s secret—the one contradiction being that I don’t share the secret, I am the secret.

  Norman arranges for the three of us to have lunch at the country club near my parents’ house—a club I have never been inside because my adoptive parents are so politically opposed to country clubs that the “CCC” on the flag flying outside might as well read “KKK.” No blacks, no Jews, no one “other” is welcome here.

  This is the world Norman lives in—faded but presumed aristocracy. The fact is, Norman is not upper class, he is overextended. (Oddly both Norman and Ellen are obsessed with class and glamour—and talk about themselves in relation to, and as though they have something in common
with, figures of the 1960s like Frank Sinatra and Jackie O.)

  Norman Jr., the number one son, looks nothing like his (our) father. His hair is dark, coarse, and his complexion swarthy by comparison. We drink iced tea, eat salads of iceburg lettuce and waxy tomatoes, and talk about “my people.” At a certain point, I feel like a white female Martin Luther King Jr. I want to join hands and sing, “We Shall Overcome.”

  By that fall of 1994, the second autumn since we met, Norman still hasn’t told his other children about me.

  He calls. “It’s Norman. I thought I’d call ya and tell ya that I have some news. I think we’ve sold our house and I think we’re going to be moving to Florida. But I want to talk to you when you have a chance. Uh, it’ll be in the next week—so will you give me a call? Thank you, doll. Bye-bye.”

  At least when he’s in Washington I know where he is. I return the call. Someone else answers, a boy, a man—maybe my brother or a nephew. “Can I help you?” he asks.

  “I’ll call back.”

  In 1994, I write to Norman to tell him how disappointed I am that he has not done what he promised. My life has been painful enough—I have worked too hard to get where I am in the world to now be kept a secret, to be something that anyone is embarrassed about.

  Norman never mentions the letter to me. I hear about it in a letter from Norman Jr.: “Whoops, I almost forgot to answer your question about your letter….” He tells me that my letter was opened by mistake by Norman Sr.’s youngest son, prompting a family crisis. Norman Jr. goes on to say that it was fortunate the letter was opened, that he too was tired of the secrecy and what I said to our father was typical of what an adopted child would say to a biological father under these circumstances: “I would have written the same letter, only sooner.”

  We all drift—estranged.

  In the middle of the winter Ellen calls—“You’d better call your father. I don’t think he’s going to last.”

  They now have more of a relationship with each other than they do with me, the intensity of their ongoing interest a testament to the power of the attraction.

  I send Norman a note; I get no answer. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.

  Norman Jr. writes asking if it’s okay to come to a reading I’m giving in Washington. I call and tell him that I’m happy to make a plan to meet him for a drink or lunch but that I’d rather he not come to the reading. I never hear from him again.

  After the millionth phone call I ask Ellen to stop calling. I am happy to exchange letters with her, but no more calls.

  “What if I go to the doctor and he tells me I have twenty-four hours to live—should I call?” she asks.

  “Wait twenty-five, then call,” I say, half joking.

  The fact is that whatever each of them is in this for has nothing to do with me—it is not about my need, my desire, and for the moment I have had enough.

  In December 1997, a week before my birthday, she sends a birthday card. It’s a putrid pale pink with roses, the color of femininity, of a box of sanitary napkins. I have now come to officially loathe my birthday, to live in fear of what it might bring.

  Dear Daughter

  This card is being sent early as I am not sure I will still be here on the 18th of December. I go to Jefferson Hospital on December 4 for a kidney procedure. What the outcome will be I do not know. I am very scared about the whole situation. I have Chronic Renal Failure. Jefferson is in Philadelphia, PA.

  Printed on the card—one of Hallmark’s best—is “I remember the first time I said, ‘I love you,’ to your face (I meant it for the rest of you as well). You had just been born, and I thought you were the most beautiful thing on earth. And in that little face of yours, I thought I could see the future. It looked beautiful too.”

  I call Ellen.

  “I canceled the procedure,” she says, explaining that it was some sort of diagnostic kidney test and that she was scared to do it alone.

  I know I am supposed to offer to go with her. But I don’t. She asks if I’ve heard from my father; I say no. She says that he is doing well, in Florida. We talk briefly and then I find an excuse to get off the phone.

  For her birthday, the following April of 1998, I send flowers—I have done this every year since she found me. This year I get no thank-you call. I call the florist to be sure that the flowers were received. I’m told that Ellen sent them back and exchanged them for a plant—she also told the florist to expect my call.

  It is summer, 1998. I am on Long Island in a small rented house. It is early evening. I am talking to my mother when her call-waiting beeps. She is gone a long time.

  “Hold on to your hat,” she says, coming back onto the line. “Ellen is dead.”

  I am on the phone talking to my mother when she gets a call telling her that my mother is dead. It’s a little too much like a Gertrude Stein line.

  The woman who delivered the news was a friend of Ellen’s. I call her for more information. She tells me that it was kidney disease. Ellen was in the hospital for dialysis, but apparently she checked herself out against medical advice, went home, and was found “moribund” on her sofa. Moribund—bound for the morgue. She tells me that Ellen’s brother was notified of her death and left Ellen’s body in the Atlantic City morgue for at least a day while he was at the U.S. Open in Forest Hills.

  “He wasn’t playing in it, was he?” a friend later asks.

  How could Ellen be dead? It makes no sense. The first thing I want to do is call her, ask what’s going on, and have her say, I had to do something to get your attention.

  I call my lawyer and ask him to let Norman know. I don’t want to break the news or deal with his reaction.

  The lawyer, ever professional, reports back that Norman “appreciated the news, asked after you, and said to tell you that he’d like to talk to you whenever you’re ready.”

  I drive to Atlantic City with no idea what to expect. The cemetery is near the airport—there’s a brick billboard just outside.

  Laurel Memorial Park

  Atlantic City’s Most Beautiful Cemetery

  For Information Call…New Public Mausoleum

  Single Graves

  Family Plots

  Urn Garden Niches Available

  According to her friend—who didn’t make it to the funeral—Ellen wanted a Jewish funeral. Instead she got a rent-a-minister in gray polyester pants presiding over a grave in the cheap part of an Atlantic City cemetery close to the airport. There are only four seats set up. Her brother, my uncle, arrives with his wife. He is wrinkled like a corn-husk doll and wears a seersucker suit. I extend a hand toward him.

  “Remind me,” he says, knowing full well who I am. “What’s your name?”

  I ask if any other relatives are buried in this cemetery.

  “No,” he says.

  I don’t tell him that I used to drive to his house, and turn the car around in his driveway, like tagging base, touch and go. I don’t tell him that I used to sit outside his white brick house—his picture-perfect prosperity—and envy him his Christmas tree and his basketball hoop. And I don’t tell him that his sister used to tell me how much she didn’t like him.

  The rented minister does his thing and I find myself nodding along, saying “Amen” to everything, and trying to make a good impression on my uncle. The grave is open, waiting, the casket next to it, unadorned. I realize that I was half expecting a large show of flowers from Norman, something in the shape of a horseshoe.

  I’m thinking Ellen is in there—in that coffin, paying attention. She knows she’s dead, she knows how awful it is—I remember her irreverent bursts of emotion, how she would say whatever it was she was thinking. It’s depressing as hell but I’m glad I’m there, if only to be witness to this woman’s life, the end of this woman’s life, to make note of it.

  After the funeral, I buy a map and drive around Atlantic City, going to each of the addresses on her letters in chronological order. I find one of the houses and remember a picture she sen
t me along with a letter saying she was one block from the ocean. It is like déjà vu—I have been here before. The house tour is a downward spiral ending in a prefabricated semidetached town house at the tag end of the street by a landfill. At each location I take photographs—I collect information, images to organize, to comfort myself.

  At her last house there are tomato plants growing outside, filled with ripening fruit. Through the kitchen window I see there are still lights on inside. I see groceries on the counter, big bottles of pills, Tootsie Rolls, and Gasex tablets. There is an inhaler on the counter, some cans of Ensure, a lighter. It looks like someone lives here. I go to the front door and ring the bell—why? From her front step, using my cell phone, I dial her number and hear the phone ringing in the house; her machine picks up—her voice on the recording.

  Looking through the kitchen window and into the living room, I see something green, a plant decorated with blinking out-of-season Christmas lights. Is this the plant?

  What is so sad is that this is a woman who I had to protect myself from while she was alive—and now she is dead and I am doing chin-ups outside her kitchen window, scrambling for clues.

  From here, I go further, I look at Atlantic City—stopping at Lucy the Elephant, a wooden turn-of-the-century tavern looking out over the ocean, a window in her ass. I park, walk out onto a fishing pier; the clouds are doing what I call the God thing, splitting light into visible rays. I see dolphins in the distance. I end up in a casino dumping quarters into slot machines. It is getting late, and although I still cannot reconcile anything, I leave with more than what I came with.

  A week later, Ellen’s lawyer and executor and supposed friend, who was also curiously absent from her funeral, agrees to let me into the house. I rent a car, bring some boxes, some plastic bags, and two of my friends for support.

  “I don’t know what kind of relationship you had,” the lawyer says as he’s unlocking her door. “But I didn’t find much, just a few pictures. My wife and I went through it. She’s an antiques dealer, she said there’s nothing.”