A memory came to me then, of Nancy Edmunds and my mother, sewing mother-daughter dresses for Nancy’s daughter Cassie and me—dresses with rickrack on the pockets and big wide sashes that tied in back. I had seen a Butterick pattern featuring the dresses at the fabric store and begged my mother to take on the project of making them. Surprisingly, for her, she relented, even going so far as to let me choose the fabric: a girlish print featuring kittens chasing balls of yarn across the yardage. Mint green and pink.
We brought home the fabric shortly before Easter 1960, at the height of the cold war. I was a fourth grader, and the teacher had taught us how to hide under our desks if the Communists came to bomb us. For years afterward, every time I heard a plane overhead I wondered if they were finally on their way to get us.
The picture came to me now of coming home from school on the afternoon of a particularly terrifying air-raid drill and finding my mother and Nancy waiting there, wearing those ridiculous dresses, with their puffed sleeves and sashes tied around the waist, that jaunty row of rickrack trimming the pockets and hem.
Maybe over the course of the years, I reshaped events to come up with the image, but I believe that even my nine-year-old self had registered poignancy in the image of my mother standing in the doorway to greet me that day, wearing the newly finished dress. Young as I was, I recognized this as one of those moments when the dream of how you hope and imagine things will turn out—the picture from the pattern of those two smiling figures in their matching dresses—turns out to bear so little resemblance to how things really go.
I had come racing up the driveway from the bus, carrying my fallout shelter instructions. As always, I longed for my mother’s arms around me, at the same time that I understood what I was looking for was not available to me. Only that day, there she was, just outside the house, in the kitten-print dress.
Never anything close to slim, my mother—in her usual clothes—came across as a strong, sturdy, no-nonsense person: not beautiful, not homely, not skinny or fat. Just totally herself.
That day, though—with those puffed sleeves squeezing down on her large arms, and the mint green and pink skirt twirling mercilessly over her thick sausage legs, her feet in their sensible brown oxfords, I remember feeling embarrassed. Not only for myself, but for my mother even more so.
“Let’s see you put yours on, Ruth,” Mrs. Edmunds called out from her station at the sewing machine in our front room, where she was putting the finishing touches on a dress just like the others, for Cassie’s Ginny doll. Mrs. Edmunds’s own dress, though not exactly fashionable, hung more successfully on her leaner frame. Cassie—several years younger than I, home from kindergarten hours before—was already dancing around the room in her dress. It was a style, I realized now, best suited to a five-year-old.
My mother was a competent seamstress, but she had cut certain corners, in the interest of saving fabric probably. Instead of a wide sash, and a full, twirly skirt like the ones on the Edmundses’ dresses, the sash on mine was narrow, and too short to make a full bow, and because I was not only tall, but long-waisted, it tied somewhere in the midrange between my chest and my belly button.
I had gone upstairs to put on the dress—knowing before I even did so that the whole mother-daughter dress idea had been a terrible mistake. As I came down the stairs, it was clear from the look on my mother’s face that she knew this too. But Mrs. Edmunds soldiered on with forced cheer.
“Just look at her, Connie,” Mrs. Edmunds said. “She’s the spitting image of you. With those dresses on you’re two peas in a pod.”
MORE THAN FORTY YEARS LATER, I opened her letter to me.
“Dear Ruth,” it began. “There is something I need to get off my chest. It seemed about time I told you.
“I know you and your mother had your stormy times, but you should know she tried her hardest to make things work. Right up to the end of her life, she was praying the two of you could get along better.”
That would be my mother all right, I thought. Saying prayers to some deity to make things better with her grown daughter instead of talking to her about it. Leaving it to God to fix things.
But it was the next words in Nancy Edmunds’s letter that stopped me cold.
“She loved you, even though you weren’t her real daughter,” Nancy had written. “She loved you the best she could.”
I read the words over again, to make sure I got them right. Then the air left the room.
NOW CAME THE STORY. NANCY had filled two sides of her lilac-trimmed stationery to explain it:
“Connie knew the day they brought you home from the hospital,” she wrote. “She knew you were not the same baby they’d handed her that first day in the recovery room. She just couldn’t convince your father to do anything about it.”
Facts, then. I could barely breathe, reading them:
The baby they’d brought to my mother that first afternoon had weighed six and a half pounds for one thing. The one she brought home weighed eight.
But more than that, Nancy had written, a mother recognizes things about her child, the same as an animal would. The first baby—the one Val Dickerson brought home and named Dana—had a short, compact body and dark hair. The original baby had short, thick fingers like my mother’s own, and—unlike any baby she’d ever seen—brown eyes with green in them. But the one they said was hers (we were speaking of me here) had fine blond hair, blue eyes, long legs, and long thin fingers. Her real baby (this would be Dana) had such a good appetite they couldn’t get the bottle in her mouth fast enough.
My parents’ real daughter slept easily and often; I was always fussy, not much interested in the bottle, and colicky.
“She said you smelled different from her child,” the letter continued. “Mothers recognize these things.”
I, mother of two myself, knew this was so.
The part of the letter that was hardest to read—and harder still to comprehend—was Nancy’s account of what happened after Connie and Edwin Plank brought me home from the hospital, when my mother—Connie, the woman who would go on to raise me, though I was not the child who had come out of her body—explained to her husband, the man I called my father, that there had been a mistake.
“Edwin told Connie what’s done was done,” Nancy had written. “He said making a fuss about it would embarrass the doctor, and he was a friend from church. You were such a pretty baby, he said. More so, truthfully, than your sisters had been.
“‘Leave well enough alone,’ he said. He decided this was God’s will, evidently.
“You wouldn’t understand how it was for us wives back in those days,” Nancy went on. “You obeyed your husband if you knew what was good for you.”
There I had it, finally—the truth: I was not the baby they’d put in Connie Plank’s arms that first morning in the summer of 1950, though I was the one she brought home with her two days later.
Sometime in between—a bath, maybe?—the birthday sisters were switched. Maybe it occurred in the middle of the night, when both of us—Dana and I—had wakened at the same moment, crying, and the nurse on duty had been only half awake. However it took place, the result was clear: I was a Dickerson who became a Plank. Dana was a Plank who became a Dickerson. We had lived over fifty years, and neither of us had ever known who we really were.
I told no one about Nancy Edmunds’s letter, or what her words had revealed to me. I wanted some time to think about this and consider what it meant. You spend more than half a century thinking you’re one person and then it turns out you’re not. Or maybe it is that the person you always were is suddenly revealed to you and all kinds of things make sense that didn’t before, and all kinds of other things that used to make sense no longer do.
Of course I wondered about Val, the woman I was now recasting in my mind as my real mother. She’d been dead more than a dozen years, and I didn’t even know if she had come to understand the truth about my parentage, though remembering that day at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Mus
eum, when she had studied my face with tears in her eyes, I have to guess that at some point along the line—later than Connie, but sooner than I—she realized what had happened, and—not out of character for a woman who seemed most herself away from her family, alone in her studio—chose to do nothing about it.
The only two people with whom I might have discussed this were the Dickerson children—their one real child, at least, and the one they had raised as theirs: Ray and Dana. Ray—the thought of whom, even after all these years, caused a wave of sadness to wash over me.
Ray, who was—it had taken me a while after hearing the news to realize this—my brother.
It would have been easy finding Dana, who lived less than a half hour’s drive away, but I hadn’t called her. What would I say?
“I got your life. You got mine. What do you want to do about this now?”
As for Ray, he had not been the kind of person for whom any Google entries were likely to exist. And even if I could have tracked him down, I was not sure that I’d want to, although at one time it was my most fervent wish. The last time I’d seen Ray I had been looking out the window of the taxi taking me away from our little cabin on the island in Canada, as the taxi pulled away down the road, with the woman I now thought of as Connie Plank, who had come to take me away from him. On what I had considered, until now, the worst day of my life, or close enough.
Now I knew why she’d done it, and though it was no less terrible, and she was wrong not to tell me—and the cost was incalculable—I forgave her at last.
Dana
That Would Have Been Better
TIME PASSED. PLANTING seasons. Baseball seasons. Baby goats. Strawberries. Cheese. Winter. Seven of them, without Clarice.
It was early spring—I got the phone call from my brother. He was at the South Station in Boston, waiting to board a bus to Concord, New Hampshire, having spent the last ten days on a Greyhound making his way east from Oregon. He wondered if I could pick him up.
I was fifty-six years old now, which meant my brother, Ray, was sixty. The last time I had seen him had been at Valerie’s memorial service a dozen years before—but the picture of him I still carried in my head was that of the young boy with the harmonica and the unicycle, with that restless, haunted look in his amazingly blue eyes.
I was not ready for the man who stepped off the bus that day. All his life, my brother had been such a lean person, with that basketball player’s easy speed and grace, that heartbreakingly handsome face. Sometime since I had last seen him his body had taken on a certain heft, but he carried himself very straight, though with a certain appearance that doing this took effort. He still had all his hair—longer than it was the last time, and mostly gray now.
“Long ride,” he said, easing slowly into the front passenger seat, like a person suffering from that disease in which every bone is brittle and subject to breakage at any given moment.
“I bet you’re hungry,” I said.
He shook his head.
I had thought, briefly, that it might be a good thing for Ray to work on the farm, tending the goats or the strawberries, but he was restless, unable to focus. I’d come home and find him sitting on the front porch holding a rake, or lying on the chaise that had been Clarice’s spot, those last few hard years. He took a lot of naps. Nights, I fixed us dinner and he usually ate in silence. Afterward, he watched television sometimes, though he liked playing solitaire. Sometimes I’d get the feeling there was something he wanted to say, but he hardly ever spoke.
“Remember all those magic tricks you used to do for us?” I asked him one time, when he had the cards out. “Do you remember that one you did, where the queen of hearts ends up on top of a person’s head?”
“That was somebody else,” he told me.
One night, when we were sitting at the table finishing our pie, I told him about Clarice. I wanted my brother to know me. And maybe, too, I just wanted to talk about her to someone. Little as he said, telling him was better than talking to the goats.
“We loved each other so much,” I said. “Until then, I didn’t know it was possible to feel that way about someone. But I would have died for her. Even now, I think about her a hundred times a day.”
“I used to know a person like that,” he said.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER HE came to stay with me, Ray said he couldn’t remain on the farm anymore. He didn’t like being around all the animals, he said. And though I knew he had lived in the woods for a number of years, back on that island in Canada, being out in the country made him uneasy now. Many nights he would knock at my door to say he’d heard a noise, or he thought there was an animal on the roof, or a person trying to get in.
“It’s nothing,” I told him. “Sometimes there are raccoons. They won’t do anything bad.”
But he couldn’t sleep at the farm. Too many stars, he said.
The goats made him nervous. The refrigerator gave off a humming noise that left him wondering if maybe it was radioactive. One time I came in from the barn and found my brother sitting at the kitchen table totally naked, looking out the window. His clothes hurt, he said.
I had come to understand, by now, all the things there were in the world that made it almost physically painful for my brother to get through the day. Even when he was young, I could remember times when Ray found it hard to get out of bed, and other times he’d feel a need to jump on that unicycle of his and disappear without telling anyone where he was off to. But back then those times when clouds seemed to envelop him were rare.
When I thought of Ray, as he was growing up, I saw this wildly funny, joyful person whose appetite for the world was so great he’d run outside in the middle of a rainstorm without caring that he got soaked—the boy who came to get me out of school with a note forged to look as if it had been written by our parents, so we could be at the record store for the release of a Fats Domino album.
One spring when we were living in Vermont, Ray had made the discovery that a surprising number of tiny and very beautiful lizards known as efts had emerged—seemingly all at once and all together—from wherever it was they’d spent the winter, and were now, on that one moonlit night, making their way like a parade of refugees across the dirt road in front of our rented house to the creek on the other side. He had awakened me in the middle of the night so I could see the red eft exodus take place, and another time—in the dead of winter—bundled me up in blankets before lifting me onto his shoulders to bring me out in the yard so I wouldn’t miss a lunar eclipse.
He’d told me very little—nothing, really—about how he’d spent those years in Canada, but it would not have surprised me to learn he’d been homeless for at least a portion of that time. Now I called a social services agency in Concord and scheduled an appointment for Ray and me, and then more visits, and testing. He accepted these visits and tests without argument.
The term they applied to my brother was schizophrenic, and because of this, he qualified for a group home, where a half dozen or so people with a similar diagnosis—some much younger, one in his late seventies, all on some form of psychological disability—lived together under the part-time supervision of a counselor who oversaw things like grocery shopping and bills. Surprisingly, for a person who seemed so totally without interest in social interaction up to that point, Ray liked the place when we paid a visit there, and we filled out the paperwork. A few weeks later a space became available and he moved in.
One of Ray’s new housemates—Natalie, who suffered from some form of OCD, but managed to hold down a part-time job at a dry cleaner’s—told Ray about a weekly workshop she attended: art classes for adults with emotional disabilities, or “special sensitivities” as she described it.
“My mother was an artist,” Ray said.
So Natalie took him to the class.
That night I was surprised to get a call from my brother. Even before he told me what had happened I could feel the agitation in his voice.
“It was her,” he said. “She has a
different name now,” he said. “But it’s the same person. Only not really.”
The woman running the art workshop was Ruth Plank.
I HAD NEVER KNOWN THE full story of what happened between the two of them, all those years ago when he was living in British Columbia. But I knew enough to understand that something terrible had taken place.
“Were you happy to see her?” I said. I had learned, by now, that it was a good idea to ask Ray questions that allowed for yes or no answers.
There was a long silence on the other end of the line—the way there would be sometimes, in the last stages of Clarice’s illness, when if I needed to be away for a few hours, I’d call her from a pay phone even though I knew talking was barely possible for her. Just so she could hear my voice, and I her breathing, as now I heard his, as if the air he was letting out of his lungs had been there a long time.
More silence. I thought he was finished. Then came his voice—quiet and low and filled with sorrow.
“I never told anyone this,” he said. “But we were going to get married. We were going to have a baby. Then it turned out she was my sister.”
I wondered how he’d learned the truth, but there was not much point in asking. He had been carrying this around with him a long time. That was enough.
“I actually figured most of that out, too. A while back,” I told him. “They should have told us before.”
“That would have been better,” he said. And then he was gone. All I heard was a soft click as he put down his phone.
RUTH
A Long Way from Boston
EVEN AFTER SO much time, I still recognized him. The old Ray didn’t enter a room so much as he took it over—bursting through the door, generally, with some amazing thing to show you, a trick or a joke or a song, maybe. One time, I remember, he had actually cartwheeled into the Dickersons’ kitchen.
The Good Daughters Page 24
