She didn’t think that could be true. If it were possible to find out, it might even be possible to see the real parents. She said, ‘Are you sure? Suppose a woman got married afterwards and never told her husband? They couldn’t just give you her name and address. You could cause a lot of trouble for her.’
‘I’m pretty sure they can. It may not be a law. Maybe it depends on the adoption agency. The one we came from allows it.’
‘Did Mom and Dad tell you that?’
‘They told me the name and address of the agency because I asked. And then I called up and asked what the policy was. They were a little cagey but they said that if they were satisfied it was a genuine desire to know, they’d tell you. So all we’ve got to do is wait.’
Alma thought about it. She tried to see herself going to an adoption agency to talk with someone there. What were those places like? Maybe they were like hospitals, or maybe it was a clinic with a kind of office attached: the mother could be at one end, giving birth, and, at the other side of the building, the adopting parents would be waiting anxiously, hoping that the baby they got would be all right.
If a child were born with something wrong with it, did they hand it back and ask for a refund? Alma imagined Elton and Bess sitting on chairs in a waiting room: Bess would be holding a brown paper bag, to take the baby away in.
She didn’t want to think in any greater detail about the procedure. Obviously it was a business – that was the reason why some people did it. The mother would have her hospital bills paid. The agency would get something: a percentage. It was strange to think that she might have cost five hundred dollars, or a thousand, or whatever it was. But she didn’t want to ask Bess. She could think about the farcical possibilities without further information and she’d dream about the more mysterious, dramatic and possibly tragic side: the love and character of her mother.
For a long time she never even wondered if her mother had gone on living after giving birth. As soon as the question came to her, she passed it on to Bruce. ‘You don’t think they’re dead, do you?’ she asked.
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘We might have been transferred to the adoption people because our mothers died in childbirth and there was nobody to bring us up.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that, but I don’t reckon it’s likely. That sounds to me like another case where the orphanage would take over. The kind of place Bess and Elton would go to would be pretty fussy about where they recruited their unmarried mothers from.’
‘Not off the waterfront, after all? How can you be sure?’
‘I suspect they got the name through some religious organization. Don’t you think so? First, prevent them from getting hold of birth control and then sell the babies when somebody knocks them up. Wouldn’t you say someone like Reverend Hodges would know quite a few convenient little addresses?’
‘Not as many as the doctors.’
‘More. Especially in this part of the country.’
‘That’s another thing: why did they go so far away?’
‘Because that’s where the adoption place was. And I guess they figured it was a good idea to go to a big city, where they wouldn’t run the risk of adopting the child of somebody who could turn out to live right down the road. Both of those women might be there to this day. Or they might have moved away, anywhere: even out of the country.’
Alma started to tell herself another story: the search for the mother. She’d think about it in the daytime and occasionally even have a real dream. The mother was always found after long and painful effort and sometimes Alma would arrive too late, just after her mother had died.
*
Elton and Bess were quieter, more formal, more modest and also older than the parents of any of Alma’s or Bruce’s classmates. They had had to wait a long time until the adoption agency had found the first baby. Many times before that they’d been disappointed. Bruce was their idol until, so soon afterwards, Alma had arrived. They were glad to notice that the news of the adoption didn’t seem to have bothered the children. Bruce had become more serious; but that was undoubtedly just because he was growing up. His schoolwork hadn’t fallen back – that would have been a bad sign; on the contrary, it had improved. Alma too appeared as outgoing and alert as ever, although sometimes she looked unhappy. Bess had gone out of her way to say that if there was anything Alma wanted to know – anything at all about, say, being a woman – then she could always come and talk to her, or to Dr Brewster, of course.
‘I couldn’t talk to a man about anything like that,’ Alma had said quickly.
‘Well then, maybe you could see my doctor. You’re too old to keep going to Dr Brewster now, anyhow.’
‘Is your doctor a woman?’
‘No dear, but he’s a gynecologist, so it’s all right.’
Alma said that she’d wait and see. She wouldn’t go back to Brewster, who’d been the family pediatrician, and she didn’t see why she had to go to anyone anyway, if there wasn’t anything wrong with her. However, she finally agreed to accept the name and address of a woman doctor and to have a complete check-up before the beginning of the next school year.
The doctor’s name was Morse; she was married to another doctor. They had three children, two secretaries, a nursemaid, a cook, and a cleaningwoman who came twice a week. One of the daughters was in a lower grade at Alma’s school. Mrs Morse was intelligent, stylish, a first-rate diagnostician of physical symptoms, and someone you couldn’t talk to. Alma said she was fine.
‘I can see that,’ the doctor said. ‘I wish all my patients were so healthy.’
Alma smiled, put on her clothes and headed for the door. She didn’t ask any of the questions she might have put to an older woman who was also a doctor, for instance: If a woman gives up her child voluntarily, do you think she’s really loved it? If she didn’t love it, why did she carry it for nine months? If all that business is as natural as people say, is it natural to take a baby from its mother for any reason whatever? And is it right that a doctor should be helping to say that a childless couple is able to take care of a baby better than its own mother, just because they’ve got more money than she has? Do you think she could be pushed into giving it away and then change her mind, so she’s been thinking about me, so that maybe she wants me to come look for her after all? Do you think she was bad, and that she got pregnant because she was just no good? Am I bad to want to sleep with Bruce: because we were brought up as brother and sister, even though we were never really related? And if we did, is it true what they say – does it hurt a lot, can it make you sick if you do it too much: what’s it like?
Bruce already knew what it was like. He’d wanted to find out without becoming involved, so he’d asked a friend of a friend and he’d made an appointment at a motel with a call-girl. After the first few times, he’d come to an arrangement with her, to see her once every two weeks. It wasn’t enough, but he couldn’t afford anything more. He hated her, yet she didn’t behave hatefully to him; she was ordinary. He couldn’t believe how matter-of-fact she was – almost apathetic. It was as if it meant nothing to her, as they said murder meant nothing to psychopaths.
His real mother might have been just like that.
He had dreams about Alma. In his dreams they made love and it was wonderful. He also, once, dreamt about Bess. But he didn’t want to have such dreams. His family was his family; it was important that they should stay the way they were. And it was even more vital that his feelings about them should be of a certain nature: filial or brotherly. If they changed, or if he himself did, the idea of the family itself could be altered.
When everybody at school started going steady, he knew that he’d have to have a date, too. He chose the class tramp from the year above him – a coy, lecherous girl with a gobbling laugh, abundant dyed hair and a weasel-like face. He used a contraceptive, as he always had, from the beginning. He said it was because he’d once had gonorrhea and there was a lot of it around. The real reaso
n was that he wanted to be sure he never got a girl pregnant. She told him to take off the rubber because she’d had everything, so she was immune to all that stuff. Then he said that he really wore it because there was insanity in his family, but it skipped a generation: he was okay, but his kids were going to be crazy; it was sad, but true. She believed him until, apparently, she discussed the matter with somebody else. Then she said: Come on, his Pa was all right, wasn’t he, and nobody ever heard of insanity like that anyway, that skipped. He blew up and said, ‘Thanks for talking about me with all your friends.’ And he told her that the reason why he wore a contraceptive was that at least twenty other guys had warned him: if you go down with her, it’s like sticking your prick into the town sewer, so watch out. She screamed and hit him in the face. He picked her up and threw her out of the car so that she had to walk home in the dark. They weren’t on speaking terms after that.
Alma started going out with boys, but she was shy with them. She didn’t want anyone but Bruce. She developed a friendly, joking manner that discouraged romanticism and if that didn’t work, she’d just say that she was old-fashioned and intended to save herself for marriage. She started to believe it, although she listened eagerly to what all the other girls she knew had to say about sex. She made up a story that satisfied them, too: she claimed that she’d had a dream about meeting a man four years after highschool and that he would be the one she married. She said that she’d know straight away, and she also knew that none of the boys at school was the right one.
One of her friends, named Penny, said, ‘I don’t see how you can be so sure. I mean, even if you find Mr Right like that and you get married in a silver cloud and all, why’s it going to stop you having some fun now?’
‘It wouldn’t be fun if he isn’t the right one,’ Alma said.
‘Sure it would.’
She didn’t believe it. She was convinced that you had to be in love. She became moody and short-tempered. She cried a lot. She lost weight and decided that she was going to be a dancer. Bess and Elton agreed to pay for lessons.
*
Bruce took up the violin. He said that he wanted to develop some minor skill that he could use in later life to annoy the neighbors.
‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason, dear,’ Bess said.
‘That’s because it’s a joke,’ he told her patiently.
He’d saved enough to buy a fiddle that he’d seen in a pawnshop. Bess wanted to know what he’d been doing in a part of town where there were pawnshops. She didn’t ask where he’d managed to get hold of the money. He always had money. In the winter he shoveled snow, in the summer he mowed lawns. He’d do deliveries, fix things that were broken, feed pets while their owners were away. He always had some job or other, often several. And he found himself a music teacher by looking through the yellow pages and phoning up one number after another: asking questions, until he’d decided which teachers he wanted to talk to. He settled on a man named Schneider.
He took a lesson twice a week. No one in the family ever met Mr Schneider but from the sound of Bruce’s practicing at home, he seemed to be able to teach a lot of music in a short time. A long while later, Bruce told Alma that Mr Schneider was a musicology student, only a couple of years older than he was himself – still in his teens. It had amused him to see how everyone, without knowing anything about the man, believed that a music teacher should be ancient, white-haired and, probably, someone who spoke English with a thick accent.
* * *
After school Alma would ride all the way across town to do dance exercises in a small room over an art gallery. There was a bar and nightclub next door, a fact that bothered Elton and Bess. But Alma wasn’t afraid. She immersed herself in her afternoon practice the way a novice would sink her personality into the formalities of religious training. When men spoke to her on the street or made more determined attempts to pick her up, she took no notice. They tried frequently; she’d turned into a good-looking girl. And the clothes she wore, the way she did her hair, made her seem older than she was.
What she couldn’t discuss with her parents she could talk about directly with Bruce. She told him, ‘You know how I feel. I never said it, but you’re the one I want. I used to see you going out with that girl and I hated her so much. You could have gone out with me. You like me: I know that.’
‘I love you, Alma,’ he said.
‘To marry? Or, we don’t have to get married. We could just sleep together.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because maybe you aren’t my sister, but I feel like you are.’
‘Isn’t it ever going to change?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘And you’d want me to marry somebody else?’
‘Yes, of course. Eventually.’
‘But I don’t want anybody else. I want you.’
‘You’ll find somebody. Listen, if you just want a guy to screw around with, there’s the whole world to choose from. But somebody to understand you and give you support in what you think, and be really close to you – that’s different.’
‘That’s marriage,’ Alma said.
‘Are you kidding? Marriage is the in-laws and the Thanksgiving dinners and thank-you notes and bringing up the children.’
‘But you start with love, and working together as a team.’
‘I can work with men. I don’t need that kind of thing. What I need is somebody to be my sister.’
‘I could be both.’
Bruce said, emphatically, no: it wouldn’t work to mix things like that. You had to be one or the other. It could ruin everything.
She thought he was right, but she wanted to be the one who wasn’t the sister. It didn’t occur to her that the whole question of being a sister or a lover, having a real parent and an adoptive parent, feeling love or desire or friendship, was one that could be with her all her life and to which there might not be an answer.
Her teacher, Merle Singer, told Bess that Alma was her best pupil, although she had started so late, and that if she wanted to, she could make her living as a dancer. Three of her pupils, including Alma, had what she considered the perfect physical proportions for a dancer. Some teachers, she knew, held the opinion that the shape of the body determined the nature of the dance, but she had seen too many exceptions – cases where the shape was not conventionally pleasing but the movement was good. Of all her promising students Alma alone stood out. The two who, according to the rulebook, should have equaled her were ungainly and without musicality. When Alma danced, her smallest gestures were charged with meaning and beauty. You couldn’t explain something like that simply on the evidence of measurement and ratio. She had the talent. But – just as important – she had the good health, stamina, will-power and concentration to succeed in competition against other girls who might have had better training.
‘If you want to go on,’ Bess said to Alma, ‘and really try for a career, we’ll help you. It means a lot of money at this stage, so think carefully. Merle is sure you can do it, but she talked about the drawbacks too: it’s a short working life. You wouldn’t have the time or energy for anything else. It’s easy to injure yourself – the professional ones sprain and break things all the time. And getting to the top and being famous means a whole series of lucky chances that just might not ever happen. So, you think hard about it.’
Bess was proud of Alma. Bruce had the brains; that was a good thing for a boy, but he could be cold, secretive and unforgiving. Neither she nor Elton knew all the time what he was up to. Alma shared herself. And she’d turned out to be beautiful-looking, Bess thought – just like some kind of foreign actress, but underneath it a really nice, down-to-earth girl. Other mothers had daughters who were drinking hard, who were going to bed with just anybody and were being arrested for dangerous driving and all kinds of wild behavior: they didn’t care what they did. Elton said you had to blame the parents, but Bess wasn’t so sure that that was all there was to it. Some went th
e wrong road, no matter what you did and some won through in spite of everything. She and Elton had been lucky. ‘You know,’ she said to Alma, ‘we’ll be happy with whatever you choose. It’s only a matter of getting the timing right, so you don’t spend years working at a thing you’re never going to want to use.’
‘All right,’ Alma said. ‘Give me a few days.’
She thought over what Bess had said. She liked dancing. She enjoyed the exercise and needed the expression of movement. But the glamor of the stage had never drawn her. Her place was on the other side of the footlights, following the story – that was what she had always loved. And that was something she could have for the rest of her life. If she felt no sense of dedication as a performer, it would certainly be better to stop now.
She told her parents and Merle that she intended to go on doing her exercises in private and maybe taking a class or two every once in a while, but that she was giving up the dance. She was thankful, she said, that she’d had the opportunity to train for long enough to find out that it wasn’t the right thing; some girls, she knew, were thwarted by their parents, so that they had the idea forever afterwards that they might have been great artists if somebody hadn’t prevented them. She realized that it wasn’t the profession for her, even though she was good at it, because there were other things she wanted to do with her life. A girl who wasn’t so good, but for whom dancing was the only interest, could give an audience more.
Everyone understood except Merle. Merle said that she did, but all the time she’d really hoped that Alma would continue; she’d seen her as a star, in the lead role, as the heroine. If she’d known about the family history, she might have fought for her belief and told Alma that the willingness to forsake her talent could well have its beginnings in her conviction that she was not the central character in anything but was, on the contrary, the daughter of a heroine. If you gave dancing lessons to a bunch of clumsy-footed, plain girls who all seemed oddly built and without inborn grace, timing or rhythm, the appearance of a natural champion in their midst was like the arrival of a comet. After one outburst Merle kept quiet, but she couldn’t get over the waste of it.
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