Blessings (19 page)

“People don’t always think, Jill.”

“You always say—a girl, especially—you tell me it’s wrong to let boys do things.”

“I know I do. And yes, it is wrong. But still, when people do wrong things, we try to understand them and forgive, don’t we?”

An image formed itself: In tall grass a girl lay looking up into the eyes of the boy who bent over her. The image was alluring and at the same time repellent; at the movies one waited to see what would come next, and yet one didn’t know whether one wanted to see it. And if the boy and the girl were one’s father and mother …

Mom was watching Jill. The corners of her mouth turned up into a fraction of a smile, but her eyes were anxious. It was the expression she wore when a child hurt himself and had to be comforted, an expression grown familiar over the years, as were the parallel creases on her forehead, or the small gold studs that she wore every day in her ears.

“Don’t we, Jill?” she repeated, and continued, “You shouldn’t blame her. She didn’t do anything bad. She made a mistake, that’s all.”

“May I come in?” Dad knocked. “Or is this a private conversation?”

“No, come in. Jill and I are having a talk about her birth.”

“Oh, are you?” Dad sat down and frowned a little, as though he were prepared to listen hard.

“I think Jill’s bothered because her birth mother wasn’t married,” Mom said. “I think she feels that makes her different from other children, from her friends. Am I right, Jill?”

Dad took his glasses off and put them back on. Somehow the gesture made him seem serious and wise. It’s the way he must look when he talks to patients in his office, Jill thought.

“Listen, Ladybug,” he said. “I’m going to say a very selfish thing. If that poor young girl hadn’t had so much trouble, we’d never have had you. And you’re one of the best things that ever happened to your mother and me. Don’t you know that? Don’t you?”

She nodded.

“And I think—I hope—we’ve been best for you.”

“I know.” Close to crying, now that they were giving her all their earnest attention, she forced herself not to. “But what I need to know is … Oh, you’ve told me she had no way to care for me, and I guess I understand that, but still, how could she have done it? Could you give Mark away?”

The parents glanced at each other. They were thinking, probably, of Mark in his crib right now. He slept with a teddy bear on either side, which made three heads on his pillow. When you went to see him asleep, you smelled talcum powder.

It was Mom who spoke first. “Yes. If we had no home and couldn’t give him what he needs, we love him so much that we would.”

“Think of how she must have loved you to do what she did,” Dad said. “Think of that. And then try not to think of it anymore, if you can. You have a whole, good, wonderful life ahead, with so much to do.” He laid his hand on Jill’s knee; the hand made firm pressure, as if he owned her, and that felt good. She wanted them to own her. When she put her hand over Dad’s, the lump of tears melted away out of her throat.

“Anything else you want to say, Ladybug?”

“Well, I have to finish the family tree.”

“Let’s see.” Dad examined the paper. “You have two choices. You can tell the teacher why you don’t want to do it, or—”

Mom interrupted. “I can write a note of explanation instead.”

“Yes. Or you can fill in the spaces with the information you have. Either way will be all right.”

They were both standing over her, smiling, but their raised eyebrows were questioning. She felt that she was expected to smile in return, and actually now, seeing them there so united and solid together, she began to feel more like doing so.

“It’s late,” Mom said. “So finish your homework.” Her no-nonsense voice was comforting too. “Skip the shower tonight, for once. You need your sleep more.”

Alone again, Jill took up the pen. Two choices, there were. She thought hard and in less than a minute had made one. One path led nowhere, just trailed off into darkness, as in those closed canyons that they sometimes saw when hiking in the Jerez Mountains. The other was a straight road to be traveled on a clear day.

So she took up the pen and started to fill in the spaces. Father: Jonas Miller, born 1918, in Phoenix. Mother: Irene Stone, born 1920, in Albuquerque. Grandfather: Otto J. Miller, born 1888 …

To say that as she grew toward, and finally into, adolescence, Jill was afflicted by heavy doubts about her birth would be untrue. She was too active, too successful, and too secure within her family for that. Yet it would be equally untrue to say that she never doubted again.

In certain circumstances the subject was jolted abruptly back into her consciousness, there to lie and trouble her until with effort she was able to argue it away. As she grew older it became more difficult to argue it away.

On a weekend camping trip with friends near Taos, the sun deceived her on a windy day, burning hot enough through the clouds to raise painful blisters.

“People with your complexion have to be wary of the sun,” the strange doctor admonished kindly. “If you’ve got brothers and sisters, tell them to guard against skin cancer. It’s the price red-haired families pay for their beauty.”

Her hair was such a marker! Sometimes she almost wished she didn’t have it. For if her hair had been brown like the rest of the family’s, would she have thought so much about herself? Now, whenever she saw a tall, redheaded woman in her thirties, she thought: Could she be the one? Briefly her heart would thump and then subside as she remembered what Mom had told her about dark, curly hair. Was it the father, then?

The bad thing was that such questioning made her feel not only that vague, recurring, quiet sadness but guilt besides. Why was she not able to accept her good life as it was?

In the summer before her senior year in high school, Gran, who had taught French, took Jill and Lucille to France. It was adventure and delight; the three were to speak no English if they could help it, even to one another. They traveled on local trains and buses to villages off the tourist track. They walked on country roads and ate basket lunches in the shade of the plane trees. Gran was young enough to keep up with the girls’ pace, while the girls were old enough to care about the museums and cathedrals that Gran knew so well.

They spent the last few days in luxury, resting at the sea at Eze-sur-Mer. The hotel was filled with Germans, British, and Americans. One evening after Lucille and Gran had gone up to their rooms, Jill became acquainted with a girl of her own age who had, like herself, been observing in the center of the garden an enormous, room-size cage, filled with exotic, tropical birds. They ordered ice cream and sat talking on the terrace.

The girl, Harriet, was friendly and blunt. “Are you here with your family?”

“My grandmother and my sister.”

“Oh, is she your sister? You don’t look at all like her, do you?”

Jill could not have said why she replied as she did. “I’m adopted,” she said.

“Really? So am I.”

For a moment neither girl spoke. Then Jill said, “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s like me.”

“You’ve probably met plenty but didn’t know it. People don’t talk about it. I know I don’t.”

“That’s true. I never said it till now.”

“I think it’s really nobody’s business, is it?”

“That’s true, too, but I don’t believe that’s the reason.”

“No? Then what is?”

“I think it’s because we—I, at least—don’t want to think about it.”

Harriet drew her chair closer, and Jill understood that this stranger was feeling the same emotion that had just swept her: a sense of close understanding never felt before with anyone else.

“I said I don’t want to, but I do think about it,” Jill said.

“I don’t. Not anymore.”

“You don’t want to know who your mother was, at least?” Jill asked softly.

“I know who she was—is. I’ve seen her.”

Jill was aghast. “How did that happen? Tell me,” she begged.

“I was born in Connecticut. It’s one of only four states that don’t keep sealed records.”

“Is Nebraska one of them?”

“No. And let me tell you, when records are sealed, they’re sealed. You’ll get nowhere, so best forget it.”

“I can’t forget it. The older I get, the more I seem to need—” Jill’s voice cracked and she stopped.

The other girl waited for a considerable time, until Jill was ready to speak again.

“Tell me. What was it like when you saw her?”

Harriet looked away at the squawking birds and the sea beyond the rocks. “She was drunk,” she said. She looked down squarely at Jill. “I’ve never told anyone except my father and mother, but I’ll tell you because I’ll never see you again and because … well, I see you need to know. So this is it. She was awful. She was tragic and terrible. She’s married—he looked as if he liked his liquor too. They had two boys, my half brothers. They were fighting when I got there. The house was filthy. I don’t know where my original father is, and I doubt that she knows, either. She clung to me and cried and begged me to come back again. Yet in a way I don’t think she really wanted me to. I think she was ashamed. We had nothing to say to each other.” Harriet paused. “It was another world.”

The brutal images darkened Jill’s spirit. “Have you ever seen her again?” she asked.

“That happened three years ago, and I’ve gone once every year since, during Christmas vacations. I live in Washington, and I’m glad I’m no nearer. We write to each other, although there’s not much to write about. They’re—she’s—kind, and I feel—I don’t exactly know what I feel about her, except that I’m awfully sorry for her and awfully glad I have the parents I have. As I said, it was another world.”

“I suppose you wish you’d never found her.”

“No, to tell the truth, I don’t. It’s much better this way. I don’t have to worry and dream anymore. Now I know.”

Gran was reading in the next room when Jill went upstairs. “I saw you from the windows, so I knew you were all right. You had a long talk with that girl. Is she nice?”

“Very. She’s adopted. We were talking about it.”

Gran was silent.

“She met her mother. Her birth mother.”

Gran looked over the top of her reading glasses at Jill; the look was long and touched with pity.

“I don’t think that’s a good thing at all, Jill,” she said.

Now Jill was the silent one. And her grandmother asked, “Was it a good experience for her, did she say?”

Jill was not going to betray a confidence, so she answered only, “I don’t know.”

“It could destroy another family, you know. What if the woman was married now and hadn’t told her husband about the child? What about any other children she might have? Or her own parents, for that matter? The damage could be fearful.”

“One could be very careful about all that.”

When Gran took her glasses off, Jill saw that her eyes were very troubled.

“You could be—if it’s you we’re talking about, and I assume it is—you could be totally rejected. We don’t want you to be hurt that way, Jill.”

“I think I’d like to take that chance,” Jill said, very low.

Gran sighed. “There’s something more. Have you thought how you might hurt your parents?”

“I would ask them first. I would explain how I love them and that this has nothing to do with my love for them.” Jill crossed the room and put her hand on her grandmother’s shoulder. “Are you annoyed with me, Gran?”

“No. But I’m unhappy because you are. Will you think this over more carefully, Jill? Think further and then, if you must, talk to your father and mother about it when we get home.”

So she thought some more but still held back from bringing up the subject when she got home. Arguing with herself, she could see conflicting possibilities. Suppose the woman who had given birth to her turned out to be a tragic disappointment like Harriet’s drunken mother? On the other hand, the girl had said, in spite of it all, she was relieved at last to know… . And then, of course, that first mother might well be the loveliest woman on earth, kind, wise, beautiful… . Somewhere she breathed and lived—oh, she was too young to have died!—but where?

On a dim, rainy, Saturday afternoon, Jill and Mom, alone in the house, were cooking together, baking bread and pies for the next day’s dinner with guests. It was a pleasant custom. Mom had taken a course with a pastry chef and was now teaching her daughters.

But today Mom, humming while she peeled apples, was distracted and unlike herself. Wondering, Jill glanced at her from across the floured board and caught a glance in return.

“You’ve had something on your mind for a while, haven’t you?” Mom asked.

Jill evaded the question. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Gran told us about your talk when you were away. We waited for you to say something, but you didn’t. I suppose we should have spoken first. I suppose we hoped you’d forget, but I see you haven’t.”

“I’ve tried,” Jill murmured.

Her mother went to the stove, moved a pot that needed no moving, and came back.

“There’s something Dad and I intended to give you when you were eighteen. But last night we decided to let you have it now. I’ll go upstairs and get it.”

In a moment she returned and handed Jill a letter, saying, “Let’s sit on the sofa in the den.”

The handwriting was feminine but firm. Curious and apprehensive because of Mom’s solemnity, Jill began to read. There was only a single sheet, and she scanned it in moments.

Dear Child,

I’m hoping that the parents who bring you up will give you this when you grow old enough to understand it. The mother who will give you birth and the boy who fathered you are good people but foolish, as I hope you won’t be. We were too young to fit you into our lives. Maybe we were selfish, too, wanting to go on with our plans undisturbed. Some people wanted me to do away with you—to abort you—but I couldn’t do that. You were already growing, and I had to let you grow to fulfillment. I had to let you have your own life. I hope with all my heart that it will be a wonderful one. I will give you away only to wonderful people who want you, and who will do more for you than I can. I hope you will understand that I am doing this out of love for you, although it may not seem much like love. But it is, believe me, my daughter or my son. It is.