The English American (6 page)

I
’VE BECOME TWO PEOPLE
.
When I go to work or to the shops to buy food and cigarettes, I chat cheerfully to people as usual. I talk to my friends and family as if there’s nothing going on.

The rest of the time, I sit in my room with the curtains drawn, waiting for the agency to call. When I sleep, I dream fitfully of a woman whose face I can only half see.

And then, finally, three months after it all began, the phone rings.

“I have spoken to your mother,” Judy says. “She is delighted.”

“Really?” I say, my heart filling instantly with pure joy.

“Yes.”

She is delighted! The joy is coupled with an enormous sense of relief that the tortuous waiting period is finally over.

“She said the news couldn’t have come at a better time. She’s in Georgia, to be with her father, who is dying of cancer. And it’s her greatest hope you will be able to come and meet him before he passes away.”

Georgia? And—oh! Her father is dying. My poor mother.

“Uh—should I call her, or should she call me?” My hand is shaking.

There’s a pause on the other end of the line.

Then: “Oh, I can’t give you her number.”

“Can you give her mine?”

“Oh no.”

What cruelty is this?

“Why not? I mean, you’ve just told me she wants to meet me before my grandfather dies, so…”

“It’s the law.”

“What law?”

“Adoption law in the United States. It is against the law for me to give you identifying information. It is against the law for me to give you her name. If you want the information, you’ll have to petition the courts.”

“Well, how long will that take?”

“It could take years.”

Years? I can’t wait years!

“Well, if I write to her, will you send on a letter? Please?”

“Yes, but we will need to remove any identifying information.”

I want to shout in frustration, but I dare not. Judy holds all the power.

“What can I call her?”

Judy’s voice softens.

“You can call her by her nickname. You can call her Billie.”

I can’t move. I lie on my bed, shaking. I can call her by her nickname. I can call her Billie. Billie, Billie, Billie.

My hand is shaking. I start to write.

I can’t say that.

I can’t say that.

I have to get to my mother. If Judy won’t help me, I shall find her another way.

I google “adoption search, US” and find a number for a man named Pete Franklin, who runs a volunteer organization out of Nevada. Five minutes later a friendly American voice is telling me that if I can persuade the adoption agency to ask my mother to fax him the date I was born—and the name of the hospital—and if I can send him a fax with my time and place of birth, and the details match, then he is one of the few people in America who is legally able to give us each other’s phone numbers.

I can tell he understands what the last three months have been like for me. I’m so relieved not to have to pretend with someone that, for a moment, I can’t speak.

The Abbey looks majestic on the other side of our garden, in the early evening light. People say it’s a holy place. Perhaps it is. But it’s the voice at the end of the telephone, belonging to a man I’ve never met, in the middle of the American desert, that brings me peace for the first time in months.

“You okay?” he says.

“I am now,” I say.

There’s a crackle on the line.

“I’m sorry you’ve had to go through this,” Pete says. “It’s a messed-up system.”

“I still don’t understand why Judy won’t give us each other’s phone numbers. We’re grown women who want to be in touch with each other.”

“The adoption agencies say they’re helping the kids. Really they’re helping the parents. And until adoption law is changed in the United States, the people the law is supposed to protect are going to be hurt in this way again and again and again,” Pete says.

As we talk, I feel like a kid. I’ve had to be at my most compliant, charming, and persuasive in order to get the invisible Judy to bend the rules and send the non-identifying information about me to Billie. Thank God for my English accent and years of learning how to conceal my anger about unreasonable rules.

Pete’s voice sounds warm and familiar across the telephone lines.

“Some of the adoptive parents are waking up,” he’s saying. “Like any parents, the good ones do what’s best for the kids, and they’re trying to get the records opened. The ones who are fighting to keep the records closed are scared.”

“Of what?”

“Losing their kids to the birth parents.”

“But I’m—they’re—not looking for a replacement mother! They just need to know who they came from! I mean in my case—well, nothing can take away the fact that Mum and Dad are my parents.”

“It’s not just some of the adoptive parents,” Pete says. “It’s also the Catholic Church. They’re deliberately distorting the facts. They know that in the states where records are open, abortion rates have actually dropped, but they pretend it’s the other way around.”

“But why would the Church do that?”

Pete’s laugh is tempered by something else.

“Some say the bishops are nervous that priests who have been birth fathers will be in a whole lot of trouble if the birth mothers are found. Not just the bishops, either. There’s a lot of more-moral-than-thou political types who’d look pretty bad if the adoption records were opened. Find the birth mothers and that leads to the name of the fathers.”

Of course.

“America is full of adopted kids who will die earlier than necessary because they’re being stopped from finding out the truth about their own medical histories. Heck, it makes me mad!”

“Yes,” I say, “I can see that.”

The injustice of it takes me away from myself for a moment as I listen to this low American voice talking to me from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of the country from which I came.

“And the crazy thing—the thing the people in power and the people who make money from adoption are trying to keep quiet—is that ninety-eight percent of birth mothers actually want to be found!”

“There’s a relief!” I say. I’m sipping a cup of Darjeeling tea. My head is spinning as I try to take all of this in.

“The two percent of birth mothers who don’t want to be found—well, they have the same right as any other American citizen to take out an injunction if they don’t want contact.”

My heart tightens at the thought of it. My God. Treating an adopted person who just wants to meet her mother like a stalker would be the greatest cruelty of all.

“I’m a Christian,” Pete says. “I read the Bible. And it says in the Bible, right there, clear, pure and simple: ‘The truth shall set you free.’”

After I hang up the phone, his last words ring in my head as I drift into the first full night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks: “They think they’re doing God’s work in keeping you and your mother apart. But really they’re doing the work of the devil.”

I
’M NOT GOING TO WRITE
what happened next, bit by bit. I could go into great detail, describing the trembling that just won’t stop, not even when Pete calls giving me Billie’s details, telling me he’s given her mine. The standing in the middle of the room unable to move. The whirlwind in my head. All that.

People don’t want to know about the darkest bits, do they? They don’t want to know about the banshees dancing like furry black demons through your dreams in the night.

I will say this: It nearly kills me, the waiting. The uncertainty. The fear that she will change her mind.

But I’d rather write about the elation when she sends me an e-mail. Finally, at last, for the first time in twenty-eight years, I know who, and where, and how she is.

There is only one person with whom I feel I can share what I feel when I read this letter.

And, because on this night everything is falling into place, he writes back immediately.

O
NE OF THE PROBLEMS
for a girl meeting her mother for the first time as a fully grown adult is what to wear. Billie’s the owner of a company. I don’t want to put her off. So the next day—another rainy London day—I go to Laura Ashley, where I settle on the dark blue dress with the white lace collar, as per Charlotte’s suggestion.

When I get home, I find Mum in my kitchen. She has been at the flat all day, throwing out stale food, washing and ironing my clothes, and cleaning dirty ashtrays. Unspeakable chaos has been transformed into order.

I’m so grateful, for a moment I can’t speak.

Mum’s wearing the shiny plastic apron she gave me for Christmas, which she must have found at the bottom of my cupboard. It’s got a bowl of fruit on it.

“Oh, darling,” Mum says. “You’re absolutely soaking wet. Don’t you have a raincoat?”

“I couldn’t find it, and I was running late, so…”

“It was under the bed,” she says, “I hung it up. You can wear it tomorrow if it’s still raining. Oh, darling. Come in, for goodness sake.”

I don’t move. My throat aches with the strain of trying not to cry. I know this thing I have to do is hard for her, whatever she says.

“I’m so sorry, Mum, about the birth mother thing,” I say finally. “I’m sorry I have to do it. You do know it doesn’t mean I don’t love you, you do know that, don’t you?”

I long to hug my mother, but I know she won’t like that. She’s wearing her light blue cashmere jumper, and I’m dripping all over the rug.

Mum goes to the airing cupboard, gets out one of the towels she folded an hour before, and hands it to me. Then she goes into the kitchen, puts on the kettle, and takes out the roast chicken she’s cooking in the oven. Hugged or not, I feel calmed by her presence, and I eat my first full meal in days.

“You did this when you were a baby, you know,” Mum says.

“What?”

“You stopped eating.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Soon after you were born. They took you to a foster home, because they weren’t sure you’d make it. Apparently there had been some sort of trauma at your birth, and you were reacting badly, and they didn’t want to give us a baby that might die, because it could be upsetting. It was probably nothing. You know how dramatic the Americans can be.”

I smile. So does she.

“Anyway, for whatever reason, they took you to a foster home and said we could either wait for you or apply for another baby if we preferred.”

“God, I’m glad you didn’t take them up on that!”

“So am I, darling.” Mum smiles at me and pats my hand across the table.

We sit quietly for a moment. I’ve never heard this story before. I don’t want her to stop talking.

“What was the trauma, Mum?”

“They wouldn’t tell us,” Mum says. “Only that it was life-threatening. We didn’t feel it was our place to ask what happened. I told Mrs. Dillard that we would take our chances, and she said that in that case I could go and visit you at the foster home. I went every day.”

“What was the home like?”

“Small. And there were several babies, all lying in cots in the same room. I think the foster mother, who was very nice, had rather too many babies to look after, so she didn’t have time to pick you up much.”

It’s dark outside now. The English rain is drizzling into the plant pot containing a long-dead cactus. The Abbey bell rings. The fridge hums.

“When I first saw you, you were all scrunched up and you looked as nervous as I was. You were so tiny, and I felt so big, and I had no idea what to do with you. But when I did pick you up, it felt quite natural, and we both calmed down.”

Just like today. I look across at the still, kind, wise face of the mother I’ve known all my life, and my heart hurts.

“I went to the foster home every day after that, and fed you your bottle, and you’d stare at me while you were drinking your milk. I told you that everything was going to be all right, and you hung on to my finger for dear life.

“Each day, when it was time for me to leave, I gave you a little kiss. And you clung to me, and I held your tiny heart against mine and felt it calming down until you fell asleep. Then I’d lay you down in your cot, creep quietly away, and come back at the same time the next day. The foster-care people said your condition started to improve after I started coming to visit you. Within six weeks you were home and our new family had begun.”

As Mum talks, she’s a young woman again. She’s not with me in the kitchen. She’s with the baby that was.

“Once a week, Deidre Martin, Sally Thorne, and the other expat wives would get together at somebody’s house and have tea. You wouldn’t let anyone pick you up except me, you know! Once I left you with Deidre while I popped out for five minutes. You were so cross, you turned blue and were sick all over the Dutch ambassador’s wife.”

Her laugh is clear and young. I laugh too.

“But then,” she says, “on your first birthday, something happened, for no reason I could ascertain. It was as if, after weighing everything up, you decided that the world was a safe place after all, and you stopped fussing and clinging whenever I went out and simply decided to be happy. You were a very easy child after that, and not just with me, with everybody.”

I ache with love for this woman I can’t quite reach. Mum and Charlotte have always managed to click quite naturally. But not Mum and me. Perhaps it’s because Charlotte grew in her tummy and I didn’t. I don’t know.

“Darling,” she says, “nothing can affect our feelings for each other, whatever happens.”

We don’t say “I love you” in England. Not like the Americans do. I think the British find it embarrassing, generally speaking.

Right now I wish Mum and I were American so I could tell her I love her. Straight. Just like that. But we’re not. And Mum would hate it. So I don’t.

“The woman at the agency said I should take it slowly, not jump in.”

“Nonsense!” Mum says. “You’re a jumper! Just like at the swimming pool. You’ve always preferred to plunge right in.” In some ways she knows me better than anyone.

I don’t say anything—we both know that she and Charlotte pussyfoot around the sides of swimming pools that are eighty-five degrees, dipping their toes in and out, taking half an hour to get in up to their waists.

I grin at her. She smiles back. She looks sad, for a moment.

I rise and scrape the chicken bone off my plate. Mum puts on a pair of plastic yellow washing-up gloves, picks up the Fairy Liquid, and starts on the dishes. I dry and put them away in the cupboard. When we’re finished, there’s no clutter to be seen. The kitchen looks cleaner than it has in months, and I am greatly comforted by it.