Tree of Strangers Page 10

  And all this time it has been my limbic brain on relinquishment. As if self is a separate thing, unrelated and always out of reach. Recalled but not remembered.

  In the poem ‘Lady Mink: A Sort of Requiem’, Marylyn Plessner asks: ‘Who hurt you, once, so far beyond repair.’18

  I now understand it was my mother. But then Fred, her father, hurt her beyond repair. And I, in my turn, fear for the hurt I have caused my own children. Pearls of damage strung together down the generations.

  Jeannie sat with Rachel on her lap, plaiting her hair. The girls had taken to her, showing off their drawings and their makeshift rooms. She had brought sticky buns with her, and I made fresh tea and laid it out like a picnic for the girls.

  ‘Your mother came looking for you, you know,’ Jeannie said. ‘You were five or six. She was living in Sydney, in love finally, and they came to New Zealand to meet with Dr Gleeson.’ She took my hands between hers. ‘The doctor told her you were happy and it would be a criminal act to look for you.’

  I felt a jolt of recall. A memory of the Onekawa swimming pools, as I lay sprawled in the shallows, the sun burning my back. A woman sat on the concrete lip nearby, her feet in the water. I could feel her eyes on me. She smiled and waved and I used my hands to propel myself towards her. I was almost there when Mavis rushed over, scooped me from the water and carried me away.

  18

  Sort of an orphan

  Jeannie postponed her meeting and stayed till mid-afternoon. We took the girls for a walk around Victoria Park. The rain had disappeared as fast as it arrived. And the sky was Auckland blue, the weeds around the park edges wilting in the heat. I had so many questions.

  ‘How did you meet Pam?’ I asked Jeannie. Whenever I said my mother’s name, I wanted to call her Mummy. I rolled the word around in silence, feeling the intimacy held within its soft vowels. I felt I had no right to use it.

  Jeannie gave a half-smile. ‘Through my husband. The Wellington am-dram scene.’ She described the world of amateur dramatics as ‘wine, cheese and behind the scenes’. ‘There was an indiscretion. Your mother, my husband. I think she only went to a couple of table-reads.’ She laughed and did not seem at all bitter. ‘For a while, I thought it must be his baby. But the timing was wrong.’

  ‘You knew she slept with your husband?’ Her calm amazed me.

  Jeannie nodded. ‘He was always hopeless at hiding his affairs.’

  ‘But you cared for her after?’ The words ‘after I was born’ stuck in my throat. That empty time, ten days alone, when I was no one’s cherished newborn, threatened to swamp me. I fought back the tears. Jeannie didn’t seem to notice. It occurred to me that those days alone in a nursery had caused me to avoid a stranger’s touch.

  ‘I did care for her,’ Jeannie said. ‘I met the train from Napier and took her home with me. She helped with my kids and she modelled for my brother who was trying to be a photographer. My husband was under quarantine. Well, they both were really.’ Her laugh was as I remembered it from our first phone conversation.

  We sat on a park bench in the heat. The girls chased a flock of seagulls that rose and drifted back down just out of reach. I understood then that I really had escaped from Runanga. That other life was over.

  ‘She got a job. Air hostess with NAC,’ Jeannie continued. ‘She took the Invercargill shifts. No one else wanted to stay overnight down there. She told me she walked all around the town looking into prams, always looking for you.’

  We followed the girls toward the swings.

  ‘It was a terrible time in her life,’ Jeannie said. ‘In the end, it was a good thing she gave you up. You seem very well adjusted.’

  I smiled and reassured her I’d had a happy life.

  Jeannie lifted Ruth onto a swing. Bonnie and Rachel grabbed the others, and we stood behind, pushing to get them started.

  ‘If only she’d survived,’ Jeannie said. ‘She would have loved this. Her granddaughters.’

  ‘Do you know who my father is?’ The words leapt from my mouth.

  Jeannie became evasive. ‘I can’t tell you for sure.’

  I did not want to beg. It felt shameful even asking. ‘So, she never mentioned him?’

  Jeannie ran her hand through her hair. ‘A little. She was distraught at his rejection, but she played those cards very close. And he was married, of course. But she hinted, and when you told me your daughter’s name …’ She nodded towards Bonnie. ‘I’ll tell you if you promise never to seek out his family.’

  I agreed without hesitation, knowing, even then, I would not keep my promise.

  ‘He was Swedish,’ she said.

  I had assumed he would be British, like my mother. It had never occurred to me that I could be half Swedish.

  ‘His name was Jo Bonnier.’

  The name made me shiver. Bonnie with an R. When my eldest daughter was born, there was no doubt her name would be Bonnie. And yet it did not relate to anything or anyone I knew.

  ‘There’s lots about him in the library.’ Jeannie pushed Ruth higher on the swing. ‘He was a Formula One driver. He died in 1972.’

  Found and lost in one sentence. I would have been twelve.

  ‘How did he die?’ I asked.

  ‘Racing at Le Mans,’ she said. ‘His car went into the trees and burst into flame.’

  Bonnie and Rachel squealed as they lifted their legs, forcing their swings higher, closer to that moment of weightlessness. I tried to follow Jeannie’s words, but all I could think was both my parents burned to death. Eleven years apart. He was forty-two when he died. My mother and her mother were forty-two when they died. I looked up into the canopy of plane trees and considered the possibility that I had sixteen years left.

  ‘They called him the gentleman racer,’ Jeannie continued. ‘He was very handsome. I’ll send you a photocopy I took from a library book. He’s on a podium with a wreath of leaves around his neck. There were two sons. One of them is the same age as you.’

  We pushed the swings in silence. I should have asked her more questions, but all I felt was a void where emotion should be.

  The girls were hungry and Jeannie had to leave. She kissed them goodbye and hugged me. ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘You promised. It would be too hard for those boys to have you turn up, out of the blue.’

  As we walked home, the girls argued about who flew highest into the sky. I wondered if Jeannie had any idea how hurtful her comments were. Everyone was entitled to their heritage, except the ‘well-adjusted’ adopted person.

  I did not feel well adjusted. It was a lot to take in. Swedish. Racing driver, dead before I had a chance to know him. Legitimate sons.

  A few weeks before I’d seen the movie Blade Runner. Daryl Hannah plays the replicant Pris with a cold fragility. When she said the words, ‘I’m sort of an orphan,’ I was struck by their stark reality. Then Rick Deckard, whose job it is to exterminate replicants, administers the Voight-Kampff test on Rachael, played by Sean Young. When Rachael leaves the room, Tyrell, her maker, admits she does not know she’s an android. He has implanted her with false memories. ‘We gift them the past,’ he says. ‘Right down to a snapshot of a mother she never had, a daughter she never was.’

  I put my hand to my chest to still the pain radiating from beneath my ribs. After, in the foyer, I listened to filmgoers enthralled by the special effects, by Harrison Ford’s body and the futuristic sets. But all I could think of was Rachael’s shock as she learns all her memories are not hers. She was staring into the abyss of her emptiness, so crushed by the realisation, she couldn’t even speak.

  Tyrell created Rachael to serve a need. Just as adopted people are often acquired to resolve infertility. Rachael was so like her creators; she thought she was one of them. In science fiction, this sense of being virtually identical to a human is called the uncanny valley. Someone or something real but not entirely authentic. And that’s me. That feeling underpins my sense of self. To make sure, I took the Voight-Kampff test. The results declared
me mostly human, which somehow makes sense.

  Christine returned later. She was working as an assistant director on The Navigator, the Vincent Ward film. She described her long days as frantic, awe-inspiring and exhausting. The girls climbed all over her the minute she arrived. In quick time we had become lifelong friends. I’d even visited a lawyer to make her their legal guardian if anything happened to me.

  As soon as the girls were in bed, I went to the bathroom. I wanted to submerge myself in water. But all we had was a line of toilet cubicles and a makeshift shower that leaked. I sat against the wall, listening to the tap dripping, and began to bang my head on the cold tiles. I wanted a singular pain, specific and sharp enough to overcome the nebulous other. I had no right to grieve the loss of my unknown father. His death belonged to his wife and sons. Just as my mother’s death belonged to her husband and daughters.

  Christine came in and stood over me. She wiped away a smear of blood from the tiles with toilet paper and led me to the sofa the film company had left behind. She opened a bottle of wine and put a blanket over our knees. I had no words to explain my nameless rage.

  ‘You have a right to be angry,’ she said in a way that gave me quiet comfort. ‘You can’t change what happened when you were born, but to also miss the chance of a reunion. That’s painful. And sad.’

  She talked about her father. Of his love and his emotional distance. Her mother died when she was eleven and her life split in two. ‘We’re all fucked,’ she said, and we toasted the mess of our lives.

  I sat curled up on that sofa thinking about the parents I’d grown up with. They were not bad people. I had taken their lives as my own, their siblings as my aunts, their parents as my grandparents. But no matter the words used, they had not considered me as one of their own.

  We finished the bottle of wine. ‘Let’s dance,’ Christine said. She put in a mixtape someone had given her and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who By Fire’ came on.

  ‘Spooky,’ Christine said as we listened to the music.

  Cohen had taken the lyrics from the liturgy of the Day of Atonement. The fate of the unrepentant sinner sealed, his existence blotted from the book of life. And I thought of the mother and father I would never meet. All right then, I thought, I’m sort of an orphan. Pull yourself together, what choice do you have?

  The girls woke up and we exchanged Leonard Cohen for Madonna. ‘Into the Groove’. We lifted the children in turn, twirling them by their hands. We cranked up the music and spun around the converted office, around our joys and the pain that drove us. Dancing for today. Tomorrow I would have to find a new place to live, or they would take my children.

  19

  Your phantom baby

  The women from Social Welfare came back the next month. I’d viewed multiple houses. One was infested with mice. Another had mould-speckled ceilings, and yet another had slipped sideways from its foundations. None was affordable. The women smiled their professional smiles. The smaller one suggested I needed to look harder. The other implied if I could not afford to keep my kids I should send them back to their father. They would allow me another two weeks.

  Not long after, a television company moved in next door. The producer was a woman, the same age my mother would have been. I felt a pull towards her. She wore business clothes with flair, and statement earrings. Her name was Catherine Saunders. Every day I invented reasons to place myself in her path in our shared foyer until she came to tea.

  I showed her around.

  ‘You’ve turned this into a lovely home,’ she said, and I wanted to cry. I knew how precarious my life was. I woke up most mornings with vertigo, my toes curled around a gaping edge. Christine had gone back to Canada to work on a new film. Mavis and Max were silent. I had so little money, three children, no family and no friends. I felt a humiliating desire to throw my arms around Catherine’s waist and hold on.

  When Jeannie had run her hand through her hair in the park, I’d wanted to do the same. I’d yearned to touch her hair, to smell her skin, to feel the safety of her arms.

  I often wonder about touch. I remember the feel of each of my babies and their absolute softness. The little dip at the back of Bonnie’s neck. Rachel’s warm cheek, and the smattering of freckles down Ruth’s spine. And later, when Lili was born, that tiny fold behind her ears.

  Each of them sought me out instinctually, turning towards my voice, their eyes widening at the smell of breast milk. Their fingers moving in the air as freely as dust motes.

  I try to imagine Mavis holding me at ten days old. Her new mother nerves and the stranger child. Did she clasp me tight or hold me away from her body? When the matron of the Salvation Army home handed me over, was Mavis’s phantom child nearby? The one she’d lost when Max drove their car over a bank. The miscarriage that was enough to take away all her future babies.

  In her heartrending poem ‘Phantom Child’, Emily Long says, ‘I don’t know what she looks like, but I see her everywhere.’ She describes all the ways she is haunted by her stillborn child. ‘She walks with me, every day, this child of mine who never took a breath in this life with me.’19

  Today they would say I’d failed to bond with Mavis. Or she with me. I know she tried. I am sure she followed Dr Gleeson’s advice to act ‘as if’ I was born to her. But I wonder if her phantom child visited her dreams. Like a secret lover. A ghost child who nuzzled her neck and reached down into her blouse to touch her breast for comfort.

  The work of Stefano Vaglio explores the mystery of how infants identify their mother’s breast. Olfaction, he says, is the mutual recognition of biological similarity between a mother and her newborn. It starts early in gestation and continues through birth, and long after.

  It turns out there’s a patch of sensory cells, the vomeronasal organ, within the main nasal chamber. Until recently we thought of this as vestigial, a remnant discarded during evolution. But babies use this organ to identify their mother’s milk from the moment of birth.

  I love the idea of an innate adaptive response as our first and most basic survival skill. It kicks in while the mother is still in a post-birth phase, before she has acquired the maternal memory to identify her child’s cry or respond to her need. The baby leading the mother into breastfeeding, initiating the fourth trimester of gestation, as she inches toward the breast that will sustain her.

  But what about adopting mothers? How do they bond in the absence of such fundamental processes? Today, the doctor might suggest the Newman-Goldfarb protocol for induced lactation.

  The non-biological mother can force lactation through supplementing with synthetic galactagogues. Doctors often prescribe a drug designed for nausea. Some take antipsychotics to increase prolactin levels. Many go on the contraceptive pill to up their progesterone. Supporters of the protocol say milk produced in this way is equivalent to natural milk. But breast milk is a magical, immune-boosting elixir. It can change taste, smell, colour and composition to meet a baby’s need, even during a feed. There is no evidence lactation produced using the protocol responds in the same way. Given the dynamic composition of natural milk, it’s hard to know what they tested. No one knows how these drugs might affect a baby.

  For adopted people, this protocol can be confronting. On the one hand, many of us suffer from touch deprivation. We have an aching desire for connection. We long for the physical intimacy of our mothers. And yet many of us recoil at the idea of suckling at the breast of our adopter.

  And no, it’s not the same as wet nursing or the sharing of breast milk in times of war and famine. The protocol is about a woman’s desire to feel like a legitimate mother. To mimic everything the natural mother might experience. To convince herself, and the world, she has her own child. As if no other mother ever existed.

  In the song ‘The Whole Night Sky’, Bruce Cockburn sings about knowing he made it too hard, and how every touch was a laceration.

  That’s me. I am a disloyal and transgressive adopted person. I know that despite her caring, her love a
nd her desire, Mavis never smelled like my mother. And I imagine I never felt like her child, not really, not if she’d ever experienced the difference.

  There is a word I love. Solastalgia. It’s a neologism that refers to a deep feeling for lost landscapes. It’s meant to cover the loss of the built world, or nature ravaged by climate change. But for me it expresses a longing for the architecture and environment of my mother’s body. Her skin and hair. Her breath and, most of all, her smell. All those things woven into my psyche, recalled but not remembered.

  Perhaps Catherine Saunders felt my desire. She hooked her arm through mine, took me on a tour of their office and introduced me to people. ‘You should see the home she created next door,’ she said to one young co-worker.

  Her endorsement gave me courage. As we said goodbye I mentioned I’d be moving soon. I told her about the Social Welfare women and their insistence that I find a home.

  She patted my shoulder. ‘Everything always works out,’ she said.

  A few days later, she came over and held out her hand, palm up. ‘Keys,’ she said. ‘A house in Ponsonby. The council owns it. If you like it, their rent is very reasonable.’

  I stared at her in disbelief. She smiled and hugged me. ‘The mayor’s my friend,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Oh, and I might have a job for you. We can talk next week.’

  Bonnie had started school at Ponsonby Primary and Rachel was in kindergarten. I picked them up in the car I’d bought with my share of the marriage money — an old Vauxhall Viva with a rusted hole in the floor and doors that leaked in the rain.

  As we drove down Clarence Street in the heart of Ponsonby, the girls shouted the numbers. As we neared 89, my heart raced. I knew this house. Hampster had driven me this way when we’d first arrived in Auckland. I’d noticed the three stucco houses in a row, their mirror twins across the street. Two up, two down, as though built for the old country, for immigrants longing for home.