Tree of Strangers Read online

  We moved in the following week. The school and kindy and Ponsonby Road were in easy walking distance. Catherine sent over bunks and we set them up in the bigger bedroom. After months sharing mattresses pushed together, the girls did not want to be apart.

  We started out in my bed, in the room I would come to love. It was Rachel’s turn to choose the book. Are You My Mother? by P. D. Eastman. Mavis had read it to me as a child, my heart racing with the fear the bird would never find its mother. I cried as I read it now, and the girls buried themselves beneath my arms, they touched my face and counted my fingers. We were a very touchy family and I basked in the solace of my children.

  Later, when the girls were asleep, Hampster knocked on the door and I let him in. He wore his yellow boots and looked around at our meagre belongings. ‘You’ve done well,’ he said, and tried to hold me against the wall to kiss me. He’d completed his divorce and was on the way to the airport to pick up his new girlfriend.

  I pushed him away. ‘Is it serious?’ I asked.

  He touched my forehead where tiny red jewels of windscreen glass still slipped through the skin. He smiled without embarrassment and dug into his bag and took out a small diamond ring. ‘But you’ll always be the one for me,’ he said, and he glanced up the stairs and pocketed the ring.

  I knew my children were an issue for him. He wanted his own.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said and pushed him out the door.

  I walked through the house full of old-fashioned features like glossy green tiles around the fireplace and space for bookshelves. The doors were solid panelled wood. The laundry was a shed outside and there was an old apricot tree in the middle of the fenced back yard. I set up the stereo and put in a Van Morrison tape.

  My ankle and my back ached all the time. But I took a pillow and held it tight, and danced around and through the two small rooms, out to the kitchen and back again. I was home.

  20

  Clarence Street forever

  Apart from my children, 89 Clarence Street was the first good thing that had happened in my life, the perfect house in the neighbourhood I dreamed about. At night the streetlamp caught the leadlight windows. White gauze curtains billowed in the breeze. The stairs creaked, the house speaking to me in the sleepless dark. The girls found friends on the street and they played in and out of each other’s homes.

  In my memory, it was always summer on Clarence Street. The washing line full of dry sheets, the front porch bathed in the early morning sun. We had a succession of disappearing cats and, for a short while, a too-large dog Hampster had acquired and discarded.

  Bruce was a teacher by then, quickly becoming the head of an English department. He kept his word and refused to help us beyond the minimal government-mandated child support. There were days with not enough food. But I learned to budget and save, and somehow the kids didn’t notice.

  One evening we walked past the bright lights and laughter at Prego. We stopped to read the menu displayed on a stand outside. I went back to my budgeting. If I ate before we went, we could afford a large pizza with everything on it for the girls and a glass of wine for me. It became our monthly ritual. We’d walk through the Tole Street park, the girls running down the sides of the skate bowl and up to Ponsonby Road. We always ordered the pizza. ‘You’re the richest poor people I know,’ a mother from the school said when we took the table next to her.

  A friend of Hampster’s assembled a group of women and invited me to lunch. My generalised anxiety kicked in. Everything else about my life felt inadequate. My op-shop clothes and lack of education, my divorced-single-mother status. I walked to the café and watched from across the road. The women arrived in a group. With their film industry careers and expensive handbags, they were confident and assured. I almost turned and left. But one of them saw me and waved, as if she already knew me. Meryl sat next to me. She put a hand over her breast and I knew she had a baby. I liked her and wanted her to like me. We exchanged addresses and she paid for my lunch. I left the restaurant and caught the bus to the library, ready to break my promise to Jeannie.

  The man Jeannie said was my father featured in dozens of books. There were photos of Jo Bonnier at racetracks, with famous drivers and beautiful women. In one he was standing on the sweeping lawn of a large house on the shores of Lake Geneva. There was a photo of an apartment with a racing car on the wall. And another of his wife with a scarf around her head, her eyes hidden behind large sunglasses. They were such beautiful people. I could not imagine myself in their world.

  I took home a documentary on VHS. The Speed Merchants followed drivers like Mario Andretti during the 1972 season. I sat in my living room in Ponsonby and watched the grainy images from Le Mans. The filmmaker had captured the crash that killed the man I now thought of as my father. They were racing at 180 miles an hour down a long, eerie straight. And then Jo made a mistake. His bumper clipped another on a slight bend, catapulting his car into the trees. In the film, the other driver jumps from his burning vehicle. He runs across the racetrack towards the billowing smoke. The narrator, Vic Elford, says he saw Jo’s car spinning in the air like a helicopter. ‘It hurts when you lose a friend,’ Elford says. ‘And on Sunday morning, we lost Jo.’20 For many years I dreamed of that burning car in the forest and the burning plane on the tarmac.

  It took me months to gather the courage to call the international directory. ‘I’m looking for an address in Stockholm,’ I said. There were a dozen listings for the Bonniers, but no private addresses or phone numbers.

  ‘I imagine they’re unlisted,’ the operator said. I was about to hang up when she suggested looking elsewhere in Sweden. ‘I have a Kim Bonnier in Malmo.’

  My same-age brother. Today they might describe us as twiblings. Siblings born at the same time to different mothers who share the same father. I lay on the floor, in front of the fire, the children sleeping upstairs, writing and rewriting to Kim. It was not the same as writing to my mother. I did not want to give too much away. Instinctively, I knew money would be an issue.

  Meryl arrived with gin and tonic. She surveyed the floor covered in the failed letters as I explained what I was doing. ‘You’re terrified of finding them in case they reject you,’ she said. That night we talked about love and children and enduring all storms. We talked about my two sisters in Spain and their life without their mother. And Meryl was right. I had been nursing a hope of reunion, a fairy tale of return, fraught with risk.

  Reunion stories fill our reality television programming and our women’s magazines. I’ve heard adoption reunions described as ‘Oprah moments’. Mothers and daughters falling into each other’s arms are good entertainment.

  But those shows serve a purpose beyond tear-jerking spectacle. They help to conceal the real effects of removing babies from their mothers. They tell us we can step out of the closet of adoption without consequences. They assume that in reunion we find completion. As if on meeting a stranger the miracle of kin will wipe away all loss.

  Psychologists call it ‘the family romance’. A look-alike mother, a father with the same sense of humour. Their unconditional love filling the holes created by stranger adoption. Such a simple thing, blood connecting with blood, and everything is all right in the world.

  But we also crave the stories of failed reunion. These prove the underlying belief that the adopted family is no different from the natural. That adoption is a better option than supporting a mother and her child to stay together.

  In 2002, the Children’s Society in the United Kingdom commissioned a study on adoption search and reunion. They looked at the long-term nature of restored relationships of 500 people. They found over 70 per cent of searchers failed to feel an instant bond with their birth parent. One in six new relationships broke down within twelve months. After eight years, 43 per cent abandoned the relationship. Rose Wallace, one of the study authors, spoke to the Guardian at the time. She said a surprising number of reunions stop after one or two letters. Sometimes after a single face-to-face me
eting. She attributed that to pressure from the birth parent still grieving the loss of their child.

  As an adopted person, my story is public property even when I choose not to tell it. On learning that I am adopted, the first thing people always ask is, ‘Have you met your mother?’ If I answer no, they want to know why. As if there is something wrong with me for not wanting to know. But if I answer yes, the next question is often a version of ‘That must be hard on your parents.’ Or, ‘How do your parents feel about that?’

  The sense that it is my responsibility to assuage my adopters’ feelings is paramount. I must at all times honour the selfless care given to me. And I must find ways to justify my desire for reunion. The least offensive response is to say I’m seeking my medical history. The most offensive seems to be that I want an authentic identity. And the same rights that every non-adopted person enjoys.

  For all the years of growing up, my mother was a nameless presence that hovered close by. She was the perfect ghost mother, emanating a bright line of pure love. Instinctively I understood the coercion heaped upon her to relinquish her child. As an adult I know how impossible her situation was. But in the weeks following her death, a small part of me relaxed. I would never need to confront that core of dread, the suspicion that she’d not fought hard enough to keep me. That she had let them take me away. Or, as Mavis said, that she had willingly given me away.

  Meryl collected up all the copies of my letter to Kim and sorted through them. She selected one and made me sign it. She addressed the envelope and took it away to mail. I stayed home and waited.

  Weeks and months went by. I became obsessed, stalking the shelves at the public library. I amassed files of information about the Bonniers, and their publishing company. They led storied lives with legendary family celebrations and public battles. I made meaning from the smallest detail. They were scientists, artists and writers, and they were rich. They were the opposite of us.

  And then Catherine Saunders called me to interview for a job. The national contra coordinator on a Telethon. I pretended I knew what a contra organiser did. For the first week, I watched and listened, my senses on high alert, acting as if I was one of them, acting as if I belonged. From my first pay, I bought my first new clothes. A jacket, trousers and shoes. Ruth was in kindy and care, and Bonnie and Rachel were in school and an after-school programme.

  I was a solo mother with a house, a good friend, a challenging job and even a car with a warrant of fitness. Mavis and Max were talking to me again. They sent much-needed clothes for the girls and phoned to express their support. They invited us for Christmas. The girls made gifts, we chose our favourite music for the trip and packed the car and drove to Napier.

  21

  The snob

  Christmas in Napier with Mavis and Max. I had somewhere to take the girls.

  We arrived in a heat wave. Max had cut down the tree in front of the house to protect the guttering. But there was a swimming pool in the back yard, squeezed between the garage and a corrugated-iron fence. The girls played in the water all day. There was a Christmas tree in the corner of the living room and a scattering of presents.

  ‘Granddad, you could pretend to be Santa,’ Bonnie said to Max. ‘We could make you a beard with wool.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. On Christmas morning he handed out gifts. Clothes and pool toys for the girls, another nightie for me. His duties over, he returned to watching cricket on TV.

  Mavis kept to the kitchen. ‘You’re our guest,’ she said when I asked to help. I was a visitor, without birthright in that kitchen. Then. Now. Always. I’d left home unable to cook a thing.

  ‘So,’ I said, to break the silence. ‘I’ve found my father.’

  Mavis whisked eggs into sugar without looking up.

  The week before I’d read a short story, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, by Edgar Allan Poe. He says there is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient as that shuddering on the edge of a precipice.

  The smartest thing would have been to step away from the edge and talk about recipes. Instead, I stepped closer. ‘He was a Formula One race driver. Died at Le Mans. Swedish. Did you know I was Swedish?’

  Mavis was making a sponge cake to take to her niece’s house for Christmas lunch. ‘We’ve always loved you like our own,’ she said, and kept her focus on sifting the flour into a bowl.

  I gave her a quick hug. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The girls came running in. They wanted to try out their new inflatables. I blew them up and sat under a sun umbrella beside the pool.

  I knew the problem was mine. I am a chronic over-sharer. Dumping intimacies in unwilling laps. Small bombs designed to flush out an endorsement. I wanted my adopting parents to be curious about me. And, by extension, I wanted other people to notice me, to take an interest.

  I look at my kids and see snippets of me in an eye roll, in a comment or an exaggerated sneeze. And I wonder if this is what makes me want to know everything about them. To know them better is to know me. Instead, in my adopting parents’ house, I felt their indifference. I felt invisible.

  Mavis packed the back seat of their car with presents and her baking. She’d devoted many hours preparing for Christmas lunch. Max drove, and we followed in my car.

  My adopted cousin’s house was nearby. Most of the extended family was there. The garage door was up and the men sat in the greasy shade, clustered around a crate of beer. It was clear they’d started drinking early. The women were in the kitchen and the kids were screaming around the hard-packed earth in the back yard.

  One of the men came out to greet us. When the others turned away, he tried to kiss my cheek. ‘Come on, Barbie,’ he said. ‘Don’t be a snob.’

  I’d always felt at risk around him. He gave me a look, snide and complicit. As if he held something over me. He returned to the semicircle of men. Max joined them and one of them whistled and they laughed at something he’d said, just out of my hearing.

  There were no trees or shelter in the back yard. I helped carry the food to a table set up beneath a tarpaulin attached to the side of the garage. At a signal, everyone swooped on the roast potatoes and meats. The salad of sliced lettuce and hard-boiled eggs remained untouched. The men took their plates back to the garage and continued to drink. There was pavlova and sponge to finish.

  After the women had cleaned up, I noticed my cousins were missing. I found them huddled in a bedroom. ‘This is a family matter,’ one of them said when I opened the door.

  ‘Our grandmother’s headstone,’ another said as if that explained my exclusion.

  Part of me wanted to remind them she was my grandmother too, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Instead, I scooped up my kids and left. We went to the beach and played in a park and the girls fed the ducks with leftover sandwiches I found in the car.

  Mavis and Max returned hours later, silent and reproachful. I put the girls to bed and Mavis made tea while Max watched a rugby replay on VHS. She passed me a slice of leftover sponge.

  ‘I’m sorry for leaving,’ I said. ‘But I was not exactly made welcome.’

  Mavis squinted at me. ‘They are not the problem.’ Her cold voice had returned. ‘They’ve always worked extra-hard to make you feel welcome.’

  ‘They call me the snob,’ I said.

  She nodded as if she’d always known. ‘Maybe because you act like one.’

  ‘I don’t like sponge.’ I said, and pushed the plate away. ‘I’ll come back to visit you, but we won’t come to another family event like that. They’re all drunks.’

  The windows were shut against the night-time insects and I started to sweat in the compact heat.

  ‘I want to tell you something.’

  From the living room, we heard Max jump up and yell, ‘Come on,’ and then, ‘You beauty,’ as a player scored a try.

  ‘M tried to put his hands on me when I was fourteen.’

  ‘You’ve never been truthful,’ Mavis said. She used her
fingers to pick up a large piece of cake.

  I watched as she ate it. ‘Like a genetic defect?’ I asked.

  She turned away. ‘I don’t know, but I’ve wondered for a long time if there is something wrong with you.’

  The transgressions of adopted people are a Hollywood staple. The Good Son, Case 39, Problem Child and The Omen all use adoption as shorthand for evil. The original tag line for the hit horror film Orphan was: ‘It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own.’ Even the Grinch’s vengeful behaviour is explained away by his adopted status.

  When we try to understand depravity in a person, we reach for ways they must be different from us. We look first to nurture. The murderer came from a dysfunctional family. He was bullied at school or grew up with drugs or poverty or a single mother. We work to place the blame anywhere but on the individual. Unless that individual is adopted.

  In the book Serial Killers, author Joel Norris says of the five hundred recorded serial killers in recent US history, 16 per cent grew up in adopted families. This, despite adopted people representing only 2 to 3 per cent of the general population. These figures pop up often in the media. There’s never a source reference. They lack time frames and qualifiers. Family situations, the age of adoption or previous placements are all missing.

  Dr Tracy L. Carlis, a clinical psychologist who specialises in adoption, says many of us suffer from Adopted Child Syndrome. We lie and steal and fail to bond. We are defiant with authority and commit acts of violence. Many studies reveal our over-representation in a range of negative statistics. From juvenile criminal systems, prison and psychiatric institutions, to drug and alcohol rehabilitation. We also have a greater chance of an externalising mental health disorder. Carlis says we are predisposed to become serial killers.

  Whether or not we are good citizens, adoption unmoors us from our history and forces us to stand alone in the world. Dr David Kirschner says we live with sealed original birth records, and a childhood of secrets, lies and frustrated searches for birth parents. He says untreated, festering adoption issues of loss, rejection, abandonment, identity and dissociated rage are all normal reactions to adoption. No matter how well we have integrated into our new families, we remain ‘other’. We are cuckoos in the nest.