Tree of Strangers Page 7
I called Mavis and Max from a phone box. Mavis’s voice was full of surprise.
‘I’ll get Dad,’ she said. We’d never had a conversation without his presence. On the phone, he would pick up the extension. There were no shared intimacies unless he was part of it. No mother–daughter secrets. We’d never once been for lunch or shopping or any outing that did not involve the two of them.
I kept the conversation short. I was in Wellington to meet someone and could I stay the night?
It was rush hour on the train to Upper Hutt. The wind came up, flinging the sea over the tracks that ran along the margin of the harbour. Fresh rain pitted the surface of the water. I wondered if Fred had gone home, or if they’d kept him in hospital. I thought of the sun-drenched images from the VHS. I wanted to walk the pathways above that calm and distant sea. I longed for arid hills. For a dry and sapless heat to smother the damp.
We waited as Upper Hutt Station emptied of people. The car park was soon deserted. Late sun crept across the litter and oil stains. I had no idea how I would explain things to them.
It was not that I had no right to find my family, it was that they did not recognise I had one. My desires did not exist because there was no framework for them to exist within.
I needed to put Ruth down and stretch my body. Mavis and Max arrived late. He always drove. He had allowed her only recently to get her licence. ‘Cricket?’ I asked. I knew from experience they were late because he’d been listening to cricket on the radio. He could not miss a second. Mavis inclined her head. An acknowledgement and a warning.
We drove without speaking to their stucco home at the end of a cul-de-sac in the middle of a seventies subdivision. The air pressure was dropping, the storm from Wellington circling Totara Park.
Mavis and Max did not ask questions. If they were curious about anything, they kept it between them. They were waiting for me to explain why I’d come. ‘If she wants to tell us, she’ll tell us,’ was one of Mavis’s sayings. I look back, amazed at how everything controversial was off-limits. We did not debate in our family. We did not disagree or argue a point. And most of all we did not contradict Max.
Mavis made dinner. As always she refused my offer of help. Max grumbled as she sent him to get the battered high chair from the garage.
In the living room, I sat on the floor in front of the console that held the record player. My old records were still here, and I pulled out Bruce Cockburn’s album Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws and put it on. Ruth clapped and I turned it up for his song ‘Wondering Where the Lions Are’.
The song consumed me in inexplicable grief. I shut my eyes and lifted my small daughter and danced with her.
Max came in and turned it off. The silence felt like the last moments under the bath water, balanced on the edge of a different eternity. ‘Set the table,’ he said. ‘You’re not a teenager anymore.’
I laid out the cutlery and sat down to feed Ruth. Breastfeeding made them uncomfortable.
‘Does she eat real food yet?’ Mavis asked.
Did I read too much into her comment? In their home, I was as sensitive as the millibars of the barometer nestled in my suitcase. I wondered if it had picked up the weight of the squall pressing down on us.
Mavis served, and we took our places at the table and began to eat.
‘I’ve been at my grandfather’s house,’ I said. They looked at each other and returned to their chops and mashed potatoes.
The Earth rotates from west to east, dragging the atmosphere with it. Birds fly away from low-pressure systems as if they know a change is coming. All I felt was a wind of fury. I wanted to be in the eye of a storm. I wanted the shock of thunder, the burn of lightning. I wanted to hurt them. But most of all, I wanted them to respond, to engage in a real way. But we continued to eat, like an ordinary family, no different from any other.
‘Did you hear about the plane crash in Madrid a few weeks ago?’
Max nodded and mentioned the fog and pilot error. This was an acceptable topic for conversation.
I took a deep breath. ‘My mother was on that plane.’ A polar wind wrapped itself around us. ‘She was on her way here, to New Zealand. To meet me.’
Mavis let out a small, wounded sound. I took out the photo of Pamela that Betty had given me and held it up. Max placed his knife and fork on the table. He grabbed the photograph from my hand. He tore it in half and screwed it into a ball and threw it across the room.
‘There is your mother.’ He pointed to Mavis, his face red with anger.
Ruth began to cry, and I lifted her from the high chair and went to the spare bedroom. I pulled back the net curtains and opened the window onto the unpainted corrugated-iron fence. I wanted to leave. But there were no trains at night. I had no money for a taxi or a motel and all my energy was gone.
They usually stayed up late watching television. But tonight an old rugby match recorded on VHS boomed through the wall. I could hear Mavis washing the dishes.
When the house was quiet and Ruth was asleep, I tiptoed out to get a glass of water. Mavis was sitting in the dark. The crumpled photograph lay on the kitchen table. She had taped the two pieces together and had tried to smooth it out. I sat beside her and went to take her hand, but she pulled away.
‘We will not speak of this again,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll take you to the station in the morning.’ Her voice was devoid of warmth.
My desire to know my family and to share that with them had made me clumsy, unmindful of their feelings. Deep in the heart of stranger adoption is an unspoken contract. You are acquired to resolve childlessness. You cannot be both the cure for infertility and someone else’s child at the same time.
William Makepeace Thackeray said, ‘Mother is the name for God on the lips and in the hearts of little children.’12 By looking for my mother, I had failed to act as if I was born to my adopting parents. Over that meal, we were all undone by the failure and otherness of my blood. Nothing in me resembled them. I had named the elephant in the room. The spell cast at my birth was now broken.
I believe most adopted people experience this ‘otherness’. Even those who declare the success of their pairing. Nancy Verrier talks about the fear of dying experienced by a baby taken from its mother. To assuage that fear, we become alert to the signs and symbols of how not to be the ‘other’. We become mimics.
The French surrealist writer Caillois calls mimicry, or mimesis, a survival mechanism. It is the ability to turn into a copy of something else. Fitting in is a trick I carry with me. I had always thought of it as a sign of mastery. But Caillois says it indicates a lack of control. A type of subjugation to the dictates of the environment. He calls it spatial disorientation, a disturbance between personality and space.
Mimicry is not the same as belonging. We need deep ponds to contain the sediments of ancestry. All that primordial muck of inheritance. The stories of the drunks and saints and raconteurs are like the fossils of our forebears. Without them, our lives are as shallow as a puddle.
I have a love–hate relationship with family memoirs. All those detailed histories to draw on. The protagonists so often in flight from suffocating pasts, their resolutions found in return to the fold. But I had nothing to run from and no fold to return to.
Mavis and Max shared so little of themselves or their families. I knew the poverty of the West Coast of the South Island formed them. Their forebears were immigrants and settlers. Max’s father died young in a hit and run, his mother was taken by an asthma attack. He grew up Catholic in a town divided by religion. Mavis’s parents were farmers after the war. Their allocated land was so stony they walked away with nothing. She had wanted to stay at school but her father made her leave at fifteen. But even in writing these brief descriptions I feel like an intruder, with no right to connect their stories with mine.
There’s a little darkness in every family. But family secrets are inheritance too. We hear them or intuit them, and they become ours to tell or keep as we see fit. I’ll neve
r know if Mavis and Max would have shared themselves with their own children.
When Max told his workmates they were planning to adopt, the men cautioned him. ‘You don’t know what you’re getting,’ is how Mavis later relayed the wisdom of the Railway Workshops of Invercargill. Was that one remembered comment enough to cause Max’s relentless frost? His unconscious fear of the ‘other’?
‘But he made you a doll’s house,’ Mavis said when I once tried to broach his coldness with her. ‘What more evidence of his love do you need?’
I had forgotten about the doll’s house. There was a time when hobbies mattered. Max did paint-by-numbers. He painted a rocking horse. And assembled kitsets. I see him in the shed, late into the night, his dark hair slicked back as he bent to paint the tiny furniture. I wonder if he was making it for the other child? The invisible one whose shadow I carry, the one he might have had, the one I should have been. I loved that doll’s house and played with it for years. By the time I had my own children, Mavis had given it away to another family. ‘They love rugby,’ she’d said when I asked why.
Being with my grandfather that day, I felt comfort in his Manchester accent. I could have held his hand forever. Sitting beside him, I’d felt strangely normal. I learned more about Fred, his remorse, his heart and his life in that one visit than in all the years with my adopting father. And then it occurred to me. There was another father out there, just as there was another mother.
The next morning I took my damaged photograph and started my journey back to Runanga. This is good, I thought. They’ve revealed their hand. I can absorb this blow because it is the lowest point of my life. We can only rise above ourselves now.
Ah, my foolish optimism. We never did speak of that night again.
13
How many times can you change your name?
With three small children, nothing ever goes to plan. It took months to wind up our joint affairs, to sell our house and move from Runanga to Christchurch. I’d stopped tending the garden and the lawns were already too long for the push mower. Vines were consuming the chicken coop. As we drove away it began to rain and I could hear the distant ocean sucking at the gravel beach.
We had fought over the stupid stuff. The girls’ beds, the weaving loom he’d made me, the kitchen table. In his mind, it all belonged to him. My place in our family was through our children. By taking them away, I forfeited everything, including his financial support.
The Baptists came to his rescue. He forgave his parents their sins, and they took him back into the fold of family and religious support. They found him a manse on a sunny corner next to one of their empty churches. The world loves a single father. Especially after the devastation of a runaway wife. The Christian ladies brought him cooked meals and furnished his house. He started teachers’ training soon after, so could only look after his children on weekends.
We moved into a concrete block of flats. One bedroom, a tiny kitchen and a toilet that leaked. I lugged second-hand mattresses up two floors. The previous tenant left behind a sofa and a coffee table with a cracked glass top.
We fell into a routine. I cared for the girls during the week. We walked everywhere and made friends at kindergarten. There was a beauty in our rhythms. We talk about the hardship of the single mother, but not the freedoms. I loved caring for my children alone. I felt my heart relax a little. When they are young, your children do not judge you. They look into your eyes and see only the good. We laughed a lot.
Bruce picked the girls up on Friday evenings. He’d kept the car as he needed it to get to training college. When they were gone, I would take a bath, my head above the water, my breath even. At around 10 p.m. I walked and bussed to my new job at a private musicians’ club. We opened late and closed early. I ran the bar, serving drinks to wired musos till three in the morning. I walked home beneath the willows along the banks of the Avon River. The pre-dawn mist smothered the stink of cigarettes and beer that clung to my hair and clothes. Hunched inside my coat, I kept to the shadows, imploring the sun to rise above the horizon.
The separation caused another issue. My name.
My adopted name had always felt inauthentic. It was an ill-defined feeling that took years to comprehend. Barbara McG was perfectly serviceable. But even now, as I type, it makes me uncomfortable.
On marrying Bruce at eighteen I became Barbara White and was happy to be someone else for a time. But what name could I use now?
I waited till late on a Saturday and called home. Mavis answered. Max was in the garden. ‘Do you happen to remember my name before you adopted me?’ I asked.
‘I’ll get Max,’ she replied. I heard the screen door bang and the tone of her raised voice but not the words. She came back on the line. ‘They didn’t tell us,’ she said. ‘I’ve already told you we know nothing. We got you and that was all that mattered.’
I made my voice soft and warm and thanked her for putting up with me. I did not want to fight.
‘We talked to Bruce and the girls,’ she said. I waited. It was unlikely she and Max would ask why I’d left him. But even if they did, I could not have explained the valley between us. ‘He misses you so much,’ Mavis said.
‘He only has the girls on weekends.’ It was impossible to hide my defensiveness. ‘And he has plenty of support.’
Max coughed to let me know he was listening on the extension. I was straying into unwelcome territory.
‘We have to go,’ Mavis said, and they hung up.
I called Jeannie. She would know the name Pamela had given me. But Jeannie was unsure. I wanted to ask all the questions. Did Pamela talk about me in the weeks and months after? Did she use my name? Did she share her secrets?
‘Come and meet me next time you’re in Wellington,’ Jeannie said. ‘We’ll talk then.’
I wrote another letter to the Department of Social Welfare. Trying again to find my files, to access any information on my identity. Weeks later, the same reply came back: ‘We have no trace of you in our records.’
Months went by and there it was on the six o’clock news. An amendment to the Adoption Act 1955 had passed into law. Adopted people could now access a version of their original birth certificate.
I applied right away. Counselling was mandatory. I was twenty-five with three children, but my desire to know was insufficient. I had to prove to the counsellor I was mature enough to know my own identity.
She was a motherly older woman with a warm air of disapproval. ‘Some things should remain hidden.’ She glanced at the photos of happy families that covered one wall of her office. And I wondered if they were adoptions she had brokered. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she said as she signed my form with a tiny signature.
I imagined Pamela boarding the plane, the door closing behind her, the fog rolling in. The counsellor was right. And now there was nothing left to wish for.
I took the precious form to the Social Welfare office and went home to wait.
I’ve altered my name seven times. I used to change everything with regularity. Glasses, hairstyles, furniture, lovers, husbands and friends — everything was movable. I’ve burned through my life like a campfire of twigs. I’ve moved house thirty-four times. My restless journey was almost unconscious. I would once have described myself as peripatetic. The idea of not belonging was who I was. It was not so much that I’d lost my identity but that I’d never had one.
‘Who am I?’ may seem like a question at the core of being human. But social theorist Zygmunt Bauman calls it a postmodern issue. ‘Identity as a concrete concept would hardly occur to any of us if it were not denied in some way … When “belonging” remains your fate — a condition with no alternative — identity does not occur to people.’ He says that until quite recently the time and place of your birth determined your identity. Very few occasions arose for questioning provenance.
Bauman does not mention stranger adoption. He died before the current practice of buying and selling anonymous gametes. But his work describes the
internal dislocation experienced by adopted people. And now that extends to those created in service to the fertility industry.
We are so reluctant to grapple with the idea that each of us intrinsically belongs somewhere. That humans are not interchangeable commodities. That eggs and sperm are not random raw ingredients. Being uplifted from your place in history and grafted onto the tree of strangers is a profound loss — to both the individual and the continuum of their genealogy. Trying to construct an identity in the face of that loss is difficult. Bauman says it’s like assembling a jigsaw puzzle that has lost its box. ‘With no image to consult, you may never know which pieces are missing.’13
I remember the plain brown envelope franked with the Department of Social Welfare logo. I took it to the bathroom and sat on the toilet seat. My name was Lilian Sumner. At that moment, I wanted to be her more than anything. An ethereal name without sharp edges, a name that conjured warmth.
Our names carry resonance and energy. In the esoteric world, onomancy is the divination of names. They say that the meaning, sounds and rhythms of the name you choose for your child make the tasks of that new soul easier. Names connect us to the past. They are genealogical roadmaps.
Barbara means stranger or traveller from a foreign land. There was once a Saint Barbara imprisoned in a tower by her father. He killed her for refusing to recant her beliefs and was later killed by a bolt of lightning.
Lilian means an offering or a vow. A name wrapped up in flowers, purity and beauty.
I started calling myself Lilian right away, but it did not go well. Bruce laughed. ‘Everyone will think you’re mental,’ he said.
Max responded with silence. ‘You have to understand,’ Mavis said years later, after he’d passed away. ‘He was an only child, the last of his line. His name was important to him.’
I asked why they’d had no problem with my married name.
‘That’s different,’ she said. We were in her kitchen. She had a small portable document shredder on the bench. They’d begun to shred anything showing their names after a news item about how easy it was to steal someone’s identity.