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Finding Walter Shirley

My two parents represent the single greatest influence on my life. And if my dad had been there for me, it would be the double greatest influence on my life.

JAROD KINTZ

THERE IS ONE STORY IN THE ANNE SERIES that breaks my heart more than any other. It hits too close to home. I have so much to celebrate in my life—but there’s one thing Anne Shirley found that I never have. When she knocked on the door of the run-down yellow house in which she had been born, Anne was embarking on a quest to find the human father who would never fail her. A very tall, thin woman answered the door.

Our Anne was on a weekend visit to her college roommate’s home (remember the superbly wacky Philippa Gordon, aka “Phil”?). This “sojourn,”[103] as Anne of the Island puts it, would be remembered for Anne’s pilgrimage to her birthplace. Here she would find her roots as the daughter of Bertha and Walter Shirley, a man who, she was going to find out quickly, had her exact carotene shade of hair.

As it turned out, the woman at the door did remember the Shirleys:

“Yes, the Shirleys lived here twenty years ago,” she said, in answer to Anne’s question. “They had it rented. I remember ’em. They both died of fever at onct. It was turrible sad. They left a baby. I guess it’s dead long ago. It was a sickly thing. . . .”

“It didn’t die,” said Anne, smiling. “I was that baby.” [“It”? Oh, 1885!]

“You don’t say so! Why, you have grown,” exclaimed the woman, as if she were much surprised that Anne was not still a baby. “Come to look at you, I see the resemblance. You’re complected like your pa. He had red hair. But you favor your ma in your eyes and mouth.”[104]

The tall, thin woman, though she might not have been the brightest light in the harbor, possessed a good, kind heart, and obliged when Anne eagerly asked to roam the house of her birth.

“Laws, yes, you can if you like.”[105] Then the woman ushered Anne into the very room where Bertha had given birth, and outside of which Walter had no doubt paced anxiously. Afterward the tall, thin woman left Anne alone to commune with ghosts who had inhabited the space of life and death, happiness and despair. It was for Anne, “one of the jeweled hours of life that gleam out radiantly forever in memory.”[106]

I find it fascinating that Maud granted Anne this jeweled hour, the crowning moment of an orphan’s quest to piece together her fragmented beginnings. She gave Anne the chance to meet her parents, Bertha and the “sorter homely”[107] Walter. (You’ve got to hand it to the tall, thin lady. She wasn’t afraid to lay it all out on the table. Yeah, I remember your dad. Great guy, but kinda ugly.)

Like a fairy godmother, Maud bestowed upon her Book Child clues on the breadcrumb path to finding her original family—a packet of letters tied in blue ribbon, and a visit to the grave in which both her parents lay.

Of course, when the tall, thin woman offered Anne the letters her parents had written each other, she took them, “clasping the packet rapturously.”[108] Our Anne Girl couldn’t merely hold such a packet.

Clutching the letters, Anne made a beeline from the shabby yellow house to the Bolingbroke cemetery, where, said the tall, thin woman, the school board had put up a tombstone to Walter and Shirley as a reward for faithful service. Their daughter paid homage, placing a bouquet of white flowers on the single grave.

In the packet of letters, Anne found that her parents had loved each other and her dearly.

At their grave, she discovered that her original parents had existed—here was proof etched in stone.

Many orphans never get the chance to discover such proof of their original family’s actuality. Most don’t come to the end of their searches to find evidence that they had been dearly loved. Generally, we find out the opposite was true. But Maud wanted a different outcome for Anne than she herself had received.

Maud, starved for a father’s love, gave Anne not only Matthew Cuthbert, but also Walter Shirley. Good, loving, homely Walter Shirley would have been an exceptionally attentive and warmhearted dad, but of course he died, so he couldn’t be there for his daughter in a million different ways. Meanwhile, Monty Montgomery, Maud’s father, was very much alive. But he wouldn’t be there for his child, in a million different ways.

The orphan’s heart knows this very well: There’s a big difference between couldn’t and wouldn’t.

“Do you know anything about Phoebe’s real dad?” is one comment that grates me like a cheese shredder.

When people say this—and they do with shocking regularity—I am thankful for forty-plus years of socialization. Also, normally there are no brooms handy with which to begin beating these people.

Oh, I understand what they are saying. They mean, do we know anything about her biological father, the source of half our daughter’s genes, the guy whose unremarkable and fleeting romance resulted in our extraordinary, permanent girl?

Obviously, calling a birth father “real” is wildly inaccurate. They are typically somewhat vaporous beings, absent, missing, and fictional in one’s imagination. At this point, the man in the moon is just as much Phoebe’s real father as the one who donated his genetic material.

But . . .

After forty-five years of thinking about my own birth father—or not thinking of him, as was usually the case—I know this for sure now: Phoebe’s first father is actually important to her spirit and sense of identity. Sure, for all tangible intents the man is lost to her, probably forever. The fact that his ancestral code is zigzagging inside my child means he is with her day to day—a part of her. Should Phoebe ever get to meet Moon, I know she’ll have lots of questions about her chromosomal padre: What was he like? Was he handsome? Funny? Do I look like him? Was he good at soccer? Did he play goalie, like me? What did you mean when you said he wasn’t the person you thought he was?

I’ll be eager for the answers, especially to the last question. What did you mean, Moon, when you were answering the social worker’s questions? What did you say to the social worker to make her jot this down: “He wasn’t the person she hoped he would be”? Did Moon even say it like that, or was it hopelessly lost in translation?

The Mart Worker of Seoul, South Korea

On our trip to pick up our six-and-a-half-month-old daughter in Seoul, I would scan the faces of Korean men, looking for my child in their golden skin and marquise-shaped eyes. “She has double eyelids!” Koreans would tell us with great gusts of enthusiasm, exulting over this prized feature in Phoebe’s face. This was confusing to us, of course, being Caucasian. We had never before contemplated or counted our own eyelids or anyone else’s. (I just now counted my eyelids and regret doing so. Don’t count your eyelids if you are over forty.)

I discovered later that for women and girls of Asian descent, especially Koreans, having double eyelids can increase your beauty by twofold—or at least that’s what they are told from a young age by their parents, friends, and culture. It’s no wonder blepharoplasty, or double-eyelid surgery, is a common practice for many young Asian girls. One in five Korean girls undergoes this surgery, also a popular graduation present from parents.

Did Phoebe get her eyes and their cherished extra creases from her birth father?

Surely, this fellow was a looker, because baby Eun Jung Kim, soon to be Phoebe Min-Ju-Jayne Craker, was so beautiful.

Surely, if he had his life together a little more and had understood what he was giving up, he wouldn’t have left Moon and her baby.

Some might argue that “Hey!—he was only twenty-one or twenty-two, unable to step up and be a man, right? Cut the dude some slack, lady.” But that argument seems about as offbeat as giving your daughter an extra pair of eyelids for graduation—what, the stores were all out of watches and mini-fridges? (Although I can’t really judge because we North Americans do some pretty nutty things to meet our own idealized standards for beauty. Hello, hand lifts!) I think of my wonderful nephew, Jake, who became a father at twenty-one. Too young, most would say. Yet Jake is a straight arrow. I know he will be stepping up and shooting straight for the next eighteen years and beyond for his blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked baby boy.

In Seoul, I was in search of a crooked arrow, not a straight one. One tidbit revealed by the adoption paperwork was that the bio father and mother had worked together in a “mart.” So I was drawn to marts during our trip (not to mention the fact that they were a blast of frigid air in Seoul, which was draped in humidity like a wet sleeping bag). I would find excuses to duck in and buy a bag of chips or a can of cold iced green tea. The cozy marts smelled cool and spicy, like green tea and ginseng, kimchi and sesame oil. They held all manner of otherworldly snacks and beverages that intrigued us to no end.

Once, Doyle grabbed a small can of something called Pine Tree Drink, decorated with emerald pine branches and the Hangul alphabet characters, and I sipped it delicately. The taste reminded me of disinfectant fumes, but Doyle swigged the whole can to my amazement. “I kind of like it,” he said.

In the city of Pine Tree Drink, I scanned thousands of beautiful Korean faces, never recognizing the strangers whose union gave us our daughter. I still scan people’s faces now, when I see them out and about or on TV. Fun fact: Because Los Angeles has the highest concentration of Koreans in North America, the majority of Asian actors you see on-screen are Korean. This gives me license to make stuff up, like Phoebe’s birth father could be Daniel Dae Kim from Lost! Well, almost certainly not.

Whoever he is, I hope he’s got his life together now. Maybe he went back to school and is now performing meaningful work in a job he loves (like as an actor on Lost and Hawaii Five-O!). Mostly, I hope he is growing into a man Phoebe could someday be proud of, a man who shows that actions are more important than words.

I’m betting Phoebe won’t waste much time wondering who he is until she’s older. It’s hard enough to wrap your mind around the fact that there is someone out there, not the person you call “mama,” in whose belly you grew, knitted together by an unseen hand. There’s a much stronger link with her.

Phoebe could strongly favor her birth father in looks, personality, and abilities, but he will be more abstract to her than an unseen planet. At least she’ll be taught about the planet in school, whereas no one outside of us will teach her about that imaginary pater, a black hole, her first dad.

About the only piece of information we can give her about this guy, apart from his age and his mart work, is Moon’s remark, swathed in questions.

He wasn’t the person I hoped he would be.

Oh, how I wish I knew what she meant.

I also wish he was the kind of man, even at twenty-one, Moon could have come to with this news, even after they had broken up. True, she could have given him the chance to step up, but she didn’t—an echo of my own story. But something tells me she would have given him that chance, if the mart worker hadn’t been a crooked arrow with a bent heart, if only he had been the person she hoped he was.

The Jack-of-all-Trades from Prince Edward Island

Only a real dad cares about getting his daughter a string of pearls and a dress with the puffiest of sleeves. Only a genuine father orders a strapping boy to help him with the farm work and loves what he receives instead: a scraggy cockatoo of a girl who never stops twittering. I adore Matthew Cuthbert!

Yet it intrigues me that while Maud created one of literature’s most devoted fathers, she herself carried a hollow where her own father should have been.

Today a young widowed father would assume full parenting duties, whether or not he eventually remarried. But this was 1876, and when his wife died, the grieving “Monty” deposited his dark-haired baby girl with her maternal grandparents. Unfortunately, Alexander and Lucy Woolner Macneill treated tiny Maud much like Anne was often treated: like a charity case.

Maud’s childhood was desperately lonely, and she was never allowed to forget she was living under her grandparents’ roof because no one else wanted her. Her grandparents were the sort to force her to kneel on the hard floor and pray for forgiveness for being such a “bad girl.” Alexander Macneill mostly ignored Maud, even leaving his daughter’s daughter out of his will on purpose when he died. (While time traveling, I’d also make a stop in Victorian PEI to administer a tongue lashing upon the Macneills they wouldn’t soon forget, that’s what.)

When Maud was seven, her beloved father deserted her entirely, choosing to move to the humming Wild West town of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, to make his mark and hopefully his fortune. He left behind a little girl who was lonelier than ever. She was so lonely, Maud’s imagination gave rise to two companions living in the oval glass doors of the bookcase: Lucy Gray and Katie Maurice.

Father and daughter wrote letters, but the ties between them grew thinner until he seemed almost as imaginary as her oval glass friends. She pined for her father, and she daydreamed about all the ways in which he would delight in her, should they be reunited. He would laugh at her jokes, admire her poems, and call her “Maudie” in that special way. Life would be beautiful again if only they were together.

So she clasped the letter rapturously when Monty wrote her at age sixteen. Monty had remarried to twenty-seven-year-old Mary Ann, and they had a toddler daughter and a baby on the way. Now that he was settled out west, it was time for Maud to come live with him and complete his family.

Throughout the nearly transcontinental train ride, Maud’s heart swelled with hopes and dreams. She was chaperoned by her Montgomery grandfather, a Canadian senator. As they rolled past the leafy farmlands, the craggy rocks of the Canadian Shield, and then the swaying prairie grasses and big skies, Maud could hardly wait to be reunited with her charming dad, a businessman with his fingers in many pies. Getting to know her father better, belonging to him at last, would surely give Maud a sense of permanence. No longer would she feel like a turnip that fell off the back of a truck.

Like so many birth-father fantasies, Maud’s went bust soon after arrival in Prince Albert. In her girlish daydreams, there was no room for conditional love or for the young, bossy stepmother who lost no time in working her like a pack mule. In letters home to her cousin, Pensie Macneill, Maud expressed bitter disappointment about the turn of events. She was little more than Mary Ann’s unpaid servant, a boomtown Cinderella set to scrubbing floors, wiping noses, and changing diapers. The cruelest blow: For two months she was kept home from school to mop and scour.

Monty, a noodle of a man, would not defend his daughter. Mary Ann was jealous of her teenage stepdaughter and would throw a fit if Monty called Maud “Maudie” in his old, affectionate way. When Maud begged him to intervene, her father threw up his hands. (Science, where are we at with time travel? Because I’m ready to go, and I’m packing a broom this time.)

After a year, Maud could no longer stand it. Between Monty’s spinelessness and Mary Ann’s cruelty, her dreams of fitting in were ground down like Saskatchewan prairie dust. She decided to return home.

Crusty grandparents aside, Maud belonged to the Island’s red-dirt beaches and purple lupine-lined paths—here was her haven and port. Here she didn’t have to face the fact that her father’s love was a shadow of her own; that by his own act he had deserted her once and continued to desert her by his choices; that he was not the man she thought him to be.

Coach Tom from Manitoba

I always kind of hoped that Neil Young was my birth father, rooted in the fact that Neil lived in Winnipeg from the age of twelve until he moved away to become a famous rock star. He was the right age, so just doing the math was enough to suggest the possibility that someday he and I could’ve been reunited, singing “Heart of Gold” and waging heavy peace together.

Things broke down when I roped in Joni Mitchell as my potential birth mother (they did meet in smoky Winnipeg clubs in the sixties). The truth is I look less like Joni Mitchell than any human being could possibly look. Case in point: Joni has cheekbones, and the only bone jutting out of my face is my nose. I’m afraid I look more like Neil Young than Joni Mitchell.

When I look back on these fantastical musings, I wonder how I could have ever thought, even in jest, that I issued forth from two musical legends. The highlight of my music career was when a voice teacher at our church cryptically suggested to my mother that my voice might be “teachable.” The low point was getting kicked out of seventh-grade band for not turning in my practice sheets. Also a low ebb: when Mr. Duba, my ancient and potbellied clarinet teacher, routinely fell asleep as I played clarinet scales for him. I am many things, but Benny Goodman I am not.

When I was reunited with Dora, she confirmed that there was precious little musical aptitude to be found on her side of the family. Also, artistic ability was meager, though I have always loved to draw and paint and sculpt. I remember finding my dad’s fine-pencil sketches of birds one day in a drawer jammed with old papers. When I confronted him with his talent, he was bemused. “That was a long time ago,” he said, smiling. In the mysterious alchemy of adoption, could my artistic talents somehow be traced to my dad? Or could art be seeded and encrypted via my birth father?

He—my birth father—wasn’t Neil Young, of course, but it was always kind of pleasant to imagine what might have been. When you don’t know where you came from, you can and will imagine all kinds of things.

Your original family members are like missing persons no one is looking for but you. They have vanished in an air thick with questions. You give them qualities your current life and actual parents lack, such as an iconic music career, riches, fame, and a grungy hipster vibe. (In contrast, my dad, Abe Reimer, the late, great king of the booksellers, wore Ichthus fish ties at work and brown dress socks to the beach. He carried little packets of Caf-Lib in his pocket and enjoyed listening to gloomy German hymns and—for a little pep—the Chuck Wagon Gang. Abe Reimer was ying to Neil Young’s yang.)

When you have no answers to your questions, you create ever-ballooning expectations that can never be met, even if your birth father is Neil Young, Captain Kangaroo, or the crown prince of Genovia. That balloon starts out like a cute red blob floating at a kid’s party, but when you puff it up with a lifetime of wonderings, it can grow to be the size of the Goodyear Blimp. And we all know that bloater’s not coming down to earth gently.

My blimp lost some steam when I found out my first answers about my birth father through the paperwork Dora had filled out before I was born, on file with the Manitoba Post-Adoption Registry. I still didn’t know his name, but I knew his height, ethnicity (which wasn’t English, as my adoption paperwork indicated), what his parents did for a living, and that for a time he had coached kids in sports.

Sweet molasses! I was the spawn of a coach? My DNA included a person responsible for inculcating athletic skill into young people? I thought of Mr. O, my jovial junior high gym teacher and coach presiding over my leaden basketball career. He would be more baffled than I at this news. I am many things, but Sporty Spice I am not.

Later on, Dora would tell me his name was Tom. Their brief romance had begun after they met that summer in the city. Dora always felt that Tom had known she was pregnant. She said little to me on the topic, other than she had kept tabs on him and would contact him when the time was right.

Theodora finally called Tom one day at his work.

“It’s a girl! She’s thirty-one!” Theodora cried joyously into the receiver.

Tom immediately jumped on his desk and joyously began belting out “I Had a Dream.” He jumped down and started handing out cigars to his colleagues when the call came through.

Yeah.

Way off on that.

What happened was this: Dora’s heart hammered as she haltingly delivered the news from the summer of 1967. She pretended he had no idea. Tom expressed shock. (Let’s give him shock, at least.) He began reciting his ethnic and medical history, followed by a litany of reasons why he couldn’t—make that wouldn’t—have a relationship with me:

“I have teenagers, and they are at an impressionable age.”

“There’s been too much water under the bridge.”

And my personal favorite:

“I wouldn’t want to compromise my career path.”

Dora, unflattened by these shabby responses, charged ahead. “Tom, Lorilee is a wonderful young woman. She’s warm and funny. She’s a writer. And she has a beautiful baby boy named Jonah, your grandson! He’s about eighteen months old and so cute. You should see her next time she comes to Winnipeg. In fact, I believe she’s coming in a couple of months. I can see if she could meet you for coffee . . .”

Tom cut her off midsentence, his crooked arrow hitting the bull’s-eye. “No,” he said. “No. I can’t handle a relationship like this right now. Please don’t ever contact me again.” There was a click, a dial tone, and later, for me, the sound of a Goodyear Blimp, hissing steam into the blue sky.

The Red-Haired Schoolteacher of Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia

The days between Bertha’s death and Walter Shirley’s own would have been filled with worry. There was no such thing as life insurance, and Walter’s family and his in-laws were all dead.

Infected already, Walter would have noticed the dreaded red spots developing on his chest. The fever and nervous delirium would claim him soon. Though Maud doesn’t tell us this, I imagine him in that meek yellow house looking down in despair at the sleeping girl in his arms, noting again that she had his own acutely red hair. He might have offered a prayer. Where would Anne end up? Would she ever belong to anyone again?

Blessedly, for Walter, there was little time to agonize.

The tall, thin lady said it all: “Pore creetures, they didn’t live much longer; but they was awful happy while they was alive and I s’pose that counts for a good deal.”[109]

That good lady eloquently summarized the legacy left by Anne’s parents, a birthright Anne discovered further in the faded, yellow letters between Walter and Bertha. In those wrinkled pages Anne inherited a glorious history. The dearest of all was the last letter, which shared in tender detail baby updates to the only person in the world who cared as much as Bertha did.

“This has been the most beautiful day of my life,” Anne said to Phil that night. “I’ve found my father and mother. Those letters have made them real to me. I’m not an orphan any longer. I feel as if I had opened a book and found the roses of yesterday, sweet and beloved, between its leaves.”[110]

Anne’s native story had been broken in pieces when she bravely knocked on the door of the yellow house, but now those pieces were somewhat bonded together. A new measure of wholeness and peace was hers. She loved the siblings Cuthbert, her real parents in all ways; but like every orphan, her first family members were tucked inside her spirit.

Unlike the mart worker, the jack-of-all-trades, and Sporty Old Spice yammering on about his career, the Walter Shirley unearthed in Anne’s visit was a man who would have stayed devotedly Anne’s, if he could have, if typhoid had not blotted out his existence.

Maud, with her orphan’s heart, knew there was a big difference between could and would. So she sent Anne on a quest to find a father who would not disappoint her, and we as readers follow eagerly. Because when Anne found Walter Shirley in that consecrated packet of letters, he turned out to be exactly the person she hoped he would be.