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“I Love Her Best When She Is Asleep and Better Still When She Is Awake”

Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents.

KAZUO ISHIGURO, WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS

BERTHA SHIRLEY’S EYES WERE SO EXPRESSIVE “she could just about talk with” them.[18] She was twenty years old and married to her love, the awkward yet sincere Walter. They had one little baby, bright-eyed Anne, who had appropriated both their hearts upon her birth. Anne had belonged to Walter and Bertha for three blissful months.

Bertha, who had been a much-loved teacher for several years before giving birth to Anne, possessed the ability to write letters as expressive as her eyes. Her personality shone through her words, preserving their splendor and bouquet years after they were written. Bertha had left fewer than a dozen letters, each one an epistle of love to Walter, a collection of words and story consecrated by their incalculable meaning to her daughter. By the time Anne first laid eyes on these notes, she was grown. Still, the letters were a treasure to her, even though they held the patina of decades—yellowed and blurry, discolored and crinkly, but still readable.

The dearest letter of all was the last one, which Bertha wrote to Walter very soon after their baby was born, when Walter had to be away for some reason. Bertha’s pride in “‘baby’—her cleverness, her brightness, her thousand sweetnesses”[19] knew no bounds. This new mother had no idea that someday her baby would read her words of devotion and be affected to her very marrow.

Bertha ended her letter with this postscript: “I love her best when she is asleep and better still when she is awake.”[20] It may have been the last sentence she had ever written. Bertha soon contracted typhoid (or maybe she had it already when the letter was written?), and she was at the departure gate, waiting for the angels.[21]

We know that Walter died soon after Bertha, leaving baby Anne on her own, bereft, left behind, and left, in a way we can hardly grasp in this day and age. When I first reread Anne of the Island as a mother, it just about killed me. How awful to leave this earth without a good plan for your baby! It also made me think that so many things would have been different today. If a young couple, both twenty years of age, died leaving a baby, there would be lots of possible solutions, but back then there were few. Even so, it is tragic to consider that there was no one on either side of Anne’s family to take her in. Even in the age of typhoid, cholera, and consumption, it seems unlikely that there wasn’t even a grumpy set of grandparents to take her in, as in Maud’s case, after her mother died. Wasn’t there even a crotchety great-aunt? A second cousin, once removed?

(By the way, nobody writes cantankerous biddies like our Maud. Rachel Lynde is just the tip of the iceberg. From Mrs. Rachel to Marilla Cuthbert, Aunt Mary Maria Blythe, Susan Baker, and Miss Cornelia—these hilarious and crusty old crabs are the salt of Avonlea’s earth—not to mention Glen St. Mary and Maud’s other burgs.)

Yet Anne was left behind, wholly orphaned. I’m pretty sure this was a plot device on Maud’s part, because had Walter and Bertha survived typhoid there would have been no Matthew, Marilla, Gilbert, or Diana. Anne’s orphanhood was the path that brought her to Prince Edward Island, to eight books, and to fifty million copies sold.

There was no one to take baby Anne and give her a decent, loving upbringing. There was no Child and Family Services to scoop her up, monitor her care, and find her a family in which to belong. There was no one to arrange emergency foster care for her as a stopgap measure. Adoption did not exist in the way we think of it today, as a formal intention to transfer all the rights of parenthood to people whose goal is to love the child as their own. In fact, The Foundling Asylum in New York City, begun by three nuns to provide care for abandoned infants, opened in 1869, four years after Anne’s birth. The home’s first recorded adoption occurred in 1873, the first step to realizing their goal of placing all their children in permanent and loving settings. In the nineteenth century, adoption was really another word for indenture, service, and labor—it was glorified slavery puffed up in a thin disguise of good works.

Baby Anne was deeply vulnerable, her position weaker than a kitten’s. In her day, concern for animal welfare came earlier than concern for children’s welfare. According to an appendix in The Annotated Anne of Green Gables, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824 in Nova Scotia, but the care of abused and neglected children wasn’t addressed until 1880, when a provincial act passed.[22]

Anne as a stray waif didn’t even have the rights of a stray dog. The lines between orphanages, poorhouses, and mental asylums were so blurred, she could have easily ended up in a place like the Halifax poorhouse of 1900, where orphan children lived in quarters without locks or handles on the doors, among criminals and the mentally unstable. Had she been taken to an orphanage as an infant, she still would have been at risk, as mortality rates in such places were appalling. In 1875, for example, the year after Maud was born, the infant mortality rate at the Halifax Infant Home was 35 percent.[23]

What did happen was that the woman who worked as a charlady for Walter and Bertha Shirley stepped in and took baby Anne, answering to no one about it because no one cared. Even when our family adopted the mutt we affectionately call Junie the Wonder Dog, we had to be approved by the Humane Society as fit owners; yet no one approved or disapproved Mrs. Thomas as Anne’s foster mother. Today, a good social worker would never allow Mrs. Thomas and her drunk, abusive husband to take home a hamster, never mind a baby girl. When things fell apart for the Thomases, Anne’s ownership (because let’s call it what it was) was transferred to the equally unworthy Hammonds, a shambles of a household and family, with more work and less care for Anne.

And finally, for the last four months of her life before Green Gables, eleven-year-old Anne was transferred to the asylum in Hopeton, an orphanage patterned after the asylum in Halifax. Reformers of the day hoped for an asylum to live up to its name as a refuge, haven, and sanctuary, but the orphans still weren’t loved. At last Anne had reliable food and shelter and schooling, but she still had a ways to go before she was to find her place of belonging.

I called my mum recently to wish her a happy fiftieth anniversary (a hard day for her, since my dad passed away in 2006). We ended up talking about my adoption and our beginnings as a family.

“You only cost eight dollars,” she said. “I just saw the receipt the other day. Can you believe it? And you only took twelve days.”

Before I could digest the fact that I came with a receipt, Mum went on.

“Did I ever tell you what happened when we went to pick you up?” (No.)

“It was the strangest thing. We got to the hospital and there was no one around; not a single staff person was there. We waited and waited. Finally, we just took you home. Mind you, we did call to say we had taken you. They seemed glad that we called, but they told us it was fine, that they were happy we had taken you.”

My mum is the world’s ultimate rule follower. She’s a teetotaler, a woman who is troubled lest a blouse neckline be construed as “brief” when it dips a millimeter below her clavicle. She does not jaywalk, feed the animals at the zoo, or snip the warning tag off new pillows. This same woman was now telling me she and my dad, the world’s number-two ultimate rule follower, had swiped a newborn from a hospital and brought her home without express permission from the authorities. Had she said I had been raised by polar bears in the Arctic for the first few years of my life, I might have been less surprised.

In 1968, when I was adopted, my parents had their pick of babies. Literally, they were told to come on down to the Women’s Pavilion and pick out the newborn they wanted to take home. It was like a baby farm in those days. Rows of babies were swaddled in blankets like husks of corn, the daughters and sons of unwed mothers, eight dollars per bundle. A bumper crop of babies was available for pickup, though they did not deliver. But this pick-out-your-own-baby business rubbed my dad the wrong way.

“We’re not buying a cow here!” he told the social worker on the phone. “You pick out our baby, and that will be God’s choice for us.” Apparently the social worker made his selection, which was approved by God Himself, but no official staff person was there to validate the transaction. I was two weeks old.

It was the Invasion of the Mennonite Baby Snatchers, a piece of my history I had previously not known about. Of course, Abe and Linda being Abe and Linda, and Mennonites being Mennonites, they made terrible baby snatchers and called the hospital as soon as they got home, took off their shoes, and placed them side by side on the rubber mat by the door. “I was kind of worried the police might be following us!” my mum said brightly, as if this infant pinching episode had been kind of a madcap caper.

She can’t remember exactly what was happening at the hospital, if I was in a bassinet in the lobby, waiting for pickup, or if I was one of a number of infants in some kind of nursery, left unattended for a period long enough for my rule-following parents to give up and grab me. “But we must have known that you were the baby we were supposed to take home,” she said solemnly, as if I might worry that perhaps they nicked the wrong one. “Maybe our name was on your crib!”

She and I both paused to reflect on this extraordinary meeting of parents and child.

“Boy,” she said, her tone contemplative, “nowadays that would have caused quite a ruckus.”

For this pair of lambs, the radical action they took that day in 1968 was ruckus enough. I picture my dad wearing a suit with his light-brown hair slicked back and my mum wearing a dress and sporting a black beehive, both excited and scared as their dream of parenthood is about to be made manifest in a baby so small, so prune-like. I remember my dad saying he was terrified I wouldn’t live. Like every new dad, he was afraid he would break me.

In the car, on the way home, I see Mum breaking her gaze only long enough to sneak a peek over her shoulder in case the police should be in hot pursuit just as Dad turns right onto Henderson Highway and onto Kingston Avenue. He drives carefully over the last slushy stretch of street until that twinkling of time when they pull into 542 as a family of three.

My dad hops out of the car and opens the passenger side door for my mum, who carefully wiggles out of the seat, carrying her baby up two steps and over the threshold of her new home.

Someday there would be a wooden playhouse to host a pet mouse, secret societies, and tea parties. There would be a son, Dan, added to the family just a few years later—this time after a fifteen-day wait. There would be a tire swing hanging from the huge old oak tree, and the initials LR and DR etched in wet cement. But now, there was just a simple house with three bedrooms and a bomb shelter, a place to come home to.

Mrs. Lovrossi, an Italian lady on the street that built me, full of immigrants from Germany, Ukraine, and Poland, told me once that my mother changed my outfit four times a day. “You would wear these preety leetle dresses, sometimes with leetle gloves even, and if you got a specka of dirt on your dressa, your mama would peek you up and carry you inside to change your dressa.” This is how I know that the second thing my mum did—after listening in on the phone call between my dad and the hospital, and making sure they didn’t have to bring me back—was to change my diaper and dress me in the softest, most beautiful baby pajamas their limited money could buy.

She and my dad watched me as I slept, their hearts blowing up in the quiet with love and pride. That night, they loved me best when I was asleep, but they would love me better still each morning I woke up as their daughter.

No photo is more scrutinized than that of a child’s photo on his or her adoption referral paperwork. No photo, ever. Trust me on this. An adoption referral portrait invites more scrutiny than an online dating photo, more inspection than a sketchy passport at the Ukrainian/Moldovan border, more analysis than a fake ID at a nightclub. This photo gets stared at one hundred times a day, each feature of the little person analyzed and reanalyzed. No photo is ever more valued and dear.

I was home alone when Phoebe’s referral came in an e-mail. It was the end of February 2005, while Doyle was at work and the boys were at school. My heart thumped wildly as I looked at my daughter for the first time. She had black hair, of course; a tiny, perfect nose; and puffy, newborn eyes. I cried as I fell in love, again. Now we had a face to put to our hopes. Her name was Eun Jung, and her birthday was December 30, 2004. This must be a joke, I thought. A third December birthday! She shared a birthday with her twin cousins, Jadon and Eli, who had turned two the day she was born.

(Dear God, re: three December birthdays, in the same month as Christmas: Ha ha ha! Not funny! Not laughing!)

I called Doyle at work and jumped in the van. I raced to Oakdale School and pulled Ezra out of preschool and Jonah out of first grade. Mrs. Knott, Jonah’s seasoned and lovely teacher, hugged me as she agreed this was big stuff; this was worth pulling a seven-year-old boy from his studies; this was the day our family would shape-shift in a significant way. At home, we scrutinized our new member together. I had printed Phoebe’s photo and we passed it back and forth. Four-year-old Ezra, who frequently said he missed Phoebe, the baby sister he had never met, was the most taken with the photo. She wasn’t just a theory or a phantom anymore; she was a face, a name, a birthday in December. She was ours. We had something to show for our two years of waiting and hoping and filling out more paperwork than it would take to buy three houses.

That night I stared at the picture one more time before placing it beside my bed and turning out the lights. I lay awake for a long time, daydreaming about my two-month-old baby, pining for her. Korea was thirteen hours ahead, so it was broad daylight there, lunchtime. Is her foster mom giving her a bottle even now? I was jealous and grateful. I loved Phoebe (Eun Jung!) best when she was a dream and a wish, and even better still when she was a realization.