THE MANILA ENVELOPE contained somewhat more than the particular paper she was determined to face; it contained the whole dismal business of her adoption, not only the adoption papers themselves couched in legal jargon — the petitioner prays the Court, and so on, herself called “Baby Owen” and signed by a judge — but the required release of her by her mother. Her mother was described as a “spinster,” a word long since out of fashion that prompted thoughts of hopelessness and discard. The papers had so unpleasant a texture she wished she had worn gloves. Here they were, the legal documents, the one giving her away and the other taking her up as if she were a piece of produce. Oh, she had been lucky, as a Miss Lovelace had said long ago, Miss Lovelace of the heart-shaped locket and the Florida Water. Lucky not to have ended in an institution rather than in the immaculate house of a Seattle attorney who was comfortable in the Rainier Club. And of what did her luck consist? That a little boy had been thrown from a horse and had broken his neck. That was luck for you.
Her mother's — her true mother's — last act as her mother was to sign that release with the name Owen. Elizabeth Owen, surely not her true name but a false one, for that poor woman must necessarily hide her true self even from herself at that moment she committed so unnatural an act. Yes, she wished she had worn gloves that either fabric or leather might insulate her from the haunting shame she felt for not having been wanted, for having been no more than an embarrassment to “Elizabeth Owen” and a fortuitous accommodation for the McKinneys who could not abide their loneliness. Yes, gloves.
For some moments she stared, fascinated, at the name Elizabeth Owen. The hand that had written that name had perhaps touched her? Somehow the handwriting was not what she might have expected. It was not a handwriting one expected to find on so squalid a document but rather on notepaper with a high rag content. Linen. However it was probable that the judgment of her eyes was tempered by her wish to believe something good about “Elizabeth Owen” who was certainly somebody else.
And somebody else she was.
For now Amy handled the last paper. This white sheet she drew out and unfolded. It was engraved at the top: ARTHUR H. GRAY, M.D., LUMBER EXCHANGE, SEATTLE. The few written words were set down in an elegant, old-fashioned hand. A perceptible trembling in that hand betrayed either age or emotion. That hand might be dangerous in surgery. The words were bald, the facts simple, as if nothing more could be had from Dr. Gray who really wanted nothing to do with this. You saw the brief confrontation in his office—of Dad McKinney the prominent Seattle attorney who so believed in human rights he insisted that an adopted child have the right to her true name (on the one hand) and a good old doctor hindered by the Oath of Hippocrates and his knowledge that in revealing names he was conspiring — he of all people — against the state and the authorities. The authorities insisted that no adopted child ever know his true parents. In making that impossible, the authorities relieved a child of the possible horror of what he might find. She might find. But at last Dr. Gray had revealed the names, for he, too, had a heart. One seemed to hear Mr. McKinney's formal thanks and Dr. Gray's formal acknowledgment of them, “…not at all.”
Bracketed on the good white paper were the names Benjamin H. Burton and Elizabeth Birdseye Sweringen, and outside the bracket was the word “Parents.” Under the name of Elizabeth was the name Thomas H. Sweringen and in parenthesis the word “Father,” and under that, an address.
Lemhi, Idaho.
So she knew who she was. A Burton. What might they have called her? Elizabeth after her mother? But they had not named her. The state called her Baby Owen, who was no one at all. But it is the last name that counts. Now she had identity. She could now imagine herself a relative of any Burton she met anywhere in the world. In a bookshop. In a telephone book. She had a name.
BURTON, she wrote on a blank sheet of paper. And again. BURTON. How often must you write a name before it's yours? But alas, it's not the name alone that counts. It's knowing who your parents are that counts, and your parent's parents and your parent's parent's parents, for the more heritage we can produce the more secure we feel, the more and older the snapshots and portraits and silhouettes, objects, candle molds, wooden churns, brass tea kettles, locks of hair, faded letters coming apart at the folds, valentines and pressed flowers. A name without a knowledge of those who gave it to us, the tilt of noses, the ring of voices, is hollow, and this Amy knew well when at first she told herself she wanted only to know her name. But in pursuing her ancestors she was afraid of what frightened or closed faces she might see, what living conditions, what doors sagging at the hinges, what empty shelves. And much as she might wish to know them, it was doubtful they would wish to know her. For better or worse they had made their lives without her, kept their own hours, managed the holidays. They would not wish their lives disturbed by one who had first disturbed them.
She thought she had better leave things alone.
She found no Benjamin H. Burton in the telephone book.
As an attorney, Dad McKinney had arranged his affairs perfectly, and Amy had no need of a lawyer until her divorce; amicable as that divorce had been, the fabric of American life is so poorly woven that a lawyer must have a hand in it to keep it from fraying. To lend her divorce a casual touch, she had chosen a lawyer at random from the yellow pages. She had found him, a young man, most pleasant and understanding; they had lunched together and it transpired that he, like her, often drove to the coast and walked solitary beside the sea. Now she wrote to inquire if he would meet her for lunch at the Olympic Hotel, pleased that she could write “Olympic Hotel” without too much regretting Nofzinger's companionship. She wrote that she wanted to speak about personal things.
She gathered up her adoption papers, which she believed pertinent, the release signed by Elizabeth Owen, Dr. Gray's terse words, and drove into Seattle. Neither the freeway with its swift, impersonal traffic nor Mount Rainier, which had appeared a few minutes before when the clouds parted, looked as they had ever looked before.
She left her station wagon with the doorman at the hotel and entered the lobby which, unlike good eastern hotels, is fitted out with many comfortable chairs and settees where those who wish to be seen can sit and be seen; in Seattle, it is assumed that nobody who does not belong there will be there, and that assumption is usually correct.
Mr. Keith Compton, the attorney, was waiting with a good briefcase into which he might slip valuable papers entrusted to him. He arose smiling from a chair, and both he and she remarked that it was good to see each other again, and that time had passed. When they had touched hands they moved into the grill. She had her papers in the battered briefcase Dad McKinney had thought to be good luck, but she was so used to the Olympic Hotel she didn't care what she carried there. She thought she might show Compton the papers, or she might not.
Yes, she said, she would have a martini. So, then, would he, and a new little bond was established. “I shouldn't be surprised,” she said, “if what I have to say sounds strange. But then, lawyers must be used to strange things.”
“Very strange,” Compton said, and smiled as one who knows a thing or two.
“All right, then. I was adopted as a very small child, and couldn't have had better adoptive parents.” She felt tears about to spring to her eyes, for their faces, framed by the years, were before her. Reaching for a cigarette in the leather case beside her, her hand touched and tipped over the poorly footed martini glass. A waiter was at once on hand to do the small mopping up. He covered the damp so deftly with a napkin it was clear that spilled martinis were usual. However, she had never before overturned a glass in public.
“You were lucky to have found such a family,” Compton said.
By so many people, she thought, I have been described as lucky.
“I know,” she said. “But naturally, out of curiosity, it has sometimes crossed my mind to try to find my real parents. Maybe it's a woman's curiosity, or is that foolish, to believe that a woman's curiosity is any greater than a man's?”
“I think not,” Compton said.
“I think anybody would be curious,” she went on. The ease of her words, the control of them, was meant to convey to Compton that her wish to know of her real parents was hardly more than a velleity, a thought that would come to one while watering a plant or peeling an orange. She wished she had not spilled that martini.
“I understand your feelings,” Compton said. “But to find out is next to impossible. The laws of this state prohibit the Bureau of Vital Statistics from giving out that information.”
“I know that. My adoptive father knew that. He was an attorney. He once told me he felt a child had the right to know. He left papers. I have thought about all this.”
“I hope you have thought about it a great deal,” Compton said.
“And I decided that because of what I might find, it was better not to pursue the matter. I suppose what I want from you is a professional opinion. But maybe it's a personal opinion I want. Someone's opinion who can be — someone who can be both objective and subjective.”
“All right,” Compton raised a hand to summon the waiter to bring lunch. “I wouldn't pursue the matter further.”
As they parted, Compton said he hoped soon to get to the coast with his family, all of whom loved the out-of-doors. But the moment before he turned from her, she felt he was about to say something else. His mouth had that look.
She was grateful that now the spring was so far advanced she could put her mind to her garden, especially her rhododendrons which sometimes had won prizes. She was serious about gardening, enchanted with the power and beauty that hides inside a tiny seed. Serious about camping, collecting driftwood which she prepared and polished. It took little imagination to see in driftwood some fanciful creature, to feel, looking at it, a tender emotion. She was serious about her duties as a Girl Scout counsellor — knowing well enough that the girls were her substitute for a family. Oh, she was lucky, and in a sense the girls were lucky, for an encumbered woman would not have had the time for them, time to show them how to kindle fires, to tell them what berries not to eat, what is the best way to survive.
To survive.
She was grateful for those girls who, as they grew older and now knew that life was not what they had thought it, sometimes wrote her and recalled the past when things had seemed otherwise.
“Keep in touch,” she had told them. “Keep in touch.”
Her Christmas card list was long, but it became harder and harder to put a name to a face.
She had been not more than ten when she realized that certain objects in the McKinney house were looked on with special regard. These objects were more carefully and more often dusted, more often polished, were more carefully placed and lodged and spoken of with a quiet reverence, as if they were true relics. Among these objects were some that had belonged to the Crowells, her adoptive mother's family, and among these were a dozen antique English tablespoons that appeared only at Christmastime. For the remainder of the year these haughty spoons, each in its private chamois pouch, were put out of sight in a tooled leather box. Mothballs are said to retard tarnishing.
These old utensils were under discussion by the two Crowell cousins when once again they arrived by Buick automobile for Christmas dinner. Having already entered the university, they had begun to put foolish things behind them and to look on property because you never can tell. Amy, not yet twelve, had stood in the kitchen where a woman who had come to help out basted the goose which the McKinneys preferred to turkey. The woman said the trouble was, she couldn't find anything. The Crowell cousins were in the pantry where the dishes were kept and the silver was polished beside a small soapstone sink. Surely the conversation in there was not meant for Amy's ears — unless it was, and they wanted to make clear to her what was made clear.
“Those spoons,” one cousin said, “shouldn't go to Amy, but to some of the Crowells.”
They had looked on her as no Crowell. She was quite lucky enough to have been a sort of McKinney. How could they have looked on her as a Crowell? And had the spoons belonged to the McKinneys, they would have looked on her as no McKinney, no matter what the adoption papers said. Blood will tell. But the selected McKinney objects she years later brought with her to the house she and Nofzinger had bought — the tall clock, the captain's desk of teak and brass, the carvings of jade and ivory and alabaster, the silver tea urn — all these continued to give her a sense of identity, at least with a past, and were doubtless looked on by friends and acquaintances as rightfully hers because she had possession of them. It was only when the Crowell cousins, somewhat faded now, for their faces had not held up, stopped to see her that she once again felt herself a ghost, drifting without a voice of her own. But aging had not diminished the Crowell cousins' resentment of her lease on the Crowell spoons. She had erred in displaying them. Flaunting them, they might have said. So at last, to appease them, possibly to test their acceptance of her as a real member of the family who might reasonably expect to lie at last in the family plot, she offered them the Crowell spoons.
“Why, Amy!” Their faces were bright with astonishment. Oh, they accepted the spoons. How quickly the one cousin swept them into her big bag! And how their spirits lifted, and how suddenly warm they were, as to an old acquaintance who had been presumed lost or dead.
“Do you know what, Amy? I think it would be nice if we had another drink!”
… having been warned by Mr. Keith Compton that it would be unwise to hunt for her natural parents, she was glad of her rhododendrons.
But Compton could not possibly know the insistence of the small voice that asked and asked, “Who am I?” Compton knew who he was. He wore no mask, was no fraud, would not understand her frequent feelings of inferiority when addressed by people who assumed she looked back on a real family. He was not troubled when he heard the words “Father” and “Mother” so easily dropped by friends.
“Mother's been sneezing lately. She puts it down to pollen.”
“My father gets these restless streaks. Now he wants to look at something west of here.”
She supposed that Compton had based his advice to her on his conception of morality — that parents who abandon a child aren't worth finding, are condemned because they shirked responsibility, thought first of themselves, did not love. Compton had given his advice so promptly that she was certain he had had much experience looking into his clients' pasts and that he knew the chances were that she would find poverty, madness, adultery or promiscuity, and with such facts before them, clients must abandon any fragile illusion that might have brightened an hour — that there may have been some special circumstances that led to their being abandoned and adopted.
Could there have been a special circumstance? And what was it Compton had been about to say that day?
She'd spent a lifetime adding up figures in a firm, clear hand — somewhat angular — making out budgets for the Girl Scouts, arranging hours. She was adept as well at arranging her emotions. It was not likely she would tip over another glass. She had been one who could face the truth — had she not faced it with Nofzinger and the Crowell cousins? — and she had been more comfortable with facts than with possibilities.
Who was she, this controlled woman? She was the adopted daughter of the McKinneys, those good people who had given her every possible thing. She was familiar with the interior fragrance of Packards and heavy station wagons whose doors closed with authority. She was five feet eight inches tall and maybe that's why she married Nofzinger. He was tall. Nine tenths of available males are out of reach of the tall woman except on tiptoe. She had been the wife of Nofzinger and now she was adrift, independent, not wealthy but comfortable with such stocks and bonds as Presbyterians chose, stocks that seldom moved up or down but always paid a dividend, and bonds whose names suggested vaults under Fort Knox. She was still, however, at the mercy of a small voice who asked, “Whom am I?”
Of course she could face who she was!
She picked up the telephone and called Mr. Keith Compton.
He wrote her promptly. She filed away the letter, for she had been taught to file things away and to keep canceled checks and to make carbons of everything.
Compton wrote from his lofty office far up in the IBM Building in Seattle that he had decided the best thing was to start searching on the paternal side. “Namely, to look for a Ben Burton,” which was the same as looking for both of them because, although he had found no recent leads, he had found in the Seattle directory for 1912 Ben and Elizabeth Burton living together as man and wife. After that, they vanished.
“I've written the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Olympia,” he wrote. “We may find something there.”
Amy scarcely read that line. The words that rose up were “man and wife.”
“They were living together as man and wife.”
In 1912 that meant they were married and not said to be married or pretending to be married, for cohabitation was punishable in those days. Living in a furnished apartment. Heavy, cheap mission oak. Morris chair, seat of worn corduroy. Lamp with wooden base, lampshade of leaded green and white glass. Folding Murphy bed. One window looked down on the street, milk bottle on the sill when the ice ran out. Other window faced the airshaft where the homely odor of frying fat drifted up. But they were young, they were young. They could dream of dozens of windows, half of them opening on the sea. After her birth they had married. She had been born illegitimate, but had they kept her she would not long have been illegitimate, for the days and the months and the years recede. People forget. Once long ago, before the First World War when the seventh Edward sat on the throne and the ship's band played “Autumn” even as the Titanic slipped under the waves, Ben Burton and Elizabeth Sweringen Burton glanced at one another when a knock came on the door.
“I'll get it.”
Census taker.
Oh, they had loved each other. But not her; they had not married until they had given her away. In the face of things, it's a wonder Amy did not say, “Well, to hell with them, both of them.” But it's not easy to say the hell with your parents. And you see, there might be some funny circumstance.
However, a family is more than a mother and a father. How she had loved Mann's Buddenbrooks and the Jalna series with that wonderful old grandmother and the uncles and cousins and brothers, all those families in Little Women and Little Men, the close ties, the pride of the head of the family; the love of the young for the old has a place, really has a place, in a good family. But while she waited for word from the Bureau of Vital Statistics, she clung once again to the McKinneys, summoned up their voices, the odor of the foods they fancied, roasting pork and applesauce, the starched linen and the china, the opening and closing of familiar doors, the striking of the clock. Oh, the protective ghosts of the McKinneys would stand beside her if the Bureau knew nothing. Bureaus are glacial in their drift because of the piles of paper everywhere and because bureaus are staffed by stout, elderly women whose children's marriages have not worked out, and elderly men who, as they grow even older, come to look more and more like their wives. These are civil servants and somehow accountable only to the state, and you can't put your finger on the state; there is no one to hear your complaints about the many coffee breaks and the good-natured bantering that takes place in the corridors.
The Bureau of Vital Statistics was glacial even for a bureaucracy, for there were all those millions and millions of names drifting in, many of them misspelled, papers signed on the wrong lines and people being born and dying and moving away leaving no word and suing for divorce and hailing each other into court.
Three times in the days that followed, Amy took up the telephone to call Compton and three times she replaced it to silence the impatient dial tone. She must let the truth unfold as it would; to force it might be to alter it.
Suppose she herself called the Bureau? But now the Bureau had become a threat; it had become a Presence that must be approached with caution. She might hear what she did not wish to hear.
And when at last she heard from Compton, she did hear what she did not wish to hear.
Ben Burton, Mr. Compton wrote, had lived for some years at the Gould Hotel on Third Street. “He died last year of cirrhosis of the liver.”
She held the letter as if weighing it. It was a fine example of a good attorney's reticence and tact, for “Gould Hotel” and “Third Street” and “cirrhosis of the liver” were all euphemisms. Gould Hotel meant flophouse; Third Street meant skid row; cirrhosis of the liver meant Ben Burton died an alcoholic. But because the letter contained the first and probably last news of her true father, she felt an obligation. Her father's life, the end of it anyway, had been a tragedy. As his natural daughter she felt she was bound to know the place where he had spent his last hours, to share with him who was now dead the peculiar shadows of his humiliation and his failure. That's what a daughter must do. That's what family means.
She dressed simply in old clothes. She would pass as the slightly more fortunate friend or relative of one of the old men living in the Gould Hotel.
The Gould Hotel was a three-story firetrap. The brick foundation was zigzagged with cracks as the earth beneath it gave way and sank towards the Pacific Ocean. At the entrance she stepped over an empty pint wine bottle; a stage manager couldn't have arranged a more dismal scene.
Attached to the thick, dog-eared register on a stout length of string was a pencil, not a pen; those who signed themselves in to the Gould Hotel need not expect the permanence of ink. That the Gould Hotel might have seen better days was suggested by the mounted head of an antlered mule deer, the glass eyes glazed with dust and smoke, a souvenir of a long-ago encounter between predatory man and timid beast in the woods to the north. Under the head sat four old men playing rummy, the chips beside them a reminder that once they had owned and even understood money; they had not lost, even now, the will to be a winner. At the feet of one old man was a brass cuspidor, for he was of a generation when, in some circles, it was acceptable to spit. At a second table two old men played solitaire. What did the end of the game mean to them? Another chance? Yes, here she was at home with those who, like her, had rejected their past and sought in the cards a future. Her signature as Amy McKinney or as Amy Nofzinger was as temporary and as easily erased as their signatures in lead pencil. Coming here dressed as a woman she was not, she was a ghost as they were ghosts.
How could she, without embarrassment to them or to her, speak of her father, how say, “Did you know Ben Burton? How did he look? What did he want?”
She sat on a wicker chair hard against the wall, such a chair as was seen on verandahs in the summertime and taken in when it rained, if anyone remembered. Tossed into the seat of a neighboring slatted folding chair like those in public halls and in the basements of churches were a copy of Reader's Digest of another year, the Elk's Magazine of another month, and a fresh copy of the War Cry, that journal of the Salvation Army that promises failures a friend in Jesus. It had been but little disturbed.
Amy opened her handbag, carefully chosen because it was worn, and drew out a Zippo lighter, a small leather cigarette case and a holder that entrapped some irritants and was her answer to stopping smoking; but even as she fitted the cigarette into the holder, she noticed that the younger of the two solitaire players glanced at her in a certain way. She realized that Third Street was not Queen Anne Hill, and that her elaborate preparations to smoke were taken as the provocative gestures of a cruising whore, that the clothes she wore were regarded as the best she had, rather than the worst. Whatever question she now asked in the Gould Hotel would be misconstrued; an inquiry about Ben Burton would mark him as one who kept low company. She closed her bag on the offending articles and rose and left the place, believing that the man who had smiled and risen to follow her was a man who might have been her father, no different from her father, who had been a drunken derelict and knew that mule deer and that shabby register with its roster of the damned.
What she found could have been worse. For Compton in his letter to her had revealed a shocking little story. He said he was relieved that she had now resolved to drop her search. Clients of his, he said, who were bent on adopting a little boy had insisted on knowing who the natural father was.
“The father,” Compton wrote, “turned out to be the last man executed in the state of Washington before capital punishment was outlawed.”
They did not adopt the little boy. Where was he now, do you suppose, and where was Bobby who had lasted for so short a time and kept his face turned away from them that day on The Virginia Five?
As far as she was concerned, the book was closed.