5

FRIENDS EXCHANGE GLANCES when one has been unlike oneself.

“You're more like yourself, now,” her friends said.

Although her parents were living when she was handed over to the McKinneys, Amy was as vulnerable as a true orphan to the uncertainties, vicissitudes and humiliations. Like a true orphan, she learned early to show gratitude in order to survive. Gratitude is the price you pay. From the moment Miss Lovelace in modified French heels had suggested she was lucky not to have landed in an orphans' home, Amy was grateful to the McKinneys for having spared her that dismal fate — the long halls, the iron cots, the sour smell of mops. The fear of orphans' homes is congenital, the stuff of nightmares in which no father or mother exists to explain away the shadows. Even children with proper parents have such dreams. At seven she knew what an orphans' home was, a place where a child was an object, an object to be clothed and fed as cheaply as possible and taught homely skills to make her at last independent of a society that had stepped in when parents or God failed. But at sixteen, released from such a home, an orphan finds no hiding place, has no sheltering name but one set on her like a hat by the authorities — as once the wandering Jews were assigned names by the German government, and slaves assumed the names of their masters.

And Amy now realized that Miss Lovelace, whose real parents possessed no beach house, must wait to be brought to one as a lucky member of a certain Sunday School class. Miss Lovelace felt bound to humiliate a little girl who quite by accident had access to a beach house, had an intimacy with the drifting fog forbidden to Miss Lovelace — legitimate and flanked by parents though she be.

The ewe tells her own lamb by its smell and rejects the stranger. When you want the ewe whose lamb has died to take an orphan lamb, you dress it in the warm skin of her own dead lamb. Except for the death of their little boy, the McKinneys would not have taken Amy. She was lucky. And it had been easy to be grateful to the McKinneys, to be kind to them as they grew old and forgot things, repeated themselves. She had vowed she would make them proud of her, and she had. They were good, gentle people. But hadn't they, in fact, dressed her in the memory of their own little boy? Hadn't she “grown into” the tricycle and the dinghy?

Amy had learned how shaky the underpinnings, how uncertain the foundations of many a legitimate family. Fathers reject sons. Mothers reject daughters. Or a mother dies, is replaced by a new woman. The children of the dead mother are first outraged, then estranged from the new woman and then from their own father. The new woman takes down pictures, hangs new draperies, puts dear things away in drawers out of sight. From the drawers into the ash can. She invites her own friends to parties.

Or, a young woman's son steps out from behind a parked truck and is instantly killed by a speeding car. After the hurried funeral the young woman's family goes its way. Life must go on. For them, anyway. Indeed, the tragedy might even strengthen the grieving young mother, make her strong for future tragedies. Future tragedies there will be. It was Amy who comforted the young mother, sat with her, who put away the little boy's toys, his clothes, the tennis shoes he had worn the day before. Oh, those shoes. She stayed in the house until one day she saw the young woman smile.

Well, then! The family she had dreamed of did not exist, that big, loving, loyal turbulent family who cared more for each other than for anybody else.

What a family that would have been. “Amy must have the heavy silver spoons,” that family would have said. “Get them out before we forget.”

Dreams. Everybody deals with insecurity. If her own was in not knowing who she was, at least she was financially secure, she had lost no child, had never feared for her job, felt little awkwardness in a roomful of people, had friends, was healthy.

And anyway, the book was closed. That was a relief. Hope is a painful emotion and stands between what one is and what one should be. Gratifying to know that now she need no longer think about all that. She understood now why the authorities made it impossible for the adopted child to find her parents. She would have been better off if Dad McKinney had not left that paper behind. She had learned her lesson. She had found her father, found a part of her past. It could have been worse.

Those good McKinneys!

“You're so much more your old self,” friends said. “You seemed troubled.”

Felt so much better, too. Her life became normal as she shopped with shrewd eyes at the supermarket and had the station wagon tuned up for a trip to the coast. She took a jacket to the tailor's to have rewoven a hole she had burned in it with a cigarette sometime during the days when she had been dreaming away.

She resumed an active correspondence with old friends all over the United States. She wrote on her adoptive father's old L. C. Smith typewriter. His fingers knew those keys. Friends in Texas. Everywhere. Many friends she had not seen in twenty years, nor had their families seen them. Family roots had dried up as the leaves scattered. Distance is destructive to families. A parent scarcely recognizes the child he meets at the airport — beard, mustache, glasses or a new way of doing the hair. The parent remembers one thing and the child another; they had been strangers from the beginning. Why, those with similar lives have more in common than those with a common blood. It is just as well if a child is independent of his family; he learns self-reliance. For each of us is born alone, lives largely within the confines of his own skull, and dies alone.

But then she did an odd thing. She wrote to Compton on notepaper engraved AMY MCKINNEY. She had put that paper away on the top shelf of a closet soon after her marriage to Nofzinger and came across it again quite by accident — well, almost quite. She did feel she owed Compton a letter because he had warned her of what she might find. She owed him a description of the Gould Hotel, must tell him that she now realized that inordinate curiosity about the past is bound to lead into dark and twisting paths.

“Dear Mr. Compton …”

She had no reason to expect a reply. The book was closed.

Then why, in the next few days, did her mind wander to the mailbox and why did it occur to her to drop in at his office? Well, because he was the only link she had with her real family. He must see her as others did not. Compton was the only one on earth who knew her name was Burton.

And wasn't it kind of him to write her — to keep in touch. In him she had possibly found a real friend. She would have him and his wife to dinner and they would all be quite comfortable sitting together at her table sharing a common knowledge, that she who basted the roast and poured out the wine was Amy Burton.

But the brief letter from Compton was hardly what she expected. She stood in the middle of the room. It was early but she poured herself a drink.

“As a friend,” he wrote, “maybe I should keep this knowledge to myself. I hate stirring things up. But as a professional man, I must speak out. As your friend again, I've got to let you know.…”

The old alcoholic in the Gould Hotel was not her father. The Bureau of Vital Statistics had erred. The Ben Burton whose records they had was a Benson Burton, not Benjamin Burton.

“I believe this matter is extremely sensitive,” Compton wrote. “But of course if you wish we can now search on the maternal side.”

On the coffee table before her she laid out the cards for solitaire, a habit of hers when she looked for guidance, a habit the sensible McKinneys would have questioned, like a belief in spirits.

Ten minutes later she picked up the telephone.