Читать книгу If You Could See Me Now - Michael Mewshaw - Страница 6

Now in her late sixties, remarried and residing in one of the most distant exurbs of Los Angeles, Mrs.Woodson (as I'll call her) was more than willing to answer my questions. Some adoptive mothers might be hurt that a child had decided to reconnect with her biological family, and jealous or resentful of a man reappearing after the hard work of child-rearing had been finished. But Mrs. Woodson was thoroughly positive, warm and outgoing, and took obvious pride in talking about her daughter.As she recounted how she and her first husband, George, had adopted Amy, the full story required her to tell how they had adopted their first child, a son named Jeff, who had been born four years before Amy and on the same day, Christmas Eve.

"In 1960, we did some research," Mrs.Woodson said, "and learned about the Adoption Institute, which was supposed to have the shortest waiting period for prospective parents. I remember we went to an orientation session, and people at the agency advised us of possible prob lems such as the adopted child might have health issues. And they emphasized that as husband and wife we had to be in this together.We both had to want it, which George and I did. So we completed the forms and expected it could be a year or more before they finished the home visits and verified our financial situation and our employment history and interviewed our families and friends, then found a baby for us. George and I had both had top-secret clearance from the National Security Agency—he used to be a cryptographer and I had been in the navy— and this process reminded me of that.They didn't ask how many times a week we had sex, but they wanted to know our religious beliefs, and they interviewed our neighbors, asking was there anything they knew that might make us unfit parents.

"I guess we passed because after only four months the Adoption Institute called to say they had a baby boy.Would we like to see it and decide whether we wanted it? I thought that was strange. It sounded so cold. Like we were comparison shopping. But I fell in love the instant I saw Jeff."

A couple of years later when she and George decided to adopt a second child, Mrs.Woodson had no preference, but George had his mind set on a daughter. A girl baby was available in 1962, but Mrs.Woodson had just had a hysterectomy and felt weak and fragile."I just didn't think I could handle it then. It was terrible to think I might not have another chance."

By 1964, when she felt well enough to cope with a baby, the Adoption Institute had folded and its records had been transferred to the Children's Home Society of California. So the Woodsons made an application there and started the familiar ritual of interviews, home visits and background checks.This time, the agency had another source of information about the Woodsons. Jeff, now going on four, got to give his opinion of their parenting skills. Again, they must have passed, as Mrs. Woodson put it.Within five months the Children's Home Society notified them that it had a baby girl.

"I remember they told us, 'The birth mother's a lovely woman.And this is a beautiful girl like her mother.' Of course, that didn't matter to me," Mrs.Woodson said."Just as long as she was healthy and I could have her, that's all I cared about."

I interrupted to ask Mrs. Woodson if she recalled the offices of the Children's Home Society.

"Yes indeed," she said. "We were there a couple of times during the application stage and a couple of more times to meet Amy. Then we came back to pick her up."

"Could you describe the place?"

"It was a big white wooden house. It had columns and a gravel driveway. I remember the sound of that gravel as we drove in, then walked across the parking lot."

I remembered it too—the grinding sound of pebbles under tires, then under the feet of a couple walking toward the house.

Mrs.Woodson went on to describe her first glimpse of Amy."They took us into an office.A plain room with a desk and a couple of chairs where George and I sat.They brought Amy in. She was six weeks old then and wearing the cutest little dress. A foster family had kept her temporarily, and they provided us with typewritten notes about Amy's sleeping habits and her eating schedule. It was all very clear and formalized at the CHS, and the foster family had had plenty of experience.

"The first thing I noticed was that Amy had a rash on her chest. I thought I knew what to do for that. She had dark hair, plenty of it, and her eyes were already turning brown. I held her, then George held her, and she never cried.There were two or three people from the agency in the room, but I don't remember the face of anyone except Amy. I just remember thinking, I want to get some cream on that rash."

I appreciated Mrs.Woodson's relish in recounting her memories of Amy. I understood how she felt. I found that I had surprisingly strong feelings about Amy myself and liked hearing about her early life.

"The night before we picked her up," Mrs.Woodson said,"I couldn't sleep, I was so excited. The next morning, we crunched up that driveway to CHS, and this time they took us into a beautiful paneled room with a fireplace. I don't remember whether the fire was lit or not.That's how nervous I was.Amy was in a carved antique crib.We had been told to bring clothes for her.We had to undress her and redress her so that the clothes she was wearing could go to the next adopted baby.

"On the ride home, we made a mistake. Jeff was with us, and he sat in the backseat. George drove and I sat up front holding Amy, and Jeff must have been feeling ignored. He said, 'I'm not sure we're doing the right thing, having a new baby.' I said,'Let's give it some time.'Then when we got home, I let him hold Amy, and after that everything was fine."

Compared to the lengthy and expensive tribulation that adoption has become, this sounded blessedly short and cheap.As Ms.Woodson recalled, the total fee for Jeff 's adoption amounted to $900. For Amy it was $1,200. "We were very lucky," she acknowledged, "to adopt at a time when there were lots of babies, and we could afford it. Nowadays, it would have been a hardship on a couple with our income."

The mention of money prompted a digression. Familiar with the "nonidentifying information" in the CHS file, Mrs.Woodson was sensitive to the economic and social disparity between her daughter's birth family and her adoptive family. In the majority of cases, especially these days, adopted kids come from low-income backgrounds or from deprived or even destitute foreign countries.Their adoption represents a step up, a promising new start. But Amy, whose birth parents were from wealthy families, had been raised by people of modest means until she was six.After that, her adoptive parents divorced, and she had grown up with a single mother who had to pinch pennies to provide for her two children.

"I always felt women gave up kids for financial reasons," Mrs.Woodson said. "They couldn't afford to bring them up alone. But to realize that with Amy's mom there was no good reason to put her up for adoption, that surprised me."

I pointed out that Amy's birth mother had been under family and social pressures, but Mrs. Woodson insisted, "That's not what I call a good reason.This woman needed therapy. Her image was too important to her."

I urged her to tell me more about what Amy had been like as a child.

"Oh, she was a joy to raise," Mrs.Woodson said,"and such a beautiful girl. Even when she was five or six, people stopped and stared at her. When she was still in a stroller, people absolutely fawned over her."

Mrs.Woodson laughed and admitted that while the adoption agency made every effort to match children with parents similar to them, they couldn't control chromosomes. "Amy doesn't look anything like me. I'm small-boned, petite, about 5'4", and I guess you'd say I'm zaftig. Beside me Amy always felt like a giant, but she was just tall and looked like a model.

"Even as a little girl, she was always interested in clothes. It must have been something inborn. She certainly didn't get it from me."

Mrs. Woodson recalled that Amy's adoptive grandmother had made her a dress for her second birthday. It was of green velvet, a color suitable for the Christmas season, and it had a white fur collar and a picture of a cat stitched on the pocket. Amy loved the outfit. But as a surprise her grandmother had also made a doll with brown hair like Amy's and a replica of the green velvet dress, accurate right down to the fur collar and the cat on the pocket. She presented it in a shoe box, and the instant Amy lifted the lid, she burst into tears and threw it on the floor.

It amused Mrs. Woodson to think that Amy had reacted like a clothes-conscious woman who gets jealous when someone shows up in the same dress. But it seemed to me more likely that it had scared Amy to see a miniature of herself in a box.

As Mrs.Woodson described Amy's adolescence, she emphasized her down-to-earth qualities. "She always had a lot of common sense. She was a decent student. Mostly Bs, some Cs. She wasn't really interested in going off to college, and I couldn't have afforded to pay for it. Her father didn't help much financially, and he didn't feel girls needed college. She did a couple of semesters at Pasadena Community College and worked at night at Monahan's Pub.That was a big pickup place in town, and at eighteen Amy wasn't even old enough to serve drinks. But she handled it well and was very level-headed."

It struck me that, except for her level-headedness and her lackadaisical attitude toward school, Amy's childhood resembled mine far more than it did her birth mother's. Divorced parents, money trouble, parttime jobs and lingering confusion about personal identity.

According to her adoptive mother, Amy became interested in her birth parents, particularly her biological mother, as she advanced into her teens."'I just want to know what she looks like,' " Mrs.Woodson recalled her saying."I told her that was normal and that I would have felt the same. Many adoptive parents feel threatened when their kids start searching for their roots. I didn't."

Mrs. Woodson encouraged both of her children to feel free to express curiosity about their birth parents. The three of them joined the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association and once went to an ALMA national convention in Las Vegas where a parent and child who had been reunited spoke of their positive experience. From local ALMA meetings, however, they gained a more realistic perspective and realized that, as Mrs.Woodson put it, "not all stories turn out prettily. But most are happy, and the birth parents say they always wondered and worried what happened to their children."

Whether reunions went poorly or well, Mrs. Woodson held the belief that adopted children have a basic right to know their origins. "The idea that third parties—doctors, lawyers, birth parents, adoption agencies—can contract away that right is appalling to me."

Still, as had been her abiding practice with Amy, she didn't push her to seek a reunion."I didn't feel it was up to me to take control of the situation." She suggested that Amy might contact the Children's Home Society for information and left it up to her.

As our conversation drifted toward areas of deepest interest to me, I found it difficult not to hurry Mrs.Woodson along. But I let her tell the tale at her own pace, interrupting only to clarify a point or unkink the chronology.

Amy, she said, had started off her search with an advantage that few adopted children enjoy.When the Woodsons went to the courthouse to complete the adoption, there was some confusion, and as lawyers and CHS representatives and the nervous parents passed papers back and forth, an extraordinary violation of standard practice took place. Amy's original birth certificate popped up in Mrs.Woodson's hands, and for an instant, before a flustered CHS employee retrieved it, she got a glimpse of a strange name: Elaine Godot Mewsahu.

"Right away, I thought of Beckett," Mrs.Woodson told me. "It hit me that the Godot part had to be an inside joke, as in Waiting for Godot. But I thought Mewsahu might be the birth mom's last name."

I'm accustomed to people mangling my surname. This was by no means the most extreme misspelling. But it shocked me that it had wound up on Amy's birth certificate.

Assuming that Amy might someday need the name, Mrs. Woodson had scribbled it down and waited. The wait lasted almost twenty-two years. At last, on July 14, 1986, Amy submitted a notarized Waiver of Rights to Confidentiality to the Children's Home Society. Otherwise known as a Consent to Contact statement, this form signaled that she welcomed contact with her birth parents. If they ever submitted the same documentation, the Children's Home Society was legally free to arrange a reunion.At the same time,Amy applied for access to the "nonidentifying information" in her file.

There matters remained for several years.The CHS received no inquiries and no Consent to Contact statement from her birth parents, and Amy, regardless of how much she speculated about the past, did nothing in the present to move her search along. Mrs. Woodson, however, had read the "nonidentifying information" closely and noticed the reference to the birth mother's being a runner-up in the Miss Maryland contest. In the early 1990s, while on a business trip to Baltimore, Mrs. Woodson leafed through the telephone directory. Although she found no listings under Mewsahu, she spotted several under a tantalizingly similar name—Mewshaw—and concluded that there must have been a misprint on the original birth certificate or that in her flustered state of mind, she had copied the name wrong.Though she didn't know it, she was still thirty miles off the mark. I come from a different batch of Mewshaws who hail from the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

On her return to California, Mrs.Woodson gave the new spelling of the name to Amy and once again let her deal with it as she pleased.This time, when Amy procrastinated, one of her girlfriends seized the initiative. Pretending to be a sociology student, she called the California Lutheran Hospital and claimed she had a graduate school project that required her to pick a date at random—December 24, 1964—and track the lives of everybody born at the hospital on that day.

"Hospitals aren't supposed to reveal that information," Mrs.Woodson said. "But sometimes they do. Maybe they guess it's a child search ing for her parents and take mercy. Anyway, Amy's friend learned there were a handful of babies born on Dec. 24, 1964, and just one of them was a girl—Elaine Godot Mewshaw."

At this point, Amy was galvanized to hire a private detective. She never met the man. Their conversations took place by telephone. As Mrs.Woodson and Amy both recalled it, the man was a friend or relative of Amy's first husband. In short order, he produced the name, address and telephone number of my half-sister.

Neither Amy nor her adoptive mother grasped how tenuous the link had been. As I took pains to point out to them, not a single detail from the "nonidentifying information" bears any resemblance to Karen's personal data. Blond and blue-eyed, 5'2" and four years younger than the birth mother, Karen had never participated in the Miss Maryland pageant, never lived in California and didn't have parents or a sibling who matched those described in the CHS file.What's more, since Karen and I hadn't had the same last name, and since for the past twenty-odd years she had lived under her husband's name, it was a mystery how the investigator had ever connected her to me.

As best Amy and her mother could explain it,the investigator had discovered that after three decades the records of the Miss Maryland pageant had been lost or destroyed. Still, he managed to track down a former employee who remembered that Karen had been a beauty-pageant contestant—in Washington, D.C., not Maryland—and that she was related to Michael Mewshaw.This satisfied the detective, who, without further digging, reported what he had found out.

That the search had produced the roughest draft of a very loose version of the truth, that the path to it had been strewn with lies and false documents and that it had run through people who were peripheral to the story—none of this bothered Amy. And I can't blame her. She be lieved she was about to locate the last piece, the key piece, in the scattered puzzle of her life. But she had no idea of the dizzying hall of mirrors she was about to enter. I knew better and feared that she might be in for a shock eerily akin to her second birthday, when the sight of a tiny replica of herself in a shoe box had provoked tears rather than gratitude.