Phyllis and Joe Homes

Bruce Homes

A.M. and Jon Homes

I remember their insistence that I come into the living room and sit down and how the dark room seemed suddenly threatening, how I stood in the kitchen doorway holding a jelly doughnut and how I never eat jelly doughnuts.

I remember not knowing; first thinking something was very wrong, assuming it was death — someone had died.

And then I remember knowing.

Christmas 1992, I go home to Washington, D.C., to visit my family. The night I arrive, just after dinner, my mother says, “Come into the living room. Sit down. We have something to tell you.” Her tone makes me nervous. My parents are not formal people — no one sits in the living room. I am standing in the kitchen. The dog is looking up at me.

“Come into the living room. Sit down,” my mother says.

“Why?”

“There’s something we need to talk to you about.”

“What?”

“Come and we’ll tell you.”

“Tell me now, from here.”

“Come and we’ll tell you.”

“Tell me now, from here.”

“Come,” she says, patting the cushion next to her.

“Who died?” I say, terrified.

“No one died. Everyone’s fine.”

“Then what is it?”

They are silent.

“Is it about me?”

“Yes, it’s you. We’ve had a phone call. Someone is looking for you.”

After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I get up knowing one thing about myself: I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young and unmarried, my father older and married, with a family of his own. When I was born, in December of 1961, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, “Your package has arrived and it’s wrapped in pink ribbons.”

My mother starts to cry. “You don’t have to do anything about it, you can just let it go,” she says, trying to relieve me of the burden. “But the lawyer said he’d be happy to talk with you. He couldn’t have been nicer.”

“Tell me again — what happened?”

Details, minutiae, as though the facts, the call-and-response of questions asked and answered, will make sense of it, will give it order, shape, and the thing it lacks most — logic.

“About two weeks ago we got a phone call. It was Stanley Frosh, the lawyer who took care of the adoption, calling to say that he’d gotten a call from a woman who told him that if you wanted to contact her, she’d be willing to hear from you.”

“What does that mean, ‘willing to hear from you’? Does she want to talk to me?”

“I don’t know,” my mother says.

“What did Frosh say?”

“He couldn’t have been nicer. He said that he’d had this call — the day before your birthday — and he wasn’t sure what we would want to do with the information, but he thought we should have it. Would you like to know her name?”

“No,” I say.

“We debated about whether or not to even tell you,” my father says.

“You debated? How could you not tell me? It’s not your information. What if you hadn’t told me and something happened to you and then I found out later?”

“But we are telling you,” my mother says. “Mr. Frosh says you can call him at any time.” She offers Frosh as though talking to him will do something — like fix it.

“This happened two weeks ago and you’re just telling me now?”

“We wanted to wait until you were home.”

“Why did Frosh call you? Why didn’t he call me directly?” I was thirty-one years old, an adult, and still they were treating me like an infant who needed protection.

“Damn her,” my mother says. “It’s a lot of nerve.”

This was my mother’s nightmare; she’d always been afraid that someone would come and take me away. I’d grown up knowing that was her fear, knowing in part it had nothing to do with my being taken away, but with her first child, her son, having died just before I was born. I grew up feeling that on some very basic level my mother would never let herself get attached again. I grew up with the sensation of being kept at a distance. I grew up furious. I feared that there was something about me, some defect of birth that made me repulsive, unlovable.

My mother came to me. She wanted to hug me. She wanted me to comfort her.

I didn’t want to hug her. I didn’t want to touch anyone. “Is Frosh sure she is who she says she is?”

“What do you mean?” my father asked.

“Is he sure she’s the right woman?”

“I think he’s fairly certain it’s her,” my father said.

The fragile, fragmented narrative, the thin line of story, the plot of my life, has been abruptly recast. I am dealing with the divide between sociology and biology: the chemical necklace of DNA that wraps around the neck sometimes like a beautiful ornament — our birthright, our history — and other times like a choke chain.

I have often felt the difference between who I arrived as and who I’ve become; layer upon layer piling up until it feels as though I am coated with a bad veneer, the cheap paneling of a suburban recreation room.

As a child, I was obsessed by the World Book Encyclopedia, the acetate anatomy pages, where you could build a person, folding in the skeleton, the veins, the muscles, layer upon layer, until it all came together.

For thirty-one years I have known that I came from somewhere else, started as someone else. There have been times when I have been relieved by the fact that I am not of my parents, that I am freed from their biology; and that is followed by an enormous sensation of otherness, the pain of how alone I feel.

“Who else knows?”

“We told Jon,” my father says. Jon, my older brother, their son.

“Why did you tell him? It wasn’t yours to tell.”

“We’re not telling Grandma,” my mother says.

This is the first important thing they’ve elected not to tell her — she is too old, too confused to be of help to them. She might do something with it in her head, conflate the information with other information, make it into something entirely different.

“Think of how I feel,” my mother says. “I can’t even tell my own mother. I can’t get any comfort from her. It’s awful.”

My mother and I sit in silence.

“Should we not have told you?” my mother asks.

“No,” I say, resigned. “You had to tell me. It wasn’t a choice. It’s my life, I have to deal with it.”

“Mr. Frosh says you can call him anytime,” she repeats.

“Where does she live?”

“New Jersey.”

In my dreams, my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens, the CEO, the CFO, and the COO. Movie-star beautiful, incredibly competent, she can take care of anyone and anything. She has made a fabulous life for herself, as ruler of the world, except for one missing link—me.

I say good night and drift off into the spin of the story, the myth of my beginning.

My adoptive mother and father didn’t marry until my father was forty. My mother, eight years younger, had a son, Bruce, from a previous marriage who had been born with severe kidney problems. He lived to be nine and died six months before I was born. Together my mother and father had Jon — during his birth my mother’s uterus ruptured, and both she and Jon nearly died. An emergency hysterectomy was performed and my mother was unable to have more children.

“It was lucky any of us survived,” she said. “We always wanted more. We wanted three children. We wanted a little girl.”

When I was young and used to ask where I came from, my mother would tell me that I was from the Jewish Social Service Agency. When I was a teenager, my therapist often asked me, “Don’t you think it’s odd that an agency would give a baby to a family where another child had died just six months before — to a family still in mourning?” I shrugged. It seemed like both a good idea and a really bad one. I always felt that my role in the family was to heal things, to make everything all right — to replace a dead boy. I grew up doused in grief. From day one, on a cellular level, I was perpetually in mourning.

There is folklore, there are the myths, there are facts, and there are the questions that go unanswered.

If my parents wanted more children, why did they build a house with only three bedrooms — who was going to share? I assumed that they knew Bruce was going to die. They may have wanted three children, but they planned for two.

When I asked my mother why an agency would give them an infant so soon after a child had died, she said nothing. And then when I was twenty, on a cold winter afternoon, I pressed her for more information, details. I would do this at weak moments, special occasions such as Bruce’s birthday, the anniversary of his death, or my birthday — times when she seemed vulnerable, when I sensed a crack in the surface. Where did I come from? Not from an agency, but through a lawyer; it was a private adoption.

“We put our name on agency lists but there were no babies available. We were told that the best thing to do was ask around, to let people know that we were looking for a baby.”

Each earthquake of identity, each shift in the architecture of the precarious frame that I’d built for myself, threw me. How much was still being kept from me and how much had been forgotten, or lost with the subtle erasure, the natural revision of time?

I asked again. “Where did I come from?”

“We told everyone that we were looking for a baby and then one day we heard of a baby that was going to be born, and that was you.”

“How did you hear about me?”

“Through a friend. Remember my friend Lorraine?” She mentioned the name of someone I met once, long ago. Lorraine knew another couple that also wanted to adopt a baby, but it turned out that in a roundabout way they knew who the mother was — this was told to me as though it explained something, as though knowing who the mother was made everything null and void, not because there was something wrong with the mother, but because there was something wrong with knowing.

As an adult I asked my mother if she would call Lorraine, if she would ask Lorraine to call the people who in a roundabout way knew who my mother was and ask them, who was she? My mother said no. She said, what if the couple has other children that don’t know they’re adopted?

What does that have to do with me? And how incredibly screwed up that someone wouldn’t have told their children that they were adopted.

My mother finally called Lorraine — who said, “Let it go.” She claimed to know nothing. Who was she protecting? What was she hiding?

My mother remembered something about real estate, something about a name, but she didn’t remember enough. Why didn’t she remember? It would seem like the kind of thing you wouldn’t forget.

“I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to know anything. I felt I had to protect you. The less I knew, the better. I was afraid she would come back and try to take you away.”

“Okay, back to the beginning — you heard of a baby who was going to be born, and then what?”

“And then PopPop’s lawyer was able to get in touch with the woman and they met and he called us and said, she’s wonderful, she’s healthy, except for some problems with her teeth — I think she hadn’t had good dental care. We set up a post office box and some letters were exchanged, and then we waited for you to be born.”

“What did the letters say?”

“I don’t remember.” Everything is prefaced with “I don’t remember.”

I lean in and the subtle pressure causes some slight discharge of information. “Just some basic information about her background, about her health, about how the pregnancy was going. She was young, she wasn’t married. I think that the father was married. One of them was Jewish; the other, I think, may have been Catholic. She cared about you very much, she wanted what was best for you and knew she couldn’t take care of you herself. She wanted you to go to a very special home — a Jewish home. It was important to her to know that you went somewhere where you’d be loved. She wanted you to have all the opportunity in the world. I think she may have been living in northern Virginia.”

“What happened to the letters?” I imagine a precious short stack of delicate letters tied in a ribbon and buried at the back of a drawer deep in my mother’s dresser.

My mother pauses, looks up and off to the side, as if searching her memory. “I think there was even another letter after you were born.”

“Where are the letters?”

“I think they were destroyed,” my mother says.

“Didn’t it occur to you that I might want them, that they might be all I ever had?”

“We were told to be very careful. I didn’t save anything. We were told not to. No evidence, no reminders.”

“Who told you?”

“The lawyer.”

I didn’t believe her. It was her choice. My mother didn’t want me to be adopted. She wanted me to be hers. She was afraid of anything that challenged that.

“And then what?”

“We waited. And on December 18, 1961, we got a phone call from the lawyer saying, ‘Your package has arrived, it’s wrapped in pink ribbons and it has ten fingers and ten toes.’ We called Dr. Ross, our pediatrician, and he went down to the hospital, took a look at you, and called us. ‘She’s perfect,’ he said.”

“What else?”

“Three days later we went to pick you up.”

I met my parents for the first time in a car parked around the corner from the hospital. They sat parked on a street in downtown Washington in the middle of a snowstorm, waiting for me to be delivered to them. They brought clothing to dress me, to disguise me, to begin to make me their own. This undercover pickup and delivery was made by a friend who purposely dressed in ratty old clothes — her costume designed not to attract attention, not to give information; this is another detail I didn’t know until I was in my twenties. My parents sat in the car, worrying, while the neighbor went into the hospital to collect me. This was a secret mission, something could go wrong. She—the mother — could change her mind. They sat waiting, and then the neighbor was there walking through the snow with a bundle in her arms. She handed me to my mother, and my parents brought me home, mission accomplished.

I have only the home movie version in my head. A big old-fashioned 1961 car. Downtown Washington. Snow. Nervousness. Excitement.

The story goes that my brother, Jon, so proud, so thrilled that the new baby was coming home, stood out in the driveway with a sign that he and my grandmother had made—“Welcome Home Baby Sister.” My arrival has always been described as if it were some magical moment, as if a fairy had waved a wand that pronounced the household cured, leaving me there, like a token, a good luck charm to fix everything, to lift a mother and father from their grief.

I was carried down the hall and laid out on the big bed in my parents’ room. Neighbors, the aunts and uncles, all came to look at me; a prize — the most beautiful baby they’d ever seen. My hair was thick and black and stood up like a rocket ship, my eyes were bright blue. “Your cheeks were luscious and pink — we ate you up. You were perfect.”

Think of the differences in anticipation; with a non-adopted baby, members of the family would have visited the hospital. They would have seen me with my mother, or visited me in the nursery, picking me out from the police lineup of bassinets.

But here it begins with a phone call: Your package has arrived and is wrapped in pink ribbons. The trusted pediatrician dispatched to the hospital to make an evaluation of the merchandise — think of movies where the drug dealer samples the stuff before turning over the cash. There is something inescapably sordid about the way the story unfolds. I was adopted, purchased, ordered, and picked up like a cake from a bakery.

When I was twenty my mother confessed that the “friend” who collected me was the next-door neighbor. I couldn’t believe that all these years, I had lived next door to someone who had seen my mother, who had actually met her face-to-face.

I dialed the neighbor’s house. “So?” I said. “You saw my mother?” The neighbor was cautious. “I hope you’re not going to do something about this,” she said. “I hope you’re not going to pursue it.” It amazed me that this was the reaction. What was her fear? That I would disrupt my family, the woman’s family, that I would wreak havoc? What about me, my life, the deep chaos that had been my existence?

“What did she look like?”

“She was beautiful. She had on a tweed suit and I couldn’t believe that she had just had a baby. She didn’t look pregnant at all. She was thin. And her hair was up in a bun.”

I pictured Audrey Hepburn.

“Did she look like me?”

I can’t remember what the neighbor said. I was suffering the deafness that comes in moments of great importance.

“I wore bad clothing,” the neighbor was telling me. “I disguised myself. I didn’t want her to know anything. And she too was very concerned about anyone knowing who she was.”

The amount of mystery that surrounded the proceedings was enormous, everything was subtext and secrecy. Beneath the intrigue was the element of shame that no one ever talked about.

“‘If you ever see me, don’t acknowledge me,’ the woman said. Meaning that if I ever saw her at a party or around town, I should pretend that I didn’t know her,” the neighbor told me.

“Did you ever see her again?”

“No, I never saw her again.”

“If you ever see me, don’t acknowledge me.” The one line of dialogue, the only direct quote.

In the morning my mother comes into my room with a scrap of paper; she sits at the edge of my bed and asks me again, “Do you want the name?”

I don’t answer. Even if I want it, I can’t say so — it feels like a betrayal.

“It’s the same name as a friend of yours,” she says, as if she were trying to warm it up, to detoxify it, to make it somehow more palatable. “I think she has a brother, a lawyer who lives in the area — Frosh recognized the name.”

“You can just leave it on the desk,” I say. Her name is Ellen. Ellen Ballman. It sounds like a fake name. Ball-man. What is she like? What does she do? Is she smart?

I once met an adopted woman whose mother had come back and found her. The mother was a photographer who traveled a lot. She was lovely, warm, respectful. She said, “I just want you to know I’m here if you need me.”

Ellen has a brother who lives in the area, my mother had said. I look up the brother’s address. I go for a ride. I am trying it on — the concept of biological family. His house is on my regular route. As a habit, I drive to think, I drive the way other people jog. I have a regular routine, landmarks. I have been riding up and down this road for years, fixated on the roll of the hills, the long driveways — how strange that my uncle’s house is just a left turn away.

White brick, lots of cars, a basketball hoop in the driveway — a sore point. As a kid the thing I wanted most was a hoop. A hundred times a year I asked for one — and my parents, entirely unathletic, would say no. A hoop would ruin the aesthetic integrity of the house. I played next door, I played up the street, I played until inevitably someone would stick their head out a window and suggest I go home for dinner.

I park outside the uncle’s house; this is the first time I’ve been within feet of someone biologically connected to me. I sit and imagine them inside, the uncle and his sons, my cousins. The Christmas decorations are up. I see their tree through the window. I imagine this as a joyous, prosperous place. I imagine they are somehow better than me — I drive away.

I call a private investigator, the friend of a friend — also adopted. I give her what little information I have.

“Give me a couple of hours,” she says.

I am a spy, a hunter, hot on the trail. I have no idea what I’m doing except that I want information, something to go on before I proceed. I don’t want any more surprises.

The P.I. calls me back.

“The woman you’re looking for doesn’t have a phone listed in her name in New Jersey. And she doesn’t have a local driver’s license, but she does own a home in the Washington area.”

The P.I. gives me the address. I get back in the car. It’s nearby, very nearby. Did she really live that close? Has she lived there all along? Might I have seen her somewhere without knowing it — in a shopping mall, or a restaurant? I circle the house. It looks empty. I park, knock on a neighbor’s door — asking questions, talking to strangers. What is a stranger? Who is a stranger? She could well be my mother.

“Do you know what happened to the folks next door? Moved? Any idea where to?” Dead end.

I go to the library of my childhood, of book reports and science projects. I look things up. I am always looking things up. I get a map of the town in New Jersey where she lives, I find her street. I look in phone books, call information. Nothing. Why is she not listed? Does she live with someone? Does she have another name? Is she a liar? An outlaw?

I call Frosh, the lawyer. “A letter. I’d like a letter,” I say. “I want information — where she grew up, how educated she is, what she does for a living, what the family medical history is, and what the circumstances of my adoption were.”

I am asking for the story of my life. There is an urgency to my request; I feel as if I should hurry and ask everything I want to know. As suddenly as she has arrived, she could be gone again.

As soon as I hang up, I start waiting for the letter.

Ten days later, her letter arrives with no fanfare. The postman doesn’t come running down the street, screaming, “It’s here, it’s here! Your identity has arrived.” It comes in an envelope from the lawyer’s office with a scrawled note from the lawyer apologizing for not having got it to me sooner. It’s clear that the letter has been opened, presumably read. Why? Is nothing private? I am annoyed but don’t say anything. I don’t feel I have the right. It’s one of the pathological complications of adoption — adoptees don’t really have rights, their lives are about supporting the secrets, the needs and desires of others.

The letter is typed on her stationery, simple small gray sheets of paper, her name embossed across the top. Her language is oddly formal, less than artful, grammatically flawed. I read it simultaneously fast and slow, wanting to take it in, unable to take it in. I read it and then read it again. What is she telling me?

…. at the time I was carrying this little girl it was not proper for a girl to have a child out of wedlock. This was probably the most difficult decision of my entire life to make. I was 22 years old and very naive. I was raised very sheltered and very strict by my mother.

I remember being in the hospital with her and dressing her the day we both left the hospital. I have never forgotten the beautiful black hair and the blue eyes and the little dimples in her face. As I left the hospital with the lady who was picking up the little girl, I can still see myself in the taxi and her asking me to give her the baby. I did not want to give her the child, however, I did realize, I did not have the wear-with-all to take care of her myself. Yes, I have always loved this little girl and been tortured every December of my life from the day she was born that I did not have her with me.

She writes that watching television shows like Oprah and Maury gave her the courage and the confidence to come forward. She lists the facts of where she was born, what street she lived on as a child, how she grew up. She tells the names of her parents and when they died. She says how tall she is and how much she weighs.

She writes of never forgetting.

Each bit of information swims through me, takes root, digging in. There are no filters, there are no screens. I have no protection from this.

She closes her letter by saying, “I have never married, I have always felt guilty about giving this little girl away.”

I am that little girl.

I call the lawyer and ask for another letter, with more information, a medical history, a more detailed explanation of what happened, what she’s been doing since, and a photograph of her.

A day later, in a panic, I call the lawyer back. “Oh,” I say. “Oh, I forgot. Could you ask her who the father is?” Not my father, but the father.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. I’ll put it on the list.”

Within days, a second letter arrives, again having been opened.

I suppose now, I should tell you about Norman Hecht. This is difficult for me because to me it is turning back the hands of time. I went to work for Norman at the Princess Shop in downtown Washington D.C. I was 15 years old. I worked for him on Thursday night and on Saturdays. During the summer, I worked fulltime. Norman as you know was much older than I. He was very nice to me. This relationship started very innocently. He would offer to drive me home and we would talk about many things on the way. Then one day while we were working he asked me if I would like to go to dinner with him. This was the beginning. At age 17, he called my mother and asked if he could marry me. My mother said, “she is too young.” Hung up the telephone, turned to me and said, I do not want you to see this man ever again. At this time, I was in love and nothing she said would stop me. I have always been a very determined person. Stubborn if you will. This is me. Norman is married at that time and promises to get a divorce and marry me. This was not my idea but his. Time goes on, I become pregnant with the young lady. He thinks I should go to Florida. He will buy a house for us both. About three months later, I am very unhappy. I return to Washington. Norman and I start to have disagreements. During the last three months of the pregnancy I stayed with my mother in Virginia where her home was. Shortly before the baby was born, Norman again said he would marry me. He asked if he could come and pick me up and take me to buy things for the baby. I told him no. I did not call him when the baby was born.

Norman to the best of my knowledge lives in Potomac, Md. He has four children. All of his children were born prior to the birth of our child. He was an All American Football Player. To the best of my knowledge his father was Jewish, his mother, Irish. I knew only his mother. She was a little chubby lady. Very kind and very nice to me.

You asked about my general health. I periodically do have a problem with bronchitis. This is treated with medicine. Damp weather is not for me. I do take pills for high blood pressure. Other than that, I am fine. I am nearsighted and do have soft teeth. Both inherited, my eyes from my father, my teeth from my mother.

She ends her second letter, “…I have a great fear of being disappointed with what I am now doing.”

Later, she will tell me that Frosh, reading the letter, recognized the father’s name and called her saying that if she was going to give the father’s name, she’d better let the father know what she was doing. She will tell me that she called my father and that he was shocked to hear from her, horrified at what she was doing, and told her that watching Oprah and Maury was beneath her.

Frosh is driving me crazy with his tinkering. It is an intrusion and interruption of the events — whose side is he on, what is he looking for, who is he trying to protect? I don’t want anyone reading my mail. I get a post office box. I call Frosh and ask him to pass my new mailing information on to Ellen. I purposely do not give her my last name, or my phone number. Having had no control over this situation for thirty-one years, I need to measure things out, moderate the amount of contact.

The father, another name to look up in the phone book, another set of blanks to fill in. What did his name mean to the lawyer? Why did he recognize it? Who is my father?

I call a friend in Washington, a native, a man who knows things.

“Does this name ring a bell?”

There is a pause. “It does. He used to come into one of the clubs.”

“Anything else?” I ask.

“That’s all that comes to mind. If I think of anything I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, is this someone you’re thinking of writing about?”

The next week, without warning, my parents visit me in New York.

“Surprise, surprise.”

They are being incredibly nice, warm and loving, as though I have a terminal disease — six months to live.

“We’d like to take you out to dinner,” they say.

I can’t go and I can’t tell them why. I send them to dinner, knowing that while they are gone, I will call her.

Hers is the most frightening voice I’ve ever heard — low, nasal, gravelly, vaguely animal. I tell her who I am and she screams, “Oh my God. This is the most wonderful day of my life.” Her voice, her emotion, comes in bursts, like punctuation — I can’t tell if she is laughing or crying. In the background there is a flick, a sharp suck of air — smoking.

The phone call is thrilling, flirty as a first date, like the beginning of something. There is a rush of curiosity, the desire to know everything at once. What is your life like, how do your days begin and end? What do you do for fun? Why did you come and find me? What do you want?

Every nuance, every detail means something. I am like an amnesiac being awakened. Things I know about myself, things that exist without language, my hardware, my mental firing patterns — parts of me that are fundamentally, inexorably me are being echoed on the other end, confirmed as a DNA match. It is not an entirely comfortable sensation.

“Tell me about you — who are you?” she asks.

I tell her that I live in New York, I am a writer, I have a dog. No more or less.

She tells me that she loves New York, that her father used to come to New York and would always return with presents from FAO Schwarz. She tells me how much she loved her father, who died of a heart attack when she was seven because “he liked rich food.”

This causes an immediate pain in my chest: the idea that I might die of a heart attack early in life, that I now know I need to be careful, that the things I enjoy most are dangerous.

She goes on, “I come from a very strange family. We’re not quite right.”

“What do you mean, strange?” I ask.

She tells me about her mother dying of a stroke a couple of years earlier. She tells me about her own life falling apart, how she moved from Washington to Atlantic City. She tells me that after she gave birth to me her mother wouldn’t come to the hospital to pick her up. She had to take the bus home. She tells me that it took all her strength and courage to come looking for me.

And then she says, “Have you heard from your father? It would be nice if the three of us could get together,” she says. “We could all come to New York and have dinner.”

She wants everything all at once and it is too much for me. I am talking to the woman who has loomed in my mind, larger than life, for the entirety of my life, and I am terrified. There is a deep fracture in my thoughts, a refrain constantly echoing: I am not who I thought I was, and I have no idea who I am.

I am not who I thought I was, and neither is she the queen of queens that I imagined.

“I can’t see you yet.”

“Why can’t I see you?”

I am tempted to tell her, You can’t see me right now, because right now I am not visible to anyone, even myself. I have evaporated.

“When can we talk again?” she asks as we are hanging up. “When? I hope you will forgive me for what I did thirty-one years ago. When can I see you? If you said yes, I would come there right now. I would be at your door. Will you call again soon? I love you. I love you so much.”

My parents return from dinner. I am looking at a picture of her, a Xerox of her driver’s license that the lawyer forwarded to me. Ellen Ballman, strong, thick, fierce, like a prison matron. There is another photo in the envelope — Ellen with a niece and nephew, with stuffed animals in the background. There is something about the way feeling moves across the face — something vaguely familiar. In the cheeks, the eyes, eyebrows, forehead I see traces of myself.

“How did she have Frosh’s name?” my mother wants to know.

“She said she’d heard it once and never forgot.”

“Interesting,” my mother says, “because Frosh wasn’t the first lawyer; the first lawyer died and we got Frosh after you were born, when we were having some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“She never signed the papers. She was supposed to sign them before she left the hospital and she didn’t. And then we arranged for her to go into a bank to sign them, and she never showed up. She never signed anything and when we first went to court the judge wouldn’t let us adopt you because the papers weren’t signed. It took more than a year after that and then finally a second judge allowed us to adopt without a signature. For an entire year, I lived in fear. I was afraid to leave you alone with anyone except dad and Grumama, afraid if I turned around she’d come back and you’d be gone.”

I think of my mother having lost a child six months before I was born, having ushered him into and out of the world. I think of her having received me as a kind of get-well gift and then worrying that at any moment I too would be gone. I don’t tell my mother one of the first things Ellen Ballman said to me: “If I’d known where you were I would have come and gotten you.” I don’t tell my mother that it turned out that all along Ellen Ballman wasn’t far away — a couple of miles. “I used to look at children,” Ellen told me. “And sometimes I followed them, wondering if they were you.”

Our conversations are frequent — I call her a couple of times a week but I don’t give her my phone number. They are seductive, addictive, punishing. Each one shakes me; each requires a period of recovery. Each time I tell her something, she takes the information and holds it too close, reinventing it and delivering it back to me in a manner that leaves me wanting to tell her less, wanting her to know nothing.

She tells me that she never got along well with her stepfather and that her mother was cold and cruel. I feel that there’s more to the story than she’s telling me. I get the sense that something was happening at home involving the stepfather, and that the mother knew and blamed her for it — which would also explain the animosity between them and why Ellen, as a teen, was propelled into the arms of a much older, married man. I never ask her the question directly. It seems intrusive; her need to protect herself is stronger than my need to know. There is an odd and anxious unknowing to much of what she says that makes it difficult to get the story straight. She reminds me of Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois, moving from person to person, desperate to get something, to find relief from unrelievable pain. Her lack of sophistication leaves me unsure whether she’s of limited intelligence or simply shockingly naive.

“Did you think of having an abortion?”

“The thought never occurred to me. I couldn’t have.”

Pregnancy, I gather, was the perfect way out of her mother’s house and into my father’s life. It must have seemed like a good idea, until my father refused to leave his wife. He tried. He sent Ellen to Florida saying he’d join her there — and never showed up. Three months later, homesick, she returned to Washington. They got an apartment together; for four days, he lived with Ellen. Then he went back, claiming that “his children missed him.” Ellen had him arrested under an old Maryland ordinance for desertion. At the time his wife was also pregnant, with a boy who was born three months before I was.

“At one point he told me to meet him at his lawyer’s office,” she says, “so we could figure out a way to ‘take care of everything.’ I sat down with him and his lawyer and the lawyer drew a diagram and said, ‘There’s a pie and there are only so many slices of the pie and that’s all there is and it’s got to go around.’ ‘I am not a slice of pie,’ I said, and walked out. I have never been so angry in my life. Slices of pie. I told my friend Esther I was expecting a baby and didn’t know what to do. She told me she knew someone who wanted to adopt a baby. I told her the baby must go to a Jewish family who would treat her well. I referred to you as ‘the baby.’ I didn’t know if you were a boy or a girl. I couldn’t take care of you myself — young ladies didn’t have babies on their own.”

She interrupts herself. “Do you think, one day, we might have a portrait painted of the two of us?” Her request seems to come from another world, another life. What would she do with a portrait? Hang it over her fireplace in Atlantic City? Send it to my father for Christmas? She is in stopped time, filled with fantasies of what might have been. After thirty-one years, she has returned to reclaim the life she never had.

“I have to go, I’m late for dinner,” I say.

“Okay,” she says. “but before you go out, put on your cashmere sweater so you don’t get chilly.”

I don’t have a cashmere sweater.

“When can I see you?” she starts again.

“Ellen, this is all new for me. You might have thought about it for a long time before you contacted me, but for me it’s only a couple of weeks. I need to take things slowly. We’ll talk again soon.” I hang up. The sweater is Ellen’s fantasy, an image of an experience that is not my own, but one that has meaning, import elsewhere — in her past.

I am losing myself. On the street I see people who look alike — families where each face is a nuanced version of the other. I watch how they stand, how they walk and talk, variations on a theme.

A few days later, I try Ellen again.

“Ruggles slept in the hall,” she says. Ruggles is the stuffed animal I sent her, in a gesture of kindness. Tonight Ruggles is me.

There is the flick of a lighter, the suck of a cigarette.

“I’m angry with you, can you tell?”

“Yes.”

“Why won’t you see me?” she whines. “You’re torturing me. You take better care of your dog than you take of me.”

Am I supposed to be taking care of her? Is that what she’s come back for?

“You should adopt me — and take care of me,” she says.

“I can’t adopt you,” I say.

“Why not?”

I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know if we’re talking in fantasy or reality. What happened to “in the best interests of the child”? Who is the parent and who is the child? I can’t say I don’t want a fifty-year-old child.

“You’re scaring me,” is all I can manage.

“Why won’t you forgive me? Why are you always angry with me?”

“I’m not angry with you,” I tell her and it is entirely true. Of all the things I am, I am not angry with her.

“Don’t be angry with me forever. If I’d known where you were I would have come and gotten you and taken you away.” Imagine that — kidnapped by one’s own mother, the same mother who had given you away at birth. She lived not two miles from where I grew up, and luckily didn’t know who or where I was. I cannot imagine anything more terrifying.

“I’m not angry with you.” I am horrified at the way I see myself in her — the loose screw is not entirely unfamiliar — and appalled that in the end I may end up rejecting the one person I never had any intention of rejecting. But not angry. Not unforgiving. The more Ellen and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up. I can’t imagine having grown up with her. I would not have survived.

“Have you heard from your father? I’m surprised he hasn’t been in touch.”

It occurs to me that “my father” may be having the same reaction to her that I’m having, that he equates me with her, and that may be one of the reasons he’s keeping his distance. It also occurs to me that he may think that she and I are somehow in this together, conspiring to get something from him.

I write him a letter of my own, letting him know how surprised I was by Ellen’s appearance, and suggesting that, while this is something neither he nor I asked for, we try to deal with things with some small measure of grace. I tell him a little bit about myself. I give him a way of contacting me.

I go to the gym. Overhead there is a bank of televisions, CNN, MTV, and the Cartoon Network. I am watching a cartoon in which a basket containing a baby bird is left outside a wooden door carved into the base of a tree. The words “Knock, Knock” appear on the screen. A large rooster opens the door and picks up the basket. A note is pinned to the fabric covering the basket.

Dear Lady,

Please take care of my little one.

Signed,

Ellen Ballman

It is seven years before I can open the boxes I took from Ellen’s house. It is 2005, and I am still on the same page, I am still wondering exactly what happened.

“Moribund on the sofa”—what did that mean? Half dead, already dead, well on the way to being dead? Was she in a coma? Did she know someone had come for her? Did she hope to be saved? How does someone live to be sixty and end up so alone? I go through the few papers I have — her death certificate says she died at 3 A.M. in the emergency room of the hospital. Who called the ambulance? How long was she in the emergency room? She must have been a little bit alive when she got there, otherwise the DOA box would have been checked. I think of calling Atlantic City 911 and asking for a transcription. And why am I remembering someone saying something about her being discovered by a Chinese deliveryman?

Seven years after the fact and it is as fresh as when it happened. It seems that this is the nature of trauma — it doesn’t change, soften, go dim, mutate into something less sharp, less dangerous.

Even now I want to call Ellen and ask what it was all about. Did she kill herself? Sort of. She chose to check herself out of the hospital against medical advice and went home to die alone on her sofa. Her fear of fear, her dislike of doctors, her underlying anxiety were certainly contributing factors.

I remember the birthday card—“This card is being sent early as I am not sure I will still be here on the 18th of December. I go to Jefferson Hospital on December 4 for a kidney procedure. What the outcome will be I do not know.”

I remember calling Ellen, half annoyed, half concerned.

“I canceled the procedure,” she said.

I never understood what the procedure was for; the closest thing I got to an answer was something about blood flow to a kidney and that she’d seen a lot of doctors — including one in Atlantic City who sent her to someone in Philadelphia — but she was scared to have anything done down there, to be alone in the hospital, and I knew I was supposed to say, I’ll come and take care of you.

Part of me thinks that if she’d asked in the “right way,” I would have helped her, and I am annoyed with myself. What does it matter how she tried to ask? She was afraid and she’d probably never gotten good results with asking — probably in part because she didn’t know how. So instead of getting what she wanted, she continually got what she didn’t — she pushed people away.

And I cannot escape the nearly biblical connection of the kidney — I was adopted into my family on account of my mother’s son Bruce dying of kidney failure. Is it my fault that she died? Was I expected to give her a kidney? Just after her death, I called her doctor in Atlantic City; in death I was to her what I couldn’t be in life. “This is Ellen Ballman’s daughter, I’m looking for some information.” I paused, waiting for him to say, “Ellen Ballman was unmarried and had no children. I have no idea who you are.”

“A transplant would have saved her,” he said, without prejudice. There was nothing in his voice implying that it should have come from me. Without prompting he went on to say that the kidney she needed would not necessarily have to have been my kidney. Had they talked about it — did he know who I was? Had he asked her, Do you have a family?

“I don’t know why she checked herself out of the hospital. I don’t know what she was thinking. Her condition was treatable — she could have been saved.”

After she died I wrote letters — to the brief list of friends her lawyer gave me, to the friend who called to say she was dead, to her niece in California, and so on. I wrote to them, telling them who I was and that I would very much like to hear more about Ellen, their memories, experiences, anything they wanted to share. I dropped the letters in the mail and nothing happened. The only person I heard from was Ellen’s Polish cleaning lady — who didn’t speak English. The woman she worked for on Tuesdays called me and together they left a message on my answering machine. It was a message left in translation as relayed by her Tuesday employer — the cleaning lady is heartbroken, she loved Ellen, she had no idea she was so sick. The cleaning lady had gone to Poland to visit her family; “she was away but now she is back.” I should call her anytime. I should come visit. She loves me very much. The Tuesday employer also left her name and phone number—“Call anytime,” she said. I couldn’t bring myself to call.

It is human nature to run from danger — but why did I have to be so human? Why could I not have been more capable, a better biological daughter? Why did I not have the strength and perspective to both protect myself and give? I failed her — I was so busy protecting myself from her that I didn’t do a good enough job recognizing the trouble she was in. I expected her to ask for what she needed in the way that I thought was appropriate. I could not see her selfishness with perspective, could not see that this was a woman in enormous pain, could not escape myself, my own needs, my own trapped desire. What does it matter how she asked? I should have given. I should have given despite not wanting to give. And what self was I protecting — does bracing oneself against something offer any protection?

People tell me how to feel. “You must be relieved,” they say. “You must be confused.” “You must be ambivalent.”

I failed her. I didn’t pay enough attention to the last letters, to the last time we spoke. She had called telling me to “hurry up and call your father, he may not last long.”

The idea that she was calling about him, that she and he had a relationship that extended beyond me, was galling. And that he was my father and had made me prove it, only to then not talk to me, and now I should hurry and call because he may not last — that these people who had so suddenly arrived might now so suddenly disappear was all too much.

My mother is dead. My mother called to tell me my mother is dead? This is the dissonance, the split, the impossibility of living two lives at once.

Yom Kippur, autumn, 1998. I am in Saratoga Springs, New York, at Yaddo, an artists’ colony. It is just a few weeks after the funeral. I go to services hosted by the local temple. I am alone among strangers, in a place safe for grief, and for me this is the memorial—“May he remember.” There is a part of the Yom Kippur service called the Yizkor — during which they read the names of all those related to the congregation who have died that year. I add her name to that list. The names are read aloud. There are other names before and after hers. Her name is called out, it is heard — equal to the others, it is not alone. Her name is said aloud, it is offered to everyone. I see other people crying and feel that I have done something, I have given her one thing she wanted, to be recognized, to be noticed. This is her Jewish funeral. I am holding a memorial service for a mother I never knew in a room full of strangers. We are embracing history and grief and all that has come and gone, and it makes more sense than anything has.

I am thinking about Atlantic City and walking out on the pier and how the clouds cracked open and rays of late-afternoon rainbow-colored light came streaming down. I am thinking about the time I sent her rose petals from the Yaddo garden. I am thinking of how she wanted everything and anything and how insatiable she was. I am glad I am there, alone, among strangers. I cry throughout the service. I am crying not just for her, but for myself, for every accident that has been a part of this, for every failing on everyone’s part, for the damned fragility of being human, for being afraid, ashamed. This is my atonement; I am confessing my sins, beating my chest, asking for forgiveness for what I have said and for what I have not said, for what I have done and for what I have not done, for those I have hurt or offended knowingly or unknowingly, for my errors of omission — this confession is known in Judaism as the Viduy. I am crying for how isolated I am, how alone, and how I have to go through life like this.

Did I ever say how precariously positioned I feel — on the edge of the earth, as though my permit could be revoked at any second?

The boxes. I come home from Yaddo and the boxes are in my apartment waiting for me, greeting me, nudging me to remember what I can’t forget. I cannot open the boxes. I am afraid of them, as though they contain something that might hurt me. Peeling the tape off them might unleash a virulent bacteria, just touching them might somehow infect me with her. I live with them like furniture, taking care to steer around them, to not let anything I care about come in contact with them, and then finally, more than nine months later, I put them in storage. I banish the boxes to the netherland of ministorage — before they go I mark them carefully in Sharpie marker on all sides, Dead Ellen 1–4. She put me up for adoption — I’m sending her to ministorage. She will join my tax records, my vinyl record collection, my dot matrix printer, my old typewriter, becoming a piece of my life I am unwilling to entirely unload but that is best kept off-site.

What is the half-life of a toxic box? When will I be ready to look inside — does the potential to rattle and shake lessen over time?

In the spring of 2005 I promise myself to once and for all deal with dead Ellen. I bring the boxes out of suspension, deliver them back to my apartment. Over time they have ripened; there is a certain smell to them — active disintegration. And again they sit, linger, become furniture. I stack things on top of them: suitcases, books, things of great weight. I am covertly holding them closed.

In the fall of 2005, twelve years after she found me, I take the boxes with me to Long Island for a weekend — just me and the four corrugated cardboard containers of dead Ellen. I take the boxes to the same small house where I stood in the yard and listened as my mother told me that my mother was dead. The house, then a rental, now is mine — a piece of something people call home. I take four boxes to the house on Long Island, a safe and controlled place — where like a bomb squad I plan to detonate them. I put the boxes on the kitchen table — my grandmother’s table. There is no escaping them now, no way around it.

I ask my family to stay home. I cannot do this with an audience, I have to be alone, able to sit with whatever I find. I need to not have to explain what can’t be explained — all that I am now of course trying to explain. I sit before the boxes, preparing to take inventory, giddy like a child playing the game of going through the mother’s purse, and then also feeling a more serious weight — I am the guardian, the keeper of what remains, and if I was not able to know her in life, perhaps I can crawl closer in death. Is there such a thing as intimacy after the fact? Will I find her in these boxes, will I know her any better after I am done? There is a piece of me that wishes I had taken more — perhaps if I’d taken ten boxes there’d be more of something, not just more of the same.

Box 1—the item on top is sheet music. “Hail to the Redskins.” I don’t know exactly why I was so surprised that this was the first item — was it because my biological father was a college football player, or that I could all too easily picture the two of them going to Redskins games while his wife was home with the kids? But it was especially interesting in light of other information I discovered: Ellen’s 1971 arrest for gambling — setting up a gaming table in the Sheraton Park Hotel and taking bets during a Cowboys-Redskins game — and an antitrust lawsuit that my father filed against the Redskins and pro football when he wanted to bring a new football team to town and ran into difficulty. And as soon as I see the sheet music, I also see myself at thirteen with braces in my bedroom in my parents’ house in Chevy Chase and my clarinet teacher, Mr. Schreiber, sitting beside me while I honked and screeched, stopping to lick the reed of my rented clarinet, wanting to get it right. Mr. Schreiber was the leader of the Redskins marching band — the Indian chief — who with a long headdress over his thick white hair would lead the band out onto the field at halftime.

Under the sheet music is a faux leather portfolio of photographs. I reflexively take a deep breath — preparing for what comes next — but on account of the dust, I have a coughing fit and have to go get a drink. The photos are the work of Harris & Ewing — the largest photo studio in Washington, photographers of presidents and high society — and apparently several are of my mother as an infant. In the first two portraits she is about four months old — there’s one serious, one smiling — and then she is somewhere near two, in a white dress with a big bow in her hair, white lace-up shoes, delicate and delighted — again and always looking off to the side. And then a little older, maybe three or four, posing with a big beautiful Dalmatian. And again — maybe part of the same shoot — in lederhosen or a pinafore. There is the palpable sense of her as Daddy’s little girl — devilish glimmer in the eye, she is shy and she is charming and she is defiant — and I have the strange sense that she knows more than she is able to fully understand. She is not a baby but a girl, and still and always there is a tentativeness and a need for confirmation — one can see it all. And for me there is a dull familiarity, an inescapable, unnamable relatedness — we do not look alike but in common. There is something similar in the arms, in the cheeks and the eyes — we have the same eyes.

There is a Harris & Ewing portrait of Ellen’s mother — cool, crisp, cold, proud of herself if no one else. The fact that these photos exist at all speaks to a certain kind of prosperity. The average person in the early 1940s did not have portraits taken of themselves and their children. It also reminds me of something Ellen once said to me—“Let’s have our portrait painted.” When she said it, the words seemed to exist in another world. Did she once have her portrait painted? Was it something promised that never happened? There is another photo taken on board a ship by someone else, of Ellen’s mother and a woman I assume is her mother’s mother, Mary Hannan — sometime in the 1930s. And then there is another of Mary Hannan long ago — a youthful, beautiful young woman.

Mixed between the pages there are random snapshots — Ellen playing on the beach, with her brother deep in the background. There is one that I assume is her father and brother in the backyard of their house. And then Ellen at about seven or eight standing outside the house with her brother — he is in his military school uniform, fists clenched at his side, his mother the photographer’s shadow a dark outline on the sidewalk — and by now her father is gone. And then Ellen is on a sofa next to her mother — adolescent, chubby, and excruciatingly uncomfortable. The images are frozen moments of family relation; they are documents taken to serve as proof and memory when there is no longer anyone to tell the story.

Things fall out — dozens of unopened bills with the yellow forwarding stickers from the post office, Notify Sender of New Address. Hers was a life lived in motion, spiraling down, running, barely one step ahead of herself. Envelopes slip to the floor — insurance overdue notice of $530 and another from a collection agency for $13,043.75 due to the office of comptroller of revenue. There is a set of legal papers relating to the reopening of a case filed by a family on behalf of their children to recover damages suffered by lead paint poisoning in buildings owned and managed by the defendants — specifically and especially Ellen Ballman.

There is a letter from Security National Bank: “This is to advise you that because of an unsatisfactory relationship on your account, we must request the account be closed within 15 days of this letter.” There is a commercial gas and electric bill due for over $10,000. And an envelope with an autumn 1995 Mark, Fore & Strike catalog, Fun Casual Clothing Since 1951. The odor wafting up from the box stings — it’s a little mothball, a little hamster cage, a little asthmatic, and definitely something turned sour. There’s a letter from the Maryland Department of Public Works dated June 6, 1984, a citation for general nuisance, vacant lot conditions, overgrowth of tall weeds and brush, scattered bottles, cans, and paper, a rat running along the front of the lot. The address, 4709 Langedrum Lane, Chevy Chase, Maryland. It is a few miles from where I grew up — and a place not known for rats. There is a notice of cancelation of insurance and another notice for delinquent taxes on a property on Seventh Street in Washington, D.C.

Under the photographs and all through the boxes there are notes, scraps of paper with little rhyming poems scrawled in pencil and pen and always signed “JC” (Jack). Who was he to her — a lover, an old friend, a friend of her father’s? I know from my research that he was arrested more than once for gambling, that he owned a dry cleaning store and later lived in Atlantic City. And I know how sad Ellen was when he was ill and after he died. How did they meet? He had a wife, Katherine — I see her name on some of the documents and I find a card from her to Ellen. Clearly, he cared a great deal about Ellen — he once wrote me a letter, attesting to the validity of Ellen’s stories about her mother.

The boxes are like a paper trail version of This Is Your Life. Inside one of the boxes is a smaller box marked Master Bedroom. I peel cracked cellophane tape off. Inside is an open metal file — in each compartment a manila folder, each folder trouble, a case in and of itself, literally. The rack is filled with file after file of real estate transactions gone wrong, buildings bought and sold, backup loans, trusts, deeds, dozens of letters to lawyers, lots of back-and-forth, motions to counter, depositions. Motion for leave to withdraw as counsel for plaintiff and for counterdefendant. There is nothing about this that is good news. At the back there is an old telephone message book — with duplicates. Call Rudy at work. Ms. Watson — important. Re Rose, verification was sent on wife last week. For Alex, re Lackey could he come by at 3pm today? It’s been years but I feel like returning the calls. Hi there, can you tell me about Ellen Ballman? How did you get to know her? Was she nice? Was she fair? Was she a good person? And then there is yet another file with a note on top. Please talk to Ellen about this! She’s annoying me to death about it. What does she want me to do except bring it to your attention!!! There is a piece of paper — on which someone has scrawled “For Your Information” and a notation that looks like “EB hours 300 as of 8-8-89.” (I take this to mean she has served three hundred hours of community service so far, but I could be wrong — maybe she had three hundred to go.) It is attached to a document that reads:

Claire Ballman

Jewel Rosenberg

I am compelled to look for more information — I have always known things that I don’t know that I know. Unidentifiable bits and pieces would visit me in my mind’s eye as if somewhere between dream and reality, but now I want to understand what I know and why.

The twenty-first-century search for roots is decidedly different from what it was as recently as the late 1990s. Now it is all about the Internet — Google, Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, and JewishGen. It is about electronic message boards and user-submitted family trees, and all of it a far cry from the days when you pulled out the family Bible and checked the names written in the front, when cousins lived next door, when you sat down and talked with old folks who, even if they weren’t related, had known your family intimately for generations.

On the Internet, one can within seconds locate the long-lost and create a portrait of family out of the scraps of information that float randomly like atoms smashed, like fractured molecules desperate to reconnect. Every clue leads to another; first you find that there are several versions of the person you are looking for — the wrong ones, the almost right ones, and then the one.

Genealogical research is currently one of the top-ranked hobbies in the United States — in some ways it’s more like a sport, collecting ancestors like baseball cards. It’s also a kind of couch potato way of traveling through time — it’s done in isolation, at odd hours, in a virtual world — and yet it is about connection, getting back in touch. And it is addictive. I am at it round the clock, a twenty-first-century Sherlock Holmes, trying to make this information age work for me. I pay $200 to join Ancestry.com. I buy electronic multipacks of articles from the Washington Post archive. I am perpetually punching in my credit card information — blindly buying anything that might be relevant.

I begin with my father’s parents. I do not know their names, I know only that my mother told my father she was pregnant on the day his mother died — so I’m thinking it had to be sometime in 1961. I search the Washington Post archive and there she is, my grandmother Georgia Hecht — passed away on April 11, 1961. (Not so long ago, in my collection of stories Things You Should Know, I wrote about an unmarried woman getting pregnant. She names the child Georgica. Conscience, or coincidence?)

Each time I locate something — a detail, a fact, a missing fragment of information — I have the sense of having made a match. Something lights up. Bingo! We have a winner! And for a moment everything is clear, and then just as quickly I am all too aware that still, always and forever, there will be an enormous amount that remains a mystery.

My father’s father is more difficult. Before I find him I locate his mother’s parents. I put the name Georgia Hecht into a 1930 census search and find her living with my father, who is five, at her parents’ house in Washington, D.C. Now not only do I have her maiden name — Slye — but I have her mother and father, my great-grandparents Mary Elizabeth Slye and Chapman Augustus Slye. I discover that Chapman A. Slye was a steamboat captain and also find in quick succession a dozen great-aunts and-uncles.

Within a week, I have traced the Slye family back to George Slye, born in Lapworth, Warwick, England, in 1564. I locate Robert Slye, born July 8, 1627, in England, who came to America and in 1654 was named as one of the parliamentary commissioners to govern Maryland under Oliver Cromwell, lord high protector of England. He was also speaker of the Lower House of the Maryland General Assembly and captain of the colonial militia in St. Mary’s County, and served as a St. Mary’s County Court justice. Linda Reno, a wonderfully generous researcher I meet online, forwards a historical note showing that on April 24, 1649, a court in Hartford, Connecticut, fined Robert Slye ten pounds of tobacco for exchanging a gun with an Indian.

I am in the Washington Post archive looking up the Slyes, and there — buried in the January 25, 1955, obituary of Mary Elizabeth Slye, wife of the late Captain Chapman A. Slye, mother of “Mrs. Irving Hecht” (aka Georgia Slye) — is the information I’ve been looking for: Irving Hecht — my father’s father. I try to find Irving Hecht in the census and can’t — it is as though he was absent on the day in 1930 when they counted all the people. Who was he? Where was he? What were the circumstances that took him away from his wife and son? What did he do for a living?

Once it begins, the search is urgent; I am up in the night surfing, connecting the dots. Suddenly there are pieces of information I can’t live without. Locating Irving Hecht takes me several more hours, but when I find his obituary — Thursday, July 5, 1956—I also find his brothers, Nathan of New York, Arthur S. of San Francisco, my great-uncles!

And as I am finding the right people I am also just as rapidly finding others that are right for a moment and then are proven wrong. For a long time I am sure one of the Harry Hechts is my grandfather, and then before I find the right Irving Hecht, I find the wrong Irving Hecht, living with his wife, Anna, and young son, Bertram, in Brooklyn on January 6, 1920. With each discard comes the lingering sense that invariably we’re all interconnected, all responsible for one another, and that no one Hecht is any more or less compelling than the next. Coming from a position of having no history, having any history, even if it is the wrong history, is fascinating. Every life lived is of interest.

Bloodlines — I find myself more and more interested in the strangers I never knew, in the blood relations that are unveiling themselves before me. I notice that I am not as motivated to dig for the history of the mother and father I grew up with, and am not sure why. Is it because I already feel familiar and familial with them — or is there something psychically unique about discovering this new biological narrative? There is no escaping that what I am finding resonates; there is the hum of identification, a sense of wholeness and well-being. On a cellular level it makes sense — it matches. And simultaneously there is a kind of contradiction, a challenge to who I think I am, how I experience myself. The best way I can describe this experience, which eludes conventional language, is to say I think of this as the difference or dissonance between the unknown or dormant biological self that I arrived with and the adopted, adapted self that I became. The looking, the digging awakens numb spots, labyrinths in my own experience, in my ability to process. I feel a peculiar overexcited high and at other moments a devastating depression. I continue to dig, thinking that if I consume information, I will be able to inhabit it, I will feel more complete — not realizing that perhaps the exact opposite is just as possible.

The desire to know oneself and one’s history is not always equal to the pain the new information causes. At times I have to slow down to accommodate a self that is constantly struggling to catch up, to recalibrate. I go to bed at midnight, and at 2 A.M. find myself at my desk — logging on. In the middle of the day I nap. My brain is constantly reshuffling the files and organizing and accommodating the new information. On the one hand I want to know my history, and on the other it is overwhelming to become aware of so many lives and to realize that most, if not all, of my ancestors are completely ignorant of my history and/or even my existence. There is a part of me that resents how hard I am working to locate information that they have lived with all along — information that is theirs for the asking.

I am looking at the records of the Slyes of St. Mary’s County, who owned other people and who sold or gave them away. I am looking at these early settlers wondering, What were they thinking? Why, having come from such incredible privilege, did they not do more with their lives? They got here first, came with land and labor and power, and what did they end up building for themselves? Why did none become president, or direct a large corporation? Why did they not lay the railroad, or discover electricity? Why did they not start a nonprofit or fund philanthropy? I am frustrated with them for falling through the cracks of history. I think a lot about responsibility — did they take responsibility for who they were and what they did? What quality of people were they? And why does it mean so much to me? Why do I need for them to be good — better than good — need them to be great?

These are my souls.

I go to the New York City Municipal Archives at 31 Chambers Street. To get in, you have to show identification, tell them what you are there for, get a pass, and then go through metal detectors. I am stopped because somewhere in my bag I have a pair of tweezers. I leave the tweezers at the desk. In room 103, I sign in and pay $5 to use the microfilm machines. The people who work there have been there forever — they know the contents of each of the flat metal drawers, they know the Soundex system of organizing information, the difference between a marriage license and a marriage certificate. They know how to dig for buried treasure — but they are cranky about answering questions. It is like a civil servant episode of Taxi, with Danny DeVito playing the hostile clerk behind the counter.

Still, there is an undeniable beauty to the things found in this room — reels and reels of microfilm, images of lives lived long ago, documents writ in an ornate Old World hand of variable legibility. I go through the reels slowly at first, not wanting to fast-forward, not wanting to miss anyone, feeling like each one of them is due a visitor, an appreciation.

The room is full of people each piecing together their private puzzles and the first thing that occurs to me is they’re not all adopted — so what are they looking for? I remind myself that the quest to answer the question Who am I? is not unique to the adoptee. In this room everyone is looking for something that will help them either confirm or deny part of what they believe about themselves. They are looking for backup, support, for definition. They are all deep in it — buried in names, dates, codes — but most are also happy to render assistance. Some volunteer helpful hints, while others tell their stories. I often ask, “How long have you been at it?” “Seven years,” one woman tells me. “It started as a hobby, a birthday present for my husband,” another says. “It started when my father died,” another woman says. “Have you tried the Italians? They keep good records, even on the Jews.”

Another woman leans over and whispers, “Have you been to Salt Lake City?” Salt Lake is “the mountain,” the mecca for genealogical information — home base for the Mormons, who go around the world collecting genealogical data. Every month five to six thousand reels of microfilm are added to their collection. Unbeknownst to much of the general population, the reason the Mormon Church has such wonderful genealogical records is that they’re collecting people — they hope to determine the genealogy of everyone in the world to prepare them for posthumous conversion. Basically they’re making Mormons from the dead — baptism by proxy. They have a purification ritual through which they claim you as their own. There has been outrage from the Jewish community because the Mormons took the information of Holocaust victims — people who were killed because of their religion — and made them Mormons. In 1995 the LDS church said it would honor an agreement to stop the proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims and other deceased Jews, and yet it continues. “And they are making more Mormons every day. I went once for two weeks,” the woman tells me. “It was heaven. Think about it,” she says.

There is the whir of the machines, juxtaposed against the virtual silence in which everyone works — it is difficult to stay focused. Repeatedly and anxiously I lose track of what I am looking for. A guy in a white shirt is hogging the files; he’s got multiple drawers open, his arms filled with reels, and he’s blocking the way. The rule is one reel at a time — take it, look at it, and put it back — which also makes it harder to misfile upon return. “Excuse me,” I say, “it’s one reel at a time.” He ignores me. “Excuse me,” I try again. “Just a minute,” he grumps, digging through a drawer. I push my leg against the drawer, threatening to close it on his hand. “Excuse me — Is your dead person somehow more important than anyone else’s?”

I find marriage certificates for David and Rika Hecht, my paternal great-grandparents, both born in Germany, and with each come the names of their parents, my great-great-grandparents: Nathan Hecht and Regina Grunbaum and Isaac Ehrenreich and Rosa Steigerwald. Within the hour I have birth certificates for Irving (born Isaac), Arthur Samson, and Nathan — my grandfather and great-uncles.

I locate Moriz Billman, born in Gomel, Russia, in 1846, who came into America in 1888 with a second wife and children from two marriages, and who later petitioned to become a citizen of the United States as Morris Bellman of 466 Bergen Street in Brooklyn. I find Billmans who became Bellmans and then Ballmans. I get a copy of the marriage license of my maternal grandfather, Bernard Bellman, to my maternal grandmother, Clara Kahn, and find that Bernard was married before and in 1925 divorced a woman named Margaret R. Bellman. Did his children — my mother and her brother — know? Were there other children from the first marriage? The man at the desk tells me that if I am curious I can look upstairs on the seventh floor — if the divorce was filed in New York City, I might just find it there.

With each name and date comes imagery. I start making mental pictures of who they were — who I might be. I am the granddaughter of an English Southern belle. I am the granddaughter of a Romanian/French immigrant. I am the granddaughter of the Lithuanian farmer girl, the granddaughter of the Russian bookie, the granddaughter of an Irishwoman. I am the adopted daughter of the guidance counselor and the left-wing artist and the biological daughter of the philandering adulterer and the wayward girl, the little girl lost.

I am back in time, wading across a clear running creek. I am a farmer on a plantation, I am captain of a ship. I am the woman in a long white dress, my curly hair high up on my head; I am feeling the heat of summer — the Southern humidity, the thick stagnant afternoon air, the coming of thunderstorms. I am conjuring sea captains and drinking glasses of blood red wine. This is the stuff of poems and fever dreams. I am of a plantation and I can say I knew it all along at some preconscious level. I am imagining the lives of indentured servants and slaves — some of whom had the very same names as the people I am looking for. When were they freed and where did they go?

What becomes clear is that all of this is about narrative — the story told. I can’t escape the oddity of how it happened that I, a person without a past, became a novelist, a storyteller working from my imagination to create lives that never existed. Every family has a story that it tells itself — that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates; some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.

As children we are all gullible by nature. It doesn’t occur to us to question the family narrative; we accept it as fact, not recognizing that it is a story, a multilayered collaborative fiction. Think of the variations, the implications in terms of time, place, social status and structure. You are from Topeka and have been for five generations; your grandfather was a preacher, your grandmother half Indian. Or your grandmother is from a small village in Italy; she came here after her entire family was killed in a flood of volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Your mother was married once before and had a child she gave away — somewhere you have a sister. Your mother was out walking one night and someone came up behind her — and the product was you.

I take the elevator to the seventh floor. The smell of stale paper smacks you as soon as the elevator door opens; the hallways are filled with metal shelving units, packed with paper, precariously perched files that are threatening to tumble onto the floor. This is the history of New York, the history of America — and it’s as though I’ve plunged into a Coen brothers movie.

It is a room of tables pushed together into a center square. There are current and not so current newspapers on the table and people sitting around, doing nothing — I am not sure if they work here or are people with nowhere to go. Maybe this is a historical day treatment center; maybe people are doing a certain kind of “time.” The room is absent of air, of the passage of minutes, hours, and years. “Where would I find a divorce from the 1920s?” I ask the entire room. One man perks up. “Might be over here in the card catalog,” he says, nodding toward the corner. There are huge metal cabinets, with cards for each lawsuit filed. Next to the card catalogs there is a large metal locker. Curious, I pry the door open. Old directories sigh and crumbling pages tumble out, dumping what looks like sawdust — or mouse bedding — onto the floor. Quickly I close the door and go back to the card catalogs. Again, I am flying blind, looking for anything and everything under any of the names on my list — Hecht, Bellman, Ballman, Billman.

“What kind of case is this?” I say, showing the man the card for Hecht vs. in RE.

“Oh, that’s going to be interesting,” the clerk tells me. Is he serious, or sarcastic? “The in RE cases usually mean that someone was either a minor or otherwise incompetent to represent themselves.”

Just the phrase, “In Re:,” gets my mind going. I sing to myself, “In Re:, a drop of golden sun.”

“If you want the files you have to fill out a request — the old cases are stored off-site.”

“Great, where’s the form?”

“Sixty Chambers Street. Room 114.”

Sixty Chambers Street is impossible to find, even though it’s supposedly right around the corner. The narrow streets of lower Manhattan are dwarfed by large hulking buildings — some incredibly old, others more modern fortresses. Between the buildings there are police patrolling with machine guns in hand — this is our new world, post 9/11, and we seem to believe that people patrolling with guns makes us safer. There is a prison right there and a woman standing guard outside with a flak jacket and a big gun. “Excuse me, where is 6 °Chambers Street?” She tells me, “I have no idea,” and in a minute I discover that it is just across the street, and I’m thinking it’s a problem that the guard doesn’t know where she is and doesn’t seem to care — especially if she had to tell someone where she was or which way someone went.

The dissonance is shocking — on the outside there is the Jersey wall, men and women with guns, the bright wash of summer light, the incredible baking heat, and inside, the smell of age, of mold and dust and things not touched for fifty years. I am depressed as hell, reminded of how unattached I am, and how crazy it is to do this digging — nobody cares. Whatever I find, it’s only ephemera, the thinnest bits of information. I think of the papers that blew from lower Manhattan into Brooklyn when the World Trade towers fell, burned notes from people’s desks, and how people clung to these scraps as if they held the secrets of the world, of creation.

At 6 °Chambers the guard at the metal detector stops me and I confess that I have tweezers in my bag. He doesn’t care. All he wants to know is, “Do you have a camera on your phone?” No. Inside I file my requests. It’s noon. I am exhausted.

From my apartment I am exchanging e-mails with strangers and with relatives I have known for the whole of my life. I pull the adoptive relations in a little closer. I have the sense of belonging to my adoptive family more than I did as a child — this comes from having shared the experience of growing up within a narrative that, while it is not my own biologically, is now mine socially and culturally. I write to my adoptive maternal relatives in Paris and London. From them I collect tales of Jacob Spitzer’s dairy farm on the Mohawk Trail in North Adams, Massachusetts — the dog, the cow, the horses, Nigger and Dick. There are stories about the children (the great-aunts and-uncles that I grew up with), Lena, Henry, Helen — who died in 1912 of diphtheria at fourteen — Maurice, Samuel, Solomon, (known as Charlie), Harold, Doris, and my beloved grandmother Julia Beatrice.

I collect information about Simon Rosenberg and Sophie Rothman — my adoptive maternal great-grandparents, born in the 1870s in Braila, Romania, a town on the Danube. My grandfather, Bernard, their eldest child, was born there in 1896, and by 1898 the family moved to an apartment at 64 rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais district of Paris. In France they had a successful hat factory and a very large family. My great-aunts and-uncles there include Rachel, who burned to death at three when the children were left home alone and her dress caught fire — my grandfather and his brother tried unsuccessfully to put the fire out. Among the other children were Joffre (who died at six), Raymond, Etienette, Henriette (who lived for six days), Adele, Maurice and Julien (who both died at Auschwitz), Emmanuel (who died of wounds in World War II), and another brother, Leon. In 1972, when my grandfather died in Washington, I got two of his hats, a winter hat and a summer hat. Elegant and understated, he never went out without a hat. At thirteen, I visited Paris and met Adele and Etienette. We went to 64 rue Vieille du Temple — my grandfather’s family name was still on the buzzer, more than fifty years after the fact.

Through my adoptive father, several aunts in Florida, and a cousin ten blocks from me in New York, I cobble together the story of my adoptive paternal grandfather and grandmother — Jacob Homes and Minerva Katz. Throughout my childhood they never spoke of their past — I knew them only as hardworking people with a fondness for cheese Danish and stewed fruit. Jacob Homes (Homelsky) was born in Russia in 1892 and had three sisters and a brother. In 1910 he walked from Russia to Finland and found work on a boat, which landed him first in Canada and then in Philadelphia — where he earned enough to bring his mother and siblings to this country. In 1916 he met Manya Kvasnikaya (Minerva Katz) from Ekaterinoslav, Russia.

Minerva, the youngest daughter in a large family, was a late-in-life baby, rejected by her parents and largely raised by her oldest sister. She was educated for two years in a Russian school and then tutored by someone who gave her lessons while she sat atop a pickle barrel at the herring stall her sister ran. At home, Minerva slept above the oven on a bed of straw.

As a young teenager she traveled to the United States with her sister and brother-in-law, and they settled in northern New Jersey. She worked as a cashier in Atlantic City, went to school through sixth grade, and later lived in Philadelphia with a woman who sold goods to immigrants. There Minerva slept on a board over the bathtub.

In Philadelphia, Jacob Homes delivered meat from the butcher to the house where Minerva was living — he liked her because she could read and write. They married; a first son died at birth. In 1918 Joseph Meyer Homes, my adoptive father, was born, followed by five sisters. No one recalls whether Jacob’s father came to this country — but all believe he was killed in an accident, run over by a wagon.

In 1929, when they were living in New Jersey, the family’s butcher shop burned down and they moved to Washington, D.C., where Minerva’s brother lived. In Washington Jacob found a tank in a junk pile, filled it with gasoline, and took it to the farmers’ market — selling gas by the five-gallon bucket to the farmers for their return trips after the market. He progressed to selling gas on the streets for ten cents a gallon and grew the business into the Homes Oil Company.

It was only when I started asking questions about the family history that my adoptive father told me one of the stranger stories of his youth — a moment where his own history collided with a particularly ugly and now forgotten moment in American history. In July 1932, he was working at his father’s gas station on Maryland Avenue in Washington, D.C., when generals Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton lead four troops of cavalry, four troops of infantry, a mounted machine gun squadron, and six tanks on a mission ordered by President Hoover to run the “Bonus Marchers” out of town. Soldiers on horseback with bayonets chased the Marchers — World War I veterans — out of their makeshift housing. Men and animals came charging right through the gas station. My grandfather grabbed my father and pulled him to safety. The story of my father and the Bonus Marchers — twenty thousand unemployed World War I veterans who marched on Washington, demanding payment of a cash bonus — is one that I hear for the first time when I am forty-four years old. I am thrilled to have it. I feel as though I’m slowly reconstructing an ancient lost tapestry.

At home in New York the electronic dig continues. I hire two researchers to help me — one in New York and one just outside Washington, D.C. We communicate by e-mail only. I tell them about the bits and pieces, the fragments of facts that I’m looking for, and they go in search. I am happy to have more than one mind on this — more than one thought pattern trying to piece the puzzle together.

I am in correspondence with someone living in Israel who may be related to my adopted father’s family in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I am talking with the Reverend John Gray in Ohio, whose interest in genealogy was sparked by the idea that he might be related to his movie hero, Roy Rogers, aka Leonard Franklin Slye. The Reverend Gray sadly reports that he is not related to Roy, but in all likelihood I am — Roy was a Slye from Warwickshire, England, and Ohio. I am exchanging regular e-mails with Linda Reno in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. She is, in fact, a distant relative and has done enormous research charting the Slye family. Each of my correspondents is as nearby as the computer keyboard, and yet as ethereal and vaporous as memory itself. And still and always I feel on the outside. I worry that at any minute I will be busted, and my pen pals will say, You are not part of this family, and you are not entitled to this information. With my chest tight I e-mail Linda Reno confessing my illegitimacy, and when I don’t hear back for two days I am terrified — and then enormously relieved when I do, and her response is warm, genuine, and accepting.

It goes on for months — in waves. I hunt and gather and then, exhausted and often disheartened, I stop and I pull myself together and do it again. I become convinced that I can crack the case of my biological maternal grandmother’s second husband — I have what I am quite sure is a photo of him and my grandmother, on what looks like a New Year’s Eve in the 1950s. I find a lot of Barney Ackermans in Florida; it seems like the kind of place where a Barney Ackerman would retire. I find a scrap of information that seems to indicate there was a Barney Ackerman who died in Canada in the 1990s but I can’t piece it together. When were Barney Ackerman and Clare Kahn Ballman married and divorced? Finally, through the Washington, D.C., researcher there is a crack in the case — she finds the wedding license. They were married September 22, 1950. Ellen would have been twelve years old at the time — vulnerable to this already twice-married stepfather. Another crack in the case brings me his obituary — it lists him as a dry cleaner and says that he was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and died March 28, 1993, at the time of his death married to Jeanne Ackerman of Hebron, Nova Scotia. That makes at least four marriages — with the first divorce in Florida, the second in Reno, the third probably in northern Virginia around 1960. He has one daughter and at the time of his death one granddaughter. Did Ellen know he died — was she relieved? It was never clear to me what Ellen’s relationship to this man was. From what she said to me in phone conversations and from what Norman was later able to add, my sense is that the relationship was at least to a degree sexualized and made her very uncomfortable.

More digging. I find Pearl B. Klein, sister of Bernard Bellman, admitted to the Washington, D.C., bar in 1924 at the same time as her husband, Alfred Klein, who later became chief law officer of the Civil Service Union.

I find Bernard Bellman’s brother John (born Jake) Bellman, whose son Richard became a major figure in the mathematics world, conceiving the idea of “dynamic programming.” Richard taught at Princeton and Stanford and worked for the Rand Corporation and at Los Alamos, while also writing forty books related to mathematical theory. I go back and forth through the material and each time I sift, new crumbs fall out — last names, the married names of sisters, the names of uncles, cousins, locations, each bit a piece of the puzzle.

My search expands. I use Internet search engines such as AnyWho.com to locate addresses for random people named Slye, Bellman, Ballman, Hecht (there’s almost no one named Homes). I write letters explaining that I am a journalist working on a family history project and would like to talk with them. As exciting as it is, I find it difficult to get the letters into the mail, difficult to make the follow-up calls. I want to talk to them, but I worry they won’t want to talk to me — and by the way, what am I going to say if and when they ask me who I am?

I hire a graduate student to help me make the first round of calls, answering any basic questions — establishing that, yes, this is a legitimate research project. I do the follow-up interviews. I speak with two Slyes who happen to be reverends, Harry in Texas and John in Virginia — neither knows the other, but both are incredibly nice, warm, forthcoming, proud of their family. I talk with Chapman Slye, who runs twenty-eight school cafeterias in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and is named after my great-grandfather. Chapman tells me about the family ties to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, about the adventures he had with his grandfather Harry E. “Skipper” Slye Sr., a shipmaster who lived to be 102 years old and guided boats up the Potomac River until he was eighty-five. He also suggests I talk with his mother, widow of Harry E. Slye Jr. I speak with her and numerous other Slye cousins. And when I ask about Georgia Slye Hecht, no one seems to remember much, except that she was “formidable,” “dominant,” and many of them were a little scared of her — especially women marrying into the family. The Slyes I speak with are a lovely, hardworking, earnest, good-natured group, very proud of their family history; but as in many American families, each successive generation seems to move farther from the family seat and is less in touch with its extended family, less aware of the family history. They ask me nothing about how I might be related to the family and when I ask one of them if there was any intermarriage, he tells me that the biggest thing was when Catholics married into the family. There is no sense of there ever having been a Jew among them — no mention of Georgia Slye marrying Irving Hecht — which gives me further insight into my biological father, Norman’s, determination to go out of his way to identify himself as not Jewish. The Reverend Harry L. Slye speaks of family reunions, long ago, when his grandfather, also Harry L. Slye, a prominent Washington, D.C., undertaker, would bring chairs from the funeral parlor out to the family home in the then rural suburbs, and the full extended family, cousins of all ages and generations, would gather, feasting on St. Mary’s County oysters, playing games, and dancing on the lawn.

My assistant reaches someone in New York named Robert Hecht, who is not likely a relative. He tells her that he’s leaving for Paris and I can call him there — I wait a few days and try. A woman answers the phone and explains that he’s now gone back to New York. “What is this in reference to?” she asks and I am on the spot. I make an effort to explain. “I’m not sure he’ll be interested,” she says, “but you might want to e-mail my daughter and plead your case.” She gives me the e-mail address of her daughter, a lawyer in New York. Ruffled by her use of the phrase “plead your case,” I gather my courage and ask, “What’s your name?” “Elizabeth Hecht,” she says, and a chill runs through me. Elizabeth Hecht, that was my name — that was the name on the little bracelet that I wore home from the hospital. All the more odd because my adoptive mother had planned to name me Elizabeth but, when she saw the bracelet, she changed her mind. “Elizabeth Hecht,” she says, and it was the last thing I was expecting. Chemicals of every sort flood my system, telling my brain to hang up, to flee, telling my brain to laugh, telling my brain this is so strange — she’s not really Elizabeth Hecht; she was once Elizabeth Somebody Else and she married Hecht. “You can try my husband,” she says. “He’s back in New York.”

I dial the number in New York; an older man answers and tells me this is not a good time for us to talk. “I’m on my way out.”

The tenor of these conversations makes me wonder who these people are.

I Google Robert Hecht and Elizabeth Hecht and find out that he is a very famous dealer of antiquities and part of an international scandal involving the sale of allegedly stolen Italian artifacts, and as of the end of 2005 was on trial in Rome, along with former Getty Museum curator Marion True, accused of trafficking in ancient art.

As far as I can tell, Robert and Elizabeth Hecht are not my relatives, but again, I find the story fascinating.

One day as I’m going through the Bellman documents, I feel brave and leave a phone message for an Eric Bellman, a therapist in California. I call knowing that somewhere I have a relative named Eric Bellman — son of Richard Bellman and brother of Kristie, who I wrote to after Ellen died and never heard back from. It takes Eric weeks to call back, but it is a match. I’m pleased with my ability to deduce which of the Eric Bellmans in the United States is a biological relative. I tell him about my project, about the dozens of letters sent. I tell him that I’ve heard from a lot of Slyes and Hechts but no Bellmans. He tells me that Bellmans are like that — whatever “that” means — and while we don’t have an enormous amount to discuss, I am glad to have made contact.

What I don’t tell him is that after I decide that he was the Eric Bellman that I was looking for, I Googled his image and then compared the photograph I found online to one of his father taken many years ago. Playing my own version of FBI analyst, I compared their hairlines, their eyebrows, the shape of their chins and concluded that this Eric Bellman was the right Eric Bellman.

In my searching, I find newspaper clips relating to the Hecht family in and around the New York area. Again, I Google and come up with Warren Hecht, a dentist. I call his office. He answers the phone himself, I attempt to explain the project. “Write me a letter,” he says gruffly. “Okay, but can I just ask you a quick question? Are you by any chance related to Arthur, Nathan, and Irving Hecht?” Elated, he repeats the names. “Arthur, Irving, Nathan,” he says. “Yes, Nathan was my father.” “I thought so.” “Who is this?” He asks. We talk excitedly for a few minutes and he proposes that we meet the following Tuesday at 7 A.M. Surprised by his enthusiasm, I agree. It’s as though he’s discovered a long-lost relative — which in fact he has. When Warren asks how I fit in, I tell him that I am the daughter of Norman Hecht but that Norman and my mother weren’t married, so I didn’t grow up with him. That seems to land without much complication. He says how much he’s looking forward to meeting me and we hang up.

The following Tuesday, my phone rings at six-fifteen in the morning. It’s Warren Hecht calling to cancel our meeting. “I’m just too busy,” he says. “I’ll call you in a couple of weeks.” When I push him to find out if he’s really too busy, or if there’s more to it, he seems nervous. I find myself wondering who got to him — who turned off the enthusiasm? Devastated, I let him go — I hadn’t realized how much I was looking forward to meeting him. I wanted to show him what I’d found, his father’s birth certificate, his grandparents’ marriage certificate. I wanted to ask what he knew about his grandparents, his uncles, and so on. After that, I decide to suspend the live interview portion of the adventure at least for now. It’s too much of a setup for rejection and too painful to continually repeat.

I sign up for the National Geographic genealogy project. I pay $100 and scrape the inside of my cheek, twice over a period of twenty-four hours — collecting DNA — and send it off, as if to join the family of man. Online I spot another DNA test that promises to tell me the most likely names of my ancestors. I think about how truly interesting and odd it is that when a woman marries, traditionally she loses her name, becoming absorbed by the husband’s family name — she is in effect lost, evaporated from all records under her maiden name. I finally understand the anger behind feminism — the idea that as a woman you are property to be conveyed between your father and your husband, but never an individual who exists independently. And on the flip side, it is also one of the few ways one can legitimately get lost — no one questions it.

Months later I go online, punch in the ID number that came with my test kit, and am given the information that my DNA belongs to the Haplogroup U, and that yes, like every woman I am descended from “Mitochondrial Eve.” But who was she? Can I look her up on AnyWho.com? Can I write her a letter? From the information provided, I learn very little about my genetic journey. I am given the option of printing out high-resolution documents, including a personalized certificate that says I participated in the Genographic Project, but other than that I feel like I spent $100 to find out what I already know — I am related to everyone.

Among my best online discoveries is Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, an organization of almost five thousand volunteers who will search for information in their local area — investigate historical records and church documents, trace headstones. Their volunteers are spread throughout the United States, Canada, and forty-four countries — the group averages eighty-two hundred requests a year.

Dipping further into history, I go to 6 °Centre Street in New York City, another of the city’s record offices, and request all files with the relevant surnames.

A week later the New York county clerk calls and leaves a message saying that some of my files have come in and that others cannot be located because they have been destroyed. Downtown I plunge into the labyrinth. Over a high wooden counter the case files are handed to me; they are crisp with age, these brittle documents, the onionskin paper dried out, each piece like a pathologist’s slices of the skin. The pages are typed, the signatures and notations made with an inky black pen. I am pouring quarters into the Xerox machines, hurrying to photograph the faded pages — as though to copy them as quickly as possible before they evaporate, as though taking these poor copies out of the building with me makes them permanent, real, present in this world.

I examine the cases, having no idea if these people are related to me and to a large degree not caring. Each is a history, a story drawing me in.

Norman Hecht as a boy

Norman Hecht as a young man

I have not spoken to my father since the conversation in late 1998 that ended with him saying I could call him anytime—“Call me in the car, my wife’s not usually in the car.”

In the summer of 2005, as an extension of my genealogical adventure, I decide to join the Daughters of the American Revolution. My desire is not political but personal. I want to join the DAR because it is a lineage organization — and among the first things my father told me about myself was that I am eligible. And while I am an unlikely member of such an organization, I want to try it on as a piece of my biological identity — I want to see from the inside the thing that I am not. My friends are upset by the idea; they view the DAR as right wing and racist. In 1939 the DAR refused to allow the black singer Marian Anderson to sing at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall. (Subsequently Miss Anderson sang at Constitution Hall six times.) I explain to my friends that understanding my background is not just about embracing the parts that feel comfortable, and that, in this case, my interest is in the concept of lineage. I trade e-mails with the president of the Port Tobacco, Maryland, chapter — the hometown chapter of the Slyes of Maryland. She sends me a copy of the worksheet, which asks the applicant to walk back through time and provide the documentation for fourteen generations proving the link to the one deemed “the Patriot.”

I am assured that this documentation can be assembled if I can provide the more current information — namely my father’s birth certificate and my own. A complication — my father’s name is not on my birth certificate. And my father’s birth certificate is available from the District of Columbia Department of Vital Records, but only to next of kin — photo ID required. I explain to the DAR that my birth parents were not married and that I was adopted and I do not have a birth certificate with my father’s name on it, but that my father and I had a DNA test to prove our relationship. The DAR responds that they do not care if my parents were married or not, they will accept the DNA test as sufficient proof. A further complication — I don’t have a copy of the results.

Why didn’t I ask him for a copy of the test in July 1993 when the blood was drawn? I could say I felt shy, but the truth is I felt infantile — thrown back through time. It was all I could do to hold on to any semblance of self. I wanted him to like me, I wanted to know more about who I was, where I had come from. I felt I had to do what I was told. As much as he and I were equal participants in the test, he paid for it, refusing to accept my offer to share the expense. I was intimidated. I didn’t want to cause trouble. I didn’t want to be rejected again.

I imagine asking him and am intimidated even now. Just the idea of it hurts. And I always worry that my call will come too late — he will be dead. And even if he’s not, what will I say—“Hi, I want to join the DAR and I need a copy of your birth certificate and the DNA test?”

I imagine him answering the phone — his voice will tremble and he’ll say, “This is not a good time — can I call you back later?” How will I feel if he doesn’t call back? And what if I do manage to ask for what I want and he stalls, and there is an awkward and heavy silence? Do I continue, “We were equals in submitting to the test and both have the right to the information?” And if he says, “I don’t think so,” I’m not sure where I go. “I’ve never asked you for anything, but now I am asking you for something and I hope you will reconsider.”

I think of calling him — in my imagination, his wife answers the phone, and is not pleased. To her I am illegitimate. Does it mean I don’t exist, that I never existed, that I am something to be forgotten, left behind, basically a big embarrassment?

In my thoughts I can call him; in reality I can’t pick up the phone.

I ask Marc, my lawyer — the same lawyer who called him years ago to tell him Ellen was dead — if he would mind giving him a call. I give Marc the phone number and explain that his wife might answer. We discuss what he is going to say. The call is made.

The wife answers the phone and my father goes into another room to take the call. My father tells my lawyer that he will not provide the test result, that in fact he does not even have the test result — he gave it to his own lawyer for safekeeping. Marc is told that he should not call my father anymore, that any further communication should go through my father’s lawyer. Marc calls my father’s lawyer and the lawyer tells him that, yes, he did have the test result but that he did something with it — can’t remember what, so it’s not to be had. Marc tells him that an affidavit of paternity will do and is told that that’s not possible, that’s not going to happen.

Call me naive — there was part of me that thought when my lawyer called and asked for the test results, the answer would be, Yes, of course, and how is she?

When Marc calls to tell me how it went I’m feeling hopeful, cheered by the swiftness of the response. “I spoke to your father,” he says and I’m pleased, proud in a certain way, and then he says, “And it didn’t go well,” and my spirits sink. “He declined to provide the information and asked that we not contact him directly again.” That’s my father we’re talking about — my father is saying, Please don’t call again. Was it something I said, or just the fact of my existence?

The idea that my father asked me to participate in a DNA test — asked me to prove myself to him — and now won’t share the results is not okay. It is about power and arrogance and the negation of my right to own my identity. I feel a moral obligation — a social and political obligation, an obligation that is larger than me — to try and get a better resolution, a better end.

“What did you expect?” a friend asks.

“More,” I say.

“This is nothing new,” she says. “He’s behaving in character. Look at what he did to your mother. He’s not a good guy.”

“He’s my father.”

“You’re screwed.”

I am waiting for this man to do the right thing. What I want from him is not his money or even his love — at this point, in the absence of his affection, I want a context, a history, a way of understanding how all this came to be. Will I ever have the question answered: Where did my paternal grandparents meet, what was their courtship like, how did it happen that the son of a Jewish butcher married a Southern belle?

And now I also have to defend my dead mother. My friend is right about this. It’s not about me, it’s about him, it’s about the way he behaves, how he values people, how he does only what he wants, what’s good for him. My mother had no life after she gave me up — she never married, never had another family. She had invested in him from a very early age — he used her and then said good-bye. She never recovered.

“Law is not about what is fair, you realize that,” a friend says to me.

I call another friend, who calls Lanny Davis, a well-known Maryland lawyer who acted as special counsel to the White House under Bill Clinton. I remember Davis from when I was growing up and he was an up-and-coming local politico. I instinctively trust him and explain the situation. Lanny offers to make a call for me; he is quite sure that if he explains the situation to my father — and the reason that I am asking for this document — it will be forthcoming.

“There’s no reason to think we’ll have to take this further.” I give him the telephone number and again mention that the wife might answer the phone. He calls me the next afternoon — shocked. My father took his call, seemed to know why he was calling before he even said anything, and flat out refused. Lanny, being careful about his description of the events, told him, “I was approached by your daughter and asked to consider representing her, but having heard the story, it is my hope that this can be resolved without my having to put my lawyer hat on.” Norman refused. “Should I put my lawyer hat on? Should I be speaking with your lawyer?” My father refused to even tell Lanny his lawyer’s name and/or provide the lawyer’s phone number — both of which I already had.

Lanny called my father’s lawyer. The lawyer said, “You don’t have a leg to stand on, there is nothing to go to court about, there is no case, and you cannot have the document.” He said no and no and no. The lawyer was cautiously reminded that if this became a court case it also became a public event. He was unfazed.

“Is there anything else I should know?” Lanny asked me. “Some other reason why he wouldn’t want you to have this?”

“There are only two things I can think of: one is that he is not really my father, but somehow wanted to be, in some strange way; or maybe he’s worried I’ll make a claim on his estate.”

Long ago, when he stopped talking with me, I thought it might be because he was worried that I would sue his estate for a “piece of the pie.” I explain to Lanny I want nothing from his estate and in fact would feel compelled to refuse anything were it to come.

Once again in my head I am writing letters.

Dear Norman,

Are you kidding? You are writing your own history. You are painting a portrait of yourself that is less than flattering — want to reconsider?

I confer with lawyers — everyone is surprised. It shouldn’t be this difficult.

“Is it something about your family and the DAR? Something maybe you don’t know? Something that bubbles beneath?” someone asks.

What bubbles beneath is rage — nuclear-hot rage. And below that, deep grief — profound disappointment that he is not capable of more, cannot rise to the occasion, does not feel compelled to do better.

I go to see the rabbi. I am hoping for some insight, hoping there is learned example, spiritual intervention that will guide my decisions. We talk a lot about what is to be gained and what is to be lost — the actual importance of the piece of paper and the larger picture.

The rabbi suggests I write a letter — a simple note: I am writing to let you know that if I don’t hear from you to the contrary, I am going, from now forward, to act as if and assume that you are my biological father.

The rabbi suggests that I run that past the lawyer. I do and the lawyer points out that it proves nothing, that it simply sets me up to wait — for nothing.

I write more letters in my head:

Dear Dad,

My interest in the DAR is about genealogy and lineage and I cannot let your actions stop me from joining with hundreds of years of my biological decedents.

You long ago promised to take me into your family — and I understand that life and families are complicated things. What I am asking for is not about your immediate family, your sons and daughters who are biologically no more or less related to you than I — what I am asking you for is to provide the link, so that I may make my own connection to my past, allowing me to join my relatives of the last four hundred years. It is the history that interests me, the history of all of the families that I am part of….

Dad—

You fancy yourself a man of belief, of good character; I would think as one grows older one would think about that belief, about what one’s God expects of him, about one’s behavior through the course of his lifetime. I am a person of great optimism and faith and it remains my hope that we can resolve this with some measure of grace.

Pop—

Take responsibility for your actions, be a bigger person, be a man.

Mr.

You are an old man — don’t you want peace, don’t you want people to feel good about you?

Dad—

Fine thing. Isn’t that your expression for events such as these?

The lawyers debate what to do — is there a way to compel him to produce the document? If we were to take him to court, what would we take him to court for — breach of contract? unfair use of the results? He’s had more than 50 percent use of a co-owned result for all these years. If in fact he lied to me, saying, I want you to do this test so I can take you into my family, when he may have wanted the results to explicitly exclude me from his family, from his estate — it’s fraud. Was he acting fraudulently?

“Where was the test done?” one of the lawyers asks me.

“The blood was drawn in Washington, D.C.”

“What was the name of the lab?”

“I don’t remember. I’m not sure it even had a name — it wasn’t so much a lab as an office, a collection site.”

“Maybe you can get the result directly from the lab.”

Once again I am digging. I am looking for blood labs that did DNA blood testing in 1993—before it was all the rage, before everyone and their mother wanted to know who throughout history was their brother. I uncover Orchid Cellmark — the leader in DNA testing — and give them a call.

“This is Jennifer,” the voice of Orchid Cellmark says.

“Hi, I’m trying to locate the results of a DNA blood test I had done in 1993.”

When I say 1993, it’s as though I’m saying 1903—the world we are living in is so brutally advanced and ahistorical.

In a millisecond Jennifer tells me, “Oh, we wouldn’t have that. Anything over five years we don’t keep.”

“What do you do with it?”

“We shred it,” Jennifer says. And I don’t believe her. I’m thinking, Jennifer, you can’t shred it because it doesn’t exist on paper — it lives in a computer. And then images of laptop computers being fed into a giant shredder fill my mind.

“Thanks,” I say, hanging up. I try another lab.

According to Pat at LabCorp of America they too don’t have the results. “We keep our records for seven years.”

“When did you start doing DNA testing?”

“Hold on.”

I’m on hold with tin can music in my ear. I’m on hold for a long time and it occurs to me that she just put me on hold to make me wait and is sitting there on the other end, picking her nose. It occurs to me that she might not come back. “First in its industry to embrace genomic testing,” says the background tape.

“Nineteen eighty-one,” she says, coming back on the line. There is a peculiar coldness, a kind of self-satisfaction to the way these people say, We don’t have that, as though they have no idea what that might mean, they really don’t care, as though they get enormous and perverse pleasure from emptying the electronic trash can on their computer screen. Gone, gone, and gone.

One of the lawyers asks if I have any letters from him. I think somewhere I might have a birthday card. Would there be enough DNA on the envelope to get a result? And anyway, without him already in a database, how would we deny or confirm?

Again the lawyers debate. We talk about the fact that I have not said his name in public, have never printed the information. I am wondering if my father realizes that until now I’ve never told anyone who he is. In fact, the origin of this book, a long piece I wrote for the New Yorker in 2004, reflected my desire to continue to protect him. In that article, I called Norman “Stan” and Ellen “Helene.” I’m wondering if Norman knows that what I wrote for the New Yorker was so convincing that when it was time for the magazine to fact-check the article, they e-mailed me and asked for “Stan’s” phone number. “My father’s name is not really Stan,” I explained. And again they asked for his name and number. I told them that I had never given anyone that information and I would not be able to provide it to them.

Only after the magazine first threatened and then did briefly kill the piece did I question why I was ruining my professional reputation protecting the identity of someone who had never shown any particular concern for me. Still, I didn’t think they needed to bother the man. They insisted. The New Yorker has what they call a double standard for fact checking — if the subject is to be unidentified or masked, not only does the subject have to be rendered unrecognizable to others, but also unrecognizable to himself. My father, simply by knowing that he is my father, had his cover blown.

The way the magazine killed the piece — as if doubting me — practically killed me. For the first time in years, I felt that my right to exist was in question. That there was any doubt to the truth of my story sent me into a spin. It had never been my desire to expose my father — and at the same time I couldn’t help but wonder, why was I being so protective? Finally I gave the New Yorker his phone number. I have no idea what was said between the magazine and my father and his lawyer. I asked to be there, a witness to the conversation, but the fact-checker refused. From what the fact-checker told me, I understood there were thirty-five questions the magazine wanted to ask; they detailed them for my father and his lawyer — and my father and his lawyer declined to answer any of them. The piece was published by the New Yorker in December of 2004.

I confer with my lawyers about the DAR application — it occurs to more than one of them that the lawyer for my adoptive parents might actually have a copy of my original birth certificate, because it was a private adoption and because my mother never signed the papers, and someone had to provide the court with a copy of the original birth certificate.

The lawyer I have to call is the man who called my parents in 1992 to tell them that Ellen had contacted him, the same lawyer who opened the letters from Ellen, who recognized my father’s name and called Ellen to say, if you’re going to give her (me) that information, you’d better tell him.

Dialing the lawyer’s house, I have chest pains. His wife answers — she is tentative when I ask for him. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“A.M. Homes.”

“May I ask, what is it about?”

And I explain, “Mr. Frosh helped my parents finalize my adoption back in 1961. It was a private adoption and I spoke with him several years ago when my birth mother contacted him trying to reach me — and now I have some questions.”

There is a pause. “He’s not entirely well.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say, wondering what that means — again, always the fear that I’ve called too late.

“He’s eighty-seven and some days he knows everything and the next remembers nothing. But I will ask him when it seems like a good moment.”

“Thank you,” I say. “What I’m looking for is the file, a copy of the file.”

“Maybe my son Brian,” she says.

“Yes,” I say, “if he could find it, that would be great. I think he knows about it. When my birth mother called, she actually first called Brian.” (Brian is also a lawyer).

And then she tells me a story of someone, maybe her daughter, maybe a neighbor, having adopted two Romanian children. At this point I’m having what I call situational deafness. I am worrying about the fact that I may not be able to get this information. I’ve half of a mind to say: Do you know where he kept his files? Are they stored somewhere? But instead I say, “Did it work out?” And I think she says yes, and I say something like, “That’s good. Good or bad, up or down, it’s all interesting, isn’t it?”

“Are you having a good life?” she asks, like she wants to know, did it all work out?

“A good life? Yes,” I say, both lying and not. I’m having a great life. “I’m really lucky. I have a great life.” And it is equally true that I am suffering, otherwise I wouldn’t be calling her. “Everything is good,” I tell her.

“That’s good,” she says. “Have a good life.”

I contact the lawyer’s son Brian Frosh, now a Maryland state senator. We exchange e-mails; I tell him about my conversation with his mother and remind him of the call he intercepted from Ellen years ago. I ask Brian if, when he visits his parents’ house, he might check for the file. He is incredibly gracious and understanding. We trade stories of what it is like to have an aging parent, our concerns for our families, for the history that is lost. Brian Frosh makes a special trip to his parents’ house to look for the file — he looks everywhere, but finds nothing.

I am running out of options.

The question of whether or not to sue, to attempt to legally compel my father to produce the DNA document or an affidavit, remains open. Joining the DAR is not essential to my health and well-being, but the idea that my father — or any one person — can decide to exclude someone from her lineage profoundly bothers me. The real question is not about the DAR but about adoptees’ rights to access and join their own heritage — and for that reason I am not entirely willing to drop the subject.

I think of my father asking me to have the DNA test and then later refusing my request for the DNA document, refusing to sign an affidavit, and refusing to acknowledge me. I think of my father and can’t help but think of Ellen — falling for him when she was just a teenager, being his mistress for seven years, and then pregnant with his child. I think of Ellen and I think of how my father behaved — making her promises, stringing her along, and ultimately abandoning her.

Nothing has changed. More than forty years later he is still behaving exactly as he always behaved. He is doing what is good for him, what suits his needs and desires. I see my mother as a teenager in love with an older man, a young woman who had to give up her child, who lived the rest of her life in the shadow of that loss, a woman who never married, who never really recovered — and for her I am angry with him.

This is not just about the DAR — that’s clear. I wish there had been more: a father-daughter relationship, a friendship. I wish I could know more about his family (my family) — where they came from, how they lived their lives, what they valued. I would have liked to know his children, to learn what we have in common, to feel what it means to have a blood knot. And I would have liked to have come out from the shadows, to be seen not as the product of an affair but as a person, an adult — who is no more or less of them than they are of one another.

Based on nothing except my own blind faith, I am cautiously optimistic that there will be some natural opening, some give on Norman’s part. I resolve to do nothing for the moment, to watch and wait, to allow myself to catch up to my feelings and to see over time where the story leads me.

Deposition: a curious word meaning to remove from office or a position of power and/or testimony under oath — a written statement by a witness for use in court in his absence.

Deposition: I think of suing my father to prove that he is my father and just the phrasing — suing my father to prove that he is my father — has the equally surreal echo of the moment my mother told me that my mother was dead. Suing my father — I picture the papers being filed, a summons served telling him to appear at a certain place at a certain time. I imagine there being a man, a stranger to both of us, someone hired to do the job, to ask the questions.

Mr. Hecht, before we begin I would like to remind you that the length of a deposition is limited to seven hours a day, over the course of however many days it takes to do the kind of call-and-response, asking of questions, related to the actions and activities of the last forty-four years — that’s how old she is now, the infant in question.

Rules of Civil Procedure. Rule 26—Discovery. We will be asking you, the deposed, to provide a copy of your birth certificate and a copy of the DNA test that you and Ms. Homes jointly participated in. Given that a potential witness is anyone who has information relevant to the issues of a lawsuit or who has information that may lead to relevant information, we will also call your wife and your children. Unlike a trial, where a judge can rule on objections, at a deposition lawyers can ask irrelevant questions and inquire into hearsay.

Is all of this clear?

Have you ever had your deposition taken before?

Do you understand that you are under oath — sworn to tell the truth?

Are you prepared to answer my questions?

Is there anything about your physical state — are you taking any medications that will prevent you from giving me complete and truthful answers?

If you need to take a break at any time, let me know.

What is your full name?

Your place and date of birth?

Your parents’ names and places and dates of birth?

Mr. Hecht, can you tell me why are we here today? Is there a particular issue?

In 1993 you asked Ms. Homes to participate in a DNA blood test that would genetically compare DNA samples from both you and Ms. Homes to prove that in fact you are her father. And the result of that test showed that it was 99.9 percent likely that you are her father, and recently when she requested a copy of that test from you, you declined to provide it — is that correct?

You asked Ms. Homes to participate in the test, but you don’t believe you should both have access to the results. Why is that?

You participated equally?

You paid for the test, Mr. Hecht — actually you had some trouble paying for the test, didn’t you? You scheduled the appointment for the test in July of 1993, Ms. Homes traveled from New York to Washington and met you at the lab, but you didn’t have the right kind of payment, the right kind of check — and you had to go back again the next day?

At the time you scheduled the test, Ms. Homes offered to pay for the test as well or split the cost with you?

Now, if it is all about the money — the costs associated with this meeting here today are in excess of the charges for the test. So perhaps this is not about money?

How would you describe yourself, Mr. Hecht?

Would you describe yourself as a family man?

Is there more to you than that — than just a retired businessman?

Are you close to your family?

Do you go to church?

You have a son who shares your name — what does that name mean to you?

What is your identity, Mr. Hecht?

Did you always know who you were?

Have you ever been arrested?

Been charged with a crime?

For the record, can you tell us about any and all claims, lawsuits, that you’ve been involved in over the years?

What was your age and place of first employment?

And your last — were you fired, or asked to step down?

Did you feel any personal responsibility?

Do you think of yourself as someone who gets things done?

Has anyone ever called you a big shot?

Do you think you’re an average man?

Same level of ambition as your peers?

Did you graduate from college?

Were you in the army? Ever kill anyone?

Where did you grow up, Mr. Hecht?

How would you describe your childhood?

Who raised you?

How was it that you lived with your grandparents — where were your mother and father?

How did your parents meet?

What did your father do for a living?

How would you describe your relationship with your father?

Were you close?

Did he love you?

Do you think it’s true that boys are closer to their mothers, and girls to their fathers?

Are you proud of your family history?

Involved in any lineage organizations?

What clubs are you a member of?

Have you ever wanted to join a club and not been allowed in?

What kind of name is “Hecht”?

Was your father Jewish?

Was he raised in a Jewish home?

Did your mother’s family consider you Jewish?

Was your father’s father a kosher butcher?

Why did your paternal grandmother carry a gun?

Would you describe yourself as charitable?

Do you give money to charities?

Do you give of your time and abilities?

Do you drink?

Did you ever use recreational drugs?

Ever smoke marijuana?

Ever take pills for energy?

Ever use cocaine?

Ever try Viagra?

Where did you meet your wife?

At what age were you married?

Did you engage in relations before the wedding?

Was she a virgin?

Were you?

Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease?

When did you last have sex, Mr. Hecht?

With whom?

Would you say that you and your wife had a good sex life?

Did you and your wife ever discuss open marriage?

So, initially she didn’t know that you were having a sexual relationship with Ms. Ballman?

Was Ms. Ballman your first relationship outside your marriage, or did someone precede her?

How did your wife find out about Ms. Ballman?

Can you tell me the names of your children?

Do you know their birth dates?

Besides Ms. Homes — did you have any other children outside your marriage?

Is it possible, Mr. Hecht, that there are others?

How many relationships did you have outside your marriage?

How long did they last?

Your wife was pregnant at the same time as Ms. Ballman?

How old was Ms. Ballman when you met her?

How would you describe her physically — her appearance?

Did you know that she was a minor?

What were the circumstances of that meeting?

Were you the owner of the Princess Shop?

How long did Ms. Ballman work for you?

When did your sexual relationship begin?

What were the circumstances of that first encounter?

Was she a virgin?

Do you think your libido is average?

Was Ms. Ballman a nymphomaniac?

Was she a lesbian?

Did you once tell Ms. Homes that Ellen Ballman was a nymphomaniac and on another occasion that she was a lesbian?

Did your male friends also have girls on the side?

How many of them knew Ms. Ballman?

Did you worry that Ms. Ballman was sleeping with other men — your friends?

When your sexual relationship with Ms. Ballman began, how old was she?

What would prompt a teenage girl in the 1950s to leave her mother’s care and take up with a married man?

Did Ellen Ballman tell you that someone was molesting her?

You told Ms. Homes that Ms. Ballman told you something that would have indicated that something was happening in her mother’s home and that you probably should have listened better.

Did you take advantage of Ms. Ballman?

Did you use birth control?

Did Ms. Ballman meet your family — your mother?

Your children?

Your wife?

How did it happen that your eldest son spent time with Ms. Ballman?

When did you realize you were in love with Ms. Ballman?

So, were you or were you not in love with Ms. Ballman?

Did she believe you were in love with her?

On more than one occasion did you propose marriage?

Even though you were already married, Mr. Hecht, you proposed to Ms. Ballman when she was seventeen — you called her mother and asked for permission to marry her?

How did you think you would explain that to your wife?

Do you believe in polygamy, Mr. Hecht?

How and when did your wife find out that you and Ms. Ballman were having a relationship?

Did your wife know how old Ms. Ballman was?

And what did you say to your wife? Again I’d like to remind you that you are under oath and your wife will be answering the same question.

Did your wife contemplate divorcing you?

Is divorce in opposition to her faith?

Are you and your wife of the same faith?

Is adultery in opposition to your faith?

Are you a religious man, Mr. Hecht?

Do you believe in heaven, Mr. Hecht?

What was your nickname for Ms. Ballman?

Was “the Dragon Lady” one of them?

Where did that come from? Was it from something you shared?

Did Ms. Ballman have you arrested for deserting her?

When Ms. Ballman was pregnant, you sent her to Florida to live and said you’d be joining her there — but you never showed up?

And your wife was pregnant at the same time as Ms. Ballman?

You must have felt like an exceptionally fertile man?

Later in the pregnancy did you visit Ms. Ballman at her mother’s home?

Did you offer to take her shopping and buy things for the baby?

Did you have Ms. Ballman meet with you and your lawyer and together discuss the fact that “there are only so many slices of the pie”?

Did you ask either Ms. Ballman or your wife to consider an abortion?

Can you swim, Mr. Hecht?

I’m just wondering if at some point during all this you felt like you were going under. Drowning.

When was the last time you saw Ms. Ballman pregnant? What month was that?

How did you hear about the birth of your child with Ms. Ballman?

Were you ever asked to sign any legal documents relating to the child?

How long did your relationship with Ms. Ballman last?

Did Ms. Ballman ever marry?

Are you proud of your daughter, Mr. Hecht?

Are you proud of Ms. Homes?

Have you read her work?

Did you ask your daughter to meet you in hotels?

Why not coffee shops?

What is the nature of your thoughts about your daughter?

Did your wife know when and where you were meeting your daughter?

If you had been meeting one of your other children, would she have known?

Are you circumcised?

Is this common knowledge?

Does your other daughter know?

Why was this information that you shared with Ms. Homes?

How did your other children find out that they had a sister?

And what was their reaction to discovering that information?

Do you think of yourself as a good father?

Let’s backtrack a little bit…

In May of 1993 you read a review of Ms. Homes’s book in the Washington Post and called her in New York City?

What prompted you to call her on that day?

If Ms. Homes were not a successful, well-known figure, would you have ever called her?

You made a plan to meet in Washington several days later?

Was anyone else at the meeting? Was the meeting taped or otherwise recorded or monitored by anyone?

What was your reaction to meeting Ms. Homes?

When you met her, were you surprised by the degree to which she looks like you?

Does she look more like you than your other children?

Despite the physical similarity at that meeting, you asked Ms. Homes if she would consent to a paternity test — saying that you had no question as to the likelihood that she was your child, but that your wife was insisting, and that you would need that in order to be able to take her into your family. Is that correct?

What made you question Ms. Homes’s paternity?

After the blood was drawn, as you were walking out with Ms. Homes you told her you had something you wanted to give her — and yet you didn’t give her anything?

What did you want to give her?

Was it something of your mother’s? A family heirloom?

Several months later, you phoned Ms. Homes to say you had the results of the test, and you asked Ms. Homes to once again meet you in a hotel in Maryland?

At that meeting you told Ms. Homes that you were in fact her father — that the DNA test said it was 99.9 percent likely — and you asked, “What are my responsibilities?”

What did you envision as your responsibilities?

What were your intentions toward Ms. Homes when you asked her to submit to the test?

Did you follow through by “taking her into your family”?

Before you discussed the results with Ms. Homes, did you discuss them with anyone else?

Did you discuss them with your wife?

Why did you not offer Ms. Homes a copy of the test result?

What did you do with the test result?

When did you give a copy to your lawyer?

Did you keep a copy for yourself?

Do you typically give the one and only copy of an important document to your attorney?

Did you not put it in your safe deposit box because you didn’t want your wife to discover it?

But didn’t you tell Ms. Homes that it was your wife who insisted on Ms. Homes’s having the paternity test before you could “take her into your family”?

Was the reason your wife wanted Ms. Homes to have the DNA test that you had portrayed Ms. Ballman to your wife as a floozy to make it seem like you were Ms. Ballman’s victim?

You arranged for your eldest son to meet Ms. Homes?

How did that meeting go?

Was your son happy to have more information about something that had only been a dim memory from his childhood — the time he spent with Ms. Ballman?

Was there a lot of tension in your home when your eldest son was a boy?

What was the occasion of your wife meeting Ms. Homes?

Is there a reason why your wife wouldn’t like Ms. Homes?

Why did you say to Ms. Homes later that she and your wife didn’t hit it off?

Did Ms. Homes ever ask you for anything?

Do you have concerns about Ms. Homes making a claim on your estate?

Did she ever in any way indicate that she had any interest in your estate?

Did you have her take the paternity test in order that you might by name exclude her from your estate?

When did you last speak to Ms. Ballman?

And what was the substance of that call?

Did you see Ms. Ballman in the months before she died?

Did your wife know you were meeting her?

How did she look? Was she still attractive?

Did Ms. Ballman ask you to ask Ms. Homes if she would give her a kidney?

And what did you tell Ms. Ballman?

Did you later tell Ms. Ballman that in fact you had asked Ms. Homes and that she said no?

Did it occur to you that Ms. Homes did not know about Ms. Ballman’s condition, nor did she have a chance to say good-bye?

Did you go to your own personal doctor and inquire about donating a kidney to Ms. Ballman?

Did you tell Ms. Homes that you had done that?

And what would your wife have thought about that — would you have had the surgery without telling her?

Did you know that Ms. Ballman was going to die?

How did you feel when you heard that Ms. Ballman had passed?

And your last phone call with Ms. Homes — several months after Ms. Ballman’s death — how did that go?

How did it end? Did you say, “Call me anytime. Call me in my car. My wife’s not usually in the car”?

Why would Ms. Homes need to call you in the car as opposed to in your home?

Is anyone harming you, confining you, not allowing you to make and receive calls and/or mail?

Are you angry with Ms. Homes?

When Ms. Homes’s New York lawyer called you — the same man who called you to tell you that Ms. Ballman had passed — and asked you for a copy of the DNA test, you told him never to call you again and referred him to your lawyer.

Mr. Glick called your lawyer and was told by your lawyer that the DNA document had been misplaced and that you would not sign an affidavit of paternity.

Did you know that Mr. Smith had misplaced the test results?

Are you concerned that other important documents may have been misplaced or mishandled?

Does it not seem a little too convenient that Ms. Homes is asking for this document, and now it is missing?

You have children and now grandchildren? Do they look like you, Mr. Hecht?

You have adopted grandchildren as well. Do they look like you also?

Do they have a right to know who they are — where they came from?

What is your understanding of why Ms. Homes wants this document?

If Ms. Homes is your biological relative, why should she not be treated in the same way as your other equally biological children are treated? Why should she have different, less than equal, rights?

Does that seem fair? Are you a fair man? A just man?

Could you please repeat for the record your name?

And Mr. Hecht, could you please for the record state the names of all your children?

Jon Homes, Jewel Rosenberg, and A.M. Homes

Jewel Rosenberg, my grandmother, my adoptive mother’s mother, graceful, grandiloquent, profound. She is in some ways why or how this book exists. I am not sure that I would have become a writer if it weren’t for her, nor would I have gone to such lengths to become a mother. Without Jewel Spitzer Rosenberg there would likely be no Juliet Spencer Homes — a girl who is now almost three, with no biological relation to my grandmother yet bearing a striking physical relation to her.

When the events charted in this book began to unfold, my grandmother was too old to make good sense of them and my mother elected not to tell her about the return of my biological parents. That decision bothered all of us — my grandmother was the ruler of the family, the queen bee; she was the one we went to about everything, the one with good advice, the one who was remarkable.

She was born in June of 1900, the turn of the twentieth century, in North Adams, Massachusetts. At fifteen she got glasses, looked up at the sky, and saw it wasn’t all black — for the first time she realized there were stars. At sixteen, enrolled at North Adams Normal School (Massachusetts State College) and studying to be a teacher, she was called into the president’s office and told she would never get a teaching job because she was a Jew. She didn’t tell anyone about the incident — except her brother Charlie.

In my grandmother’s house there was a table built in the year of my birth by the Japanese-American artisan George Nakashima from wood my grandmother selected at his shop in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The table is seven feet long, lush — French walnut. It is subtle, not announcing itself as something special until you spend time with it, until you get a feel for it. Then its significance becomes clear.

This was the family seat. This was where we gathered, where my grandmother, our matriarch, held court, where her brothers and sisters and their children and their children’s children came to celebrate, to discuss, to mourn.

There have been great multigenerational political and philosophical debates at this table, especially when my grandmother’s brothers Charlie and Harold would visit — the family radicals. They put themselves through college, changed their name from Spitzer to Spencer, ostensibly to protect the family from their radical reputations, but conveniently also hiding their Jewishness. They both studied law but never practiced. Charlie went to work in a Chicago steel mill and became a union organizer, and Harold married the dancer Elfrede Mahler and went to Cuba, where he taught English and she became the head of Cuba’s modern dance movement. When they came to town, we would spend hours at the table, debating everything from the current political situation to the lyrics of songs they made up as children.

This table was where my grandmother fed us. She had long ago taught herself to prepare the traditional French cuisine that my grandfather had grown up with — and had long ago progressed from a Massachusetts farm girl to a seriously sophisticated intellectual.

As a writer I think of narratives — family stories. Growing up, I was never sure about whether or not I could or should absorb the family history. At family gatherings great-aunts and-uncles from around the world would pull their chairs in close and tell stories about life on my great-grandparents’ farm in North Adams, Massachusetts. I fell in love with these stories, felt attached to them, but also was made uncomfortable — this agreed-upon narrative was not my narrative. “It’s not my history, not my family,” I would whisper to my mother. “We are your family, believe me,” my mother would say. I wanted to believe, but something felt off, inorganic.

Growing up, I had two adopted cousins who were black — they lived in upstate New York and we didn’t see them all that often. Once when we were all at a relative’s house for dinner — the adults downstairs, the three of us playing in the upstairs bedroom — I said, “I’m adopted too,” trying to make a connection. The cousins looked at me blankly—“No you’re not.” “Yes I am.” I was insulted that they didn’t believe me — it didn’t occur to me then that because I was white like my parents they thought I couldn’t possibly be adopted. “Mom, am I adopted?” I yelled downstairs. “What are you children doing up there?” was the answer.

When she was in her late nineties I would visit my grandmother at her home outside of Washington every couple of weeks. We sat at the table and drank tea and talked. While we talked, she rubbed the table, her hand unconsciously moving in circles as if polishing the wood, repetitiously stroking it like a talisman, for comfort, for the giving and getting of wisdom.

We each sat in her familiar place, my grandmother at the head, I just to the left.

At her age, she was perhaps now even older than the tree the table had come from — in my mind they are inexorably bound.

“We went up to the old farm,” I said very loudly.

“You did? And you were able to find it?”

“Yes.”

The weekend before, my cousin (also a writer) and I had driven up and down the hills of North Adams on an impromptu pilgrimage to find the farm where my grandmother grew up. The dirt driveway had long ago dissolved; the only way in was by foot. We climbed quickly, ascending into the mythology of the farm.

The original buildings remained, crumbling, collapsed, but still identifiable. I conjured images of my grandmother as a child, one of nine born to Lithuanian immigrants at the turn of the century on this Massachusetts dairy farm. I imagined her walking down the dirt road to a one-room schoolhouse, picking wild blueberries, helping my great-grandfather milk the cows and tend the chickens. I remembered her telling me the Mohawk Trail was just out the back door, and in my mind she was outside playing a real-life version of cowboys and Indians, substituting farmers for cowboys, cows and plows for horses and guns.

My cousin went on an ersatz archaeological dig, using a knife to poke in the dirt near one of the buildings. After a few minutes, he pulled out an old bottle.

“This must mean something,” he said.

I nodded. We each took a couple of slate shingles from the crumbling roof and made our way back to the car.

“Tell me about the farm. How was it?” she asked, as if half expecting there was still someone there leading the cows out to pasture in the morning and back home again at night.

“Interesting.” I told her about the landscape. She closed her eyes. I told her about the rolling hills, the tall trees, Mount Greylock in the distance.

“Just as I remembered it,” she said.

She looked at her table. I imagined this table echoing something, some other great long farm table in my great-grandmother’s country kitchen. I see my grandmother’s nine brothers and sisters as children underfoot in their mother’s kitchen. I see my great-uncles as teenagers in the summer selling buckets of water to overheated cars on the Mohawk Trail. I feel their grief when their fourteen-year-old sister, Helen, dies of diphtheria in 1912. I see their brother Maurice staying in North Adams — becoming the town doctor, delivering over twelve hundred babies.

My grandmother rubbed her finger along the grain of the wood.

Again, her hand circled the wood. “Tell me about you,” my grandmother said.

“I’m fine, I’ve been working hard, I’ve been thinking about buying a little house out on Long Island, a cabin where I can go and write.”

She nodded. “It’s important to have a house of your own,” she said.

“Tell me about you,” I said back to her.

“I’ve got nothing to tell,” she said. “I’m bored.”

She had worked her entire life — full-time until she was eighty-six. In 1918, two years before women won the right to vote, she came to Washington by herself, got a job in the War Department, and soon brought her brothers and sisters down from the farm. In 1922 she met my grandfather, the Romanian-French hatmaker, during a summer visit home when he happened to be working at his uncle’s hat shop in nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In the mid-1920s my grandfather sent for his younger brothers Julian and Maurice, hoping they would stay in America. The boys came for a summer but didn’t like it — they couldn’t get girlfriends because they didn’t speak English. They returned to Paris and in the 1940s were deported from Paris to concentration camps — Julian to Drancy and then Auschwitz, and Maurice to Auschwitz. Neither survived.

Later, in Washington, D.C., my grandparents started a successful wine importing company, and when she was seventy-eight, Jewel Rosenberg became a founding director of the first bank in the United States organized by women for women.

Whatever I know about how to live my life, I learned from her. When I graduated from college and wanted to become a writer, she lent me the money to buy an IBM Selectric typewriter. I dutifully paid her back $50 a month, and when the debt was repaid, she wrote me a check for the entire amount. “I wanted you to know what it means to work for something.”

Back at the table, she sighed. “I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t feel useful anymore.”

“It’s your turn to rest and let others do things for you.”

“I’m not a rester, I’m a worker.”

“Let’s go for a ride,” I said, getting up from the table. We drove to a local farm, the place where my mother took me apple picking and pumpkin hunting as a child. I drove up a rutted road toward the berry patch.

“Where are we? This is beautiful, it reminds me of North Adams.”

I parked beside a row of blueberry bushes and opened her door.

She made her way to the bushes and started grabbing at the berries and popping them into her mouth, her ninety-eight-year-old fingers suddenly nimble. Sweeping her hair back, she looked up at the sky and moved down the row, picking rapidly. She was a girl again, filling the basket with ripe, warm berries. “This is exactly how it used to be.”

We drove home with the basket of berries on her lap. She squeezed my leg. “Buy your little house,” she said, and I did.

I called her from the little house on Long Island. I stood in the small yard and told her what I was planting: rosebushes, tulip bulbs, seeds for carrots, beets, and squash. I had turned over a small square of land at the far end of the yard and began calling it “the field.” I told her about tilling the field, tending my crop — the enormous satisfaction in this work, in being away from the city, my hands deep in the dirt.

She turned ninety-nine. “When are you coming home?” she asked several times in each conversation. “Soon,” I told her. “Soon, I am coming home.”

And then she was gone, the only person I’ve known to die unexpectedly at ninety-nine. I hurried back to Washington. I went to her house. I moved from room to room. I sat at the table, waiting. I had the feeling that she too felt she left too soon. She seemed to still be there, hovering, floating, packing.

I stayed for a while, just sitting, comforting myself with the echoes and objects that were like symbols, vessels of history.

At the end of the summer I pulled my carrots out of the ground, as proud of them as I was of any story or novel I’d written. She was the person I would most want to share them with; she was the one who would understand when I held up the green grassy ends and proudly said, Look what I made.

I see now that I am a product of each of my family narratives — some more than others. But in the end it is all four threads that twist and rub against one another, the fusion and friction combining to make me who and what I am. And not only am I a product of these four narratives — I am also influenced by another narrative; the story of what it is to be the adopted one, the chosen one, the outsider brought in. In the living room bookcase of my parents’ house there was a two-volume slip-cased set called The Adopted Family. One of the volumes was a book to be read to the adopted child, and the other was a book for the parents. I would often sit with that book not sure entirely what it was about but sure that it was of great import, that in some way it was quite literally about me. I felt like a doll whose package comes along with a book.

As a child, I devoured biographies — in particular a set of biographies for children called Childhood of Famous Americans. I read each of them again and again; two in particular stuck in my mind: Eleanor Roosevelt and Babe Ruth. And at some point they conflated into a character of my own making, Eleanor Babe, a sort of early superhero — not only did she start organizations like Unicef, she had a mean curve ball. Thinking back on those two books, it’s clear why they lodged in my thoughts; both Eleanor Roosevelt and Babe Ruth were sent away by their families — Eleanor to live in London with aunts who had no understanding of her, and Babe to a children’s home in Baltimore after his mother died. It was their outsider experience, their loneliness, that I identified with. They were invisible adoption heroes — not only had they survived but they succeeded.

It was the death of my grandmother that compelled me to try to have a child of my own. Motherhood was something that terrified me. I have a great fear of attachment and an equally constant fear of loss — I am not sure if this is true for everyone, but for me the ghost of the dead brother still and always looms. When I was younger I always thought I would adopt a child, but after Ellen’s death and then my grandmother’s, I felt I wanted a biological child, and so it was something that I decided to do. It had never occurred to me that it would be difficult to get pregnant. I started at thirty-nine, and in the end it took two years, thousands of dollars, the best of medical science, and two miscarriages before my daughter was born.

“What’s the matter?” my mother asked. “Isn’t adoption good enough for you?”

“Of course it’s good enough,” I said, but it wasn’t that — I felt compelled to try my hardest, to issue a biological echo, to see myself before myself, writ large and small and as fully related as one can ever be.

Months after my grandmother had passed, my mother called and asked if I would like my grandmother’s table.

“I know it’s big and that your house is small, but I think it would be nice if you had it.”

The table came in through the side door, carried by four men, carefully wrapped.

“These are tables of great weight,” one of the men said, and he was right, but the weight was not so much literal as emotional. I inherited much more than an object — it was a mandate to live and work as hard and with as much grace and style as she did.

At first the table looked out of place, lost. I oiled it. I rubbed it with a soft cloth, moving my hands over the surface and noticing the richness of the tone — the lived-in marks that Nakashima called Kevinizing after his son Kevin. I thought of the spiritual life of the wood, what it gave beyond a surface.

The first time I used the table, I invited a friend over for lunch. I took my usual spot. Instead of looking at a painting on my grandmother’s living room wall, I was now looking out a window at a bird feeder. I set two places at the table, hers and mine. My friend sat in my grandmother’s place and something felt strange.

“I need to change places with you,” I said.

The friend looked at me oddly — she didn’t understand.

“Could we switch?” I asked, and then I slid into her seat.

When the table gets dry — thirsty — its surface looks pale, parched. I rub it with oil; it drinks and then glows. And while it is only a table, an object made of wood, it is a perfect and constant reminder of how to live, how to stay connected. It was in this little house — which I wouldn’t have bought without my grandmother’s nod and a gift that helped with the down payment — that I got the phone call from my mother saying my mother had died. It was in this house that I first miscarried and that, a year later, I celebrated my child’s first Christmas and Hanukkah. It was in this house, at this table, that I sat alone unpacking the four boxes from my mother’s house in New Jersey. It was this table that could hold those boxes.

The table is the centerpiece of our family life. It is where on the weekends my young family gathers — my daughter draws her pictures here; together we make cookies and decorate them. Each time I sit here I remember myself in my grandmother’s kitchen, in awe and admiring her spice rack, her jars of cookie sprinkles and cinnamon hearts. Now, sitting in what was my grandmother’s seat, I watch my daughter sitting in my spot to my left. I watch this girl, who more than anyone reminds me of my grandmother. She carries the same facial expressions, the same gestures, the same simultaneous compassion and judgment. I witness the way she moves through her life, the confidence with which she carries herself. Like my grandmother, she takes great pleasure in making sure that others are taken care of. And as I am thinking this, she gets up from her spot, comes over, and gently pushes me out of my seat.

“I need your chair,” she says, climbing up, filling the vacated spot.

I am my mother’s child and I am my mother’s child, I am my father’s child and I am my father’s child, and if that line is a little too much like Gertrude Stein, then I might be a little bit her child too. Most important, now I am Juliet’s mother, and that brings with it a singularity of love and fear that I have never known before, and for that — and she is truly a blend of all four family lines — I thank all of my mothers and fathers, for she is my greatest gift.

Did I choose to be found? No. Do I regret it? No. I couldn’t not know.