Black Diamond Page 14

  *

  The adoption agency was housed in a one-story building of municipal brick. It looked as if it could have been a bank, a firestation or even a chapel. He thought it was fitting that everything about the place should appear anonymous.

  He’d written ahead and he’d dressed for the part: neat, respectable, mature. He was good at interviews: they gave him a chance to display his acting talents. And he wasn’t going to make any mistakes. He’d told himself that if the bastards saw he had a hair out of place, they’d probably refuse him the information, or just lie and say that they didn’t have it.

  The woman who interviewed him was in her early fifties and not good-looking, although she too had taken care with her appearance, mainly with her hair, which looked almost sculpted. She had his file on the desk in front of her. It crossed his mind that if she really said no, he could knock her out, grab the file and just run. Why not? This was going to be his only chance to get his hands on the records. No court would convict him because a jury would understand a man’s need to know the truth about his past. And an adoption agency would be very careful about getting into a tangle with the law, maybe hitting the headlines.

  The woman’s name was Mrs Whitlow. A sign on her desk said so, as did a plastic card pinned to the cardigan she’d draped over her frilly blouse. ‘Well, Bruce,’ she said, ‘why do you want to find out about your natural parents?’

  ‘Just because of that,’ he told her. ‘Because no matter what, they are my parents by nature. I guess you could say I feel that things have got to be settled. My parents have been great. If I’d never known, it wouldn’t have made any difference to me. But when they did tell me, I knew then that I’d always want to know more about the others.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see.’

  He could tell that he’d made a good impression. She put her hand on the file and turned the cover. His breathing speeded up a little.

  ‘There isn’t too much we can tell you,’ she said, and stopped.

  He gritted his teeth and waited. She seemed to be reading. He concentrated on keeping his voice right, and asked, ‘Were they married?’

  ‘No.’ She looked up. ‘I’m afraid we have no information at all about the father.’

  ‘Well,’ he said gently, ‘anything you can tell me.’

  ‘The mother’s name was Joanna Elizabeth Henderson. She was sixteen.’

  Despite all the possibilities he’d gone over in his mind so many times, he’d expected to hear that she’d been in her thirties, or possibly late twenties: a woman – someone who could take care of herself and who knew what she was doing. Not a young girl.

  Mrs Whitlow continued, ‘Fifteen, when her parents first came to us, in 1962. It seems that there was an unsuitable alliance, with a married man. Yes. We talked to the girl. She was hostile but not hysterical. She agreed that adoption was the best course. She knew that without the help of her parents, she’d be in the hands of the courts. Underage, no means of support …’

  He felt sick for a moment as he wondered if the interview could have taken place in that very room, where the low ceiling added to the sense of claustrophobia. It was certainly possible that other rooms down the corridor held pregnant girls and worried parents, who didn’t want to become grandparents. He would have liked to know if anyone in the family had expressed regret about giving the baby away. It wasn’t a question for asking eighteen years later.

  Mrs Whitlow said, ‘That’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to know quite a few practical details. Medical history, that kind of thing. Have I inherited anything that I should know about?’

  ‘Everything was perfectly normal, so far as we could tell.’

  ‘On my father’s side, too?’

  ‘That we don’t know, but we did receive an assurance from the family doctor that there was nothing out of the ordinary in his history.’

  ‘His family doctor? Or hers?’

  ‘It’s the same name on both reports.’

  ‘They had the same doctor?’

  ‘So it appears.’

  ‘Then they must have had a record of the name.’

  ‘Yes.’ She flipped to a section in the file, looked through a few sheets of paper and turned back the cover again. ‘There’s nothing here. It does seem strange, but not completely unheard of. There may have been reasons. I just don’t know. We have the name of the doctor, but not of the patient. And no medical record, only a statement that the examination showed nothing unusual.’

  ‘Right. Well, in that case, if that’s all, I wonder if you could let me have the address she was living at when she came to see you.’

  ‘You’re going to try to make contact?’

  He smiled one of his dozen best smiles, saying, ‘Oh, I don’t think so. I told you: my parents are enough. But I really do have the feeling that I’d like to find out about the others. I guess it’s because my field is history.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. And after a moment she simply took the file and turned it around so that he could see, and copy out, everything.

  He wrote down all the names and addresses: town, parents, daughter, doctor, and so on. His handwriting seemed to him jerky and strange-looking. Mrs Whitlow sorted through some papers of her own while he was busy. When he’d finished, he stood up. He thanked her and said that she’d been a big help. His face and voice were composed as he left the room, went down the hallways and came out of the building.

  He walked straight to his car, as if he had somewhere to go. All his movements retained a look of purposeful coordination.

  He drove the car around a couple of corners, just to put some distance between himself and the adoption agency. He parked under a tree.

  He sat behind the wheel and sweated. He started to shake. He didn’t understand what was happening to him. The whole of his face was suddenly wet. He put his hands up to cover his eyes. He couldn’t stop.

  It lasted for about three minutes. There was a point where he was afraid that he wasn’t going to be able to get himself out of it. He tried to think. He tried to tell himself to relax. It couldn’t be. It ought not to be possible: that he, who was always perfectly in control of himself, should fall apart.

  When it was over, he felt exhausted. He wished that Alma were with him, right at that moment, sitting on the seat next to him. They could begin the search now. He had all the information he’d needed.

  He thought: Maybe Joanna Elizabeth hadn’t known the man was married. She could have been taken for a ride. Maybe. There hadn’t been anything about religion in the files. That had surprised him. If a fifteen-year-old, middle-class girl went ahead and had a child, you’d think that there would be some religion in the background, especially since the girl hadn’t intended to keep the baby. On the other hand, he’d known quite a lot of fifteen-year-old girls himself and not all of them were angels. Some of them had been doing it since they were twelve. Some charged money for it. It was certainly a possibility that she’d gone after this married man and tried to blackmail him, or had done it to spite her parents, or something like that. The man had had the same doctor: that would make it a lot more likely that all these people were known to each other, and that she’d be aware of the fact that he was married. And he wouldn’t necessarily have to be her parents’ age, either. He could have been under thirty. Still – it shouldn’t have happened: for her to have a child and then ditch it.

  He started to tap his hand against the steering wheel. ‘No,’ he muttered. His hand beat down more violently on the wheel, again and again. He wasn’t aware of it, nor of his voice repeating the word ‘no’, until he hit the horn by mistake.

  Stop, he told himself. This is idiotic. Facts first; then start to think about it. Never theorize ahead of the data: that’s the rule for historians. It should be the rule for everyone.

  He started the car. The sky was still clear, the trees in leaf, the houses evenly spaced along the road. Nothing was out of place. Given a little luck, any
one ought to be able to find his way in such a well-regulated world.

  *

  He took Alma out for a meal at her favorite Italian restaurant. They sat in a booth away from the other diners. He purposely didn’t order any cocktails or wine. He wanted to keep calm and get everything in the right order.

  ‘It was simple,’ he told her. He described Mrs Whitlow. He repeated what he’d discovered. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we just find out if anybody’s living at that address – if they died, if they moved, if they changed their names, and so on. Twenty years ago it wouldn’t be so easy. Now everybody’s on a computer somewhere.’

  ‘They didn’t say anything about your father? No name or anything?’

  ‘No. I don’t know why I expected it. Bastards don’t usually know the name of their father.’

  ‘Don’t keep calling it that.’

  ‘Why not? It’s the truth. Anyway, I’m having second thoughts about the married-man story. Maybe she didn’t know who it was. Maybe she was just one of nature’s whores.’

  ‘Bruce, whatever she was, she was your mother.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘She could also have been a girl whose parents disapproved so much, they sort of forgot to tell her about birth control. You know what I mean? There are a lot of them left, even now. And in those days, you couldn’t get anything legally, unless you were a man. A doctor would report you to your parents, otherwise he’d get into trouble. It was against the law.’

  ‘Sounds a little far-fetched to me.’

  ‘I don’t like it that you’ve got this feeling of hatred against her.’

  ‘Joanna.’

  ‘You had it before you even went to the agency. It isn’t good to think like that, Bruce.’

  ‘You’re just nicer than I am. What I feel is that there are some people who always get away with it – always. And they shouldn’t be allowed to.’

  ‘Do you really think a woman who’s had an illegitimate child has gotten away with anything?’

  ‘She could have stayed with us. With me.’

  ‘Oh, Bud. Way back then? Even nowadays – at the age of fifteen, with her parents about to throw her out of the house?’

  ‘Well, if she couldn’t, then she should have had an abortion.’

  ‘I guess in those days they weren’t so easy to get. And it would have cost a lot of money. And maybe it would have been too dangerous.’

  ‘I think she was just a bitch, that’s all.’

  Alma reached across the table and grabbed his hand. ‘Stop,’ she hissed at him. ‘Stop it, right now.’

  He laughed. ‘Right. It isn’t that important.’

  ‘And it was over a long time ago.’

  ‘I’m still going to find out, though. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, do what I did: just go there and see what they can tell you. You don’t have to do anything about it. You could even think about it for ten years before you follow it up.’

  ‘Is that what you’re going to do?’

  ‘I’m starting now. I wouldn’t want to leave it and then find out they’d died just the week before I rang the front doorbell.’

  ‘If we’d never been adopted,’ Alma said, ‘I’d never have met you.’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘We could do other things besides look for our parents. We could travel around the world together. We could get married.’

  ‘I told you: I’m not getting married.’

  ‘I bet you will.’

  ‘And I can’t start making plans about anything else till I get this out of the way.’

  ‘So, you wouldn’t mind if I got married to somebody else?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘How do I know? I could meet somebody at any minute.’

  ‘Oh. Well, when you’re ready to settle down, I guess that’ll be up to you. But you promised to help me if I need you to go in and get information for me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sure.’

  *

  In the ballets, Alma thought, it was always the woman at the center of the drama. She was lifted high, carried into the light, put where you could see her displaying herself like a preening bird. But life was the reverse. In love, in marriage, she was supposed to be in the background, coming second. She was waiting by the stove or standing at the front door, tapping her foot and thinking: Where are you? If you were going to be late, you could have called. She was the one who loved and he was the one who didn’t care. Why wasn’t Bruce ever going to love her?

  What brought her almost to despair was the thought that if she didn’t care so much, he might begin to consider her interesting or romantic: if she were unaffected by him, if she felt nothing. But she’d never be able to pretend that. Her feeling for him was always boiling up in her to the point where it blocked out other people. It spoiled everything. All the wonderful things she had – the good luck, the loving parents, the nice life – weren’t enough. The only thing she’d ever wanted was never going to be hers.

  And her mother? Her mother had taken one step further. In her case it hadn’t been just that the one wanted prize was withheld. No. The one unwanted calamity had come upon her and she’d had to accept it. Even though the evidence had been disposed of.

  But perhaps her mother hadn’t thought of it like that. Who could tell?

  *

  He didn’t need her at all in the beginning. He only wanted her to listen to him as he reported back the things he’d found out: The Hendersons, his grandparents, were still in the same house. He could go and take a look at them any time, if he wanted to. The daughter, Joanna, had run off to Maryland when she was eighteen and married a man called Raymond Baxter, who was ten years older than she was.

  ‘Well, maybe they’re happily married somewhere,’ Alma said.

  ‘Maybe she’s been divorced and remarried six times by now.’

  ‘And they could have children of their own.’

  ‘What?’

  How could his mother have had other children, when she’d thrown away the first one? She’d have no right to do such a thing. He didn’t think she’d have the right to be happily married, either. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ he said.

  He went away to college. He studied hard. He got top grades. Alma too applied herself to her schoolwork. She didn’t see the sense of working at anything, but she knew that if she didn’t push herself, she’d give up completely. Every day, from the beginning to the end, she missed Bruce. Time passed without enjoyment for her, so that when she looked back at the year, long stretches of it seemed never to have been.

  *

  Alma memorized her lines for the school play, The Importance of Being Earnest. She had the part of Gwendolen, the sophisticate. The part of Cecily, the sweet, unspoiled girl, had been given to the class flirt, who played it surprisingly well.

  After rehearsals she’d rush back home to see how Bess was. Bess had started to have fainting spells; her doctor, Dr Mason, said that they were caused by blood pressure. He’d given her some pills, but she still got tired out and would feel faint. At last Dr Mason referred her to another man, a doctor named Boyd. Elton told Alma that Dr Boyd was a specialist in heart diseases, and that in fact there had been a lot of heart trouble in Bess’s family; she’d never mentioned it: she didn’t see why she should upset the children. ‘But modern medicine,’ Elton said: ‘They can work wonders. They’ve even got these little pacemaker gadgets.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Alma said, ‘is it that bad?’

  ‘No, honey. Don’t fly off the handle. I’m just telling you: if. You know what heart conditions are like. People can last up into their nineties so long as they take good care of theirselves.’

  Or they can go at any minute, Alma thought. She telephoned Bruce. ‘I don’t want to worry you,’ she told him. ‘I just wanted to hear your voice, that’s all. Dad says I’m getting too worked up about it. Anyway, she’s not feeling so good. And that’s why.’

  Bruce said that he’d be
back in two weeks for a visit. He called up the next day to say hello. When Alma came home from school she found Bess pleased and cheerful.

  ‘He’ll be here next week,’ Bess said.

  ‘That means next month.’

  ‘Well, at least he’s keeping in touch.’

  ‘It’s the thought that counts,’ Alma said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But actions speak louder than words.’

  ‘Alma, you’re teasing.’

  ‘I think he could come home a little more often than he does. He can afford it.’

  ‘It makes a big difference in the house. Even when he was so busy with something, and he’d just march right upstairs without saying a word: at least he was here. He said if he couldn’t make it, he’d be home for your birthday, definitely.’

  *

  Bess was well enough to attend the school play. She applauded vigorously. ‘Wasn’t it just the best thing?’ she kept telling everyone: ‘Wasn’t it fun? You couldn’t see anything better on a professional stage.’ Elton’s enthusiasm almost surpassed hers. He’d loved everything: the story, the laughs, the other players and the costumes. He kept saying how pretty Alma had looked in her dress. He thought that they ought to let her keep it.