Yet even in an office, with colleagues nearby, she sounded friendly and relaxed, and assured me that this was a good time to talk. After a bit of preliminary throat clearing— profuse thanks for my calling, apologies for probing—she got down to her questions.
"Have you ever lived in LA?" she asked.
"Yes. A long time ago. "
"In 1964? I was born on Christmas Eve that year. "
"Yes, I was in California then. "
"I know this is awfully sudden and may come as a shock, but I have reason to believe you're my biological father. "
"An hour ago you told my half-sister you believed she was your mother. "
"I'm not so sure about that. "
"How sure are you about me?"
Amy didn't answer directly. Perhaps my question struck her as aggressive, and she wanted to avoid any hint of confrontation. Sounding every bit as sweet and lovely as Karen had described her, she volunteered information about herself. She told me she had been born at California Lutheran Hospital. She specified the time of her delivery and her birth weight. The Children's Home Society of California, she said, had handled her adoption, and she had grown up in the Valley. Now in her early thirties, she had had a first marriage that didn't last. It looked likely she would marry again soon, and since she hoped to have kids, she needed to learn about her family and their medical history.
"That's my primary motivation," Amy said. "I'm not looking for somebody to be my parent. I had a wonderful mother and father and a happy childhood. I don't want to barge into anybody else's life or upset you and your family. I'm not expecting a public acknowledgment of paternity. I'd just like to meet you and find my mother, but if that's not possible, I'll be satisfied with some background information and a medical history. "
When I asked Amy what she looked like, she said,"I'm five feet seven and weigh a hundred and twenty-eight pounds. My hair's straight and dark brown, and my eyes are brown too. "
"Tell him you resemble Sandra Bullock,"someone at her end shouted.
Amy laughed. "That's on a good day and in good light. But you get the picture. "
Indeed, it was a picture deeply familiar to me. Still, I hesitated to admit this or anything else. It puzzled me that she had contacted Karen. When I pressed her for an explanation, she said that new developments in adoption law had allowed her to gain limited access to data about her biological parents and the circumstances surrounding her birth. Once she received her files and what she referred to as the "nonidentifying information" from the Children's Home Society, she had hired a private investigator who turned up Karen's name.
"What about my name?" I interrupted. "Had you ever heard it before?"
She conceded that she had. During the final phase of the adoption, her adoptive mother had caught a fleeting glance of my last name on a stray document and had scribbled it down. Years later, when Amy expressed interest in finding her biological parents, her mother passed the name along. "I've known it for a long, long time," Amy said. "I've had Karen's name in my purse for over six years. It took me that long to work up the courage to call her. "
"She's not your mother," I said. "I want to stress that from the start. "
"But you are my father, aren't you? That part's true?"
I evaded the question and asked Amy to send me a photograph and a copy of the adoption files. Then I said I'd like to talk to her adoptive parents.
"My father's dead,"Amy said. "But my mother'll speak to you. I'll call and tell her she'll be hearing from you. In the meantime, won't you please let me know something about you and my biological mother? You can't imagine how hard it is not to know anything about yourself. "
Like Karen, I had a powerful urge, an almost irrational impulse, to tell Amy whatever she wanted to hear. It would be a coldhearted person who could resist helping her. Still, I held back. Hard experience had taught me caution. While as a writer I've been accused of grubbing around in people's lives, tweezing up details for my fiction or violating the privacy of friends and strangers alike for my nonfiction. I, like every author no matter how minor, have suffered intrusions and trespasses that were frightening when not downright dangerous. Nutty readers of fiction often accuse novelists of stealing their life stories and vow revenge. Sources in nonfiction sometimes believe they've been libeled and threaten legal action and physical mayhem.
In a career where the personal and professional have often overlapped, the subjects of paternity, identity and adoption have cropped up in all my books, so much so that I can no longer say whether I seek out the stories or they pursue me. Since my parents divorced when I was an infant, I suppose a psychiatrist might claim I come by my obsessions naturally. Yet there have been an amazing number of wild cards, like Amy, that have seemed to stack the deck. All during my adolescence, I lived with the fallout of a double murder committed by a friend who at the age of fifteen killed his adoptive parents. While he went to prison, his younger brother was taken in by my family. Twenty years later I wrote an account of the case and caught flack from every direction. My foster brother sued me for $6 million, and I started receiving hair-raising letters from death row inmates, renegade cops and deranged mental patients who demanded that I record their dictated memoirs.
When another grisly parricide occurred in the neighborhood—once again an adopted boy murdered his adoptive parents—police advised local newspapers that it was a copycat killing based on my book. At the time I happened to be covering a trial in Florida of a man who was convicted of killing his mother and his adopted brother. Intrigued by the case,I went on to publish a novel whose plot hinged on the suspicion that a child who was put out for adoption returns as an adult to hunt down his biological father, hell-bent on revenge, but kills the wrong man.
So, as sympathetic as I was to Amy, I thought I had good cause to proceed slowly. But she didn't agree. "Look," she said,"if there's something you're hiding, I mean if my mother's dead, you can tell me. Don't leave me guessing. Even if she's a drunk or a drug addict or a terrible person, I'd like to know, and I'd like to meet her if she's willing. I've been in a support group, ALMA—the Adoptees Liberation Movement Association—where some of my friends found out they were children born of rape or incest. No matter how bad this is, I can deal with it. "
"It's not that it's bad," I said. "Just very complicated. "
"You sound like you're protecting someone. Is it my birth mother or me?"
I couldn't bring myself to confess that I was protecting me. I had a family, a life, a precariously won equilibrium that I didn't care to risk.
"You know, I've seen your books,"Amy said. "In the pictures on the back, especially before your hair went gray, you look like me. Or I guess I look like you. Why won't you tell me who you are?"
"I'll be glad to once I find out who you are. "
From my travels in Eastern Europe, I remembered Russian dolls, each painted wooden figurine containing smaller and smaller ones. A caricature of Marx encased a miniature Lenin, then a Stalin, a Khrushchev, a Brezhnev, a Gorbachev and a Yeltsin. The symbolism suggested continuity, cause and effect, faith in a pattern and a prime pattern maker. I longed to believe in that notion—in a math or metaphysics that maps the course of life as unerringly as the trajectory of an arrow.
But in asking who I was and what I knew about her mother, Amy had uncorked a bottle that had been shelved so long I had no way of predicting whether she had released a genie or a wine that had turned to vinegar.
