Amy, she didn't push her to seek a reunion."I didn't feel it was up to me to take control of the situation." She suggested that Amy might contact the Children's Home Society for information and left it up to her.
As our conversation drifted toward areas of deepest interest to me, I found it difficult not to hurry Mrs.Woodson along. But I let her tell the tale at her own pace, interrupting only to clarify a point or unkink the chronology.
Amy, she said, had started off her search with an advantage that few adopted children enjoy.When the Woodsons went to the courthouse to complete the adoption, there was some confusion, and as lawyers and CHS representatives and the nervous parents passed papers back and forth, an extraordinary violation of standard practice took place. Amy's original birth certificate popped up in Mrs.Woodson's hands, and for an instant, before a flustered CHS employee retrieved it, she got a glimpse of a strange name: Elaine Godot Mewsahu.
"Right away, I thought of Beckett," Mrs.Woodson told me. "It hit me that the Godot part had to be an inside joke, as in Waiting for Godot. But I thought Mewsahu might be the birth mom's last name."
I'm accustomed to people mangling my surname. This was by no means the most extreme misspelling. But it shocked me that it had wound up on Amy's birth certificate.
Assuming that Amy might someday need the name, Mrs. Woodson had scribbled it down and waited. The wait lasted almost twenty-two years. At last, on July 14, 1986, Amy submitted a notarized Waiver of Rights to Confidentiality to the Children's Home Society. Otherwise known as a Consent to Contact statement, this form signaled that she welcomed contact with her birth parents. If they ever submitted the same documentation, the Children's Home Society was legally free to arrange a reunion.At the same time,Amy applied for access to the "nonidentifying information" in her file.
There matters remained for several years.The CHS received no inquiries and no Consent to Contact statement from her birth parents, and Amy, regardless of how much she speculated about the past, did nothing in the present to move her search along. Mrs. Woodson, however, had read the "nonidentifying information" closely and noticed the reference to the birth mother's being a runner-up in the Miss Maryland contest. In the early 1990s, while on a business trip to Baltimore, Mrs. Woodson leafed through the telephone directory. Although she found no listings under Mewsahu, she spotted several under a tantalizingly similar name—Mewshaw—and concluded that there must have been a misprint on the original birth certificate or that in her flustered state of mind, she had copied the name wrong.Though she didn't know it, she was still thirty miles off the mark. I come from a different batch of Mewshaws who hail from the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
On her return to California, Mrs.Woodson gave the new spelling of the name to Amy and once again let her deal with it as she pleased.This time, when Amy procrastinated, one of her girlfriends seized the initiative. Pretending to be a sociology student, she called the California Lutheran Hospital and claimed she had a graduate school project that required her to pick a date at random—December 24, 1964—and track the lives of everybody born at the hospital on that day.
"Hospitals aren't supposed to reveal that information," Mrs.Woodson said. "But sometimes they do. Maybe they guess it's a child search ing for her parents and take mercy. Anyway, Amy's friend learned there were a handful of babies born on Dec. 24, 1964, and just one of them was a girl—Elaine Godot Mewshaw."
At this point, Amy was galvanized to hire a private detective. She never met the man. Their conversations took place by telephone. As Mrs.Woodson and Amy both recalled it, the man was a friend or relative of Amy's first husband. In short order, he produced the name, address and telephone number of my half-sister.
Neither Amy nor her adoptive mother grasped how tenuous the link had been. As I took pains to point out to them, not a single detail from the "nonidentifying information" bears any resemblance to Karen's personal data. Blond and blue-eyed, 5'2" and four years younger than the birth mother, Karen had never participated in the Miss Maryland pageant, never lived in California and didn't have parents or a sibling who matched those described in the CHS file.What's more, since Karen and I hadn't had the same last name, and since for the past twenty-odd years she had lived under her husband's name, it was a mystery how the investigator had ever connected her to me.
As best Amy and her mother could explain it,the investigator had discovered that after three decades the records of the Miss Maryland pageant had been lost or destroyed. Still, he managed to track down a former employee who remembered that Karen had been a beauty-pageant contestant—in Washington, D.C., not Maryland—and that she was related to Michael Mewshaw.This satisfied the detective, who, without further digging, reported what he had found out.
That the search had produced the roughest draft of a very loose version of the truth, that the path to it had been strewn with lies and false documents and that it had run through people who were peripheral to the story—none of this bothered Amy. And I can't blame her. She be lieved she was about to locate the last piece, the key piece, in the scattered puzzle of her life. But she had no idea of the dizzying hall of mirrors she was about to enter. I knew better and feared that she might be in for a shock eerily akin to her second birthday, when the sight of a tiny replica of herself in a shoe box had provoked tears rather than gratitude.
C h a p t e r F i v e
Then I called to tell Amy that I had received what she had sent, I sensed her tension. Or maybe I felt so much myself that I transferred mine to her.
"My mom told me you two talked."
"Yes, we had a long, helpful conversation," I said. "She's a nice woman.You're lucky to have her as a mother."
"I know."
"She's proud of you.And I can see why.That was a lovely picture."
"Probably too flattering. But did you see anything familiar in it?"
"A lot," I said. "Your mother told me you've always wondered what your birth mother looked like. Well, you just have to look in the mirror."
Amy thanked me and added that I couldn't imagine how good that made her feel.
"You must have noticed in your file how often your birth mother's beauty is mentioned," I said."Did it surprise you that she had three marriage proposals when she was pregnant with you?"
Amy said it sounded plausible to her. As an attractive woman, she understood what it was like to be overwhelmed by men and their attention. She had received her first marriage proposal at the age of fourteen. A friend of her brother's, a fellow in the marines, had sent her an engagement ring out of the blue and urged her to set a date. "I never even went out with him. I thought of him as a friend."
Conscious of stalling, I asked if she ever fantasized about her birth mother.
"I used to fantasize she was a bareback rider in a circus," Amy said. "Then as I got older, I wondered whether she'd be low-life trailer trash."
I had to laugh."No, she's far from that."
"Tell me about her. Are you still in touch? Do you know where she is and how to reach her?"
"First I have something to tell you about myself."
Amy hastened to say that she hadn't meant to be rude. She wanted to hear about me too, not just her mother.
"Look, Amy, I'm sorry, but the truth is, I'm not your father."
For a moment, there was silence.Then there followed an adamant refusal to accept my word. Although she did so in her sweetest, politest manner,
