AT THE END of the day, St. Gregory’s Hospital is empty, the air thick with pine-scented floor cleaner and old urine. For almost seventy-five years, St. Gregory’s has served as an orphanage, a place where unwed mothers could have their babies and give them away, or bring their children and leave them for someone else to take home. It was where Georgia had sent her son; Elliot knows that because every time they passed St. Gregory’s his mother told him about Georgia’s child, how she never even held him, how a transfer here had been made, and someone had, presumably, adopted him.
Waiting for someone to appear at the records office to help him, Elliot hopes for another rush of memory, a sign that he has been here once, briefly, before he was transferred over to the people who had raised him. Already, in the short subway ride uptown, the faces of his parents have dimmed, his connection to them has grown frayed and thin.
There is nothing modern about St. Gregory’s. Thick, dusty files line the room that stretches before him beyond the desk where he waits. The telephones have rotary dials. I’m like a time traveler, Elliot thinks, smiling. He hears someone approaching, slowly, shuffling along the newly washed floors. He hears his mother’s constant reprimand when he was a child: Pick up your feet, Elliot. Don’t drag them like that. He thinks too of Georgia and the clogs she always used to wear. She clopped when she walked, heavy, noisy. His mother used to wonder aloud at home how someone could wear those things, why someone would wear them. “They aren’t even attractive,” she’d say, shaking her head, looking down at her own practical loafers. Elliot used to like it best when Georgia wore no shoes at all and padded around her Bank Street apartment barefoot, the pads of her feet thick and callused, her arches so high that she always appeared to be about to jump.
A voice behind him says, “I can guess why you’re here.”
Elliot turns to face a small, wizened nun, dressed in a black habit, bent almost in two, her back like a bridge in a Japanese garden.
“They all come back,” she says, shuffling past him, to the desk.
“They who?” Elliot says.
Once, in an adult education class at the local high school, his mother took a course in making figures out of dried apples. She made a woman, dressed it in a long red-print dress and white bonnet, put a doll-size butter churn in its hand. That apple woman’s face looked just like this nun’s: wrinkled and dried so much that it appears to be folded like that, pressed into its own peculiar shape.
“The children,” the nun says, shaking her head. “The little ones who were given away.”
Elliot fights back an urge to touch her, to stroke that dried-apple face. He longs for arms around him, he realizes. He longs to be held. He thinks he might cry, so he merely nods.
“I have cancer,” the nun says without self-pity. “Of the stomach. They say my intestines have disintegrated, that they’re just hanging there, loose, like old yarn. I can only tolerate applesauce and baby food.” She shakes her head, as if remembering. “Not even water will stay down,” she continues. “Do you know what I used to love? Pizza! With pepperoni!” Her eyes sparkle. “I always used to add extra hot pepper flakes.” She starts to shuffle away from him, to the room beyond. She pauses. “Name?”
“Elliot Stern,” he says.
“No, no, no. Do you know your mother’s name, sonny?”
“Georgia,” Elliot says, his voice barely above a whisper. “Montenegro.”
The nun nods, then disappears between those shelves, her feet leaving smeared footprints in the dust.
While he waits for her to return, Elliot considers all the possibilities that lay before him. He will never have to go back to the house in Chappaqua, where, when he left this morning, his mother and Mr. Rickey had started to paint his father’s old study a color called celery, which his mother had read soothed infants. He will never have to endure another meal with his father and Veronica, with their arguing and Veronica’s smoking while he eats and his father’s slapping him on the back. He will never have to face the Rickey sisters in daylight. He could go back to Providence tonight, ring Georgia’s doorbell, lose himself in her arms, in her hug. Thinking it, he can almost actually feel those arms around him. She never got to hold him, he remembers.
The nun comes back with a file, thin, dusty, sealed.
In front of him she breaks the seal and opens the folder.
“Baby boy Montenegro,” she reads. “April 16, 1975. Mother: Georgia A. Father: Unknown. Adopted April 23, 1975, by Margaret M. and Alexander D. Lewis, 10 Bank Street, New York, New York.”
The information rattles around in his brain. None of it is him. Not the birthday—his is in January—or the names of the adopted parents. He is not Georgia’s son, after all. The feeling of her embrace vanishes and he is left shivering, as the nun hands him the file and shuffles out.
“Send me more,” she says. “I’ll tell them. I don’t want these babies walking around the earth alone, untethered.”