By Blood A Novel

By Blood A Novel - By Ellen Ullman



ONE





1.


I did not cause her any harm. This was a great victory for me. At the end of it, I was a changed man. I am indebted to her; it was she who changed me, although I never learned her name.

My involvement with the young woman in question began several years ago, in the late summer of 1974, while I was on leave from the university. I sought to secure for myself a small office in the downtown business district of San Francisco, where I intended to prepare a series of lectures about The Eumenides—The Kindly Ones—the third play in Aeschylus’s great trilogy. A limited budget brought me to the edge of a rough, depressed neighborhood. And my first sighting of the prospective office building—eight begrimed gargoyles crouched beneath the parapet, their eyes eaten away by time—nearly caused me to retrace my steps.

Yet there was no question of my turning back. Immediately upon my arrival in San Francisco, a month earlier, a great gloom had descended upon me. I had arranged my leave in great haste; I knew no one in the area. And it must have been this isolation that had engendered in me a particularly obdurate spell of the nervous condition to which I had been subject since boyhood. Although I was then a grown man of fifty years, the illness, as ever, cast me back into the dark emotions of my preadolescence, as if I remained unchanged the desperate boy of twelve I had been. Indeed, the very purpose of the office was to act as a counterweight to this most recent spell, to get me dressed and out of the house, to force me to walk on public streets among people, to immerse myself, however anonymously, in the general hum of society; and in this way, perhaps, sustain the gestures of normal life.

It was therefore imperative that I do battle with my trepidations. I suppressed my fears of the neighborhood and my distress at the building’s dreary mien. We were in the midst of the Great Stagflation, I reminded myself. The whole city (indeed the entire country) had a blasted, exhausted air. Why should the building before me not be similarly afflicted? I therefore turned my gaze from the eyeless gargoyles, told myself there was no reason to be unnerved by the shuttered bar on the ground floor (whose sign creaked in San Francisco’s seemingly perpetual wind). Somewhat emboldened by these mental devices, I took the final steps to the entryway.

I opened the door to a flash of white: a lobby clad entirely in brilliant marble. So clean and smooth was this marble that one had the sudden impression of having entered a foreign landscape, a snowy whiteout, where depth perception was faulty. Through the glare I seemed to see three cherubs floating above the elevators, their eyes of black onyx, which, as I watched in fright, appeared to be moving. It took some moments to understand what hung before me: elevator floor indicators, in the form of bronze cherubs, their eyes circling to watch the floor numbers as the cars rose and fell.

To the right of the elevators was a stairway, above it a sign directing visitors to the manager’s office on the mezzanine. I climbed this short flight—its marble steps concave from years of wear—then I followed the manager into the elevator and rode with him up to the eighth floor (the cherubim ogling us, I imagined). He led me along hallways lined with great slabs of marble wainscoting, each four feet wide and as tall as an average man of the nineteenth century. Finally we stood before a door of tenderly varnished fruitwood, its fittings—knob, back plate, hinges, lock, mail slot—all oxidized to a burnt golden patina.

The room he showed me was very small. The desk, settee, and bookcase it contained were battered. The transom above the door had been painted shut. But I had already decided, on the strength of the building’s interior materials—clearly chosen to withstand the insult of time—that this would be my office. So with the manager’s agreement to restore the transom to working order, I signed a one-year lease, to commence in three days, the first of August. And then throughout the first weeks of my tenancy, while I struggled to regain my footing and begin my project, I was calmed by the currents of dark, cool air that flowed through the transom (the sort of mysterious air that seems to remain undisturbed for decades in the deep interiors of old buildings), and by the sight of the aged Hotel Palace across the way, where I could, in certain lights, see the doings of guests not prudent enough to close their shades.

Each weekday, I rode downtown on the streetcar, anticipating the pleasures of sitting at my desk, the rumble of the traffic eight stories below me. Before reaching the city center, however, one had to pass a grim procession of empty storefronts, vacant lots, and derelict buildings—a particularly blighted district. Nevertheless, despite the proliferation of such neighborhoods, the good San Franciscans seemed to rouse themselves each morning to perform at least the motions of civic life, producing an air (however false) of gainful industry. This impression of restorative public energy helped me to put myself aside, so to speak, and by month’s end I had made progress on my lectures, producing my first coherent set of notes.

Then, shortly after Labor Day, as I sat down to draft the first talk in the series, I found that the acoustical qualities of the office, previously so regenerative, had abruptly changed. Cutting through the pleasant social drone from the streets below, superseding it in both pitch and constancy, was an odd whirring sound, like wind rushing through a keyhole. And just audible above the whir, coming in uneven and therefore intrusive intervals, was a speaking voice, but only its sibilants and dentalizations—only the tongue and teeth, as it were. I am certain it was only the general darkness of my mood, but I felt there was something mocking and threatening in this sibilance, for the sound drew me to it the way a cat is lured—psst, psst—for drowning.

I jumped up from my desk determined to know the source of these intrusions. Immediately I suspected the doors to the adjoining offices. My room, small as it was, had two interior doors to what were once communicating offices, both doors now kept locked. Aside from noticing the fine wood of which they were made, I had paid these vestigial entryways no attention, as I had never heard anything issuing from them. Indeed, I had had no awareness of the other offices at all, my goal in securing my own room having been, as I have said, to find a place outside of my own life, so to speak, to immerse myself in a general, anonymous social sea.

Now forced to consider the reality of the tenants around me, I went out into the hall. The stenciled letters on the office door to my left identified its occupants as “Consulting Engineers.” I moved my ear closer and heard nothing, but through the frosted glass in the door’s upper portion (unlike my office, many doors retained their original etched-glass panels, with finely wrought patterns), I could make out two heads moving, as if over a desk or drafting table. The only odd thing I noticed about this office was that its number was out of sequence, being 803, whereas mine was 807, and my other neighbor’s 804. I then recalled the building manager saying, when I signed the lease, that tenants, as they changed offices over the years, were permitted to take their numbers with them as long as they remained on the same floor, their suite numbers obviously constituting some kind of property or identity. And indeed, as I looked around the hallway, I saw that the office numbers were a complete jumble, 832 next to 812 next to 887, and so on, indicating that the lessees had proved themselves loyal to the building and to the eighth floor but were otherwise restless and inconstant. I wondered for a moment if I should want to retain 807 in the event that I should move away from my neighbor, and I decided that I would, for there was something orderly in the descent from eight to seven passing around zero, and, in the number 7, perhaps an aura of luck.

Rousing myself from these distractions and resuming the surveillance of my neighbors, I came to the office on my right, number 804. As I drew closer, the whir became unmistakable, as did the voice. There was no glass panel in this door; its gold letters simply read, “Dora Schussler, Ph.D.”

I stood immobile in the hall for some seconds. My first association with the designation “Ph.D.” was that this Dr. Schussler should be an academic like myself, and that she and I should coexist quite well, her time being spent in the quiet pursuits of reading and writing. Why, then, was there this whirring, and this persistent hissing? And why hadn’t I heard it from the first, on the day I inspected what was then my still prospective office, thereby preventing me from being bound to such an incompatible neighbor?

These questions (posed to myself with an aggrieved, affronted, indignant air) distracted me from seeing the truth of my situation, which became clear only as I stared at the swirls of the ancient, wear-darkened broadloom that lined the hall. I recalled the first time I had ever heard a sound like the one issuing from Dr. Schussler’s office, which had been many years ago, in the office of one of the many therapists I had had reason to visit during the course of my life. In the waiting area, there had been a small beige plastic machine, placed on the floor, which had given off just such a whir, its role being to blur the clarity of the spoken word that might be audible from the therapeutic offices, thereby preventing anyone, as he waited, from understanding what was being said within (though I myself, still a young man, often tried to overhear, telling myself such curiosity was natural). With great force, the whole period of time surrounding my meetings with the psychotherapist came back to me, and I could see quite clearly the little yellow lamp she kept on a low table beside her, and the vine that covered the single north-facing window, its leaves perpetually trembling.

I did not wish to recall this portion of my life, especially not at the office where I had sought to escape the great black drapery of my nervous condition. Indeed, finding myself tied to such an enterprise seemed to me an evil joke, as I had wagered both my emotional health and my professional reputation against the efficacy of the therapeutic relationship. Over the course of thirty-five years—meeting weekly, twice a week, sometimes daily—I had looked across small rooms into the bewildered, pitiable faces of counselors, therapists, social workers, analysts, and psychiatrists, each inordinately concerned about his or her own professional nomenclature, credentials, theories, accreditations; all of them, in the end, indistinguishable to me. Now, still battling the hooded view of life that had haunted my family for generations, I had come to the conclusion that their well-meaning talking cures, except as applied to the most ordinary of unhappinesses, were useless.

What now could I do to separate myself from this Dora Schussler? How could I escape her analysands with all their fruitless self-examinations, beside whom I was now obligated to spend the remaining eleven months of my lease? I had no legal recourse, I realized. I could not go to the manager and say I had been duped, my neighbor had been hushed, paid off to silence the babblings of her profession on the day I had first surveyed the premises. The situation of my room had not been maliciously misrepresented. I had engaged the office in August, iconic month of the therapeutic hiatus. It was now September. Dr. Dora Schussler, Ph.D. and psychotherapist, was back at work.





2.


Still standing in the hallway, I leapt to an uncharacteristically hopeful thought. I dared believe that the piercing, sibilant voice coming through Dr. Schussler’s door belonged to the current analysand, not to the analyst (as I chose to call them, indiscriminately, since I was not inclined, as I have said, to be impressed by the naming conventions of the psychological professions). I reasoned that if it were the patient whom I had been hearing, all I had to do was be away from the office for one therapeutic hour per week, a mere fifty minutes, and the situation would be tolerable. Somewhat reassured, I went back to my room to wait for the conclusion of the current session and the beginning of the next.

Yet, as the remaining thirty minutes of the session crept by, all manner of alarming thoughts intruded. I shuddered at the consideration that, though the horrid voice might indeed be that of the patient, she (for the voice seemed to me eminently female) might be undergoing a true, orthodox, Freudian analysis, which meant she would be coming to whisper and cluck her problems at me every day of the workweek. It then came to me that the therapist’s name was Dora, the name of Freud’s famous hysteric. Surely, I reasoned (using the absurd, self-defeating logic that always ruled during nervous episodes), Dr. Schussler was a Freudian, the dreadful voice would haunt me daily, my work at the office was ruined, my dwindling financial resources were committed without recourse, and I would have to return to my empty house in a dreary neighborhood, where it was mortally dangerous for me.

In this foolish but inevitable manner, I escalated my own fears, growing ever more agitated, until I was startled by the slam of Dr. Schussler’s door. I then heard the patient tread past my office, the ding of the elevator bell, and finally, rising into my awareness as if it had suddenly been turned up in volume, the whirring torrent of the noise machine.

I forced myself not to become fixated upon the sound. This was difficult, because the whir, which had seemed so constant upon first hearing, now appeared to have patterns within it, coming in rhythmic waves. And there was something teasing about these subtle rhythms, a kind of phantom music that seemed to play just below the level of audibility, all the more seductive for being not quite music, a melody just beyond reach, vanishing when I gave it direct, analytical attention. Only through the greatest mental discipline could I consign it to the background, willing it to become part of the general sound atmosphere, along with the rumbling trucks below, the shrill of a traffic policeman’s whistle, the honking horns. This cognitive effort was exhausting, even for the brief ten minutes of the interclient interval. When I relaxed in any measure, looking up from my notes or glancing across the way to the windows of the Hotel Palace (where a maid was assiduously wiping a table), the quasi-musical patterns returned, luring my attentions.

So it was that the subsequent ding of the elevator came as a relief—or, I should say, at least an exchange of anxieties. For now I waited expectantly to see if the next client would be the solution to the problem of the sibilant voice. This new analysand walked past my own door; Dr. Schussler opened hers; and the patient entered the office. Due to the strong air currents that always blew through the hallways, the door closed with a wall-rattling slam (an annoyance, since I myself was always mindful of the draft, closing my own door in respectful silence). For one moment, there was only the whir of the sound machine and the noise from the street. Then, fulfilling my worst expectations (as life would always do, said my depressed illogic), the awful sibilance returned. And there was no escaping the conclusion: The horrid sound was produced by the tongue and teeth of Dr. Schussler!

I would move, I thought. I would carry my 807 down the hall, or I would accept another office on another floor, pursuing any avenue to get away from this therapist, counselor, psychoanalyst—whatever she wished to call herself. I was about to look for the building manager, demand he place me in a different room, when suddenly everything went quiet.

It was the sound machine: abruptly stopped. And in its absence was a stillness so crisp that I could hear the suggestive, teasing, slip-sound of a single tissue being withdrawn from a Kleenex box.

Then a voice, which said, Thanks. You know I hate that thing.

And a reply: So sorry. I do forget.





3.


I was so startled by the clarity of the sounds coming from the next office—I could hear a sigh, an intake of breath, the lifting of a haunch, indeed to the extent that I knew with utter certainty that both client and analyst sat upon leather—that I could not move for several seconds. What was I to do about this sudden, forced intimacy? Perhaps I should have coughed or jostled a drawer, so that they, hearing me, would know the extent to which I was hearing them. Yet I sat still. And in a brief instant, through some quirk of reasoning (no doubt related to the generally twisted logic of my mood), I convinced myself that my making noise would be an imposition upon them, that my presence would inhibit them, and the only way for analyst and analysand to continue their work undisturbed was for me to keep my existence a secret.

Supporting my decision was the fact that I understood almost nothing of what they were saying. Charlotte, Roger, Susan—who were these people? The hotel, our arrangement, the old project, the meeting, the assignment—references to empty space. How could I see myself as a trespasser when I had so little comprehension of what I was overhearing? Ten minutes passed with a discussion of scuba diving (the patient had or had not done this before?). Then she circled back to “the assignment” and “the old project.” Dr. Schussler of course would know the meaning of these references, or would have to pretend she did, since that was a therapist’s most basic function: to keep the thread of her patients’ stories, to remember all the names, relationships, and events, to absorb (somehow) the infinitely expanding expository action of an ongoing life. But it all meant nothing to me. I was like a person who had happened upon a novel fallen open at random.

So it was that I simply sat and listened to the sound of their voices—Dr. Schussler’s, in particular, her spat-out Ts and whistled Ss. Of course! She was German. This explained the mysterious dentalizations and sibilance that had intruded over the whir of the noise machine. But now I could also hear what the machine had masked: a calm—even soothing—resonance, something throaty in it, a tone pleasantly raked by time. Her accent confused me. I had spent a sabbatical year in Germany, living in the home of a professor of linguistics, and I had come to understand that a hard S, like the doctor’s, was characteristic of a resident of Hamburg. Yet her unhurried syllables and soft tone were more indicative of Bavaria or, perhaps, Switzerland. I wondered if she had been born in the Baltic region and had moved to the south, or perhaps vice versa, for my knowledge of German was insufficient to discern which part of her accent was dominant, so to speak.

Her patient, however, was altogether American, with the flat accent of the Midwest—from somewhere along the rim of the Great Lakes from Buffalo to Detroit. Her cadence and inflection were like those of my female former graduate students, and I therefore took her to be in her mid- or late twenties. At some point in her young life, she seemed to have unlearned the worst aspects of her native region’s speech, for she had softened the jaw-breaking growl that passed for an R in that part of the world, and had widened the mashed, dipthonged A (a horrid sound, as if you pinched your nose while saying ee-yeah) into an airy, open, monosyllabic ah. The effect, altogether, was of a provincial who had acquired culture, at an out-of-town university perhaps. Now and then, her acculturated layer slipped—an A going nasal, an R growing teeth—which was not at all an unpleasing phenomenon, as it let one hear past her creamy alto into a core of watchfulness and vulnerability.

I merely let the sound of these voices play over me, as I have said, allowing the mentioned names and places to come and go without attempts on my part to understand their referents. The patient meandered; Dr. Schussler replied occasionally with friendly nonchalance; and in this way more than half the session passed. Then came a moment I distinctly understood. The doctor’s voice abruptly changed; her accent turned harsh; her tone pointed, as she said:

So, have you thought further about our discussion before the break?

A long pause followed. And as I waited to hear the reply, I realized I had distinguished this moment because of all the therapists and analysts who had insisted upon asking me this same demonic question. And I recalled how much I had detested it: this constant looping backward in time to the last therapized hour, as if everything that had happened in the intervening days or week was not real, or not quite as real as the life lived inside yellow-lamp-lit rooms where ivy trembled at the windows. My goodwill toward Dr. Schussler retreated. I found myself allied with the young analysand, with her resistance: What force there was in the annoyed sigh she gave off! And what a long moment she took to lean over and slowly withdraw a tissue from the inevitably close-by box.

I know we agreed we’d go back to it after the break, the patient finally said. But I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ve avoided it all my life for good reason. I don’t see how it will help for me to get into it now.

Dr. Schussler made a small, throaty sound but said nothing. There was now another pause, as analyst and analysand sparred to see who could longer endure the silence. Of course it was the client who gave way:

I really don’t see the relevance of that to who I am now, she said. I don’t want to go there. I told you. I don’t see the point. I’ve made my peace with it. It’s a fact, like where I grew up or the color of my eyes. Please, I don’t see why you keep coming back to it. I told you. Some things should just remain a mystery.

I was naturally enticed by the idea of a mystery, as anyone would be, and I hoped she might reveal at least the nature of this secret. But for some seconds, the analysand did not speak. She only stirred in her chair (was she lying on a couch? I thought not; something about the quality of her voice made me think she sat upright), and then she immediately changed the subject.

The topic to which she leapt was an argument with one Charlotte, a name that had already come up several times during the session. It seemed that she and Charlotte had argued over the arrangement of food in the refrigerator. Then the patient complained that Charlotte always left the kitchen-cabinet doors open. Finally, she decried Charlotte’s continual invasions of her privacy, saying, She talks to me all the time. When I’m in the bathroom. When I’m in the shower. While I’m washing dishes and can’t hear over the water. That booming voice: it follows me everywhere.

I thought this Charlotte must be her roommate. With whom else does one have such dull domestic spats? Dr. Schussler had obviously heard much of this before, for she inquired whether the two women were following the ground rules they had established. As her client went on to reply, it was clear that the doctor was as bored as I with the course this session was taking. She signaled her disengagement by continually shifting her weight in her leather chair, sending out squeaks and creaks that somehow connoted a jeering disapproval.

Finally, she intervened. Remember, said Dr. Schussler. We did talk about whether you were going to take seriously these incompatibilities. It is not simply a matter of housekeeping standards. Charlotte is a bicycle messenger, and you are a financial analyst. She has barely completed a junior college course in accounting, and you have a master’s degree in business administration and econometrics. She accuses you of being a “collaborator” for not being open at work about your lesbianism.

(Lesbians!)

She jeers at you for wearing “straight” business clothes. She says you think like a man. These are serious problems, as you yourself have said, and they are not going to disappear simply because Charlotte thought you were “stunning,” as she put it.

Yes, said the patient. Totally true. You’re right. But just the same—she paused—all that bicycle riding has given her a truly amazing pair of legs.

The doctor coughed.

The thighs, most especially.

Silence from the therapist.

And let’s just say that I immensely enjoy all the many ways she considers me stunning.

Her analyst tssked. You know what I mean, she said.

Oh, all right. I do. Of course I do. We’re completely different. We have nothing in common. It’s ridiculous in so many ways. But when we take our clothes off … when the sex is so very good …

Lesbian sex! I experienced a moment of extreme titillation, for there is no one who is not curious about homosexuality, and especially about lesbianism, if one is a man. I felt my groin tighten and my penis begin to stir, bodily acts about which I could do nothing. One might as well try to stop one’s heart from beating as attempt to prevent this involuntary rush of blood to one’s manly parts, especially when one has been presented with an image of two women, naked, their beautiful legs, their breasts, the hidden places into which they—and so forth. Although I considered my reaction altogether normal—as I have said, any man in my position would have responded similarly—when the tumescence proceeded briskly, I became quite alarmed. Further engorgement would require me to stand and adjust my trousers—and then all would be lost. My chair would creak; they would hear me; I would never again learn about lesbian sex, or indeed any other aspect of the patient’s life. I would be plunged back into loneliness in my dreadful house by the sea. I therefore forced myself to think of the two women in their roles as squabbling roommates—the disputed refrigerator shelves, cabinet doors, shouts over running water—arguments so banal as to dispel the deepest desire and compulsion.

Oh, Charlotte’s all right, the patient was going on (to my relief, as I began to wilt). Really. You’re making too much of the surface differences. I know we’ve talked about it, but maybe the problems aren’t insurmountable. It’s just that she’s so steeped in the politics of lesbianism, the radical idea of it, she can’t exactly think for herself, react for herself. It’s as if her body belongs to some community, not to herself. She’s forever coming home from a meeting of one collective or another, and she has this struggle model in her head. Everything must be fought for; an action must always be planned. The personal is political, she never stops saying. I keep trying to tell her the reverse is not true! But then she says to me, Everything worthwhile requires a fight. Honey, don’t you want to struggle?

Now the patient burst out laughing, as did the therapist, and it was all I could do not to laugh myself. The women’s liberation movement was in a period of great militancy; the streets of the university were often filled with short-haired women marching with their fists in the air. And it was absurd to imagine these stalwarts going home to struggle over the correct way to arrange a refrigerator. (I preferred to imagine them otherwise, as I have said.) But the therapist did not permit this diversion for long, as she was clearly intent upon drawing her patient into deeper waters.

Yes, said Dr. Schussler pointedly. All that is true. But remember what you said not long ago: Charlotte chose you. You are not sure that you would have chosen her in return. The doctor’s voice then softened: And this does bring us back to the subject we were discussing before the break. Remember how we talked about the ways this mirrors your relationship with your mother, this profound sense of otherness?

The client snorted her impatience. She loudly drummed on the arm of her seat with her fingers and turned herself this way and that amidst much creaking of leather. I told you, she said finally. I don’t want to go into this again. I like not knowing where I’ve come from. I like it. Every child thinks it must have been switched at birth, these can’t possibly be my real parents, it’s all a big mistake. Well, I just happened to have more evidence than they do. Mine really aren’t my parents. I told you this a hundred times: I am not adopted! I have mysterious origins!

Dr. Schussler took in a breath and then released it. For several seconds, neither client nor therapist moved. They had arrived at last at the heart of the matter. But alas the hour was too far advanced. What came next were the softly murmured words with which every therapy session inevitably ends: Our time is up, the doctor said.





4.


So this was the mystery the patient wished to keep hidden: She was adopted! Improbable as this may seem, it was her adopted status, not her lesbianism, that produced in me the keener excitement. For my best friend while growing up, Paul Beleiter, had been adopted, a fact he had worn as a badge of identity. I was overjoyed to think of him! When we were fifteen, Paul escaped from our meager town. His parents had threatened to withdraw financial support if he did not prepare for a course of engineering; he shrugged them off as one would shed so many ill-fitting clothes. He moved into the rooming house of an old widower, then on to an existence all his own: Manhattan, a scholarship to a special high school of art, Greenwich Village, friends who smoked Gitanes, Jewish girlfriends with haloes of frizzy hair.

How I had longed to follow him! It was the time in my life when my ancestors had already put their damp hands on me. Any hope that I would not emulate my father was dashed (or nearly so) when I followed not his example (alcohol and pills) but the more elegant method of Virginia Woolf: into the river with stones in my pockets. I was appointed with my first mental health practitioner (she of the ivy trembling at the window). And there was Paul, already a man on his own terms, graceful and full of laughter, freed from the strict, brittle people who had raised him.

I was certain it was the adoption that had given him the courage. Paul was not adopted as one would say “I am Protestant” or “I am from Michigan,” but as a quiddity, an indwelling trait that set him apart from we poor, owned, claimed children of our mothers’ wombs. His alien genes had blessed him; they had given him the knowledge of his difference, his singularity. Now it thrilled me to think that I, sitting quietly behind a thin door, could follow the psychological turns whereby my dear friend had extricated himself from the engulfment of family; whereby he, like the patient, had come to the realization: These are not my parents.

If Paul—and now the patient—could extricate themselves, why not I? Why could I not learn the art of being parentless from these adoptees: these very models of self-creation?

At that moment, it seemed to me that my relocation to San Francisco had not been a stumbling error after all. The sudden leave, the dismal house by the beach I had rented, the ad in the newspaper that had led me to this strange office building in a rough neighborhood—each of these steps now seemed a requisite stage in a propitious process designed to bring me to Room 807, to the adopted patient, and, through her, to a possible release from the clammy hand of ancestry. Such a release had been the quest of my many psychological explorations; and to think that now I sat so close—physically and psychically—to the nub of this matter filled my heart with the first true joy I had experienced in decades.

Yet my happiness alarmed me. I was drawn to the patient, excited by the thought of an intimacy such as the one I had had with Paul, but a deeper intimacy for my being hidden and therefore more liable to know her secrets. But I was simultaneously ashamed of that excitement. My crouch behind the wall was too familiar, a stance too close to the postures of my darker nature; to impulses I had pledged to resist.

I ached as I considered it—to lose this grand opportunity of escaping my progenitors!—yet my pledge was made. Not to honor it could lead me farther into the shadows. How clever were the crows of my nervous condition: to thus show me a path to freedom but one that led directly through their realm, so to speak.

I therefore resolved, steadfastly, to avoid the patient’s sessions. But here I faced another difficulty: I had no idea when the patient’s next therapy hour might be. Did she come once a week, twice, daily? For that matter, what other patients, coming at any time of any day, might similarly want Dr. Schussler to turn off the sound machine and whose privacy I might therefore also breach, behind whose lives I would crouch in silence?

I could not decide on a plan of action; the office was to be a refuge for me, as I have said, a place where I might pierce the isolation that had so exacerbated my current nervous spell. Nonetheless, before Dr. Schussler’s next client could arrive, I left the building and made my way to Market Street, there to begin the long, rumbling ride on the N Judah streetcar out to its terminus at Ocean Beach.

The car rocked westward, and by degrees the fog closed in on us. At first, there were only small puffs of low-lying clouds blowing across the sky, which caused the sun to blink on and off disagreeably, glare one moment, sun-blindness the next. The intervals of darkness grew gradually longer, until the drifts finally coalesced into a bank of cloud; so that by the time I alighted at my stop by the Great Highway, with the ocean just beyond, the insatiable fog had completely swallowed up the sun. There was a stiff wind. My teeth were gritted with sand as I walked the three short blocks to the small house with peeling paint I had rented, sight unseen, during my hasty departure from the university. The idea of living by the sea had seemed recuperative. Never having visited San Francisco, I had had no idea that the Sunset District, through which I now walked, was a treeless neighborhood of cheerless houses, where the fog swirled relentlessly and the wind blew without cease. I arrived home and tried to calm myself by reprising my expansive moment at the office—the joyful certainty that I had come to San Francisco and Ocean Beach for a purpose—but all night long the wind rattled the windows, and I found no peace.

The next evening, a Thursday night, I tried to return to the office at a time when Dr. Schussler’s hours would certainly be over, eleven o’clock. But the moment I approached the building, I was on my guard. Bordering the office building was a great expanse of vacant lots, twelve square blocks of weeds and trash, the remains of a blighted neighborhood that had been demolished years earlier in a wave of so-called urban renewal. During the day, I had often come upon a bedroll or a tent or the remains of a cook fire. But now, by night, the site looked like the campground of a defeated army, as indeed it was. Desperate veterans of the Vietnam War had joined the ranks of the usual beggars and alcoholics—many veterans still wearing bits of their uniforms, a shirt, a jacket, insignia attached, all filthy now. Here they squatted in threes and fours by small fires, cooking their dinners among the ruined foundations of vanished buildings. Many eyed me, there being no one else about, and I hurried past. But at the entrance to the office, I found two drunken men sprawled in the doorway. As I reached across them to let myself into the building with my key, one of them abruptly turned over and grabbed the hem of my coat. I tried to pull away, but the man held his grip, growling at me, Hey, mister! Gimme your money! Gimme your money! Then he flopped on his side and passed out again, too drunk even to rob me. I stepped back, shaken. In an empty streetcar, I took the long ride home, resolving I would never again go to the office by night.

I next tried the weekend. The hubbub from the nearby shopping streets was reassuring, providing the general social context I had sought at the office. But the empty building was disquieting. The lobby stank of stale cigarette smoke, as it never had during the week, the sort of ghost-smoke that lingers in bars and badly aired hotel rooms, although the small bar-and-grill on the ground floor had been shuttered for a decade. The creaky elevators were often out of order, and I was afraid of becoming trapped between floors with no one there to hear me. As I worked, I kept hearing the ding of the elevators but never the tread of anyone getting on or off. Now and then, doors would slam up and down the corridors, yet I never saw anyone in the halls. I looked out to find only the empty, block-long hallways that, at their distant ends, disappeared into an odd, hazy, indoor twilight.

The next morning, Sunday, I rode up in the elevator with great apprehension. Rising floor by floor, I became more comically distressed. For I suddenly saw myself as a big, circus-decorated balloon that was designed to expand as it rose and then spectacularly explode. I knew this image was ridiculous, yet I simultaneously could not shake its efficacy. It was the same problem I had faced throughout all the long years of my therapies, when I had learned to be aware of my own thoughts and feelings, even to the extent of understanding why I was having those thoughts and feelings—their root causes, the curious emotional subterfuges through which certain emotional propensities install themselves in the psyche—yet, withal, finding myself powerless to change them. The dark emotions seemed to be part of my body, instinctual, issuing from the cells as surely as saliva or blood or urine, and with as little conscious opportunity to intervene in their production. By the time I reached the eighth floor, all I could do was step out into the corridor, look up and down the empty twilit halls, press the elevator button once again, and ride my way back down.

I spent Monday in the house, avoiding Dr. Schussler and her patients, and by Tuesday, while the wind and sand still knocked at the windows, the reasons that had prompted me to lease the office reannounced themselves with renewed urgency—indeed, I felt there was a grave risk in my staying home for another day. I had been in my nightclothes since Sunday afternoon; I hadn’t washed; I hadn’t shaved. On Tuesday night, in a nameless rage, I had smashed all the cheap glassware the owner of the house had left for me. I knew that Wednesday morning, whatever else I might do, I had to go back to the office.

As the N Judah carried me away from the beach, I awaited that moment when the fog would drift, thin, lift, and clear. Finally in sunlight, I thought of the cool white lobby that awaited me, the benign cherubs gazing down from elevator lintels, the man-high wainscoting standing marble-hard outside my office door. And above any other anticipation was my desire to hear the analysand’s voice once again; for she was, after all, the only person in all of San Francisco I could say with any truth that I knew.

So it was that at eleven o’clock on Wednesday morning, which last week had been the patient’s appointed hour, I sat very still in my office, sipping air in the smallest quantities respiration would allow, awaiting the next installment of her therapy. The sound machine gave off its torrent; the patient walked past my office; the door to Dr. Schussler’s office slammed shut. And then, after the sound machine ceased its roar, came the sudden, exciting silence.





5.


I’m tired today, the patient began. I don’t know why I’m here. I shouldn’t have come. I didn’t sleep well. My stomach hurts. I have a headache.

Are you ill? asked Dr. Schussler.

No. A hangover.

Silence.

I went to the bar last night. A Little More. I hate that place. I don’t know why I go there. I think I just want to look at the old-style girls, with their makeup and their breasts out to here. Next to the so-called politico lesbians, they’re so sexy. Not a flannel shirt in the crowd last night. God, I’m so tired of women who don’t look like women.

After a long pause, Dr. Schussler asked, Doesn’t Charlotte look like a woman?

The patient sighed. Have I been talking to a wall? She’s a politico. Short hair. Flannel shirts. Jeans. Sturdy shoes. Struggling.

But you said … Her legs …

Muscular. Dyke’s legs. In Doc Marten’s stomping boots. I told you, she loves it when I call her a dyke, but she squirms if I call her a woman. For godsakes, the whole idea for me was to be with a woman. Like Colette said, If I wanted to be with a man, I’d be with someone who could do a pee-pee against a wall.

The therapist said nothing.

What’s the point, the patient went on. What’s the point of talking about this anymore. We’ve talked about it ad nauseam. The entire lesbian community talks about it ad nauseam. Butch, femme. Sexy or sex object. I’m so tired of this. I don’t belong in this so-called community. I want a regular life. I don’t want to change the world, I just want to go to bed with a woman! But I’ve told you this, I’ve told you this.

Yes, said the doctor. You have told me. But sometimes we must go over and over things before their meaning is clear.

I told you. I told you. Over and over. Two years of coming here just to say the same things again and again. I don’t even know why I come to therapy. What a waste of time. A waste of money. I’m not getting anywhere. I should get out of here, not waste my time today. I should go.

After a pause, Dr. Schussler said: Naturally, I would like you to stay, if only to work through this mood, this anger and impatience that takes you over. But of course you can leave anytime you like. As we have discussed, this is all for your sake, not mine.

The patient blew out a breath. Sorry. I’m sorry. Like I said, I’m in a bad mood. I shouldn’t have come. I’m just going to bitch at you, so I should probably get out of here before I get abusive.

But why would you get abusive toward me?

Oh, don’t play that therapist game with me. You know very well what I mean. We’ve discussed it a million times, like everything else. I’m about to tell you to f*ck off, so I’d better go before I do.

The therapist gasped softly (this profanity evidently had crossed some prior limit). But immediately the doctor righted herself. She took a long breath, then said in an even tone: All right. Perhaps. If you think that is best. You can go. But before you do, let me ask you one thing. Do you think this anger, this feeling of getting nowhere, of not belonging, has anything to do with the last session, with my bringing up the subject of adoption?

The patient breathed in and out several times.

F*ck no! Why do therapists think everything is about therapy? I went to a bar and wanted to make love to a woman in high heels, all very wrong in the world I live in for some stupid reason. That’s what it’s about. But hey, you’re so hyped up on this adoption thing, I’m not sure you’re even hearing me.

Perhaps you are right, said Dr. Schussler.

Then I’m leaving, said the patient.

If you must, said Dr. Schussler.

I guess I have to pay for the session anyway.

(Ah, money, I thought. The patient’s revenge: reminding the therapist we’ve paid for her, like a whore.)

Yes, you must, the doctor said.





6.


What an exciting session! I could barely contain myself while the patient slammed the door behind her and the sound machine came on again. Beautiful legs in stomping boots! Women in high heels! Old- and new-style lesbians! As if sex had a fashion that waxed and waned with the design of shoes.

Throughout the long week that followed, I waited with almost unendurable anticipation for the patient’s return. For I wondered what new drama would ensue. I was certain I had come in on her therapy at just the right moment, one of those mysterious fulcrum points: a pure, Aristotelian shift in the plot wherein the therapeutic story of the patient’s life was about to turn. All my years of therapy told me this was true. Something had pressed up against her denials and evasions for two long years, and now—with all the inevitability of Oedipus killing his father—she must give way.

On the following Wednesday, therefore, I arose early and took special care to dress in comfortable, loose-fitting clothes (the better to sit absolutely still during any inadvertent titillation). I brought with me a small seat cushion (also for comfort during my immobility). It was barely nine in the morning when I boarded the N Judah; quarter of ten when I came within sight of our building’s eyeless gargoyles.

It was a dangerous time, hard upon the interclient interval. Dr. Schussler often left her office between patients, for a restroom visit, I assumed, or a coffee at a nearby cafe, and it was imperative that she not encounter me entering my office. My presence in the hallway, my body before the door so close to hers, would force upon her the very fact of my existence, my face and physique giving visual form to any sound she might hear. Yet she must not imagine a body in Room 807; she must believe the room holds nothing but air.

Accordingly I slowed my steps. Upon entering the lobby, I scanned the persons about, wondering if one woman or another was Dr. Schussler. Over the weeks, a certain picture of the doctor had grown in my mind—nearing sixty, a slight limp (which I heard as she walked by my door), gray hair, perhaps a bun—an image simultaneously particular in certain details but vague overall, the way a character in a novel, barely described, can yet occupy a distinct place in one’s mind. In short, I thought I should recognize her. Yet it was necessary that she not notice me in any particular way, even as a regular presence in the building. I had to be part of a crowd, an ordinary man in gray clothing: nothing. I was practiced at this; my nervous condition had given me a wealth of experience in the art of nonbeing.

I waited before the three elevators, watching the eyes of the cherubs circulate, an effect that had not entirely ceased to unnerve me. Eight other people waited. None among them was a woman who agreed with my image of the doctor; neither did she appear as one elevator and then another disgorged its passengers.

I therefore took the next car to the eighth floor and softly walked to my office. As I had practiced for the last weeks, I took extraordinary care with the keys and the lock and click of the door—always a tense moment. The mechanisms were old and not entirely reliable; I had learned to use a plastic card to control the release of the latch. Now having entered, I appointed my chair with the cushion, and then sat down to wait, listening all the while to the whir of the sound machine and the doctor’s shushuations.

The ten o’clock patient left. At the stroke of eleven—a nearby church bell bonged out the hour—the doctor’s sound machine promptly ceased. I stilled myself. Nothing but silence issued from Dr. Schussler’s office. A minute went by, then two, three, four: excruciating minutes for anyone expectant and immobile, as I was. The time moved on to five past, six past, seven past, eight. And now from the other side of the door came an odd, teasing, slippery sound. It vanished, then returned—a rubbing, slip-slip—then vanished again.

I was suddenly frightened. What if I had gotten everything wrong? What if the great, dramatic turning point in the patient’s therapy was not to be a grand story but an abrupt ending? With dawning dread, I remembered: the patient’s sense that years had gone by, that nothing had changed, that nothing would ever change—how often had such feelings led me to abandon whatever therapist, psychiatrist, counselor, analyst, social worker, doctor who had dared to presume I might be happy? The patient could leave Dr. Schussler. She could abandon me.

And now again came that rubbing, cicada-like slip-slip.

Then another sound, a scrape.

My nostrils were suddenly filled with the scent of phosphorus; now of smoke. A cigarette: Dr. Schussler was smoking!

I no longer smoked—my stale-tobacco smell had become too memorable—but my nose was yet lined with countless receptors for the bitter, brilliant, desperate, dangerous scent that now came sliding under our adjoining door. I knew at once, with utter certainty, that Dr. Dora Schussler was smoking not a Kent, nor a Marlboro, nor a simpering Kool or Newport, but that she inhaled nothing other than a Pall Mall or a Viceroy—Viceroy, I decided—so tuned was I still to the tender shadings of my former addiction. I could all but see the pack, the gold medallion pendant from a V-shaped pin. And along with this sudden visualization of her cigarettes, I could picture the doctor herself: leaning back in her chair, lifting her head, exhaling, tipping the ash into the ashtray, crossing and recrossing her legs. Of course. That was the slip-sound I had been hearing: the slide of nylon upon nylon.

I was immediately becalmed. It was as if a long, long snake had curled under the door and wound one end around the therapist and the other around me—so joined did I feel to the experience of Dr. Schussler’s cigarette: every breath she took, in and out, lung to lung. I inhaled her assurance. There was no need to worry. If not today, then next time: The patient would return.

And, soon enough, there came the ding of the elevator, the footsteps running down the hall, the therapist rising to open her door, the slam as the draft banged it shut.

Oh, hell, said the patient. I’m so sorry. A ridiculous argument at work. You know how I hate being late.





7.


Sit down, said the therapist.

It was the third derivative, said the patient.

But of course. Sit down.

The patient took her seat with a great puff of a cushion.

Carl kept questioning our historical curve analysis, the patient went on. Get rid of that function on the third derivative, he says. But Marsha refuses. It’s done; it works; leave it, she says. But then Peter insists, Let’s consider Carl’s input. But Paul agrees with Marsha, and says, No, we tested it; it’s working; our model is predictive. And so everyone is arguing in my carrel, and no one hears me when I’m saying, Stop, I’ve got to go. Then even more people pile in.

The patient rambled on in this vein: Peter, Marsha, Carl, Sasha, William, Paul, John, Larry. If Dr. Schussler knew these people, she simply let their names go by, as did I, since they meant nothing at all to me. The patient spoke, besides, of secular trends and intermediate trades, of waves and quadrants and regression curves, not to mention various incomprehensible three- and four-letter acronyms, which, I presumed, pertained to her company’s insider terms relating to stock-market technical analysis and econometrics (subjects about which, again, I knew nothing).

But no matter. The sound of her voice soothed me. The curling remains of Dr. Schussler’s cigarette still threaded the air, floating by like the patient’s incomprehensible words. I simply sat still and enjoyed the tone of her voice, which played above the words like the sustain of a majestic chord. And there was something else, a little tremolo, the deep, inner unease I had noticed on that first day. For even as she raved on, it seemed that the little watchful person who stood guard over her speech had remained at his post, at attention, carefully ushering her confused As and Rs into the proper halls of culture.

She continued on for some time about her problems at work: a project that was late, a manager who disliked her, a woman in another group—was she perhaps a lesbian? Charlotte then made an appearance: another argument, this time initiated by someone’s failure to fold the sheets (whether it was the patient or her girlfriend who had so shirked her duties I could not tell).

As I sat listening, I considered how odd it was to know such intimate details about a person’s life yet have no context in which to place them. The voice that emanated from Room 804, the characters described, the situations and events—it was as if I were tuned to a radio play, a disembodied story floating in the quickening of my imagination. And what an odd narrator this story had, how risky, from a critical point of view; how much more conventional if she were only a financial analyst, or only a lesbian, or only an adoptee, if she did not have this odd mélange of characteristics living uneasily inside her. As the minutes went by, I kept pondering this, and saw the great difficulty in the work of the therapist: making a whole from the evidence of the broken pieces we bring them, these disparate stories that hold dark meaning for us, these unhappiness samples.

The patient was quiet for some seconds. Then:

Pretty dull stuff? she said to her therapist.

Not at all (lied the doctor).

But I suppose you’d like me to talk about what happened last week.

Silence from the therapist.

About my running out, the patient went on.

Dr. Schussler still said nothing.

You know, said the patient, I wasn’t late because of last time.

The therapist gave a little laugh. No, she finally said. Of course not.

It wasn’t … Oh, all right. Maybe. Maybe it did. I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to get here.

A long pause ensued.

It’s that adoption business, the patient finally said. You’re driving me crazy over it. It’s not like I haven’t looked at it before. There were times when I tried to find out about my past. I mean indirectly, in my own way, as I had to.

When Dr. Schussler gave no response, the patient went on:

I looked into the process of adoption, when I was young, thirteen, still in boarding school. It’s a good story. I’m assuming you’d like me to tell it.

But of course, said Dr. Schussler.

I thought you would, said the patient.

Dr. Schussler did not reply.

I thought you’d be overjoyed, said the patient. I thought you’d be encouraging, pushing, probing.

The doctor laughed. What can I probe, since you have not yet said anything?

Yes, yes, all right. I’m sorry. I’m playing games, aren’t I?

Well, no, said the doctor after a pause. I do not think it is a game at all. I think you are doing exactly what you need to do. I think you sense, correctly, that this subject will be unsettling to explore. And that you will explore it how and when you are able.

The patient gave a little hum. And I could feel the waves of gratitude pouring forth from her. (If only my own therapists had been so giving! I thought.) Thank you, the patient said at last. Because I’ve been feeling you’ve been short with me, that you’ve been disapproving of me. As if you’re getting bored with me. As if I couldn’t be an interesting client if I didn’t explore my “mysterious origins.”

Dr. Schussler inhaled sharply, and for some time she said nothing. I heard her shift in her chair; there was a crinkling sound; and I knew it could only be the Viceroy pack she was seeking: a cigarette, to help stave off the next thing that must happen. For everything now depended upon her reply. If Dr. Schussler did not admit to her own failings and humanity—if she hid behind the therapist’s ridiculous game of asking, So why do you think you thought that I had disapproving thoughts about you?—this therapeutic relationship, like so many of my own, would die.

The pause went on: eight seconds, ten, twelve. A fire truck wailed below then dopplered off.

Yes, Dr. Schussler said at last. I may have been … perhaps I …

She fell back into the cushions of her chair.

You know, she said, in our profession … it is often hard to know when to press on and when to let go.

(Mirabile dictu!)

Now the patient drew a breath. Do you think … she began.

Yes? asked the analyst.

Do you think it’s time …

What?

That I dealt with—

Your adoption? I do, but—

Find my mother? Do that whole nasty thing where I blow up my family and hers, and make everyone unhappy?

No, no, no. Not that—

Then what?

I mean—

What else can you mean? Once you open this door, you know there’s no way in hell to close it.

I glanced at my wristwatch, and to my dismay saw that the patient’s hour was now gone. Then I remembered how often I had done the same: allowed myself to approach the brink only when I knew I could soon back away. There is some instinctive internal clock, some narrative curve, we analysands surely follow, so that we may have the fortitude to tell the story of ourselves another day.

We will have to explore this next time, the doctor gently said.





8.


I was filled with happiness—why deny it? The plot was turning, just as I had predicted. And it was now about to address the subject of my most ardent hopes: how the adoptee creates himself (or herself, in this case). I would learn how one separates from parents of all sorts, “real” or adoptive. And surely that path had to lead through the canyons of genetics. Even my dear friend Paul Beleiter had spent a year wondering over his blood relatives. How could one not? Such is the desire—irresistible, physical, cellular—to find one’s likeness; to know whence came this eye, this brow, this dimple in the chin, or, for that matter, this talent, this compulsion, this madness: whatever one feels is indelibly engraved within.

Yet it was also imperative that the patient, like Paul, investigate the birth parents as an idea—an exploration confined to thoughts, dreams, images in the mind. The slabs of flesh of her actual parents would debase her quest, I thought. If she found those whose genes she carried, she would be surrounded by yet more people owning the perquisites of parenthood—a whole coterie with the power to grant her joy, or snatch it away. Paul had never found his parents. Later he told me of his relief: What if they were only ordinary? he said. And I replied: What if they were monsters? He laughed and said: That would be better.

All now depended upon the skill of the analyst. The success of the patient’s endeavor, and my own, required that Dr. Schussler lead her patient through the ravines of inheritance without letting her stop there, so to speak. She must not stimulate in her client a thirst for her “true” mother, for that would transform those gloriously “mysterious origins” into a banal reality of blood. But I had no faith in the powers of the psychological professions, as I have said. Who was this Dora Schussler that she would presume to take on the role of psychic guide?

I feared for the patient. I rode the streetcar up and down Market Street; I went from my house to the office and back again; the weekend went by and then came Monday, Tuesday. And all through, the patient’s words hung in the darkening of my thoughts: Once you open this door, you know there’s no way in hell to close it.

Wednesday morning came; I trembled in my office; at last the patient arrived. The doctor wasted no time in returning to the subject of their prior meeting.

What we want to do, she said as they began, is probe your feelings about being adopted. We want to understand adoption’s effect upon who you are now, upon your relationships with your parents, your friends, your lovers, and, most of all, upon your inner concept of yourself.

The patient laughed.

I already know adoption’s effect on my feelings.

But really, said Dr. Schussler, we are just—

It hasn’t had any effect. There is some deep-down way that my parents—my adoptive parents—don’t affect me at all.

(Yes! I thought.)

That can’t be so, said the analyst.

Oh, really? What do you know about it?

The doctor exhaled, annoyed. Then she said: Of course it is my job to know just a little about these things.

But aren’t you supposed to listen?

Of course.

Then listen. There is some way that I am distant—unconnected—to my family. I will never be like them. Some core part of me is alien to them. I am … alone.

(Exactly! I thought. The apartness Paul had always spoken of, that sense of being a singularity in the world!)

Precisely, said the doctor. It is just this sense of being unconnected that we need to explore.

Please just listen! It’s the story I wanted to tell you last week before we ran out of time.

The analyst stirred in her chair. Yes, dear, she said in an odd voice.

What’s that about? said the patient.

What? said the therapist.

That “yes, dear” business—and don’t say, What do I think it’s about.

The doctor laughed. You have said many times that when your mother is resisting you, she says, Yes, dear.

Hell. I don’t want to talk about Mother. What I’m talking about is older. Original. Built in. Before Mother, before Father, before school. Before I even learned to think in words. As if it came out of my bones, my nerves, my skin. Original—she gave a laugh—like sin.

The analyst sat back amidst a great commotion of creaking leather. Please, she said. Go on.





9.


It was Christmastime, the patient began. I was thirteen, home from boarding school on winter break. I don’t think Mother even kissed me before she said, Don’t unpack. We’re going to New York. A holiday! she sang. But I had an assignment for school, due after the break, and there I was in New York, in a hotel, sharing a room with Lizabeth,

(Lizabeth?)

who chattered at me all the time when she was little.

(Ah, a sister, it seemed.)

It had to be a report of a visit to a hospital for some reason—yes, we were studying the medical professions—and now I had to find someplace in New York. There was a Yellow Pages in the closet of our hotel room, where I found a long list of hospitals, column after column. How would I choose? Presbyterian Such-and-Such, Jewish Center for This-and-That, Mary Mother of So-and-So—then suddenly one name jumped out at me.

She paused.

The Manhattan Hospital for Foundlings.

Foundlings! she went on. What an old-fashioned word. It made me think of newborns left on doorsteps. Of Baby Moses in the reeds. And wasn’t there this medieval practice where infants were put in some sort of lazy-Susan-type thing and spun anonymously into a convent?

Here the patient stopped, and I thought, Surely Dr. Schussler will participate now, despite the patient’s request that she merely listen. For what a grisly image the patient had conjured up: helpless infants in a trap of clanking iron, surrendered to the cold care of nuns.

The patient gave off a little laugh. Or at least that’s what I remembered from some medieval history class, she said. I mean the lazy Susans.

Again she waited.

(She’s asking for help, I thought. Help her, Dr. Schussler!)

So I called them, the patient went on. The Hospital for Foundlings. I was transferred around, and finally I had an appointment with someone—was her name Mrs. Waters? Yes, let’s say it was Mrs. Waters.

I didn’t tell my family where I was going—oh, well, yes; they knew I had an assignment and that I was going to a hospital. But I lied about the name. I told them it was something like “General Hospital.” They never paid much attention to me, so lying was easy.

I had to lie, you see. Adoption could not be mentioned in our family. Never—along with many other forbidden topics that came under the rubric of what Father called “interpersonal matters.” Of course everyone knew I was adopted. But it was not to be discussed, not to be mentioned. But Father could not control everyone, much as he would have liked to. There was always the occasional stupid person meeting us for the first time who would say, Now which one of you is the real one?

Oh, yeah, said the patient with a laugh. I always used to think, Lizabeth’s the real one and I’m the phantom. How do you do, ma’am. Shake hands with me and I’ll give you a good squeeze to show you how real I am.

(Lizabeth. The sister. A “natural” one. How horrid for the patient to be followed by a “wet” child!)

The patient laughed again.

Besides, she quickly went on, it was very easy to keep the fiction going. From the outside, we seemed such a well-matched family. Father with his sandy hair and blue eyes. Mother also blue-eyed and blond—and getting chemically blonder by the year. Lizabeth still towheaded, her hair so light her eyebrows disappeared. And there I am: blond, too. Well, “dirty blond,” Mother was sure to point out; perhaps we should fix that, she’d say. And then there were my hazel eyes. Don’t squint so, she’d always say. It makes your eyes go dark.

The patient stopped.

I … Never mind, she said.

So Mother gave me money for a taxi, the patient went on, to get to the hospital—the subway was out of the question, said Father; perverts were everywhere in New York. The hotel doorman helped me into a cab, and then I rode up a broad, bustling avenue. I have no idea which it was, only that life was exploding all around me. People, cars, trucks, buses, taxis, horns, shouts, lights; policemen blowing their whistles and waving their arms to hold back the crowds: a magnificent craziness. It was cold, snowing; the taxi window fogged. I couldn’t bear having it between me and the world. So I rolled it down and rode with my head stuck out in the air like a dog. The snow swirled around in the windy street, and all the people and cars seemed to swirl with it, me along with everyone and everything, and I had a moment—oh!—that I thought signaled the opening of my life at last; the sort of moment I thought would come again and again and again.

Ha, said the patient. She paused.

What? asked the doctor.

(What? The doctor had to ask “what”? Of course it was the adult understanding that such moments did not come again and again!)

Nothing.

(The doctor let it pass. Fool!)

Anyhow, said the patient, then went on:

Finally—too soon—we came to the foundling hospital. It was at the back of a gated courtyard; I had to circle and circle the building, tramping in the snow, before I found the door. I went to a reception desk, asked for Mrs. Waters, and was given a seat in a large waiting area. It was crowded with women and babies; noisy with the babies’ cries; steamy with the heated, melted snow from everyone’s boots and coats and hats. The minutes went by, and soon the pile of winter clothes in my lap began to thaw. I began to panic. I imagined my skirt with a large wet stain right in the front; my white blouse gone see-through, everyone able to see my bra, which I had just started wearing that year. My sweater sleeves would hang damp, my skirt would look like I’d just peed in it, my new stretchy bra would be on view for everyone to see—the little red rose in the middle like a bull’s-eye. I wished suddenly that I had never come here, had never lied to my parents, had never done anything relating to foundlings or babies or children or adoption. I prayed earnestly to be transported back in time, to the hotel room with Lizabeth, where we would be planning our outfits for an outing to a museum.

Suddenly, a tall woman loomed over me. I was staring into the crotch of a very fitted skirt in a nubby sort of fabric, the skirt clinging in an hourglass sort of way, so that I could see very clearly the woman’s hips and panty line, even the bumps of her garters. Now a hand came toward me. I’m Mrs. Waters, said the woman. Let’s see if we can’t help you with that project of yours.

She was wearing a skirt suit and the highest heels I had ever seen. Her hair was nearly black, cut to chin length. She wore deep red lipstick—she was beautiful in a frightening sort of way. I somehow found my own hand from under my pile of clothes, offered it to her in return, and stood up awkwardly, trying to hold on to my coat and scarf and hat, and at the same time keep everything in front of me, to hide the water stains.

I followed Mrs. Waters across a wide lobby. Along the way I checked myself and saw, to my enormous relief, that my skirt and blouse were only wrinkled and damp, not wet through. And now I could concentrate on the sight of Mrs. Waters’s high, high heels as they clicked their way across the white marble floor.

She led me into an elevator. It was very dark in there—black glass panels, black floor, pinpoint lights above—so that all I could see of Mrs. Waters’s face were her cheekbones, everything else disappearing into black sockets. It seemed that we rode up for a long time, silently, just a whistle of a ventilator coming from somewhere, finally arriving at a floor Mrs. Waters called “the wards.”

The elevator door opened to blinding light: bright, greenish fluorescent lights leading off in long trails across what seemed a mile-long ceiling. And noise. Hundreds of cries and wails and screams. Under the trail of the lights, I saw what looked like an endless line of cribs. It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at: ward after ward of babies, room after room, row after row. I had never seen so many babies in my life. And were all of them “foundlings”? I asked Mrs. Waters, Are all of these babies without parents? And she said yes. And then I asked, Where did they come from? From the courts, she said. From unwed mothers. From lawyers and social workers. From the police, who sometimes found infants in trash bins.

(Trash bins! Dr. Schussler: Where are you?)

Trash bins! said the patient. My God! Then before I could get over this, Mrs. Waters led me back into that night-dark elevator, where she turned a key in a lock on the elevator panel and then pressed a button for a floor. This lock, the darkness, brought back the anxiety I had been feeling while I had waited to meet her. And in the confinement of the elevator, during the long, quiet ride, with only that whistling ventilator—I suddenly felt that I was in extreme danger. I clutched my damp clothes and held my breath, the way I did as a kid passing a cemetery, as if just inhaling would let in whatever horrible thing was out there. All at once it came to me that I was making a terrible mistake. I was trespassing. I was doing something totally, completely, utterly forbidden: finding out where abandoned babies came from.

The elevator door abruptly opened, and now I had no choice but to follow Mrs. Waters, who clip-clopped ahead of me down a long, stark hallway, finally opening a door and waiting for me to enter. It was very dim in there, almost as dark as the elevator, and I could make out several people sitting before a panel full of knobs and buttons, some sort of controls, I thought.

This is where we test the children, said Mrs. Waters, gesturing as she said this toward what at first had seemed to be some sort of screen but that I now saw was a glass, a one-way mirror, and on the other side, being looked at by the people in the booth or control room, were several babies—I don’t mean babies, exactly; they were sitting up by themselves, so maybe they were six months old or so. I found all this very strange. Those babies, the people observing them, the darkness, the locks, the knobs and buttons—what were they for? And what exactly did they control? Although there was nothing at all sinister about what the babies were doing. They were sitting there playing, in a patty-cake sort of way, with blocks and stuffed animals and puzzles and colored shapes, all very normal. And it seemed they were mostly enjoying themselves, just a few tears now and then, but only in that quick way children have of crying when they’re thwarted for a minute.

Then Mrs. Waters explained the purpose of the booth: They were investigating the psychological health of the children. We need to understand them before we can offer them for adoption, she said. We place the children in both comfortable and less comfortable conditions. We want to see how they react, whether they’re sturdy or fearful children, or maybe truly disturbed, all of which has a bearing on what we would tell the prospective adoptive parents, or if we would consider them adoptable at all. For instance, we can make the room instantly dark, or we can introduce a very loud noise, and see what is called their “startle” response. Strange people can suddenly walk in; or already-reliable people can play with them, then suddenly leave. We’re stressing them psychologically, it’s true, but only briefly and under the most controlled conditions—and all in the interest of placing them in suitable, happy homes.

Mrs. Waters stood over me, so tall, so imposing. The investigators kept their backs to me and said nothing, only adjusted the controls before them. And I looked over at the babies, playing, trusting, all unsuspecting, about to be put through some terrible gauntlet before they could leave this strange hospital and find a home. Which one, I wondered, was the unlucky one: the one who might not be “adoptable at all”?

At that moment, several people entered the room on the other side of the glass, picked up the babies, and carried them away—I don’t know where they went. Then Mrs. Waters said, Why don’t you sit here quietly, and you can watch us put the next batch through their paces.

And so the next “batch” came in, three babies of about the same age as the previous group—girls, each one held by a woman. The women put the babies on a table and sat down beside them, and then they played with the babies, each woman with the baby she had carried in. This went on for some time. They played coochie-coo and patty-cake and hide-and-seek behind their hands. The women held up squeaky toys and rattles, balls and stuffed animals. They kissed and hugged the babies, who were laughing and squealing.

Then at some point—there must have been a signal I wasn’t aware of—each woman picked up her own version of the same appealing toy, a sort of head with feathers and shiny bits, which rattled and squeaked as the women played with it in front of the babies. All the babies reached out eagerly to touch the toy. But the women just kept holding it, shaking it, rattling it. Then the women reached down and picked up something from the floor, which turned out to be tall metal cylinders. After giving the babies one more chance to see and reach for the toy, each woman placed her toy in her respective cylinder. Then they stood up and left the room.

For a moment, all three babies just looked at the cylinders, which really were quite tall in comparison with their little bodies, almost the whole length of their arms. Then one, the little girl in the middle, reached right in and retrieved the toy. The baby on the left patted the outside of the cylinder, gave off some quick cries and tears, then began tentatively exploring it, gradually going deeper until, with a great cry of glee, she came up with the toy in her hand.

But the last baby … the last one could not bring herself to reach inside. She began wailing and screaming and hitting the top of the cylinder, so hard I thought she would make her hand bleed. The happiness of the other two babies just seemed to make her more miserable, because she watched them, saw their happiness, their delight, then screamed and hit her cylinder again and again. I thought I had never seen such misery in my life, such raw, terrible unhappiness, her whole body turning nearly inside out with cries.

I looked at the researchers. How could they put this child through such a trial? None of them spoke. They just watched and took notes, while this baby was tortured with desire for the toy they themselves had made her want.

Finally I turned to Mrs. Waters and asked, What does this show? What does this tell you? She nodded at one of the researchers at the control panel, who said, That this child is very fearful. That she’s afraid to explore, is easily overcome by stress, even when given a great deal of love and attention. It’s too bad. She’ll have a hard time in this world.

Here the patient stopped and sat there breathing haltingly, as if she would cry—but no. At once she regained control of herself, and said:

So I knew I was looking at the unlucky one.

She paused.

Born unhappy. Built in. Original, like sin. In her bones and blood and skin. And nothing would ever change that verdict: She was going to have a hard time in this world. I looked at that little baby—she was still screaming; why didn’t somebody soothe her now, for God’s sake?—and I wondered: What would I have done? How deep and dark and terrible that cylinder must have seemed. Would I have been able to do it: reach in and find the shiny little happiness at the bottom?