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