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.