a clear, clean life filled with martinis, like Mother’s. I would wear high heels and skirts; I’d learn to wear makeup, learn how to chitchat at cocktail parties; I’d get married to some unassuming man—be normal, regular, like everyone else, which all at once seemed what I’d always wanted: to be normal and regular, not odd, not adopted, not an unhappy genetic alien set down among cheerful people. For a moment I even wondered if my being gay was just another admission of defeat.
Defeat at what? asked the therapist.
At being normal.
Do not do this to yourself, said the doctor. Now you are punishing yourself.
Yes, said the patient after a long pause.
As her client remained silent, Dr. Schussler said: So you made the martini and carried it to your mother.
Yes, said the patient. I did it as if in a dream. Some other person was carrying that tray, not spilling a drop of the drink, getting kissed for it. Someone else clicked off the TV. And that person said:
All right, Mother. What else was in that file?
Wait, sweetheart. That first sip. Ah! Perfect, as always. All right. Now. What else was in that file.
Mother put down her glass and looked out the window, where our neighbor’s light was now shining through the leaves.
How many times have I asked Jim Bracket to put a shade on that horrid porch light! she said. It’s brighter than a bloody streetlight. There must be some regulation about how bright a residential light can be!
Mother, please.
Her mother sighed. Yes, I know. I know I’m stalling. But you see how hard it is for me to go on with this. I promise I won’t get drunk. I’ll drink this slowly. But let me say to you now: Don’t you think you know enough already? You came from Germany. Your mother’s name was Maria. Somehow she lost you—it was wartime; perhaps she died. Isn’t that quite enough to know?
Was it? Was it quite enough to know? For one last time, the patient told her therapist, she felt the pull of secrecy, the thrill she had felt during all those years of having mysterious origins: the vague, wonderful stories she had recited in the back of her mind. Mothers and fathers had paraded by—nobles, movie stars, singers, artists, intellectuals—as her tastes in parents had changed over the years. Sometimes they were named Wilhelmina and Reginald, sometimes Fighting Bear and Little Feather. At twelve, she had imagined herself the secret illegitimate child of Jo Stafford; at fifteen, the unknown daughter of Virginia Woolf. Then, at sixteen, the happy images had suddenly faded, and the idea of her parents had become a hazy story of a woman who had an affair with a married man, got pregnant, and had to give up the baby for adoption when the scoundrel wouldn’t leave his wife and marry her.
Now all those old parents were suddenly banished.
Now there was Frau G.
Wasn’t that quite enough to know?
If she stopped here, and learned no more, she thought, there would still be stories she could tell herself, plausible stories about Frau G. Perhaps she was a very rich woman, a cultured woman, who lived in a grand apartment in Berlin. Yes, of course. She was a liberal-minded woman, not a Nazi, and the intelligentsia of Berlin had flocked to her drawing room, where each Tuesday evening she held a salon. Her husband was on leave when she was conceived; and then, tragically, he died at the front. The war ended, and Frau G. now found herself without her fortune, all the banks of Berlin having been looted, all the records lost, the mark worth not a pfennig. Sitting in the ruined drawing room where she had held forth over so many happy gatherings, her belly grown large and heavy, the lovely Frau came to the reluctant and awful decision to give her baby away, to give her to someone who could give the child what she had had before the war: a happy, prosperous home.
But I was too old for all that now, said the patient to her doctor with a laugh. The ridiculousness of the story was too apparent. I knew I couldn’t make up any more special parents.
So I said:
You can’t stop now, Mother. What else was in the “secret” file?
Yes, sighed her mother. I know. I can’t stop now. I knew this day would come sometime. And, oh, hell—she laughed—here it is.
She took a small sip of her drink. All right, now, dear. Collect yourself.