her parents; her girlfriend Charlotte was gone (along with all her Holly Near posters, said the patient); she worked ten hours a day, went home, slept a little, and repeated the schedule. Weekends for a while were filled with compulsively scheduled dinners and movies; then, as the patient wearied of her plan-making, she had little but an empty apartment and lonely hours.
I maintained only one hope for the patient: that she would abandon the idea of finding her “birth mother.” How I wished she could see herself as made from whole cloth—as the self-created creature I’d hoped to follow into my own release from ancestry. This she might have achieved if that damned Dora Schussler were better at her job. But the therapist did not have the skills to bring the patient across to the other shore. Her patient was therefore caught in a downstream current, flowing relentlessly toward one goal—finding her “true” mother—and its corollary: the possibility of being loved by her. I believed this goal to be a disastrous one, as I have said; I thought it would merely bring the patient under the tyranny of another set of parental needs and desires—tie her through the horrible, placental prerogatives of blood.
The sessions wore themselves away. February rains battered us; March was moody, humid for San Francisco, seeping into our seams until life itself seemed bloated and gray.
Then a literal hood was drawn over us. The OPEC oil crisis had panicked the nation. Ostensibly to save fuel, President Ford had ordered that daylight savings time should begin two months early. And so we moved our clocks ahead while still in winter light. All of us on the N Judah at 7:30 in the morning found ourselves in the lingering dark, our bodies and senses telling us everything was wrong, the light was wrong, the very earth itself was out of kilter, the axis not yet tilting toward spring. We might try to convince ourselves that life was getting better—last year, under the now banished President Nixon, we were forced into daylight savings in January. But the wrongness of the sky prevailed over everyone’s mood. To live under this pall of darkness made us all feel impoverished: beggars shivering in the black morning, paupers in the cold dark.
Meanwhile I listened to the patient’s sessions in a growing state of terror—yes, terror overtook me. She was alone, vulnerable, unloved. She had licked clean the happiness of her one night with Dorotea (so to speak). And her path to her “birth mother” seemed hopelessly closed.
So of course they came, the crows, fluttering at our windows in the last of the rains; banging at the glass with the forces of the wind; rattling our tender doors—depression’s ministers, sucking away the ancient cool core of the building. This time, however, they came not for me but for my dear patient.
She must abandon this fruitless search for her mother! I thought. There was no other way to drive out the creatures! But she did not, could not. She went on contacting this agency and that, to no avail. The pecked-out days went on, week after week. The Furies kept chattering through the voices of our trembling doors, through the rattling of our windows.
And finally I could bear no longer the patient’s suffering. I could not stand this death-in-life. She was to be my icon, my champion. And the more mired she became in the muck into which Dr. Schussler had shucked her, the more determined I became to save her. She would not abandon her search; the doctor could not guide her. Now only I could help.
I could not let the monsters get her! I would not let them in! I was a professor; I had research skills. I reasoned that I could learn much more than could my dear patient, even given the sparse nature of our clues.
Therefore my project was launched. There was no choice, I thought; I could not just sit and listen. I had to abet the search for the birth mother.
My new hope was to find her dead.
TWO
49.
I began my search at the San Francisco Public Library, which was not as useful as I had hoped. Their literature of the postwar period was entirely focused upon the Marshall Plan: heroic tales of America saving Europe from chaos, financial backing, food aid, and so forth.
There was but a single volume about European displaced persons. It was not a scholarly work but a personal account by a Polish Jewish woman, one Anna