We all stood, we shook hands, and then we sat back down. Roberta looked at me and smiled her big cracked-open smile. “Sarah told me you’d be coming,” she said approvingly. “No Edward?” she asked, looking around, knitting her brow.
“Next time,” said Sarah. Still, she had a bit of happy hope in her face. Roberta Marshall opened a manila envelope. “So here’s our little girl,” she said, pulling out some Polaroids. “Just barely still a baby,” she added. “She’s been sitting in the foster care of Catholic Social Services awaiting an African-American couple.” This was the same story I’d just heard. “They did find one, but then the couple changed their minds: said they had prayed to their God and their God had advised against it. So they turned the baby down. And then the birth mother, who is white, finally left Catholic Social Services and came to us.”
“Well, then, just as well,” said Sarah with her happy confidence still working her gaze, which cast itself eagerly toward the snapshots that Roberta was holding.
“I don’t know who ‘their God’ was that it was so different from the rest of ours,” said Roberta, rolling her eyes; you could see she had no truck with ditherers. “Once I did an international, and the couple spent two weeks in a Santiago hotel and flew back childless because they said they ‘couldn’t bond with the baby.’ So, just as well; yes, just as well.” She was still hanging on to the photos for some reason. “The birth father is African-American, or at least part African-American, though he seems to have skipped town. We have put in the ads we’re supposed to before we sever his rights.”
“What ads?”
“The ones telling him to show up or else. But this happens a lot. Even if we find these guys, we usually can meet with them at McDonald’s, buy them a burger, and let them know that giving up their rights is the best thing. Even if they’re in prison we go and talk to them, though that’s a little harder. A guy in prison won’t give up anything. He’s given up a lot already.” She paused, as if she thought that might sound brutal. “No one is coerced. They are convinced in completely compassionate and reasonable ways. Everything is legal. These are usually young guys who’ve come up from Milwaukee or Chicago for a job in the canning plant and one Friday night just had a couple beers, if you know what I mean.” Then she added, “The birth mother is white — did I say that already? She didn’t know the father for very long; Victor — we’re on a first-name-only basis here all around. But the birth mother is not romantic about motherhood: she would like to pull her life together and go back to school. She doesn’t have much.” She thrust the photos toward me. Uncertainly, I went to take them but she quickly pulled them back. “I’m sorry,” she said, touching her head as if she had a headache. “You,” she said to Sarah. “I meant to give them to you. Sorry.”
Sarah took it in stride. She didn’t want to upset the applecart in any way. She gently took the photos as if they contained the baby herself. “Oh, look at her,” she said with pleasure. “She’s beautiful.”
“She’ll darken up, of course,” Roberta Marshall said quickly.
“Of course. It’s not as if that’s a problem!” Sarah arranged a look of benign indignation.
“Well, I didn’t mean to suggest it was a problem. I just think people should understand. I have a biracial son myself. And he has been raised with a sense of total racial blindness. It’s a beautiful thing. He knows his adoption story by heart, how mommy’s tummy didn’t work, and he has completely embraced it.” The adoption business seemed to be full of women’s “broken tummies.” “When he was ten years old he was watching Gregory Hines dance on TV, and he said, ‘Look, Mom, that dancing man is adopted.’ It was the cutest thing.”
It didn’t sound that cute. It sounded odd. It sounded like it had the sharp edge of a weird lie poking into it. Perhaps, as we said in Dellacrosse, the former home and hope of extraterrestrial visitation, she had her head up her hinder. I glanced over at Sarah, who was remaining tight-lipped and nodding. I always had the sense with her that she didn’t suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how. Although later I would hear her say, repeatedly, “Racial blindness — now there’s a very white idea,” right then she merely asked, “When were these pictures taken?”
Roberta craned to look at them again. “They were taken by the birth mother the day before yesterday, I think.”
“She’s healthy? The baby?”
“Healthy. A little allergy to her formula, initially, but that all got worked out. She’s eating regular food now, I do believe. We’ll have to see what the foster family says. I have to warn you about the foster care from Catholic Social Services: it’s not the Pfister Hotel.”
“And what else do we know about the birth parents?”
“Well, the birth mother you’ll meet today — everyone on a first-name basis only. She needs to interview you and see if you are the right parents — right mother — in her mind. The birth father, well, we don’t know much. And there are privacy issues. She didn’t know him well. It was, I think, only a fling, of sorts. Possibly it was a — no, I take it back. I don’t think it was a date rape.”
A dry quiet descended on the room like snow.
Finally someone stirred stiffly, as if shucking off ice. Sarah. “Can we meet the baby?” she asked.
Roberta grinned. “You’ve come all this way. Of course! But first you need to meet Bonnie. The birth mother.” And here she lowered her voice. “She’s just going to ask you a few questions. Her concern is religion. The baby’s already baptized, but Bonnie wants a promise that she’ll be confirmed.” And here Roberta lowered her head and her esses made a hiss: “Unenforceable, of course.” She then resumed a normal tone and what seemed to me an attorneylike posture. Broom up the back. “You wouldn’t have any problem with that, would you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Sarah. “I have attended the Unitarian Church and often there they have ceremonies that—”
Roberta did not like the word Unitarian. She interrupted with an ominous richness of voice. “This is a birth mother who spends her Saturday nights ice-skating with nuns. You wouldn’t have any problem with having the child confirmed and taking First Communion in a Catholic church.”
“Uh, no, I wouldn’t,” said Sarah, on cue.
“Good.” Roberta stood. “Now let’s meet Bonnie.” She opened the door to her office and signaled to someone inside. “We’re ready for you,” she said quietly, and then opened the door wide.
Bonnie was not bonnie. She was dressed formally, in a beige knit suit, pantyhose, and brown flat shoes, to make her look professional, I supposed, which she wasn’t but wanted someday to be. She was heavy, perhaps still from the pregnancy. Her hair was thick and pale, the color of a wax bean, with roots of darker door-knocker blond. She was older than I was. Maybe she was even thirty. She wore glasses, and behind them I could see her eyebrows were shaved into a thin line — the stubble showing both above and below. The thin line was lengthened at the end with an eyebrow pencil, which looked about as natural as if she had just taped the pencils themselves over her eyes. I had always been told never to pluck above the brow, only below but never above, and never, ever shave them, and seeing her standing there, in the muck of her mistake, I finally knew why people had said all that stuff about plucking. I stood to greet her. She looked puffy and medicated. I wondered how it would be for her going back to school, inconveniently carrying around this ironic name — like the birth father, Victor. I wondered if she thought it mocked her. When everything else in her life probably was a source of sorrow, on the other hand, why would she care about the rhetorical mockery of her name?