This was Tucson.
We had not been told much about her natural family but we had been told one thing: her mother was from Tucson. Her mother was from Tucson and I knew her mother’s name.
I never considered not doing what I did next.
I got up from dinner and found a pay phone with a Tucson telephone book.
I looked up the name.
I showed the name to John.
Without discussion we went back to the crowded table in the dining room and told the producer of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean that we needed to speak to him. He followed us into the lobby. There in a corner of the lobby of the Hilton Inn we talked to him for three or four minutes. It was imperative, we said, that no one should know we were in Tucson. It was especially imperative, we said, that no one should know Quintana was in Tucson. I did not want to pick up the Tucson paper, I said, and see any cute items about children on the Judge Roy Bean location. I asked him to alert the unit publicity people. I stressed that under no condition should Quintana’s name appear in connection with the picture.
There was no reason to think that it would but I had to be sure.
I had to cover that base.
I had to make that effort.
I believed as I did so that I was protecting both Quintana and her mother.
I tell you this now by way of suggesting the muddled impulses that can go hand in hand with adoption.
A few months after the arrival of the FedEx Saturday delivery, Quintana and her sister met, first in New York and then in Dallas. In New York Quintana showed her visiting sister Chinatown. She took her shopping at Pearl River. She brought her to dinner with John and me at Da Silvano. She invited her friends and cousins to her apartment for drinks so that they and her sister could all meet. The two sisters looked like twins. When Griffin walked into Quintana’s apartment and saw the sister he inadvertently greeted her as “Q.” Margaritas were mixed. Guacamole was made. There was about this initial weekend meeting a spirit of willed excitement, determined camaraderie, resolute discovery.
It would be a month or so later, in Dallas, before the will and the determination and the resolution all failed her.
When she called after twenty-four hours in Dallas she had seemed distraught, on the edge of tears.
In Dallas she had been introduced for the first time not only to her mother but to many other members of what she was now calling her “biological family,” strangers who welcomed her as their long-missing child.
In Dallas these strangers had shown her snapshots, remarked on her resemblance to one or another cousin or aunt or grandparent, seemingly taken for granted that she had chosen by her presence to be one of them.
On her return to New York she had begun getting regular calls from her mother, whose initial resistance to the idea of a reunion (in the first place it wasn’t a reunion, her mother had punctiliously pointed out, since they had never met in the first place) seemed to have given way to a need to discuss the events that had led to the adoption. These calls came in the morning, typically at a time when Quintana was just about to leave for work. She did not want to cut her mother short but neither did she want to be late for work, particularly because Elle Décor, the magazine for which she was at that time the photography editor, was undergoing a staff realignment and she felt her job to be in jeopardy. She discussed this conflict with a psychiatrist. After the discussion with the psychiatrist she wrote to her mother and sister saying that “being found” (“I was found” had evolved into her arrestingly equivocal way of referring to what had happened) was proving “too much to handle,” “too much and too soon,” that she needed to “step back,” “catch up for a while” with what she still considered her real life.
In reply she received a letter from her mother saying that she did not want to be a burden and so had disconnected her telephone.
This was the point at which it seemed clear that not one of us would escape those muddled impulses.
Not Quintana’s mother, not Quintana’s sister, certainly not me.
Not even Quintana.
Quintana who referred to the shattering of her known world as “being found.”
Quintana who had called Nicholas and Alexandra “Nicky and Sunny” and seen their story as “a big hit.”
Quintana who had imagined The Broken Man in such convincing detail.
Quintana who told me that after she became five she never ever dreamed about The Broken Man.
A few weeks after her mother disconnected her telephone another message arrived, although not from her mother and not from her sister.
She received a letter from her natural father in Florida.
Over the time that passed between the time she knew herself to have been adopted and the time she was “found,” a period of some thirty years, she had many times mentioned her other mother. “My other mommy,” and later “my other mother,” had been from the time she first spoke the way she referred to her. She had wondered who and where this other mother was. She had wondered what she looked like. She had considered and ultimately rejected the possibility of finding out. John had once asked her, when she was small, what she would do if she met her “other mommy.” “I’d put one arm around Mom,” she had said, “and one arm around my other mommy, and I’d say ‘Hello, Mommies.’ ”
She had never, not once, mentioned her other father.
I have no idea why but the picture in her mind seemed not to include a father.
“What a long strange journey this has been,” the letter from Florida read.
She burst into tears as she read it to me.
“On top of everything else,” she said through the tears, “my father has to be a Deadhead.”
Three years later the final message arrived, this one from her sister.
Her sister wanted her to know that their brother had died. The cause of death was unclear. His heart was mentioned.
Quintana had never met him.
I am not sure of the dates but I think he would have been born the year she was five.
After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.
This call to say that he had died may have been the last time the sisters spoke.
When Quintana herself died, her sister sent flowers.
24
I find myself leafing today for the first time through a journal she kept in the spring of 1984, a daily assignment for an English class during her senior year at the Westlake School for Girls. “I had an exciting revelation while studying a poem by John Keats,” this volume of the journal begins, on a page dated March 7, 1984, the one-hundred-and-seventeenth entry since she had begun keeping the journal in September of 1983. “In the poem, ‘Endymion,’ there is a line that seems to tell my present fear of life: Pass into nothingness.”
This March 7, 1984, entry continues, moves into a discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger and their respective understandings of the abyss, but I am no longer following the argument: automatically, without thinking, appallingly, as if she were still at the Westlake School and had asked me to take a look at her paper, I am editing it.
For example:
Delete commas setting off title “Endymion.”
“Tell,” as in “a line that seems to tell my present fear of life,” is of course wrong.
“Describe” would be better.