First, they called it the State Agricultural College and Model Farm. Then: Iowa State Agricultural College. Then: Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. That same year Khruschev visiting Iowa State, the college was renamed Iowa State University of Science and Technology. This is the name it retains today, although most people simply call it Iowa State University.
When did the shift in emphasis happen? Agriculture and Mechanic Arts to Science and Technology? Or are these the same things, under different guises?
The college — university now — still has a focus on Agriculture, but I suppose that’s inevitable if you live in Iowa, which I don’t.
Driving through with Blanche, I can hardly believe I ever lived here. This place, this whole damned state, feels like a movie: the kind of movie that makes you angry that you spent the time watching it. The kind of movie that you wish you could demand a time refund from. That’s how I feel about this whole state. And poor Blanche is sitting in the backseat, like we’re still out West, like we could belong here.
Although Blanche (the woman who raised me whom I sometimes call Mother, not my daughter) made it clear to me from a young age that I was adopted, she never told me my story before she picked me from orphanage. It’s possible that she wasn’t told, but now that this story is out, now that the detective told me I was one of those babies — a premium baby at any orphanage, really — it doesn’t make sense that Blanche wouldn’t have known.
Blanche is a quiet woman. She always has been, even when I was a baby. Well, really, I must’ve been toddler age by the time I got to her. My timeline has a bunch of holes in it, but at least it’s a skeleton of something or other. It’s enough to get me started, is all I’m saying. I was brought to the Richards House in 1959.
Back then, back when I lived there, it was called the Richards House. Before that, it called Duplex-C. Now, it’s called the Andrews-Richards House. It’s more massive than I’d imagined, not that I was given much time to give it thought, but it’s not what I thought it’d be like.
Now, it holds offices for professors. When Blanche tells me about the adoption, she explains that I was something of a prize. She tells me I was the baby everyone wanted most, but she was the one who got me. I was a source of pride — her winning me like I was a lottery jackpot — that she had no further need to adopt more babies or have any babies for herself.
Blanche tells me adoption becomes an addiction for her friends: they get one baby and before she knows it, they’ve got another, then another. And then, they have babies of their own.
Blanche tells me all this to differentiate our home from all these other women’s homes.
But I’ve never met these other women.
Not that I doubt Blanche or her ardent declarations.
Faulty though it can be, lottery aptly describes my adoption process.
Blanche may have explained how special I was when she adopted me, but she failed to mention why.
It’s possible she didn’t know.
It’s possible Blanche simply wanted me because other women wanted me and for no other reason than that.
We all want to be special.
The fields in Iowa are laid out like a newspaper in columns and blocks. The crops align like copy. Even the farm ponds are squared off. A picture of the blue sky — clouds at right angles — reflects on the still water, engraved with ripples like an old lead plate.
Together, Blanche and I drive down the white, dusty gutters, along the indentation of the folds. Folks here in Iowa must feel claustrophobic.
Truth is: I don’t know what we’re doing here. I don’t know what this will accomplish. When the detective first called me, I knew I had to see the Richards House but short of that, nothing. I have no plan.
Yesterday, as Blanche and I drove into Ames, she slept, her blanket securely against her face. I had to wake her, just to verify the gravity of our arrival, but she fell back asleep, the infinitely stretching walls of corn too mesmerizing to capture her attention.
When we toured the university, there was no mention of the Adams-Richards House, not until I specifically asked about it, and even then, my blockhead guide just dropped us off there without any historical note.
It was anti-climactic, our wandering through the halls of a building that could’ve been any other building on any college campus. To think I lived there for a year, that eight women cared for me like I was truly their baby for a year, and the blockhead guide didn’t care.
In fact, even Blanche didn’t care enough to wake up for it.
I came here to find some hint of my mother, my real mother. Blanche has been a wonderful and more than perfectly adequate mother, but there’s something about blood.
I have to be honest: I was hoping there would be portraits — photographs — of me around the house. Perhaps it’s the egoist in me that desires others to deem me important enough to not only immortalize my existence but also want to display that very existence for others.
Or to be kinder to myself, I’d like to think that I wanted to see photographs hung, framed, mounted, so that I can be sure I was the baby here: proof.
There were photographs lined along one wall. Like everything in Iowa, they made straight perfect rows and columns. They were in chronological order, but they only showed the women who lived in the house.
1959: There are eight women, each with very stylish haircuts, ironed dresses, their hands properly folded. They look like waxed figurines. They are too perfect to be human. Like Blanche, they too are some form of mother to me.
I’m told that in a file box somewhere in some place, there’s a treasury of all the Polaroids and photographs taken during the year. I’m told if I was indeed a baby here, there would probably be pictures of me.
The boxes were lost in the shuffle though.
Some administrative assistant apologized profusely.
She could not even verify if I was a baby there.
When the practice babies were brought to the Richards House, they were given code names. Or rather: because these were mostly orphaned or poorly maintained babies, the students had the option of giving them new names.
After the allotted time at the Richards House, the practice babies were returned to the county to be delivered to either Child Protective Services or the orphanage. At which time these babies — no longer “practice” babies but not “real” babies — could be renamed. Records were often shoddy and the baby could be given several different names over the span of two years: the name their real mother gave at birth, the name the State gives (which could vary from birth name because many babies are abandoned at different points around the county), the name the students endow, the name the State gives (which could vary from the name they originally gave or that the students gave), and finally, the name the adoptive parents gives.
Unless, of course, the baby is unlucky and must enter the foster system. Although foster parents are encouraged to use the name the county gives a baby — for continuity’s sake — what happens within the boundaries of the home can never be known with any degree of certainty.
In fact, I once knew a foster father — a single father at that — who renamed all of his foster children Sally. He had over thirty foster children over the course of his lifetime, many of which were boys. Before I left the Adams-Richards House, I asked the administrative assistant for any information she could release about the students who lived in the house in 1959. She was kind enough to photocopy the file she had on hand.