Total Recall

So I felt horribly trapped: I wouldn’t abort the pregnancy, but I could not keep the baby. I would not raise one more hostage to fortune that could be snatched from me at a moment’s notice.

I couldn’t tell Carl. Carl-if he’d said, let’s get married, let’s raise the child, he would never have understood why I wouldn’t. It wasn’t because of my career, which would have been destroyed if I’d had a baby. Now-now girls do it all the time. It isn’t easy, to be a medical student and a mother, but no one says, That’s it, your career is over. Believe me, in 1949, a baby meant your medical training was finished forever.

If I’d told Carl, told him I couldn’t keep the child, he would have always blamed me for putting my career first. He would never have understood my real reasons. I couldn’t tell him-anything. No more families for me. I know it was cruel of me to leave without a word, but I couldn’t tell him the truth, and I couldn’t lie. So I left without speaking.

Later I turned myself into the saver of women with difficult pregnancies. I think I imagine every time I leave the operating room that I have saved not myself but some small piece of my mother, who didn’t live long after the birth of that last little sister.

So my life went on. I wasn’t unhappy. I didn’t dwell on this past. I lived in the present, in the future. I had my work, which rewarded me richly. I loved music. Max and I-I never thought to be a lover again, but to my surprise and my happiness, as well, that happened between us. I had other friends, and-you, Victoria. You became a beloved friend before I noticed it happening. I let you draw close to me, I let you be another hostage to fortune-and over and over you cause me agony by your reckless disregard for your own life.

She muttered something, some kind of apology. I still wouldn’t look at her.

And then this strange creature appeared in Chicago. This disturbed, ungainly man, claiming to be a Radbuka, when I knew not one of them survived. Except for my own son. When you first told me about this man, Paul, my heart stopped: I thought perhaps it was my child, raised as he claimed by an Einsatzgruppenführer. Then I saw him at Max’s and realized he was too old to be my child.

But then I had a worse fear: the idea that my son might somehow have grown up with a desire to torment me. I think-I wasn’t thinking, I don’t know what I thought, but I imagined my son somehow rising up to conspire with this Paul whoever he is to torture me. So I flew to Claire to demand that she send me to my child.

When Claire came to my rescue that summer, she said she would place my child privately. But she didn’t tell me she gave him to Ted Marmaduke. To her sister and her brother-in-law who wanted children they couldn’t have. Want, have, want, have. It’s the story of people like them. Whatever they want, that they must get. And they got my child.

Claire cut me out of her life so that I should never see my son being raised by her sister and her husband. She pretended it was disapproval of my thinking so little of my medical training that I would get pregnant, but it was really so I would never see my child.

It was so strange to me, seeing her last week. She-she was always my model-of how you behave, of doing things the right way, whether at tea or in surgery. She couldn’t bear for me to see she was less than that. All those years of her coldness, her estrangement, were only due to that English sin, embarrassment. Oh, we laughed and cried together last week, the way old women can, but you don’t overcome a gap of fifty years with one day’s tears and embraces.

Wallace, Ted and Vanessa called my baby. Wallace Marmaduke, for Ted’s brother who died at El Alamein. They never told him he was adopted. They certainly never told him he had Jewish ancestry-instead, he grew up hearing all the lazy contempt I used to hear when I crouched on the far side of Mrs. Tallmadge’s garden wall.

Claire showed me a photograph album she’d kept of his life: she’d had some notion she’d leave it for me if she died before me. My son was a small dark child, like me, but then, so had Claire and Vanessa’s father been a small dark man. Perhaps Vanessa would have told him the truth, but she died when he was seventeen. Claire sent me a note at the time, a note so strange I should have realized she was trying to tell me something that she couldn’t put into words. But I was too proud to look behind the surface back then.

Imagine Wallace’s shock when Ted died last fall: he went through Ted’s papers and found his own birth certificate. Mother, Sofie Radbuka instead of Vanessa Tallmadge Marmaduke. Father, unknown, when it should have been Edward Marmaduke.

What a shock, what a family uproar. He, Wallace Marmaduke, was a Jew? He was a churchwarden, a regular canvasser for the Tories, how could he be a Jew, how could his parents have done this to him? He went to Claire, convinced there was some mistake, but she decided she couldn’t extend the lie that far. No mistake, she told him.

He was going to burn the birth certificate, he was going to destroy the idea of his birth identity forever, except that his daughter-you met his daughter, Pamela? She’s nineteen. It seemed to her romantic, the unknown birth mother, the dark secret. She took her father’s birth certificate away with her, she posted that notice on the Internet, that Questing Scorpio you found. When she heard I had shown up, she came at once to my hotel, bold like all those Tallmadges, with the self-assurance of knowing your place in the universe is secure, can never be taken from you.

“She’s very beautiful,” Victoria ventured. “Dr. Tallmadge brought her to my hotel so I could meet her. She wants to see you again; she wants to learn to know you.”

She looks like Sofie, I whispered. Like Sofie at seventeen when she was pregnant with me. Only I lost her picture. I wanted her with me. But I lost her.

I wouldn’t look at Victoria, at that concern, that pity, I would not let her or anyone see me so helpless. I bit my lip so hard it bled salt into my mouth. When she touched my hand I dashed her own away. But when I looked down, my mother’s photograph lay on the ground next to me.

“You left it on your desk among the Royal Free newsletters,” she said. “I thought you might want it. Anyway, no one is truly lost when you carry them with you. Your mother, your Oma, your Bobe, don’t you think that whatever became of them, you were their joy? You had been saved. They knew that, they could carry that comfort with them.”

I was digging my fingers into the ground, clutching at the roots of the dead weeds I was sitting on. She was always leaving me. My mother would come back and leave, come back and leave, and then she left me for good. I know that I’m the one who left, they sent me away, they saved me, but it felt to me as though once again she had left, and this time she never came back.

And then-I did the same thing. If someone loved me, as Carl once did, I left. I left my son. Even now, I left Max, I left you, I left Chicago. Everyone around me should experience the same abandonment I did. I don’t mind that my son can’t endure the sight of me, leaving him the way I did. I don’t mind Carl’s bitterness, I earned it, I sought it. What he will say now, when I tell him the truth, that he did have a son all those years ago, whatever ugly words he showers on me, I will deserve them.

“No one deserves that pain,” Victoria said. “You least of all. How can I feel angry with you? All I have is anguish for your grief. As does Max. I don’t know about Carl, but Max and I-we’re in no position to be your judges, only your friends. Little nine-year-old Lotty, setting off alone on your journey, your Bobe surely forgave you. Can’t you now forgive yourself?”

The fall sky was dark when the awkward young policeman shone his flashlight on us; he did not like to intrude, he said in halting English, but we should be leaving; it was cold, the lighting was bad on this hillside.