“Mom,” I whispered into her hair.
Judy stepped back, her hands on my shoulders, searching my face. Tears filled her eyes as she took in every detail of my appearance.
“Gary,” she said, her voice trembling. “My son.”
Those words sounded magical to me.
With one arm still around her, I turned to introduce her to Zach. While they got acquainted, Frank held out his hand and introduced himself to me, then ushered us outside to his car.
As Frank drove from Oakland to San Francisco, I couldn’t stop stealing glances at my mother. At fifty-four, she was slender and youthful, her beautiful eyes and hair enhanced by flawless, tanned skin.
Before long, we arrived at Fisherman’s Wharf. Zach marveled at the huge Dungeness crabs that filled aquariums in front of Alioto’s restaurant, where we were to have dinner. Men, mostly immigrants wearing white smocks, fired the cauldrons while tourists sampled crab cocktails served in paper cups.
“Can we get one, Dad?” Zach said excitedly. He had never seen a crab that big in Louisiana.
“Maybe later,” I laughed. “Let’s eat at the restaurant first.”
Once seated, we looked out the window at the colorful fishing boats lined up along the dock, their hulls rocking back and forth to the rhythm of the bay. The menu, featuring seafood brought in on those boats, reminded me of home.
“What looks good?” Judy said.
“Everything,” I laughed, “but we definitely have to order calamari. I bet it’s much fresher here than in Louisiana.”
“Sometimes squid will school into the bay, but mostly they’re caught just beyond it in the Pacific,” Frank said.
We kept the conversation light throughout dinner, each of us wanting to say so much but realizing we had to get to know one another slowly. After dinner, we walked along the wharf, peeking in shop windows and watching street performers dance and hula-hoop for passersby.
“It feels so good here,” I told Judy, enjoying the cool breeze that swept along the bay. “At this time of year in Louisiana, you can’t even breathe because it’s so hot.”
“It’s like this all year round. We love it,” she said, reaching for my hand. “I’m so glad you’re here. I can’t wait to show you San Francisco.”
It was late when we arrived at the apartment Judy and Frank shared. After Frank and Zach fell asleep, Judy and I stayed up until three in the morning, sometimes talking, sometimes just staring at each other, neither of us really believing this was happening. Finally we could talk no more, and for the first time in my life, I kissed my mother good night.
The unfamiliar roar of city buses on the street below woke me the next morning. Zach was still sleeping on the couch when I walked into the living room, and I leaned down and kissed him on the cheek before walking to the sliding glass door of my mother’s third-story terrace overlooking the city.
The view of San Francisco was beautiful. Straight ahead, I could see Noe Valley, a working-class neighborhood filled with Edwardian row houses colored in pinks and blues and greens. In the midst of the valley, the twin steeples of St. Paul’s Catholic Church climbed high into the sky. Just across San Francisco Bay, I spotted the hills of Oakland. To the right, Candlestick Park carved an oval into the landscape, and to my left, cars moved quickly across the upper and lower decks of the Bay Bridge. Between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge, Alcatraz appeared hauntingly serene. I stood there for a moment, taking it all in before getting dressed.
Judy and I had agreed to attend church that morning, and later that afternoon we drove to Benicia, a tiny fishing village that had grown into a thriving city thirty-five miles northeast of San Francisco, to see the corporate headquarters of a company that had recently offered me a position.
My seventeen-year career as an electrical engineer had been an unsteady rise up the ladder of success. I graduated from Louisiana State University with a bachelor of science in 1985, and over the years I’d advanced with one company and then another, working my way into management before becoming vice president of industrial services for a large company. As often happens in the boom-and-bust industrial cycle in Louisiana, that company started showing signs of downsizing, and I began to worry about my job security.
A month before Judy called my mother, Delta Tech Service, in Benicia, had contacted me. The company was looking for someone to open an industrial service location in Baton Rouge. Fatigued by the ups and downs of the oil business, I turned the offer down and accepted a job as plant manager at a plastics manufacturer. I was supposed to start that job the Monday after Mother’s Day, but then Judy entered my life and everything changed. I accepted the position with Delta Tech, excited about the prospect of being able to travel in and out of San Francisco. It seemed like divine intervention that the job offer had come so close to the time I needed to be in California as often as possible. It was perfect. I could visit my mother whenever I was needed at our company headquarters.
Judy and I rode together in her sporty red Grand Am while Frank, wanting to give us some time alone, followed with Zach in a blue Mercury Sable. As we rode, I absorbed the landscape – the colorful Victorian houses climbing one after another up the hills, the unfamiliar shrubs and trees, the golden wild grass. It all seemed so surreal – a lifetime of emotions and experiences being crammed into a few short days. For a while we rode in silence, Judy wondering when I would start asking the tough questions and me trying to figure out what to ask first.
“Isn’t this where the bridge collapsed during the 1989 earthquake?” I said.
“Oh, yes. In fact,” Judy said, pointing overhead through the windshield to the bottom of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge, “right here where the red markers are is the exact spot the bridge failed.”
“I remember seeing that on TV like it was yesterday,” I said, before spitting out the question I had been dying to ask. We had been dancing around it since I arrived.
“So, Mom … who is my father?”
Putting both hands on the steering wheel, Judy cleared her throat and straightened in her seat. I could see she was nervous.
“You remember when we first talked on the phone, and you asked me to be completely honest with you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I promise you that I will always tell you the truth. We have to build our relationship on love, truth, and honesty. But, honey, it’s been so long now, and you have to realize that I was forced to forget everything about your father and about you. My memory of that time is severely repressed.”
Judy began sharing with me some of her recollections of my father, which were sketchy at best. “His name was Van. I don’t remember his full name,” she said, before explaining that they had met when she was very young and had run away together.
“Anyway, we ended up in New Orleans, and I ended up pregnant. One day, I think when you were about three months old, your father took you to Baton Rouge. I remember he took you by train, because we still didn’t own a car. He took you to a church. When he returned without you, I left him,” Judy continued. “Your father got mad at me for leaving and turned me in to the authorities.”
I struggled to comprehend what I was hearing. I had been brought to a church?
“So my father took me to Baton Rouge and turned me in to the authorities at a church, and then he turned you in to the authorities?” I queried, wanting to be sure about every detail.
Judy hesitated and then nodded her answer. “Yes.”
I sat quietly for a moment, taking it all in. Finally I said, “You know what, Mom? I really don’t think I want to know any more about my father. I have a wonderful family back home in Baton Rouge, and my dad is the best father in the world.”
Judy’s relief was visible.