Jeanne had traced her son on-line and been surprised by how easy it was to run down the whereabouts of an adopted child. Perhaps if she had known how quickly and almost casually this could be accomplished with the help of the Internet, she would not have had the courage to try. But on a rainy afternoon, working late and finding it impossible to concentrate on the monthly report to the board, she had finally done what had occurred to her a hundred times before. Why had she called up her search engine and typed in adoption search on that particular day? Maybe she had been feeling lonely or nostalgic or regretful. Maybe Teddy had been more difficult than usual. She could not remember; it didn’t matter. She had done it, begun the process; and Jeanne rarely stopped something once she’d started it. The search for her son became her own exciting secret.
To find him so close, fifty miles to the north, practically a neighbor . . . She had not been sure what she felt then. Gladness, relief, a new dread to add to the others?
For a time it had been possible to put James, now called Mark, out of her mind. She had that kind of mind; it did as it was told. But she dreamed of him sometimes and there were boys at Hilltop whose names and faces tweaked her memory. According to the tracer’s report he had graduated from NYU and become a graduate student at UC. But what did he study? And what kind of personality did he have? Was he funny, impatient, thoughtful? The strong silent type or garrulous and talkative? Not married, the report said. But maybe in love? Gay or straight?
One afternoon she told Teddy she had an appointment in San Jose and left school early. She drove to Berkeley and parked outside the tiny bungalow where her son lived. She had no particular intention, and in this her behavior was so completely unlike her that if Hannah or Liz had heard about it they would have declared the story fiction. Logical Jeanne. Orderly Jeanne. Jeanne who would not tolerate loose ends or indecision parked her car in front of the house and turned off the ignition. She wrapped herself in her heavy wool coat and scrunched down behind the wheel like a private investigator in a film noir. She found the NPR affiliate station but turned it off after a few minutes. The talk intruded. If I am going to do something as peculiar and risky as this, she thought, I want to do it with full concentration.
After a while a man came out of the house leading a dog on a leash. He wore a navy blue parka and a black watch cap tugged down to cover his ears. Absolutely, this was her son. The glimpse she had of his handsome profile was like sighting Teddy at twenty. If someone had told her this was not her James she would have fought to prove it was.
She uttered a choking cry and began to weep.
The Lab tugged on the leash like a comic book dog, dragging its complaining, laughing master after him. The sound of the young man’s voice thrilled Jeanne. He turned into the park. She wiped her eyes, got out of the car and followed him. It was cold. Her damp face stung and her hands trembled. She shoved them deep in the pockets of her coat.
The park had a jungle gym, a soggy sandbox, a few benches and a picnic table with an overturned trash can beside it. James/Mark unhooked the Lab’s leash. The dog took off after the birds pecking at the trash can, got distracted and started digging in the trash himself.
“Rontu,” James/Mark called. “Get outa there.”
Rontu ignored him and grabbed a fried chicken box and shook it, scattering bones and papers around.
“Jesus Christ,” the young man yelled. “Goddamn son of a bitch. Sit, Rontu, goddamn sit!”
The dog looked up and dutifully sat, head hung low. James/Mark laughed and rubbed its ears, murmuring something. Jeanne couldn’t hear him; but she knew he was saying, “Good dog, good dog.”
James/Mark leashed the dog again, took a plastic bag from his pocket and removed his gloves, tossed them on the picnic table. With his hand in the plastic bag he picked up the mess Rontu had made. Neat, Jeanne thought. And responsible. My son. She thought her chest might burst with pleasure. She wanted to help him but the fear he would recognize her held her back. Was there a son and mother recognition gene? What would she say? How would she explain? If he knew the true story he would never forgive her.
James/Mark righted the trash can and turned away, walking toward the far side of the park. Jeanne thought it would look too obvious if she followed him. He would turn and look closely at her and then, the possibility of recognition. She watched his straight back and long strides all the way across the park. When he turned the corner out of sight, she sat down at the picnic table and held her face in her hands.
This was her son and Teddy’s. And she had been right to give him up. She could see immediately that his adopted parents had done a fine job of raising him. Look how wonderfully well he had turned out: an intelligent and responsible man with a sense of humor.
Better than we could have done.
Beside her elbow, his gloves. She picked them up and looked across the park where she had hoped to see him return. If he did she would say: You left your gloves. And he would grin and say, Yeah, thanks. No, he might see the similarity in their eyes or high cheekbones. Worse, he could recall her voice from his infancy. She had sung him a lullaby her grandmother taught her: Stay little wave, stay little wave, Shy one stay on the shore.
She slipped her hands inside the gloves and walked back to the car wearing them and crossed the street to lay them on the bungalow’s square porch where he would find them. But at the edge of the ragged lawn she stopped, turned back to the car and drove home.
It wasn’t stealing. James/Mark was her son, her blood. And Jeanne had always appropriated items belonging to the people she cared about. Cuff links from her father’s dresser. A neatly folded, embroidered handkerchief from her mother’s purse. Not to use, to hoard and hide. When Hannah’s daughter, Ingrid, was born Jeanne took a little ribbon headband, pink and pale yellow, the quintessence of femininity for a bald-headed baby girl. A frivolous thing. But it had relieved the anger and envy Jeanne felt whenever she thought of Hannah and her newborn.
Now she touched her cheek with Simon Weed’s gloves. The leather was soft as baby skin. She felt no envy for Simon Weed. Nothing about him made her angry, nor did she want power over him. Jeanne didn’t know why she wanted his gloves but it was not in her character to dissect and microanalyze motives. She wanted them. She would put them in her desk where she could sometimes take them out and slip them on. If he came back for them they would be there, but he was a rich man. A pair of worn gloves meant nothing to him.
Jeanne went into the office adjoining hers and told the school secretary, Ann Vickery, that she was going home before taking her lunch with the boys in the dining hall.
“Simon Weed forgot his gloves,” she said. “They’re in my top drawer if he calls.”
Teddy refused to eat the school food but the presence of one or the other of them was expected in the dining room. Today was Thursday; she was scheduled to sit with the eight-year-olds and watch them drip ketchup down their chins. She left the administration building by a side door.
Though larger now, with a new gymnasium and outdoor amphitheater, Hilltop School was not much changed from the days when Jeanne and Liz and Hannah—nine or ten at the time—hid in the bushes outside the dorms and spied on the boys undressing. Or when, a few years later, they shared a crush on a senior-school boy whose father was a famous movie star. Jeanne’s parents, Wade and Vera Hendrickson, had bought the land and buildings during the war from a departing religious order for—as Jeanne’s father always said with smirky cleverness—a hymn. The old buildings were of stone and stucco with heavy tile roofs; and though Hilltop was decidedly nondenominational, an atmosphere of latent Romanism clung to the place in the form of religious arcana cut in the arches and windows and doors of the older buildings. Here and there along the paths that unified the forty-acre grounds, stone slabs