It had to have struck him as a strange, implausible tale, this story that had transpired sixteen years before his birth, when I wasn't much older than Marc was now. And it must have seemed to have occurred in a world that no longer existed. Indeed, I had a hard time believing that it had ever existed—this world where contraception when available was undependable, where abortion was illegal and the sexual ignorance of university students was on a par with that of contemporary middleschoolers. It was a time when the Vietnam war was intensifying and the military draft dangled like the sword of Damocles over every eighteenyear-old, when communism, not terrorism, caused nightmares and an unplanned pregnancy had the capacity to ruin lives. It was a time when gasoline cost twenty-five cents a gallon, the Internet hadn't been invented, and unwed mothers were expelled from school, secretly shunted into institutions and pressured to relinquish their babies for adoption.
Marc nodded as he tried to take it in. He was a good student, an avid reader and a fellow with a fertile imagination. He appeared to have little trouble accepting that the early '60s were as different from today as . . . well, as England was from Italy, where Marc had spent the first nine years of his life, or as the States were from the rest of the world. And unless I utterly misinterpreted his reaction, he also accepted that his father had once loved another woman and that a baby given up for adoption decades ago had, against all odds and logic, found me.
No doubt Marc's attitude was influenced by Linda's. She greeted the news not just with equanimity but with something akin to joy. She had always wanted a daughter and viewed Amy as a surrogate. Then, too, the twists and turns of the story fascinated her. Like me, she couldn't fathom how Amy had tracked down Karen and reached me almost by chance. How had she gone about her search? How long had it taken? What must she have felt all those years? And how did she feel now?
I warned Linda and Marc that there might have been a mistake. Amy might not be who she claimed to be or who she believed herself to be. She might have motives that she hadn't admitted. We couldn't be certain until she provided the information I'd asked for.
But I could tell that they didn't share my worries. Caught up in the melodrama, they couldn't see the situation except through the scrim of dozens of movies, TV specials and novels that present adoption as a genre of happy endings. The unvarying blueprint of the story as told by the entertainment industry boasts classic, even mythic, dimensions. It's a quest for identity, a journey of discovery and the resolution of a primal mystery made all the more enthralling by its potential for failure and abject misery. But the desire to recapture the past and achieve closure and emotional redemption always appears to win out.
Linda and Marc didn't need to depend on the media for examples of blissfully reunited adoptees and biological parents. They didn't have to read the ghosted memoirs of famous politicians, actors and athletes who have received a call like the one that interrupted our dinner. Here in London, the novelist Martin Amis was a friend of ours, and we knew that as a young man he had had an affair with an older married woman who had given birth to a daughter without revealing to Martin that the baby was his. She had, however, confessed to her husband, and twenty years later, after her death, the husband had told the girl the truth about her birth father.
By all accounts, the reunion of Martin and his daughter had come off without a misstep. Martin had welcomed her into his family, introducing her to his two sons by his first marriage and two daughters by his second wife. While happy to meet them, the girl had remained close to the man who had raised her, and everybody accepted it as something of a miracle that their lives had suddenly been enriched. I prayed that that was what would happen to us—a widening of the circle, a deep enrichment.
In bed that night, however, I pondered alternative scenarios. How many reunions go catastrophically wrong? Some adoptees, after being abandoned at birth, were rejected again. Others discovered too late that their birth parents were dead. But that far worse things might happen, any writer worthy of the name could easily imagine. I recalled a novel written in the 1980s by P. D. James, Innocent Blood, which described a young woman who tracks down her birth mother, only to discover that Mom is an infamous child murderer, now out of prison on parole. More recently, Kathryn Harrison published a memoir, The Kiss, about reuniting with her biological father and having an affair with him. According to psychiatrists the attraction between long-separated relatives is powerful, and sexual acting out is far from uncommon.
To prepare for problems that I feared might arrive in my life along with Amy, I decided I needed to know a lot more about adoption than I had learned from personal experience. I needed facts, statistics and scientific data. But as I would find out, such information is difficult to obtain because adoption has historically been shaped by secrecy and deceit. Unmarried pregnant women, adopted children and adoptive parents—the triad, as it has come to be known—have generally viewed confidentiality as the best recourse in a society that continues to be conflicted about premarital sex and illegitimate children. Even today, when many never-married mothers choose to raise their children alone, a stigma persists, just as it does for women who give up their babies. And although increasing numbers of people are willing to adopt children from different races, religions, cultures and countries, a premium is paid for white babies who can integrate into adoptive families without calling attention to themselves.
True, radical changes have occurred over the years. The great majority of adoptions are now "open. " Birth parents and adoptive parents meet and discuss arrangements beforehand, exchanging medical and family histories, and they often maintain contact throughout a child's life. Adoption, at its best, has become inclusive, not exclusionary and guilt-ridden.
But with the growing frequency of foreign adoptions—the bulk of them originating in Russia, China, South America and other impoverished and/or overpopulated nations—children have no chance of staying in touch with their birth families or of finding them. Even in the States, the legal system places great obstacles in the path of adoptees who try to locate their birth parents. It also impedes statistical analysis and sociological studies of adoption. Instead of collecting national figures, it keeps records sealed in local courthouses around the country, and an accurate tally of adoptions would require research in every city and town in the United States.
To obtain general background, I called and left a message with the hotline at the American Adoption Congress (AAC), which advises on matters of searches and reunions. Richard Curtis, the AAC southern regional director, phoned me back promptly and offered a sympathetic ear. Adopted as an infant, he hadn't known anything about this fact until late in life, and by the time he started searching for his birth parents, they were dead. Still, he treasured the siblings and cousins he had tracked down and said that for him the truth made it all worthwhile. He decried the culture of "secrets and lies" that characterized adoptions and disputed the notion that birth mothers had received legal guarantees of confidentiality.
"You hear that all the time," Mr. Curtis said. "Mothers claim—and politicians support them—that they have legally binding agreements. But there's nothing in writing, no documentation. It's all verbal. "
In his opinion, these verbal agreements were invalid and unenforceable. But resistance to opening adoption records and facilitating reunions still pervaded state legislatures, he said, where key lawmakers sometimes had a conflict of interest. Either they had adopted children of their own or they had relinquished babies and dreaded having their secret revealed.
Mr. Curtis claimed that certain adoption agencies and lawyers had a vested financial interest in maintaining the status quo. And they found common cause with conservative adoption groups that were affiliated with quasi-religious political movements. These people fought to keep adoption records confidential because of a conviction that unwed pregnant women would seek abortions if they could no longer give up their babies in secrecy. According to Mr. Curtis, there was no evidence to support this notion.
Despite his fervor about the rights of adopted children and his unquestioned belief in the benefits of reunions, I wondered out loud whether mistakes ever occurred.
"What kinds of mistakes?" Mr. Curtis asked. "You mean adoptees who don't have successful reunions?"
"No, I mean cases of mistaken identity that lead to tragedy. "
Mr.