As best Amy and her mother could explain it,the investigator had discovered that after three decades the records of the Miss Maryland pageant had been lost or destroyed. Still, he managed to track down a former employee who remembered that Karen had been a beauty-pageant contestant—in Washington, D.C., not Maryland—and that she was related to Michael Mewshaw.This satisfied the detective, who, without further digging, reported what he had found out.
That the search had produced the roughest draft of a very loose version of the truth, that the path to it had been strewn with lies and false documents and that it had run through people who were peripheral to the story—none of this bothered Amy. And I can't blame her. She be lieved she was about to locate the last piece, the key piece, in the scattered puzzle of her life. But she had no idea of the dizzying hall of mirrors she was about to enter. I knew better and feared that she might be in for a shock eerily akin to her second birthday, when the sight of a tiny replica of herself in a shoe box had provoked tears rather than gratitude.
C h a p t e r F i v e
Then I called to tell Amy that I had received what she had sent, I sensed her tension. Or maybe I felt so much myself that I transferred mine to her.
"My mom told me you two talked."
"Yes, we had a long, helpful conversation," I said. "She's a nice woman.You're lucky to have her as a mother."
"I know."
"She's proud of you.And I can see why.That was a lovely picture."
"Probably too flattering. But did you see anything familiar in it?"
"A lot," I said. "Your mother told me you've always wondered what your birth mother looked like. Well, you just have to look in the mirror."
Amy thanked me and added that I couldn't imagine how good that made her feel.
"You must have noticed in your file how often your birth mother's beauty is mentioned," I said."Did it surprise you that she had three marriage proposals when she was pregnant with you?"
Amy said it sounded plausible to her. As an attractive woman, she understood what it was like to be overwhelmed by men and their attention. She had received her first marriage proposal at the age of fourteen. A friend of her brother's, a fellow in the marines, had sent her an engagement ring out of the blue and urged her to set a date. "I never even went out with him. I thought of him as a friend."
Conscious of stalling, I asked if she ever fantasized about her birth mother.
"I used to fantasize she was a bareback rider in a circus," Amy said. "Then as I got older, I wondered whether she'd be low-life trailer trash."
I had to laugh."No, she's far from that."
"Tell me about her. Are you still in touch? Do you know where she is and how to reach her?"
"First I have something to tell you about myself."
Amy hastened to say that she hadn't meant to be rude. She wanted to hear about me too, not just her mother.
"Look, Amy, I'm sorry, but the truth is, I'm not your father."
For a moment, there was silence.Then there followed an adamant refusal to accept my word. Although she did so in her sweetest, politest manner, Amy protested that it wasn't possible. She argued that what I had said to her adoptive mother, the way I had said it, showed that I knew things only a father could know. "Besides, your name's on my birth certificate. How do you account for that?"
"I can't."
"It's obvious, isn't it? My birth mother gave your name as the father. Are you accusing her of lying?"
"I'm not accusing anybody of anything. She might have had reasons for doing it."
"What reason?"
"I'd just be guessing."
"It sounds to me like you're just guessing you're not my father."
"No, Amy, reread the file from the Children's Home Society. Right there on the first page, it refers to a boyfriend who came with your birth mother to California 'expecting to marry her and help her through her pregnancy.'That's me."
Amy paused before bombarding me with anguished questions. I can understand the ambivalence of an adopted child who is simultaneously anxious to reunite with her biological parents and wary about meeting the people who abandoned her. I can also appreciate the ambivalence of birth parents who both want and are afraid to be found. But the depth of my own ambivalence caught me off guard.While I felt I'd like to be honest and help Amy, I realized suddenly that I couldn't do it without humiliating myself.
"Was my mother pregnant when you started dating her?"Amy asked.
"No."
"Then how can you be sure you're not my father?"
"Believe me, there was a time when I wished nothing more than that you were my daughter. But you're not."
"You haven't said why you're so sure."
As a novelist, you're taught to value subtlety and implication, but there are times when only a blunt statement of fact will serve."I didn't have intercourse with your mother until months after I knew she was pregnant."
"And you knew because—"
"Because she told me."
"And she told you who the father was?"
"Yeah, she told me that too."
Amy reacted not so much with incredulity as with incomprehension."How did all this happen?"
The question admitted of no easy answer. Did she mean how did her mother get pregnant? Or how did I come to be in California with her? Amy maintained that she'd like to know both.
"She was dating another guy," I said. "They had a long-standing relationship. It went back years before I began going out with her."
"Why did you stay with her?"
Out of the volumes I might have spoken, I distilled a one-line synopsis."I loved her."
"You loved her even after she got pregnant by another guy?"
"Yes, I was crazy about her." I chuckled and tried to lighten the mood."Maybe I was just plain crazy."
"Why didn't you two get married?"
"I was willing. But as you must have seen in the 'nonidentifying information,' she had expectations, plans."
"Is that why she didn't marry my birth father?"
"She said she didn't love him. She said she loved me. But it must have been more complicated than that."
"What I don't understand is why she told either of you she was pregnant.Why didn't she have an abortion?"
"It was illegal back then."
"But with money and connections, she could have had one.Wouldn't you have preferred that?"
"I'm a Catholic."
"So you're against abortion in all cases?"
"I don't know about all cases.This was the only one I was involved in, and I wanted to handle it in a way that left us a chance afterward. I didn't realize until later how much I had deluded myself."
"About what?"
"There really wasn't much of a chance for us."
"But you gave me a chance,"Amy said."I'm grateful for that. I guess I've got you to thank for being born."
"I played a very small part. It was far harder on your mother. It was agonizing for her to carry you, then give you up. She's the one who deserves your gratitude."
"I'd like to have the chance to thank her personally. But I've got to say, she strikes me as one screwed-up woman."
"She was confused back then. I wouldn't call her screwed up. Even the file points out that