By the time the adoption went through, however, these cozy days were long past, and the cabin itself was an embarrassing outbuilding slowly but surely sinking back into the ridge from which it had come. “You lived in this?” people said, including the social worker from the adoption agency. Now it became my photo studio—inside it, pictures came up out of the dark.
We’d eventually found an agency that handled “open adoptions,” in which birth mothers made contact and then partnerships with prospective adoptive parents. Agency counselors and social workers then led both partners through the legal and emotional reefs and shoals of these complicated waters to the completion of the adoption process. Once an adopting couple had paid a fee and attended a two-day workshop in the Bay Area community where the agency had its main office, a couple constructed a “birth mother letter,” a combination of dwelling, advertisement, and beseeching in words and pictures that went into a thick volume called the “birth mother book.” Expectant young women for whom an “open adoption” seemed the best option perused these books, imagining the child they carried living out her life with the people on the pages. If they saw a couple with whom they “felt a connection,” they could contact them, and if the initial contact went well, could go on to make an agreement with the couple to give the child over to them for adoption at birth. It didn’t bear too much thinking about, really—and there were many times during the process that I found myself wishing fervently for the neat discretion of some sort of Dickensian arrangement in which, fees having changed hands in a leathered office, a thinly smiling lawyer would advance toward us carrying a bundled child, no questions asked.
Instead, we followed the agency guidelines and wrote our letter. Hard at work trying to describe myself in such a way that a young pregnant woman would want to entrust her child to me, I consoled myself by recalling Delmore Schwartz’s short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” in which the dreaming narrator watches in horror a film of his parents’ courtship which will one day produce an awful marriage which will in turn produce the story’s unbearably unhappy author. It reminded me of one of Mother’s favorite stories, of how she’d met this handsome serviceman on the train to Kansas City, Father of course, and how they’d struck up a conversation as he helped her adjust her seat. I’d been in enough therapy to learn to distrust triumphalist readings of moments like this. Fitting our letter into a transparent sleeve and clicking it into place in the ring binder where it would wait for a pregnant girl in one of the several states where the agency operated to flip through the pages and get an inkling, an intuition, a murmur of connection to us, might not be an improvement on the usual way of forming families, but on the other hand might not be much worse.
Cheerful self-advertisement in the birth mother letter
Earlier, at the first orientation, seated on folding chairs in a conference room with the other hopeful adopters, before the meeting even started, we’d been caught up in an epiphany that seemed to strike all of us at the same time: finally here were people who understood. Here were people who knew what it was to want children, who watched the years drift past in twenty-eight-day increments, earnest “aunts,” “uncles,” and godparents who bought toys for their friends’ new babies and faithfully went to birthdays and baptisms and made quilts and sent cards and gave congratulations. Just feeling this knowledge and deep mourning move silently across the room into every person was enough. No one spoke, and then one young woman simply began to weep. After that, it felt reasonable enough that a young pregnant woman would look through a book and pick out the parents of her child.
However, six months after the orientation, no one had contacted us. Our optimism started to flag; clearly, there was something terribly wrong with our cheerful, loving self-advertisement, and thus with us. We felt back in the grip of the old familiar cycle of failure, and one evening came home in an especially dark mood. It was the anniversary to the day of losing the in vitro pregnancy. We’d been to a movie, but that had only postponed the inevitable, and now we were back in our empty house. My wife had begun quietly to cry; we both felt dark and empty. But turning the unlit corner into the dining room, I could see that the phone message was blinking. This would be a relative, I thought, reaching down, or someone from work with a problem to solve. While my wife put her coat away, I pushed the message button, only to hear a young, unfamiliar, tentative female voice sound in the quiet room: “Hi—I saw your birth mother letter and wanted to talk.” The message went on and gave a name and number. My wife came toward the phone, wide-eyed. “Oh my God,” I said. I pulled the chair back, sat her down—this was her moment—and went to get her a box of tissues. Then, while she dialed and began to speak, I went in another room and sat very still.
“Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness of the Midwest?”
—JAMES WRIGHT
MANY THINGS WERE growing. Through the adoption and the first three years of our daughter’s life, I kept gathering images, now not only of Southern California but of other locales of my family’s past. The social-service blankness of questions on the agency paperwork was one sort of stimulus: Describe your childhood. Describe your adolescence. How was discipline handled in your family? Then there were the less-conscious cues: holding the baby, handling toys, glimpsing a child’s motion from the corner of the eye; all these could take you backward out of the flatness of the ongoing.
I believed in glimpses. They were a kind of weaving. Once at a high school reunion I’d gathered with classmates for a group photo, and as we jumbled together with the usual jokes and shuffling around, I became conscious of a sort of cloud of images I realized that I perpetually inhabited in memory and that was now coalescing, just for a moment, into the real, a sweet cubism of faces, glances, corners of eyes, teeth, of chins and hair, necks and shoulders and breasts and backs that had formed around me during my school years in classes, halls, and playgrounds, an infinitude of glimpses familiar as the memory traces of siblings jostling each other brushing teeth or playing in a shaded yard; as an only child I saw this as my own extended body, or as Gary Snyder put it in a poem I liked called “The Levels,” “the soul of a great-bellied cloud.”
I felt this weaving growing around my wife and daughter and me too; it made me want to make a cloud of pictures as well. So I packed the tripod and camera and began to visit places important to my family, Giles County, Virginia; Lincoln, Nebraska; Buffalo, Wyoming; Galveston, Shreveport, Martinsville, and Winchester. As my portfolio of negatives began to grow, I felt ready to follow their glimpses further into the past toward the great-bellied cloud of what seemed my family’s deep time, their glances and lost talk.
FATHER WAS FROM Virginia, Mother, Nebraska. These places, their histories, myths, and landscapes, made my two earliest languages. Each was secretive, inflected, and tonal, drifting from picture to word and back again, a dream of memory in two streams.
For a time, Father’s Virginia tongue was the dominant in our house, carrying itself forward in anecdotes, genealogies, personalities, accents, customs, food, and outlook. This identity was our self-advertisement in the diaspora of Southern California. Father’s rural family had been landed, now