What if you couldnt meet him at the hospital
What if thered been an accident on the freeway
What would happen to me then?
All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to have been abandoned by their natural. They are programmed, by the unique circumstances of their introduction into the family structure, to see abandonment as their role, their fate, the destiny that will overtake them unless they outrun it.
Quintana.
All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them.
Quintana.
Quintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct.
Quintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct.
I said early on that adoption is hard to get right but I did not tell you why.
Of course you wont tell her shes adopted, many people said at the time she was born, most of these people the age of my parents, a generation, like that of Dianas parents, for which adoption remained obscurely shameful, a secret to be kept at any cost. You couldnt possibly tell her.
Of course we could possibly tell her.
In fact we had already told her. Ladoptada, mija. There was never any question of not telling her. What were the alternatives? Lie to her? Leave it to her agent to take her to lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Before too many years passed I would write about her adoption, John would write about her adoption, Quintana herself would agree to be one of the children interviewed for a book by the photographer Jill Krementz called How It Feels to Be Adopted. Over those years we had received periodic communications from women who had seen these mentions of her adoption and believed her to be their own lost daughter, women who had themselves given up infants for adoption and were now haunted by the possibility that this child about whom they had read could be that missing child.
This beautiful child, this perfect child.
Qué hermosa, qué chula.
We responded to each of these communications, we followed up, we explained how the facts did not coincide, the dates did not tally, why the perfect child could not be theirs.
We considered our role fulfilled, the case closed.
Still.
The recommended choice narrative did not end, as I had imagined it would (hoped it would, dreamed it would), with the perfect child placed on the table between us for lunch at The Bistro (Sidney Korshaks corner banquette, the blue-and-white dotted organdy dress) on the hot day in September 1966 when the adoption became final.
Thirty-two years later, in 1998, on a Saturday morning when she was alone in her apartment and vulnerable to whatever bad or good news arrived at her door, the perfect child received a Federal Express letter from a young woman who convincingly identified herself as her sister, her full sister, one of two younger children later born, although we had not before known this, to Quintanas natural mother and father. At the time of Quintanas birth the natural mother and father had not yet been married. At a point after her birth they married, had the two further children, Quintanas full sister and brother, and then divorced. According to the letter from the young woman who identified herself as Quintanas sister, the mother and sister lived now in Dallas. The brother, from whom the mother was estranged, lived in another city in Texas. The father, who had remarried and fathered another child, lived in Florida. The sister, who had learned from her mother only a few weeks before that Quintana existed, had determined immediately, against the initial instincts of her mother, to locate her.
She had resorted to the internet.
On the internet she had found a private detective who said that he could locate Quintana for two hundred dollars.
Quintana had an unlisted telephone number.
The two hundred dollars was for accessing her Con Ed account.
The sister had agreed to the deal.
It had taken the detective only ten further minutes to call the sister back with a street address and apartment number in New York.
14 Sutton Place South. Apartment 11D.
The sister had written the letter.
She had sent it to Apartment 11D at 14 Sutton Place South via Federal Express.
Saturday delivery, Quintana said when she showed us the letter, still in its Federal Express envelope. The FedEx came Saturday delivery. I remember her repeating these words, emphasizing them, Saturday delivery, the FedEx came Saturday delivery, as if maintaining focus on this one point could put her world back together.
23
I cannot easily express what I thought about this.
On the one hand, I told myself, it could hardly be a surprise. We had spent thirty-two years considering just such a possibility. We had for many of those years seen such a possibility even as a probability. Quintanas mother, through a bureaucratic error on the part of the social worker, had been told not only our names and Quintanas name but the name under which I wrote. We did not lead an entirely private life. We gave lectures, we attended events, we got photographed. We could be easily found. We had discussed how it would happen. There would be a letter. There would be a phone call. The caller would say such and such. Whichever one of us took the call would say such and such and such. We would meet.
It would be logical.
It would all, when it happened, make sense.
In an alternate scenario, Quintana herself would choose to undertake the search, initiate the contact. Should she wish to do so, the process would be simple. Through another bureaucratic error, a bill from St. Johns Hospital in Santa Monica had reached us without the mothers name redacted. I had seen the name only once but it had remained imprinted on my memory. I had thought it a beautiful name.
We had discussed this with our lawyer. We had authorized him, should Quintana ask, to give her whatever help she wanted or needed.
This too would be logical.
This too would all, when it happened, make sense.
On the other hand, I told myself, it now seemed too late, not the right time.
There comes a point, I told myself, at which a family is, for better or for worse, finished.
Yes. I just told you. Of course I had considered this possibility.
Accepting it would be something else.
A while back, to another point, I mentioned that we had taken her with us to Tucson while The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean was shooting there.
I mentioned the Hilton Inn and I mentioned the babysitter and I mentioned Dick Moore and I mentioned Paul Newman but there was a part of that trip that I did not mention.
It happened on our first night in Tucson.
We had left her with the babysitter. We had watched the dailies. We had met in the Hilton Inn dining room for dinner. Halfway through dinner a few too many people at the table, a little too much noise, just another working dinner on a motion picture on just another location it had struck me: this was not, for me, just another location.
This was Tucson.
We had not been told much about her natural family but we had been told one thing: her mother was from Tucson. Her mother was from Tucson and I knew her mothers name.
I never considered not doing what I did next.
I got up from dinner and found a pay phone with a Tucson telephone book.
I looked up the name.
I showed the name to John.
Without discussion we went back to the crowded table in the dining room and told the producer of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean that we needed to speak to him. He followed us into the lobby. There in a corner of the lobby of the Hilton Inn we talked to him for three or four minutes. It was imperative, we said, that no one should know we were in Tucson. It was especially imperative, we said, that no one should know Quintana was in Tucson. I did not want to pick up the Tucson paper, I said, and see any cute items about children on the Judge Roy Bean location. I asked him to alert the unit publicity people. I stressed that under no condition should Quintanas name appear in connection with the picture.
There was no reason to think that it would but I had to be sure.
I had to cover that base.
I had to make that effort.
I believed as I did so that I was protecting both Quintana and her mother.
I tell you this now by way of suggesting the muddled impulses that can go hand in hand with adoption.
A few months after the arrival of the FedEx Saturday delivery, Quintana and her sister met, first in New York and then in Dallas. In New York Quintana showed her visiting sister Chinatown. She took her shopping at Pearl River. She brought her to dinner with John and me at Da Silvano. She invited her friends and cousins to her apartment for drinks so that they and her sister could all meet. The two sisters looked like twins. When Griffin walked into Quintanas apartment and saw the sister he inadvertently greeted her as Q. Margaritas were mixed. Guacamole was made. There was about this initial weekend meeting a spirit of willed excitement, determined camaraderie, resolute discovery.
It would be a month or so later, in Dallas, before the will and the determination and the resolution all failed her.
When she called after twenty-four hours in Dallas she had seemed distraught, on the edge of tears.
In Dallas she had been introduced for the first time not only to her mother but to many other members of what she was now calling her biological family, strangers who welcomed her as their long-missing child.
In Dallas these strangers had shown her snapshots, remarked on her resemblance to one or another cousin or aunt or grandparent, seemingly taken for granted that she had chosen by her presence to be one of them.
On her return to New York she had begun getting regular calls from her mother, whose initial resistance to the idea of a reunion (in the first place it wasnt a reunion, her mother had punctiliously pointed out, since they had never met in the first place) seemed to have given way to a need to discuss the events that had led to the adoption. These calls came in the morning, typically at a time when Quintana was just about to leave for work. She did not want to cut her mother short but neither did she want to be late for work, particularly because Elle Décor, the magazine for which she was at that time the photography editor, was undergoing a staff realignment and she felt her job to be in jeopardy. She discussed this conflict with a psychiatrist. After the discussion with the psychiatrist she wrote to her mother and sister saying that being found (I was found had evolved into her arrestingly equivocal way of referring to what had happened) was proving too much to handle, too much and too soon, that she needed to step back, catch up for a while with what she still considered her real life.