But how unnatural it must be, then, for biological parents to cast off their young . . .
That is the mystery. Clare has not liked to consider it.
Now, having turned thirty, she considers herself too old—that’s to say, not sufficiently young, naïve, hopeful—to really care about biological parents—ancestry.
Why risk being hurt (again)? She hasn’t fully acknowledged that she has ever been hurt, in fact.
She looks up Cardiff, Maine, in a book of road maps. Very close to the Atlantic Ocean. Nearby towns of Belfast and Fife suggest that this (eastern) part of Maine was once a Scots settlement. She wonders if her (paternal) ancestors were Scots, or Irish. Until that morning she’d had little thought of ancestry.
(Though she has felt, undeniably, a tug of interest in Celtic history—art, music. Hearing, by chance, an Irish ballad on NPR while driving somewhere, so overcome with a sensation of loss, longing, she’d almost had to pull onto the shoulder of the highway . . . Detecting a Scots or Irish accent, however faint, she is immediately riveted.)
But why should origins matter? The adopted one knows that only now, here really matter.
Clare sees that Cardiff is not one of the larger cities in Maine. Only nineteen thousand people. Seventeen miles north of Eddington, on the coast, which looks as serrated as a knife.
Strange to suppose that she might be from there—a mere dot on a map.
But, well—we must all be from somewhere.
Clare chides herself, don’t be hopeful. Don’t give in to expectations. Hope is the thing with feathers, the poet has warned. Easily injured, because vulnerable.
She has never wished to believe in genetic determinism—“fate.” As an educated person, as the child of professional educators, she understands that it’s the environment that shapes the self, essentially.
People, places. Quality of life, education. The air we breathe—is it clear or is it contaminated? The immediate environment that surrounds us, this is what matters.
In this, Clare has been lucky. The sentiment is, adopted children are lucky. Plucked out of obscurity, chosen, therefore cherished. She has been well educated, she has never gone hungry or feared for her life. (Has she? Not within memory.) And now she is living in a quite nice one-bedroom rental apartment a short walk from the ivied Bryn Mawr Humanities Research Institute, where she is a postdoctoral fellow, engaged in a study of nineteenth-century photography.
Her work, which involves visiting the excellent photography archives at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is entirely self-determined. The institute has a policy of allowing its research scholars to work in solitude, in privacy, for years, without having to report to anyone.
You could die, Clare has thought, bemused, and the institute wouldn’t know for months. Such freedom from scrutiny is thrilling yet also unsettling. You could die from loneliness—has crossed Clare’s mind.
Too restless to work today. Peering at slides in the high-ceilinged archival reading room at the museum, preparing footnotes on her laptop—Clare is too distracted. Instead, she spends hours at home, scrolling the internet, researching Eastern Maine, the rockbound Atlantic coast. Historic eighteenth-century settlement of Cardiff.
There are distinguished (male) artists associated with Maine: Winslow Homer, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, Frederic Church . . . Surely there are talented women artists whose work has been overlooked, undervalued.
Women artists rarely survive their generation, no matter their talent and originality. No matter the awards their work receives, no matter even the male artists with whom they are associated. As soon as they die, their work begins to fade and die. Clare has felt the injustice and is determined to help remedy it.
In Maine, she will embark upon a new project. Perhaps.
Beneficiary. Estate. Grandmother—Donegal. The deep-baritone voice of the Cardiff lawyer echoes seductively in her ears.
Clare wishes she could share her good news with someone. But there is no ideal friend here in Bryn Mawr. She has always been cautious about speaking too openly with anyone, even a lover. Especially a lover.
Intimacy with another entices us to reveal—too much. Unclothed, we are vulnerable. Once a secret is shared, it can never be retrieved.
Also: Clare hasn’t told anyone that she was adopted. That is her secret. So now she can’t tell anyone about the happiness she feels as an heiress.
Proof that someone cared for her. A grandmother.
But why did she wait so long to acknowledge you, Clare?—this grandmother of yours . . .
And what about your (birth) parents? Are they alive? Will you try to contact them?
Questions Clare has no wish to hear. No idea how to answer.
Trying to focus on the computer screen. Scrolling through a website devoted to Winslow Homer in Maine. Badly distracted by rushing random thoughts . . .
Within a day or two you might meet them. Whatever awaits you in Cardiff.
Clare has tried not to think of them—mother, father. Even as a child she hadn’t allowed it. Assumed that neither parent was living, for otherwise why would their daughter be given away to strangers at the age of two years, nine months?
No one would do such a thing voluntarily. An unmarried girl or woman might surrender an infant out of desperation, but a toddler is a different story.
Yes but you might have been sold. Not only didn’t they want you, they wanted to make money from you.
Not possible. Ridiculous! Clare would never believe this.
And now, having learned that her father’s mother has left an estate, that the Donegals were not impoverished . . .
As a child, Clare had known children who’d been adopted. Middle school, high school. Astonishing to her that such an intimate fact, such a shameful fact might be shared with others. One of her college roommates became (exasperatingly) obsessed with seeking out her biological mother. (Clare hadn’t encouraged her in the search and hadn’t sympathized when the mysterious birth mother turned out to be a disappointment.) Even to these girls, Clare had not declared herself. She’d never made any effort to explore the legal process of seeking out biological/birth parents.
When you are adopted, it is not in your best interest to ask questions why.
To know that you are adopted is the answer to any question you might ask about your adoption.
Phone rings!—this time Clare checks the caller ID before recklessly answering.
Seeing with dismay that a friend is calling—a (male) friend, not (yet) a lover, but a (seemingly) romantic prospect—with whom she’d made plans, she realizes now, to have dinner in Philadelphia that evening. Her friend is a fellow postdoc at the institute, whose research brings him to the Free Library of Philadelphia. A day ago Clare was looking forward to this evening and would have been sharply disappointed if her friend had canceled; now she has forgotten all about it and will have to invent a plausible excuse for not meeting him at the restaurant.