Before and After Page 8

  This upbringing is hard on her, and Martha will seek a better, more stable life. Her best friend’s boyfriend is in the Air Force with a guy named Raymond, who complains that he does not get any mail. “I started writing to him,” Martha remembers, “not even thinking anything would come of it.” Raymond visits her for five or six days when he’s on leave in October 1961, they continue writing, and he returns at Christmas and asks her to marry him.

  She graduates from high school in 1962 and marries in November of that same year, not having seen him for a year. The Cuban Missile Crisis has roiled the nation, and he cannot leave his post in Kansas. Martha travels to Kansas on her own. “I got there on a Saturday, and we got married on Thanksgiving. We have two wonderful daughters and five grandkids and two great-grandkids.”

  They have been married for fifty-three years when Raymond falls terminally ill. Michael enters their lives in time to get to know his brother-in-law and to help out as Raymond’s health fails. Reuniting with a lost sibling lessens Martha’s sadness and brings new joy to her life. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to my wife in a long time,” Raymond tells Michael. “I know if something happens to me, you’ll be there for her.”

  “You want me to call Uncle Michael?” Martha’s daughter asks one time when Raymond’s health declines. They know he will drop everything and come. All they have to do is ask.

  Michael is also good for Raymond, giving him a new reason to do things. Since it is hard for Raymond to travel, Michael and Grace go with him and Martha on trips, including a driving tour to Canada for a grandchild’s wedding. “All of my grandchildren love Michael, and my girls just love him,” Martha says.

  In 2009, Martha and Michael travel together to visit an aunt—the one who helped Grace connect by phone with Michael’s sisters. “We took off and went to Michigan,” Martha says. “We had such a good time, and we talked. We laughed. We probably cried.”

  The cousin, cognizant of how time is moving on, jokes about the get-together. “It’s good we’re finding relatives, since we’re losing so many,” she says.

  When Martha’s beloved Raymond is rushed to the hospital shortly before his death, she calls Michael, who lives nearly two hundred miles away, in Memphis. “I’m on my way,” he says.

  He is happy to make all the trips. “I told Grace I just couldn’t get peace,” he says. “I really feel like I need to go be with my sister.”

  After Raymond’s death, Michael and Grace continue to visit regularly. “To me, now and even right after I met him, I felt like he’d always been there,” Martha says. She sometimes dreams that she is young and that Michael, an adult, is there. “I had several bad experiences as a teen,” she says. “Now I think about Michael. He’s there and protects me…I feel like we’ve gotten so close that sometimes it’s hard for me to realize we didn’t grow up together.”

  She has kept her promise to make him pay as the baby of the family. “I love to tease him, and he loves to tease me. We have such a good time together…I pick on him a lot, and he picks on me a lot.” Martha calls Michael “the tumor” and “the furry-faced baboon.” But their primary endearment for each other: “You wrinkled-up fart.”

  Even though Michael and Martha and their older sister Mildred, now in weakening health, bonded quickly, their Midwestern big brother, Sammy, was skeptical of the newfound sibling and remained standoffish for a year or so. Then, in 2006, a cousin set up a family reunion for everyone to meet Michael. “We drove to Michigan to meet all of them,” Grace says.

  Sammy said he was tired and didn’t want to go. His wife persuaded him.

  The meeting surprised each of them. “I see my brother in a Bob Evans parking lot in South Bend, Indiana,” Michael says with a touch of bemusement. “That’s my brother right there. I see a family resemblance.”

  Sammy’s wife gasps to her husband, “My God, that’s you ten years ago.”

  At the same moment, Grace tells Michael, “That’s what you’re going to look like in ten years.”

  “There are so many things that parallel in our lives,” Michael says. A decade older than Michael, Sammy had also been in the military. Instead of naming their oldest sons after themselves, making them a “junior,” as is tradition, they each made their younger sons their namesake. They both started smoking at twenty and quit at sixty-three. They dress alike; when they meet, they are wearing the same tennis shoes, same types of shorts and shirts.

  Adoptees and family members spend hours studying documents, photographs, formal records, and handwritten notes, seeking clues to family histories.

  Now that they see each other more, Grace says, “We’ll get to the motel, and the guys have the same color shirts on.” “We’ve never known anyone with the name Kira,” Michael says. Yet his brother has a great-granddaughter Kira, and Michael has a granddaughter named Kira.

  These days, with the brothers’ relationship solidified, Grace and Michael and his brother and sister-in-law go to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville each year. “We get together and play cards and just have a ball,” Grace says.

  “He and I have been as close as two brothers can be,” Michael agrees. “We’re best friends.”

  PART THREE

  Reunion

  To this day I search Ancestry.com and use my DNA to discover if there is some familial connection somewhere. If I could just learn the truth of my mother’s story, I might find some peace.

  —EMAIL FROM AN ADOPTEE’S CHILD

  WHERE THE STORY BEGINS

  As a cub reporter, I learned that every story starts with the old-fashioned who, what, when, where, why, and how. The 5 W’s and 1 H, they’re called in journalism school. The answers to those questions lead you, like a stone path into a garden, to the heart of any story, from the breaking-news account of a devastating tornado to a visit to the White House for lunch with Nancy Reagan to the splendor of a rocket launch from Cape Kennedy to a profile on an aging farmer who grinds his own meal and shares his cornbread recipe.

  Those same questions serve me well as I get to know adoptees and family members with strong, unique voices. Preliminary phone calls lead to stories of agonizing separation and joyous comings-together and make me long to visit with each adoptee in person.

  With the TCHS reunion a couple of weeks away, I consider heading to Tennessee early for a handful of road-trip interviews. Then, amid the ongoing scramble of planning, we receive the disappointing news that one member of our core group of adoptees may not be able to attend. Patricia Forster, “the Jewish baby” who caused such a stir at Lisa’s book festival talk last fall, may not be up to the trip.

  I fret—not only that this event could be a bust without folks like her, but that her memories might be lost. I need to sit with her. To listen. The urgency may seem melodramatic, but who knows what the future will bring?

  A few decades ago, I started my career as a hard-news reporter. I know how to get places in a hurry. I don’t want to miss this story. I cash in all my frequent-flier miles and get on a plane.

  CHAPTER 7

  BORN ON CHRISTMAS DAY

  “I was one of the Jewish babies.”

  BORN ON CHRISTMAS DAY IN 1942, the little girl is a gift her mother decides not to keep. Left at a Nashville hospital by the parent she is never supposed to see again, she is called Carol by the doctor.

  Thirteen months later, Georgia Tann comes up with a plan for little Christmas Carol.

  Seven hundred miles away in Buffalo, New York, the Fromers have been married for twenty years but have failed to conceive a child. By now Howard, age forty-six, and Larisa, forty, are too old to adopt conventionally.

  Larisa comes from the Lower East Side of New York City, raised in a tenement. She is born to Russian parents, new to the United States. Her twin sister dies at age eight from a tooth infection. The family is close, but Larisa’s childhood
is poverty-stricken. Her situation is not unlike those of the youngsters Tann targeted in the rural South. Larisa and the other neighborhood kids gather around a candy and ice cream store and vie for leftover fountain drinks, eager for a few sips of something sweet. Larisa, a tall girl, is happy when she gets the treats.

  Howard’s relatives are also immigrants—from Poland. By age fourteen, he holds two jobs in Buffalo, delivering Western Union telegrams and working as a busboy at the original Statler Hotel. He uses his paychecks to buy galoshes, which he then sells on street corners when it snows. That enterprise, undertaken while he is still a teenager, propels him and a brother to start a vigorous retail shoe business in Buffalo; in the years to come, they will own seven shoe stores.

  An uncle in New York City makes Howard’s match with Larisa, setting his Jewish nephew up with a friend’s Jewish daughter. Howard has a car and money that he doesn’t spend, and Larisa is interested.

  Until they go on a date to Niagara Falls, and Howard attempts to kiss her.

  She promptly slaps him.

  “But they told me all the New York City girls do that,” he sputters.

  Not Larisa.

  In the weeks that follow, he persists in his courtship, writing letters and returning to New York City to see her. They marry in 1924, in her parents’ tenement apartment, and head to Buffalo.

  Larisa is an independent woman, ahead of her time in some ways. She wears pants and drives a car. She bowls and does good works at the temple. And she accepts the fact that there is not going to be a baby. Until 1944.

  Her two sisters and two brothers’ wives are all expecting children. Larisa desperately wants to be part of the group of new parents. Someone tells her about a doctor in New York City who knows something about a way to get a baby.

  Larisa calls on the doctor, and he confirms the rumor. “I heard about a place down South, in Tennessee,” he says, “A place where you can adopt babies. But it’s expensive.”

  Howard, who grew up in a household with six brothers, is not keen on the idea. However, Larisa threatens to leave him if he does not try the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. Whether she would have left is doubtful, but he adores her too much to risk it. Their quest for a baby is under way in a city and state they have never visited.

  Although Howard gives in to getting a child from TCHS, his preferences are definite. He wants a boy who will follow him in his business—and no diapers. With the faraway aid of Tann, Larisa and Howard settle on a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy.

  Two weeks before their son is to be delivered to them, though, a telegram arrives from the orphanage: “Boy no longer available. Have thirteen-month-old girl. Are you interested?”

  Patricia

  PATRICIA FORSTER, NOW AGE SEVENTY-FIVE, is flipping through a People magazine, awaiting her turn in a suburban Atlanta nail salon, when she stops, startled.

  A short article rouses memories she does not often revisit. A new novel is out, based on the shocking true story of a Memphis orphanage.

  Patricia’s nails are scarcely dry as she heads across town to buy the book, Before We Were Yours. When she returns home, she eyes the novel with curiosity and a touch of apprehension, opens it, and is hooked. In addition to the plot, she is drawn to the story’s images of dragonflies, symbols to her of transformation, clarity, and illumination. They remind her of her own life.

  A few days later, she sees a notice that the author is coming to the area for a book talk. Once more she is caught off guard. Is this coincidence or fate? She argues with herself about the event.

  Do I want to go?

  You read the book. Do you really need to go?

  In the end, it is not so much that Patricia talks herself into attending. It is that she cannot talk herself out of it.

  The day arrives, and she puts on one of the stylish, flowing outfits she prefers. Her son-in-law picks her up and drops her off at the book festival. A capacity crowd resurrects her doubts. Lisa is already onstage when Patricia tentatively snags a seat in the middle of the room.

  As the presentation unfolds, the author relates the true story that inspired the fictional Before We Were Yours.

  Patricia already knows some of the details.

  Lisa explains how Georgia Tann played God with the lives of children through TCHS. Adoptees were often sent to older parents and presented as possessions to mold as desired, with little to no consideration given to how a child might fit into a family.

  “ ‘They are blank slates,’ ” Lisa quotes from Tann’s repertoire of sales pitches. “ ‘Ours are only the cream of the crop.’ ”

  The children came with intricate histories frequently fabricated from Tann’s imagination. Lisa mentions the non-Jewish babies being misrepresented to Jewish adoptive homes in the wake of the Holocaust.

  Hands fly up as readers clamor to ask questions.

  Patricia, with her dark hair and generous smile, is a gentle, unassuming person with the kind of lap that grandchildren happily climb onto. She’s not one for speaking up in a crowd. She sits and listens.

  “Any last-minute questions?” the moderator asks.

  The session has almost ended.

  What comes next surprises Patricia. “I don’t know where I got the courage to do it, but I stood up and said, ‘I was one of those Jewish babies.’ ”

  Her quiet statement causes an unexpected hubbub. The woman next to her treats her like a celebrity, and Lisa’s helper invites her to come forward for a photograph.

  As the crowd disperses, Patricia heads to the book-signing table for the picture and to have her copy of Before We Were Yours autographed. Lisa is excited to visit with her, the first of the Jewish babies she has met.

  “To a woman with a story to tell,” Lisa writes on the title page of Patricia’s book.

  * * *

  —

  FOR PATRICIA, A NEW part of her story opens up with the novel and encounter. She has been mostly fine with leaving the past alone through the years. “I have always been the reluctant one about looking,” she explains as we prepare to sit down for a morning interview several months after she heard Lisa speak. “I was blessed.”

  A mother and adoring grandmother, she has made peace with her family background. If she examines it more deeply, she thinks, she might find things she does not want to know. Things she does not need to know at this season of her life.

  But now something compels her to tell her story to me.

  And I am so pleased that I came to hear it. The last-minute flight and frequent-flier miles are well worth it as I conduct my first in-person interview with a TCHS adoptee.

  A gracious woman, Patricia greets me in the lobby of her high-rise retirement apartment building pushing a wheeled cart for balance—too proud, she admits with spunk, to use a walker. A hodgepodge of bright art created by residents lines the lobby walls, and a receptionist at the counter smiles, her gaze curious as she ponders the reason for my visit with Patricia.

  Our elevator chat is not that of strangers but of new friends. We have visited on the telephone and connected over shared experiences, including the deaths of our mothers when we were about the same age and our years in the South. As the former editor of a newspaper published near where Patricia was born, I am surprised that it took me so long to hear about the TCHS scandal. She finds it ironic that she wound up down in Georgia, a move South that she never would have expected but made to be near her daughters.

  Stepping into her apartment is like entering a professionally staged antiques gallery. Each square foot is a delight, a tableau that tells a story, no detail left untended. I learn that the walls were painted to her specifications, the paint names carefully recorded and shared. The colors complement everything from the scarf she wears to an Art Deco piece of furniture that moved with her when she downsized, not long ago. She conduc
ts a quick tour of her treasures and mementos.

  She lingers on sentimental stories of family objects—an evening bag that belonged to her mother, a picture of her father. We wind up at a tiny table by a window, beautifully set for breakfast, the view one of a courtyard with a large tree Patricia loves. Always full of gratitude, she repeats her thankfulness for her new space here, for this particular apartment, for that tree, different and beautiful in all seasons.

  Like life.

  She serves breakfast with the polish of a hostess who has done this many times. Her appreciation of entertaining is clear, whether she’s hosting the young grandson who loves to sleep over on the fold-out couch or her oldest, dearest friends from New York, her supportive posse.

  With coffee and extra croissants, the conversation about her life catches fire, and I begin recording her story. Maybe it is age that compels Patricia to document her experience. Or family. Or a need to preserve it for history. Or the desire to ensure that something like this never happens again. Most likely, a combination of all four factors. “I don’t have any secrets,” she says as we begin talking in earnest. “It’s all about what we do with what we were handed.”

  Patricia’s smile is huge as she begins an oft-told family tale. No one knows what happened to the orphaned boy, past diaper age, who was to have been given to Larisa and Howard, but family recollections are clear on what happened after that: “That’s how I entered their life.” She speaks pragmatically, slipping into the third person. “That’s how they got Patricia. They didn’t get their boy. My aunt loved to tell this story.”

  Tann sends a purported nurse by train to Buffalo to deliver baby Carol, soon to be renamed Patricia. Overcome with excitement, Howard’s whole family waits at home. They are gathered in the kitchen when the child arrives. The courier puts the girl on the floor with a warning: “She doesn’t walk, but she can crawl, and she doesn’t like to be held.” The scene that follows goes down in the annals of Patricia’s family record books. Aunts and uncles re-create the moment for years. “The woman put me on the floor, and I crawled over to my dad and pulled up on his pant leg. The way my Aunt Myra told it, he picked me up and didn’t put me down until I was six years old.”