Before and After Read online

  Throughout those early years, the family would tease him: “Howard, she can walk.”

  “Why should she,” he would reply, “when she has me?”

  Tears sparkle in Patricia’s eyes as she finishes telling this favorite story. Having talked for hours, we pause for lunch, letting the emotion settle for a while over another meal, which she again serves with the kindness that radiates from her. She digs deep to answer questions and shares dramatic stories from the heart. As she talks about all that happened, she returns to Larisa, the woman who became her adoptive mother. “I wish I could have this chat with my mom,” she says.

  Perhaps together she and Larisa could clear up some mysteries. Patricia’s early life, it turns out, is based on extraordinary lies. Lies that will not be revealed for decades. Tann tells Larisa and Howard an elaborate yarn about their little girl’s heritage, fiction full of details sure to please the Jewish couple. Her manufactured background is documented in TCHS records and goes like this:

  The baby’s birth parents were young. Her father was a Jewish medical student. Her mother got sick and died after delivering the baby. The grandparents owned a haberdashery shop. “Son,” they said, “you’re too young, and we’re just too old to take on a baby. This baby has to be put up for adoption.”

  The yarn climaxes with Tann’s happy pronouncement to Patricia’s enthusiastic new parents: “You have yourself a little Jewish girl.”

  Thus, a non-Jewish baby born on Christmas Day in Tennessee is raised by a Jewish family in New York.

  Upbeat overall, Patricia looks wounded as she discusses the transaction: “Georgia Tann was a good saleswoman. She had good products…child trafficking. What a lowlife.” The time leading up to baby Carol being put on that train and delivered to Howard’s family gathering in the kitchen is, to this day, a troubling void for Patricia. She wonders where she was for the early months of her life. Did the doctor send her to the Memphis orphanage? Was she in foster care? Rejected by some other adoptive family?

  “It remains a mystery,” she says. “Where was I those thirteen months? It was a long time to be on the shelf in Georgia’s business.” What few hints she has about her earliest months are disturbing. She knows that she arrived in Buffalo with a big boil on her ear, wasn’t used to being held, and wouldn’t sleep.

  That, thankfully, was before Larisa and Howard, who immediately devote themselves to their new daughter. They drive her around in their car to lull her to sleep and unceasingly shower her with love. “Clearly you were beautiful, but you were the saddest baby I had ever seen,” her dad will later tell her, after she’s grown. As a new father, he dedicates his life to erasing that sadness. The feelings that start when she crawls toward him will continue until his death at age ninety-five.

  “He always called me ‘Doll’ and ‘Dolly’ and ‘Dear Darling Daughter Patricia,’ ” she remembers with a mix of happiness and sorrow.

  Adoption, however, will not be a topic for discussion in their home. She learns young to tread softly when it comes to talking about it with Larisa. “I’m not sure how old I was when I started asking about the other mother and father. My mother didn’t talk about the adoption. She really wasn’t open to ever discussing it. As far she was concerned, I was hers.”

  Once, when Patricia raises the subject, her father takes out a TCHS brochure and shows it to his daughter. The marketing piece offers photos of babies looking for mommies and daddies. “I was a commodity,” Patricia says. “I was part of her inventory.”

  One of Patricia’s favorite family mementos, this framed photo of her with her adoptive parents sits in the bedroom of her retirement apartment. “I always felt like I was born under a lucky star,” Patricia says of her adoption and escape from poverty.

  Larisa and Howard reassure her, though, over and over again, that she is precious. Out of twenty-five babies, she was the chosen one, they tell her. The little girl next door? Well, that child’s parents had to take her home from the hospital.

  Later, in high school, a friend tells Patricia that her adoption was the talk of the neighborhood: “My parents knew all about the baby who was coming. It was such a big deal. They were so excited.”

  Despite the love her adoptive parents lavish upon her, she feels somehow different. It’s a sense that is hard to pinpoint. She’s just different.

  In the fourth grade, she turns for advice to her friend Lucille’s grandmother, who lost a son in World War II. The woman lives upstairs in Lucille’s home, and her room becomes a type of after-school sanctuary for ten-year-old Patricia. “It just happened. She’d tell me about her son she lost in the war, and I would talk to her about being adopted. I remember sitting there, and I remember crying.”

  As an adult, Lucille says her grandmother intuitively knew that Patricia needed to talk. “My mother and I had no idea what you talked about.”

  “She was my first therapist,” Patricia says. “She was the first person I talked to about being adopted, being different. She gave me permission to talk about things I didn’t talk to anyone else about.”

  Despite wondering where she came from, Patricia, an only child, embraced her life. True, her birth mother turned her back on her at birth, but her adoptive mom always had her back. Always. “She was one of those amazing women who everyone adored. She was the answer gal. You only get one mother in this world…The one who sends you off to school, stays up late to wait for you.” If you’re fortunate.

  Her adoptive father, Howard, is a sentimental man who spoils her. When her elementary school friends go away to summer camp, her father does not like—not one bit—the idea of her going, too. Although she and her mother talk him into it, he refuses to accompany her to the bus to say goodbye. At camp, she gets a postcard from him daily. Each one starts, “Dear Darling Daughter Patricia.” Every time parents are allowed to call, an announcement on the loudspeaker summons her. Her father is on the phone. He always has the same message: “Just say the word, Dolly, and I’ll bring you home.”

  She softens as she talks about him. “How lucky was I? He worshipped the ground I walked on. I could do no wrong. I knew that my life was beautiful.”

  Larisa dies of breast cancer when Patricia is only twenty-two, leaving an emptiness that makes her wonder how she will go on. “My mom affected everyone she came into contact with…She was bigger than life…She was an excellent model for caring for people, for being herself. She made everyone laugh.”

  In Howard’s later years, after he has retired from the shoe industry, he helps Patricia open a candy and gift-basket business and runs it with her. “I was much loved…It’s the good stuff that life is made of.”

  A beeping interrupts her memories, and she apologizes and adjusts a small cell phone–looking medical monitor on an end table. “Would you like more coffee?” We pause for a refill before returning to the story.

  After Larisa’s death, nearly thirty years pass before Patricia sees a TV exposé about the Tann adoption scandal. Her father, by then in his late eighties, catches her off guard when he mentions that he watched the program.

  “Did you see it?” he asks.

  She acknowledges that she did.

  “I want you to know that Mommy and I never paid any money for you.”

  Her tone is wry as she describes that conversation to me. “Which was a massive lie,” she points out. Like most parents, Larisa and Howard paid fees well above what a regular Tennessee adoption would have cost. They had money and would have given almost anything for their precious Dolly.

  The TV program and a flurry of other reports about Tann in the early 1990s move many adoptees to seek their biological families. Patricia is not among them. She has no interest in connecting with her birth family—or so she tells herself. Instead, she focuses on resolving other relationship issues. Divorced young—with one child and while expecting ano
ther—she remains friends with her children’s father, her only husband. She then becomes involved in a long-term relationship that ends badly and leads her to therapy. “One more thing we need to address…” her therapist says after many sessions.

  Though as a child she willingly discussed her feelings about adoption with her friend’s grandmother, Patricia is not willing to go there again during therapy. “I didn’t talk about the adoption,” she says. “There’s that little spot in the corner of your heart…I wouldn’t peek through that curtain very often.”

  The therapist persists: “You need to honor your history. You have to find your roots.”

  Instead, Patricia signs up for an intense weekend program with a different therapist, determined to get over the romantic relationship. A group of strangers sit in a circle to share and work through their innermost problems. As her fellow participants speak, Patricia is reminded of something Larisa used to tell her: “If everyone put their troubles in a hat, you’d want your own.” That’s the way she feels. “My story was nothing compared to what we heard.”

  Then one of the participants starts talking about his mother. Patricia begins to weep.

  “Before I knew it, it was all about abandonment. All about my mother.”

  The group leader speaks words to her that no one has before: “When you’re adopted, you come into the world with loss.”

  With an abundance of tears and tissues, Patricia goes well beyond an aha moment. The weekend is a breakthrough. “Being adopted does affect you,” she realizes. She lingers on the thought now. “Mother loss…it’s big-time stuff.”

  After Howard dies, Patricia hesitantly sends a letter to the Tennessee Department of Human Services, requesting her birth records. “Take your time,” she tells the officials there, not at all sure she wants to know her history. When she first hears back, the clues are few—and the Internet is not yet available for public research. She receives the name of her birth mother, a street in Nashville, and the bakery where her mother worked.

  Having grown up in New York, Patricia, at this time of her life, still nurses a deep prejudice against the South—largely driven, she confesses, by fear of the unknown parts of her history. “I’m not proud of it, but that’s how I felt.” She picks at each of the scant details she receives about her birth mother, finding her first name, Anita, to be a singular, pleasing detail. It’s one of the few kind thoughts Patricia remembers having that day. The mental stereotype she paints of her mother—seven hundred pounds, without a tooth in her head, and cooking up moonshine in the backyard—embarrasses her now.

  She makes a decision as she reads the materials. She will not pursue her biological family further.

  That pronouncement does not sit well with a group of soul-deep friends who have been part of her life since childhood. They are disappointed. They’ve daydreamed for years that Patricia is Jackie O’s sister…or maybe Natalie Wood’s. They also love Patricia enough to believe that she needs answers.

  A friend who is headed to Nashville on business resurrects the subject. She phones Patricia and puts forth an oh-so-casual question: “What was that name again?”

  Patricia answers, but she is swift to add, “I don’t want to find her.”

  The friend writes down the information anyway and, posing as Patricia, calls every person with that name in the Nashville phone book. “My mother worked at Holsum Bakery,” she says, and mentions Anita’s name. Then she explains that she is trying to find others who worked there. After numerous tries, she makes contact with a guy whose mother was employed at the bakery.

  Patricia is part amused and part irritated when she tells me what happened next: “I’m on my phone at home in New York when the operator breaks in with an emergency call.”

  It is her friend with information about the Nashville conversation.

  That is an emergency? Patricia is peeved. “I don’t want to hear it!”

  The friend tells her that the man she reached on the phone gave her a number for a possible relative. Patricia hesitantly writes the number down—and puts it away, still afraid of what she might find. Having been given away at birth, she has always felt as if she missed being hit by a freight train by only an inch, that somehow she had escaped a bad life.

  Months pass into a year.

  Then this same friend begins working on her again: “Did you ever make that phone call?”

  “You know damn well I didn’t.”

  “I’m hanging up. You call her now.”

  So she does. Just like that.

  When a woman answers, a most pronounced Southern accent comes across the line. Exactly what Patricia expected. But Patricia presses on, telling the stranger that she is looking for her birth mother. “I was born on Christmas Day 1942,” she explains.

  “Well, that just can’t be,” the woman drawls. “You got your story wrong, lady.”

  Patricia is more than eager to hang up. “I’m sorry I bothered you,” she says. And she means it.

  Then the woman gasps. “Lordy, Lordy, you’re baby Carol.”

  The woman, twang and all, is Patricia’s biological first cousin. Once upon a time, Aunt Anita arrived at her childhood home to recuperate after a mysterious baby was born. Cousins had huddled on a staircase to eavesdrop, sensing drama playing out.

  Among things they overheard: Anita describing how hurt she felt at giving her child away, how hard it was to leave the baby.

  Patricia is flummoxed. But the cousin’s more meaningful news comes next:

  “You have sisters.”

  “I do?”

  For the first time, she feels a shiver of excitement about her birth family. For the first time, she learns the truth. The young Jewish mother who died and the med student father who couldn’t keep the baby? They never existed. In truth, Anita was thirty-five when she became pregnant with baby Carol. She had four children at the time, and three who had died. She sent the four older children, who had no idea about a new baby, out West to stay with an aunt, who, decades later, held on to the secret.

  The news of sisters causes a new round of doubts to swirl around Patricia. She ponders. She considers. She deliberates. Maybe she will call them. Maybe not. They can have a nice chat and exchange photographs and holiday cards. Nothing more. She is not getting involved with them.

  But she cannot shake it. The time has come to make another call she is not sure she wants to make.

  Her demeanor is luminous as she describes this moment. “I did find my sisters in 1992, these amazing, lovely sisters,” she says of that phone call. “I found my family…I’m a very blessed woman.”

  The sister who answers the phone that day is in her late fifties—and confounded. “Where is this coming from? How could she have a baby and us not know about it?”

  That sister hangs up and calls the oldest, who is in her sixties.

  Patricia quickly receives a call from her.

  The story told by the eldest is a heartbreaker. She and her three siblings were not given away. While Patricia grows up pampered in New York, they experience searing neglect. They are not parented. They grow up believing that if they try hard enough, dance fast enough, their mother will care.

  One brother dies saving another brother from drowning. That brother is later killed in the Korean War. Tall for her age, the oldest sister lies to get a job as an elevator operator at age fourteen and buys cheap food, bologna mostly, for the children to eat each night. Meanwhile, Patricia has outfits for special occasions, including her all-time favorite chiffon dress. Her oldest sister has one dress, bought for her by an aunt. At sixteen, she marries and takes her nine-year-old sister to live with her and her husband. Even after that, life is difficult.

  They never dream that one day they’ll be reunited with a sister, a family secret revealed. The aunt who held that secret, who helped
conceal the existence of baby Carol for so many years, eventually connects with Patricia as well. “I made a promise to your mother,” she says of her reluctance to talk.

  More chats between the sisters follow, but Patricia does not want an in-person meeting. Phone visits satisfy her, and she laughs with delight as she tells of an early conversation. Her oldest sister asks what church she belongs to.

  “I belong to a synagogue, a temple, because I’m a Jew,” Patricia responds.

  Dead silence.

  Then the sister says, “One of my neighbor’s daughters down the street married a Jew. He is a lovely boy.”

  Patricia laughs more, remembering that awkward getting-to-know-you moment. Born to a Christian mother, she is now thoroughly Jewish, from her religious beliefs to holidays and family traditions. Her grandchildren call her Bubbe, using the Yiddish word for “grandmother.”

  All four are being raised in the Jewish religion.

  Her sisters tell more stories of their upbringing and send photographs, including one of her birth mother, Anita. Patricia is shocked. “I saw my face looking at me, but she had the saddest eyes I had ever seen. That picture is so telling. I felt so sad for her.” She shows me the image, her face filled with compassion. “How can you not feel for this woman?”

  Patricia’s sisters, after sharing photos and history, getting acquainted across so many miles, cannot take it anymore. They are impatient to meet her in person. “Can we come to Buffalo to visit?” they ask. She agrees to a visit but tells herself—and her friends—that this does not mean she is making a lasting connection with them.