Ned Balbo

Developed from a paper presented as part of the 2004 Associated Writing Programs Annual Conference panel “Other People’s Histories: Ownership and Appropriation Across Three Genres,” delivered March 27, 2004, Palmer House Hilton Hotel, Chicago, Illinois.

Brothers Met at the Millennium: Risks of an Adoption Narrative

The only time I saw my brother Dean as an adult was on a rainy day in January of the new millennium. We hadn’t met or spoken since the fall of ‘78, when Dean was only seven and didn’t know I was his brother: eleven years older and expected to keep the family secrets. Dean is son of the same parents who’d given me up before they married--who, the year before my birth, had abandoned my older sister Kim--which meant that we three would grow up in three different households. The saga is complex: Elaine, the birth mother we share, not yet divorced from her first husband, had begun an affair with Don, the birth father we also share; when Elaine found herself pregnant, she hid Kim’s, then my, existence, planning vaguely to reclaim us after she and Don could marry. The divorce dragged on so long that Elaine missed her chance: instead, her two illicit children would remain with relatives, never legally adopted but, in the custom of the time, raised with our origins concealed from the world and from us. But where Kim and I had grown up in the same blue-collar town, acquainted as neighbors and as schoolmates, I’d hardly known Dean at all, his life and world far from my own, my childhood nearly over by the time that he was born. Could we make up for those lost years as best as our busy lives allowed? And so, at forty, I’d travelled to Manhattan--Dean worked in the financial world, I taught in Baltimore--preparing to confront our history of hopes raised, then abruptly dashed.

It would have been too much to expect one meeting would heal the family rifts. Still, if Dean and I could come to understand each other’s viewpoint, perhaps we’d form our own bond independent of the past and find a way to gain perspective on our lives. I suppose I wanted a brother and, also, finally, to be heard: to know that someone in that house at least wanted to understand what it was like to face the questions any adoptee must confront. That day, as I crossed Lexington, walking along E. 53rd, looking for CitiGroup Center, our appointed meeting place, I wondered how our lunch would go, what impression I’d make, and what we shared besides the blood that both joined and divided us.

Minutes after the guard notified Dean that I’d arrived, my little brother emerged from the elevator, twenty-nine years old, in a gray three-piece suit filled out by his swimmer’s shoulders, his blonde hair not yet gray, two inches taller than I. In black leather jacket, black jeans, and gray turtleneck, I found myself already looking for resemblances between us.†Of our siblings, only Dean and I had graduated from college: our birth parents had never attended, while my adoptive parents, like many who grew up during the Depression, had dropped out at eighth grade so that they could find a job. Maybe our education would provide some common ground besides the family issues that could prove oppressive.

We shook hands awkwardly, the CitiGroup mall gleaming around us, weekday strollers window-shopping past stainless steel walls and railings, the guard stationed comfortably behind his small security desk. Outside, Dean confided, “You know, that guy is sometimes trouble: he treated Robert Rubin no better than someone who walked in off the street.” With the solicitude of near-strangers, we had to decide on where to eat; in deference to my surname, and the lunch hour’s limitations, Dean suggested an Italian restaurant half a block away. We set out, making small talk till I caught sight of the sign, the restaurant’s logo in gold metal set against a blue background. We descended into a space slightly below street level where Dean took the lead in asking for a table.

Without the internet, I’d have never found my brother: our parents wouldn’t have helped, while the pursuit of other leads would only have led to awkward questions, even outright disbelief at any version of the truth. But a web search did the trick: his resume was posted on his graduate program’s site where newly minted M.B.A.s were advertising for employers. Through the fall, the two of us had e-mailed back and forth; Dean had said, in sum, he wasn’t surprised to hear from me: through the years of separation, he’d imagined our first contact at “a million... hypothetical past and future points of my life.” I liked the way he expressed himself. Only two days separated our November birthdays, a fact I replayed through the years as if it were some happy omen, proof of connection that persisted despite all.

Why hadn’t I written him since the early 1980’s? Age and geography were part of what had kept us out of touch: while I attended graduate school and sought to prove myself a poet, Dean lived with Elaine and Don, in a house I’d never shared, a child evolving every year into the person I might have been had our parents never given me away. Even so, he was a stranger, for all I knew still uninformed of who I was or of the past our parents had tried hard to conceal. In short, I couldn’t imagine a relationship with Dean that didn’t include our birth parents also.

We took our seats, received our menus, looking up sometimes while we read, surprised that we were really here, actually in each other’s presence. When the waiter took our order, Dean recommended a dish or two, my brother’s manner authoritative, gentle. Was this the same child I’d watched over during summers I’d worked for Don? A blue-collar entrepreneur, our father owned a chain of shops that replaced or repaired auto glass and auto radiators. The quintessential self-made man, he saw himself as someone chosen and, with pleasure, would recount for all his long climb to success. He left out Kim and me, of course, while Dean entered the story last: by then, Don and Elaine had married, had a son approaching four, and become wealthy enough to afford a home in exclusive St. James, Long Island.

Meanwhile, Kim had lived with Don’s mother and stepfather, I with Elaine’s half-sister and husband. Throughout childhood, neither of us knew we were adopted, let alone brother and sister--we thought we were classmates, neighborhood kids who rode the same school bus every day--nor did we know that those who’d surrendered us continued to have children.

Surrounded by framed zodiacs that fit the restaurant’s lunar theme, my brother and I were cordial, at times genuinely friendly. At one point, Dean requested that I take my glasses off, studied my face and finally said, “I thought you’d look different than you do.” Was he surprised or disappointed? Probably both, after so many years of expectation. During lunch, we covered the state, or fate, of those we had in common, including Kim to whom Dean hadn’t spoken in eight years--not since she’d worked as Don’s bookkeeper, forbidden to say she was his daughter. Although he was happy our married sister now had two boys of her own, Dean seemed pensive at the thought of having never met his nephews. Of the four adoptive parents, the only survivor was my Dad, whose household I ran long distance and on fairly frequent visits. But as I spoke of HUD-funded apartments for the elderly and poor, I remembered the setbacks that had landed him in one. An out-of-work plumber in his fifties, not exactly in demand, he’d accepted a job with Don to get us through the long recession, and, for two summers, I’d worked there, too, as did Kim, who stayed full-time; and, yes, Dean, too, would visit, a seven-year-old beside our father, never suspecting the college student with whom he rode out on deliveries was the brother he’d meet years later in a restaurant in New York.

Whenever Don established a new shop, restoring some wrecked or burned-out building, my adoptive Dad did the plumbing without any extra pay, obtained materials at cost, and, over time, saved Don a fortune. But when expansion slowed, odd jobs and essential tasks complete, Don had a change of heart. Suddenly, keeping my Dad around became a burden: a daily reminder of the weakness Don had worked hard to escape, the silence surrounding all of us, the rumors that his workers whispered. Besides, I was away at college, immersed in my own life, Don assumed; my adoptive father had served his purpose and would recede from my life, too. So Don laid off my Dad, widower of Elaine’s half-sister, the woman I’d called my Mom- the act a metaphor for Don’s desire to see my adoptive father vanish and the occasion for a break that would last to the present day.

Once, and only once, in the summer of 1984, while my Dad and I ate dinner at Hauppauge’s Expressway Diner, Don walked in--six-foot four, heavier than I remembered, his beard flecked with gray--to join some friend or client in a booth beside the window, a seat from which he couldn’t have missed us: the brown-haired, bespectacled grad student who looked like Don writ smaller, sitting across from his silver-haired, mustached, stoop-shouldered Italian Dad. Don said nothing, and we said nothing in return.

But Dean wanted to make peace, to help me understand our parents: ward of a Catholic charity, “Don had it rough,” Dean said, abandoned by the single mother who couldn’t both work and raise a child; Elaine had always wished that Dean “would become a professor, too”- as if she’d glimpsed some symmetry between Don’s oldest and youngest sons. My letter that past spring, Dean explained, had never reached our parents; if it had, they’d have replied, “We don’t know how it got lost.” He struck me as a good son, and also a good brother, tactfully passing on information that he thought might make a difference, wanting to end the stalemate that had lasted over twenty years. Maybe he, too, wanted to clear away the years’ debris so we could better see what ought to happen next.

Finally, lunch was near an end. Dean’s dessert was torta della nonna, a pastry topped with vanilla ice cream, plate drizzled with lemon sauce. “Would you like to try it?” he offered amiably. Our two forks tapped against the dish as the waiter brought the check which my brother politely insisted that he pay. In the first week of our e-mail correspondence, Dean mentioned that he’d ordered my book from amazon.com then abruptly cancelled the order, not yet ready to face the poems--including those about my parentage, the years before Dean was born, even the years before my own birth: poems about the young mother trapped in a loveless marriage, pregnant with the daughter not of the husband she’d escape but of the man she’d one day wed, the same man who’d father me. I thought the collection a balanced account of loss, sympathetic to the choices Elaine particularly had faced, realistic about the disconnections affecting all her children. Therefore, I’d brought a copy, intending it, despite our past, as evidence of understanding--proof that, over time, I’d forgiven my adoption, the product of shame and panic in times quite different from our own. But as I took out and inscribed the book, Dean’s voice altered slightly.

I’d paid attention to his voice, whether on my phone machine, on his office voice mail, or in our few conversations: aside from a stronger New York accent, his voice was mine: the same in timbre and intonation, even in its faltering, the same stammers that plagued me, too.

“Just watch out what you publish in the future,” my brother said decisively. “Remember, it’s my private life, too, and in my business this is the last kind of publicity I need.”

We’d sat there briefly, brothers met in the same room, and with one comment, a mask had dropped, or, perhaps, a fear had risen: had he consented to the entire lunch only to stage a warning on behalf of our birth parents? Or on his own behalf? To those of us who know the size of poetry’s readership, Dean’s words provoke a smirk, a ruefully exclaimed “If only!” But, non writer that he is, he saw through to the essential point: the words are my version, not his; I’d chosen to make my origins public: hence, I’d broken the code of silence adoption had once relied upon. How many heard me didn’t matter.

More than anything I wrote, it was the voice--his voice--he feared, speaking the words of an intolerable perspective.

We walked together in the rain, under the same black umbrella, the older, smaller brother leaning closer to the younger, both keeping up the small talk, but I was rattled, and so was he. Still, we kept up our casual manner. “How long are you staying in Manhattan? When are you heading back?” Dean asked, his inquiries, like my own, banal except for what lay beneath: the desire to connect, the fear of letting down his guard, and all the still-unspoken questions charged with history and grief. But these, too, would have to wait. A few months later, he’d move to Germany for a year, then fall out of contact with me when transferred back to the States. Don and Elaine would let Kim and their grandsons struggle without their help, without one word, subject to the next recession’s squeeze on working families. And in that familiar, careful hand I’d known since childhood--since before I’d known she was my mother--Elaine would write that she and Don were “enjoying their ëgolden years,’” concluding “the past is passed”--that there was nothing she could add to questions not about my birth but about the rifts we’d faced, the chances that we’d missed, and whether we could somehow salvage a relationship. To their prosperity and peace I’d proved an inconvenience, impossible to embrace or easily explain, better off treated as nonexistent, one more claim to be turned away.

Non-writers seldom relish having their secrets told. But more alarming is the writer’s power of having the last word; of placing events in order; of extending compassion, reproach, or insight on the terms we set ourselves. In all the years I hadn’t written to my birth family, I’d written about them, behind their backs; and now, Dean probably felt, I gave him some book as if he should be grateful: poor substitute for wasted years, for losses better left unspoken. The hold of secrecy and silence reasserting itself once more, Dean took the gift but chose to never speak of it again. And this is where suspicion of writers fuses with fear of those adopted, the widespread, deeply rooted distrust of what we have to say.

To adoption scholar Marianne Novy’s collection Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, Garry Leonard contributes “The Immaculate Deception,” a piece on the adoption themes in Edward Albee’s plays. Memorably, Leonard argues, “...as a fantasy space for others, the adoptee’s point of view is terrifyingly threatening, since even by having a point of view at all, the adoptee contradicts the illusions and self deceptions that have been deposited in him by others. Any move toward subjecthood by the adoptee is experienced by these others as an intolerable exposure of illusions they have grown dependent on.”

I hadn’t reckoned on the power of these illusions. Whatever the viewpoints of two different adoptive households, the premises Kim and I both share as well as those on which we differ, Dean brought to the table his own version of the tale, one our birth parents had shaped and which tolerated no dissent: Kim and I had never been legally adopted, therefore we hadn’t been given up--regardless of the names we carried, the years of lies and cover stories, our parents’ constant fear that strangers would catch on to their botched concealments. What views would any of us have held had we been raised together--Kim, Dean, myself, our other siblings? And more: who would we be? Would we even recognize ourselves? Given the pressure of competing narratives, multiple homes, and points of view--even different generations--these were questions Kim and I had always felt powerless to resolve, our smallest effort crushed by the weight of too many “might-have-beens.” Had Dean faced similar questions? Or had he turned them aside, certain that once we finally met, the differences would disappear--which meant that my perspective would shatter and give way to his?

Novy’s anthology hadn’t been published the day I met my brother, but had I known it, I’d have better grasped his ambivalence and my own. Resolved to bury narratives too threatening, we are inexorably drawn to the absences they hold. But those narratives aren’t static (it would be easier if they were), a truth painfully apparent when a ghost appears, made flesh, with his account of how he vanished, his arrival starting another chapter. When Dean realized that our narratives diverged at crucial points, impossible to reconcile, did he decide then to retreat, to turn the ghost away once more? At least his version would gain closure, sealed from doubts or contradictions; loyalties would remain unchallenged, uncomfortable truths would be pushed away.

I sometimes reread Dean’s replies in the first e-mails we exchanged: the tone so promising, so open to seeing from a new perspective. “Please don’t apologize for circumstances that we can’t control. Don’t apologize for not being a part of my life. You made decisions I believe were probably right for you at the time. And I don’t feel as if you didn’t (or don’t) care, I sort of believe you’ve had a cross to bear and there are issues that you have faced that I may not even begin to understand.”

With luck, Dean and I may one day reconcile, once he can recognize why silence is destructive to us all--even to Elaine and Don, determined to live out their illusions, turning away the son and daughter whose voices they cannot bear. Or maybe it’s better I disappear into the silence where I belong, the realization that it’s too late. Why shake the foundation of old lies so carefully constructed, the easy answers to stranger’s questions that consign me to the void? If our birth parents choose to ignore the voice across the gulf, shouldn’t my brother follow suit, and shouldn’t I, at last, stop calling? But, for a writer, a voice is life: to be silenced is not to exist, an equivalence that, in my own case, cuts too close to home--the long-unspoken wish, perhaps, of those who offer only silence: why did that girl, that boy, have to be born?

Maybe one day I’ll discover if I’m imagining the worst, or if it’s possible to find some common ground for dialogue. The story each of us dares construct, from which others might turn away--each holds the narratives that are, and are not, our lives.

Garry Leonard, “The Immaculate Deception,” in Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, Marianne Novy, editor. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2002.