How old would she be now? Shouldn’t she be retired? According to Pythia, she wasn’t retired. Still in her corner, staring at people, saying nothing, a cipher, still shrinking heads. Still sticking pins in voodoo dolls. Well, fine—but hadn’t he shown her in the end? Hadn’t he proved she was wrong to send him packing? He’d succeeded in life, become rich and famous, and now his story included adoption, which, he realized, might make it better. There was traction in a secret adoption. The king’s a pauper until he’s discovered, the serf’s a lord with a complicated story. And it was Biblical, too, à la Moses, for example. He who is high shall be brought low, the meek shall inherit the earth.
Adopted! What had Dan and Alice been thinking? What had gone through their liberal, Jewish minds? Here were two people childless in their thirties—were they fertility-challenged? Had they tried and failed? Now Ed could see it: a professional couple of a change-the-world bent, young in the era of the budding Peace Corps, enamored of the handsome President John Kennedy, members of the ACLU, contributors to the NAACP, and probably disconnected, intellectually and emotionally, from the notion that their genes came first. Dan had worked for the UN in Africa, and Alice had been on a thousand boards designed to do wonderful and beneficial things; for twelve years she’d been the co-chair of Tikkun, Temple Beth David’s community-service auxiliary, and for seven she’d done volunteer work for the Jewish Family & Child Service—which was, among other things, an adoption agency. Was it the one they’d used? That was a possibility—except, thought Ed, something local would have made it harder to keep their secret. People like Dan and Alice could be big on adoption—on adopting as a hallmark of liberal heroics, on adopting starving Third World kids, on adoption as an answer to the world’s problems—but on the other hand, Dan and Alice were Jews, and Jews weren’t necessarily big on adoption; there was only so much room among the Chosen People, and outsiders weren’t usually invited in. Ed thought this through until it turned on its head: Dan and Alice, Reformed, modern Jews, had always been upset with Orthodox Jews for being intransigent, blatant, and embarrassing, so adoption could have been their private revenge on the bearded and bewigged, the Hasids and Yids, and open revenge on their parents.
Ed could see it now: the altruism, the parental entanglements, the subfertility, the intratribal warfare, and the repressions of the era—just pre-counterculture—all crying out, to Dan and Alice, “Adopt!” Pything and clicking, he imagined the doctor and the doctor’s wife anguishing, jointly—they were always anguishing jointly—over ethics, society, religion, and politics, and coming to the conclusion that, all things considered, secrecy was best for all involved. Then he remembered how Pop, at L’Chaim House—half meshuggah thirty years before, and such a sad old guy, condemned to die befuddled—had asserted that one of the King men was adopted, and how he, Ed, had assumed at the time that this sort of talk was just more dementia. How stupid not to listen! There it was, the truth! Pop had known: Ed was adopted. He’d been in on the secret and had kept it until he couldn’t.
Ed fumed. Then he checked the latest rain news. Pioneer Square was under water, the shipping docks on Harbor Island were closed, Interbay and the entire landfill that was Seattle’s industrial area were a mess. Seattle, apparently, was going to sea in the middle of summer. On the other hand, it was a physical problem, and physical problems could always be fixed. What couldn’t be fixed were total fuck-ups, and Dan and Alice had definitely fucked up. Enlightened Dan, enlightened Alice, nurturing, generous, and loving Dan and Alice. They’d cuddled, coddled, and prodded Ed, while keeping this essential secret from him. They’d endured his years as a hot-rodding hellion, kissed and hugged him, paid for his education, cheered for him, praised him, put him on a pedestal—but, no, they wouldn’t tell him the truth about his birth parents. And wasn’t that just like Dan and Alice, worrying about emotional health and certain that, if you knew you were adopted, chances were you’d end up on a shrink’s couch? Yes, that was just like them. Neurotic.
The next step was obvious: ask all-knowing Cybil. She’d crunch her way through the Web as taught, following the prescription he’d encoded in her algorithm, and tease an answer from the cloud of information hovering out there, waiting. Ed clicked where he had to click to make himself audible, then said, “Cybil.”
“Good afternoon, Ed.”
“Cut the pleasantries,” said Ed, “and search for my birth parents.”
Pause. Then: “I’ve searched but am unable to locate your birth parents. I’m sorry, Ed. I wish I could help with this.”
Okay, so he’d do it the old-school way—the pre-Cybil way—the way he would have done it in his hellion years, the way he’d always done it as lord of Pythia. Fine, okay, Cybil couldn’t answer, but an answer was somewhere because adoptions were recorded. Right now, somewhere in the world, was a document signed by Dan and Alice that held the answer to his question.
Again he imagined Dan and Alice in ’63, deciding, together, what to do with this document, whether to put it in a safety-deposit box or hide it in the attic or bury it in the yard or keep it in Dan’s office or … Definitely it would be like Dan and Alice to talk about options endlessly, and then, anxious about the drawbacks of each, talk their way through them over again, and why not? Ed, an infant, wasn’t going to search for his adoption papers any time soon, so they had time to think things all the way through; why not debate and discuss? Why not make the perfect decision? Ed could see that his adoption papers had been well hidden, very well hidden, or maybe even destroyed. He could see Dan and Alice, in their fretting and paranoia, deciding that no hiding place had a thorough enough guarantee—better to burn the papers in the fireplace and erase all traces of their deed.
Ed thought back. When Alice moved from Castle Drive to a condo, two years after Dan had died, there’d been an expurgating clean-up. At Alice’s death, a team from Pythia had taken over with an interest in archiving, liability, and security; eventually, nearly everything was gotten rid of except for things that Si wanted to keep, including a lot of boxes full of memorabilia, and stuffed with check registers and credit-card records that—Alice had insisted on this in the weeks after Dan’s death—had value as a record of his interests and obligations. There was a slim chance, Ed decided, that from one of these boxes the secret adoption papers might be extracted, but the problem was that Simon had taken them to Santa Barbara. Another old-school, physical-world problem: the shortest distance between two points was a helicopter bounce to Boeing Field, a dash from the pad to his fastest plane, the Citation, and, at Mach. 90 to Santa Barbara, less than two hours in the air. If Simon could quickly be brought up to speed, the pertinent raw material could be waiting on the tarmac, so Ed was just two hours from getting on his glasses and combing for an answer, on his way back home, at forty-five or fifty thousand feet. It was possible that before evening he’d know everything.
He set things in motion—got the right parties moving—and then, on his way to the helipad on his garage roof, called Simon in Santa Barbara. “Don’t ask questions,” he demanded. “I’ll explain later.”
“Is everything okay?”
“That’s a question.”
“I’ll have the boxes on the tarmac.”
“Perfect plan,” said Ed.
“You guys are rained out.”
“Weird, yeah.”
“Always sunny down here,” said Simon.
In the chopper, Ed assessed flood damage. The scene was of lowlands that looked like lakes, silty brown flows down mired hillsides, and inundated streets, yards, and parks. Ed, distracted by this apocalyptic panorama, wore a padded headset to make his next call. “Diane,” he yelled, above the chopper’s roar, “I’m on my way to Santa Barbara.”
“Why?”
“Because apparently, I find out at age fifty-four, I was secretly adopted, is what it looks like.”
There was a Cybil-like pause at the other end of the line, which Ed filled with “Where are you?”
“At home.”
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“Flood news got you?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway,” said Ed, “I’m adopted. Unbelievable.”
“By your mum and da?”
“In secret.”
“How do you know?”
“The miracle of DNA sequencing,” Ed explained. “Si got his done, and we compared notes.”
“Maybe Si’s the one adopted.”
“No. We checked.”
“You’re sure about everything, all the results.”
“I’m adopted,” said Ed. “It’s me, not him.”
“That can’t be,” said Diane.
“Anyway,” said Ed, “I have to go to Santa Barbara, because Si’s got some files I want to look at.”
“Files,” said Diane. “What kind of files?”
“Hopefully,” said Ed, “a file with my adoption records in it, so I can find out who gave me up.”
“You’re looking for your birth parents.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“You know me, Diane.”
“You might be better off not searching, Ed.”
Ed said, “Come on, you know me better than that. It’s not even under my control at this point. Something like this, I can’t just sit back. I have to know, if for no other reason than that I have to know. Chopper’s on the ground—I’m gonna bolt. Love you.”
Strapped in beside Guido in his Citation X—a plane he hadn’t learned how to fly just yet—Ed was soon above all weather, beyond the clouds, where there was no sign of flood or the beleaguered earth, just the sun and the horizon southward. Guido said, “I’m butting in, pal. Can I call you ‘pal’? I know I should probably keep my mouth shut right now, but—”
“Shut up, Guido. Don’t get started. You’re a lot better off staying out of my business.”
Guido said, “Okay, boss, not another word, then,” and flew the plane.
When the door opened on the tarmac in Santa Barbara—sunny, still air, oppressive heat—there stood Si, in a belted trench coat and plastic glasses, with the requested boxes beside him. “I totally understand,” he said, as Ed came down the gangway. “I’m not supposed to ask a single question. But can you stay for a while? Have a drink or coffee? Have lunch—or are you in a rush?”
“I’m in a rush.”
“One question, then—are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Diane’s okay?”
“Yes.”
“Your business—no disasters?”
“Simon,” said Ed.
“I mean, when was the last time you did something like this?” Si pointed his thumb toward the rear of the plane, where the boxes Ed had asked for were already being loaded. “Suddenly you’re down here picking up boxes. Suddenly you want to look at stuff. You have to admit, it’s unprecedented.”
“Hey,” said Ed, “they’re loading the baggage aft. I want it in there”—he pointed toward the cabin—“pronto, all of it, so I can go through it on my way home.”
The word went out. The memorabilia got transferred forward expeditiously. Ed said, “Simon, I don’t have time. All I can say is, I’m a jerk, okay? I’m a jerk, and maybe I can explain this to you later. But for now—I’m a jerk. I know that.”
“Don’t worry about what’s past.”
“I’m a jerk,” said Ed. He climbed the gangway, turned, and waved. “I’m a jerk,” he repeated. “Let’s leave it at that. But for now—see ya later. Gotta run.”
Simon shrugged. “Come back down when you have more time,” he said. “When things aren’t so crazy. When you’re not in a hurry.” He slipped his hands into the pockets of his trench coat. “We can talk,” he said. “We can just … hang out. We can, I don’t know, compare notes on life.”
Ed waved again, shut the door, and pulled the handle. “It’s go time,” he said to Guido. “Let’s hit it.”
Guido got going and before they were in the air, Ed had a box open. On top were Dan’s driver’s licenses—a packet of them, rubber-banded, arranged chronologically—and in each photo taken at the Department of Licensing, Dan looked like Simon. “Not now,” thought Ed. “Stay on the program. You can deal with Simon and Dan another time.” He shuffled through some tax files, staying on point: yes, Dan’s income and expenses were interesting, as was his ongoing stock-market foolishness, but all of that could wait for a day of less urgency; right now the thing was, who were his parents? The Citation got airborne, and on the way up, Ed riffled the pages of Dan’s appointment books, which Alice had saved, as she’d saved so much else, because of how they memorialized Dan’s life; if she couldn’t keep him breathing, she’d keep him in boxes. “Sad,” thought Ed, “but move on.”
The climb gentled out, and at fifty thousand feet, Ed gave Dan’s appointment books deeper scrutiny. Annually, in April, days were blocked for “cal,” which Ed took to mean the car trips to California the Seattle Kings had made—through 1969—for Passover with their sun-punished L.A. relatives and a Bay Area layover with Pop. Those many trips had included … But it didn’t matter. Ed homed in on ’63, the year—presumably—he was secretly adopted. It was difficult to translate Dan’s scribblings and abbreviations, or the code Dan used to keep track of his commitments in a hand even worse than the average physician’s, but Ed could see that, in April of ’63, Dan and Alice had made the trek to California. It was possible, Ed thought, that they’d returned with a beach boy in tow—him—plucked from an orphanage in Pasadena or San Jose. Maybe they’d brought him home, introduced him to his crib, and two months later—Ed’s birthday was July 15, though that could be wrong, because everything was up for grabs right now—his adoptive father got around to forgery. Was that what had happened? If so, it meant orphanages up and down the coast would have to be contacted with a request for records. Daunted by the thought of the patience this would take, Ed skipped ahead to July 15; perhaps, somehow, he hadn’t been adopted, and there, in Dan’s book, would be ed born! But on July 15, it didn’t say that; instead, there were three days, the 12th through the 14th, blocked out under “port.” Deducing, swiftly, from the evidence of cal, Ed decided port meant Portland, Oregon. Or Portugal, but no way Dan had gone to Portugal for three days. An acronym for a medical group holding a convention? Ed called Cybil and asked her to check. After treading in place, she tried his patience with “Personnel Operations Research Team, as in Schizophrenia PORT, Pneumonia PORT, Stroke Prevention PORT, Prostate PORT,” until Ed had to tell her to shut up.
The Citation flew steadily, above scrutiny and weather, in the peace and majesty of altitude. Ed opened a second box of memorabilia and drew out a paper Dan had kept on “Spontaneous Regression in Alveolar Soft Part Sarcoma.” There was also a racing form from ’65, a menu from a restaurant on Waikiki, and a file of chronologically arranged anniversary cards from Alice, which Ed, for the moment, disdained. He dug, instead, into Dan’s Debits & Credits files, which spanned thirty-two years. They were in neat order but had yellowing, frayed edges. Perusing them, Ed thought of something. He flipped to ’63, and sure enough, on July 12 and 13, Dan had paid for a room at the Benson; on the 12th, he’d spent major money at the Fish Grotto—judging from the bill, and adjusting for inflation, dinner plus excellent wine for two—and on the 14th he’d bought gas between Portland and Seattle at Sunny’s Esso, in Castle Rock, where—Ed engaged in a pertinent conjecture—Alice had fretfully changed a diaper? On the 15th, Dan had gone back to work and—more conjecture—went straight to Maternity to falsify some paperwork?
There were more medical papers in another box—“Ewing’s Sarcoma in Pre-Adolescence”; “Desmoid Tumors and Polyposis Coli”—a stack of postcards from traveling friends, Dan’s army discharge papers (he’d missed World War II and in ’46 was an eighteen-year-old typist in Hospitality at Fort Monmouth), a brochure on the Trans-Siberian Express, five copies of an edition of Seattle magazine naming Dan a Top Family Doctor, a certificate of honor from the American Society of … But none of
this mattered. Ed pulled the top off a box of check registers, each duly labeled with, for example, “#2234–#2306” and “9/27/83 to 7/1/84.” Yet more anal-retentive organizing, because the dozens upon dozens of registers had been divided into units of ten and rubber-banded chronologically.
Ed scrutinized. His adoptive parents, the evidence indicated, had been, at best, grudgingly charitable, doling out donations in twenty-five-dollar portions or less to Hillel, Hadassah, the Jewish Child & Family Service, the ACLU, and B’nai Brith. Dan, in his heavy hand, had done the adding and subtracting, the dating and the descriptions of transactions—“phone,” “electric,” “life insurance,” “Dept. of Licensing”—usually with an exacting clarity. So it was interesting to note that, on April 22, 1963, Dan had written a check for $250 to the vastly cryptic BGASO. He’d written another, this one for $125, to BGASO on May 22, and a third, for another $125, to BGASO on July 13.
BGASO? Five hundred dollars? When the ACLU only merited ten? What, or who, was BGASO? Especially when, on the day Dan made out his third check to them, he and Alice were in Portland?
Ed pestered Cybil from fifty thousand feet over California. “Give me organizations,” he commanded her, “with the acronym or initials B-G-A-S-O.”
“Do you mean B-A-G-A-S-O? If so, bagaso—Esperanto for ‘baggage.’ Bagaso—Tagalog, also for ‘baggage.’ Begaso—Cebuano—”
“Stop,” said Ed. “I mean B-G-A-S-O. An acronym, or as initials.”
Lengthy pause of the annoying variety. Ed added, “Assume ‘O’ stands for ‘Oregon’ and search acronyms and initials.”
Second lengthy pause, followed by “Referenced in Critical Issues in Child Welfare Research, page 231, Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon, acronym BGASO.”
“Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon. Tell me what they do.”
“I’m happy to do that for you, Ed. And here we go: for more than 120 years, the Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon has been helping Oregon’s children. They do this in a number of ways. First, they connect kids with caring adults through mentoring. Second, they provide safe places for kids in shelters and foster homes. Third, they find children permanent homes via adoption. The Boys and Girls Aid Society of—”