The Mistress's Daughter Read Online Free Page A

you mean, strange?” I ask.
    She tells me about her mother dying of a stroke a couple of years earlier. She tells me about her own life falling apart, how she moved from Washington to Atlantic City. She tells me that after she gave birth to me her mother wouldn’t come to the hospital to pick her up. She had to take the bus home. She tells me that it took all her strength and courage to come looking for me.
    And then she says, “Have you heard from your father? It would be nice if the three of us could get together,” she says. “We could all come to New York and have dinner.”
    She wants everything all at once and it is too much for me. I am talking to the woman who has loomed in my mind, larger than life, for the entirety of my life, and I am terrified. There is a deep fracture in my thoughts, a refrain constantly echoing: I am not who I thought I was, and I have no idea who I am.
    I am not who I thought I was, and neither is she the queen of queens that I imagined.
    â€œI can’t see you yet.”
    â€œWhy can’t I see you?”
    I am tempted to tell her, You can’t see me right now, because right now I am not visible to anyone, even myself. I have evaporated.
    â€œWhen can we talk again?” she asks as we are hanging up. “When? I hope you will forgive me for what I did thirty-one years ago. When can I see you? If you said yes, I would come there right now. I would be at your door. Will you call again soon? I love you. I love you so much.”
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    My parents return from dinner. I am looking at a picture of her, a Xerox of her driver’s license that the lawyer forwarded to me. Ellen Ballman, strong, thick, fierce, like a prison matron. There is another photo in the envelope—Ellen with a niece and nephew, with stuffed animals in the background. There is something about the way feeling moves across the face—something vaguely familiar. In the cheeks, the eyes, eyebrows, forehead I see traces of myself.
    â€œHow did she have Frosh’s name?” my mother wants to know.
    â€œShe said she’d heard it once and never forgot.”
    â€œInteresting,” my mother says, “because Frosh wasn’t the first lawyer; the first lawyer died and we got Frosh after you were born, when we were having some problems.”
    â€œWhat kind of problems?”
    â€œShe never signed the papers. She was supposed to sign them before she left the hospital and she didn’t. And then we arranged for her to go into a bank to sign them, and she never showed up. She never signed anything and when we first went to court the judge wouldn’t let us adopt you because the papers weren’t signed. It took more than a year after that and then finally a second judge allowed us to adopt without a signature. For an entire year, I lived in fear. I was afraid to leave you alone with anyone except dad and Grumama, afraid if I turned around she’d come back and you’d be gone.”
    I think of my mother having lost a child six months before I was born, having ushered him into and out of the world. I think of her having received me as a kind of get-well gift and then worrying that at any moment I too would be gone. I don’t tell my mother one of the first things Ellen Ballman said to me: “If I’d known where you were I would have come and gotten you.” I don’t tell my mother that it turned out that all along Ellen Ballman wasn’t far away—a couple of miles. “I used to look at children,” Ellen told me. “And sometimes I followed them, wondering if they were you.”
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    Our conversations are frequent—I call her a couple of times a week but I don’t give her my phone number. They are seductive, addictive, punishing. Each one shakes me; each requires a period of recovery. Each time I tell her something, she takes the information and holds it too close, reinventing it and delivering it back to me in a