By Blood A Novel by Ellen Ullman

Author:Ellen Ullman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781250023964
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-03-24T07:00:00+00:00

55.

All of this was happening too quickly, I thought when I returned home. I was delighted at the patient’s reaction to Rosensaft. Yet her sudden identification with him—the need to see him as her father, instantly, with the evidence of just one photograph—communicated to me the urgency with which I had to find Maria G. The patient had to know her relatives, have hard information about them, what had happened to them, and soon, or else begin to drift into fantasy; thence, I feared, back into depression.

She had said to Dr. Schussler: You can’t imagine how hard it is not to look like anyone.

And I thought of my dear boyhood friend Paul, whose singularity had been a release from oppressive parents—or so I had always supposed. Now, in light of the patient’s words, I relived that distant summer afternoon with Paul’s clippings from his boot boxes. I now considered what anguished energy had driven him to create that collection of aging family faces, in secret, over the course of years: what hard work had gone into convincing himself that looking like one’s kind was not a comfort but a nightmare.

My motives fell into confusion. I had posited Paul as an icon for the patient, and for myself, an image of the self-created individual, freed from the ownership implied in the inheritance of one’s parents’ genes: You are not of them; they do not own you; you owe them only the normal gratitude for having been raised up and fed by them; you may become what you need to be.

Yet now I wondered: Was I doing the right thing in aiding the patient’s search for her mother? I thought of her twenty-ninth birthday. Celebrated in Puerta Vallarta. Quietly? Privately? Not telling the sexy Dorotea? The patient did not say. On the day of her birthday, December 26th, I had sat alone in my office, pondering her experience of that singular day: the first in which the “birth” portion had acquired flesh.

Now she knew she had come out of the body of a particular woman, a Maria G., in a physical act, at a specific time, in a specific place. Did this fact overwhelm all the prior birthdays? Did the old birthdays suddenly seem to be vaguely superfluous affairs, parties with cakes yielding over the years to dinners with wine, all the while detached from their origins, the physical facts, from the blood and guts of birth?

At none of her prior birthday parties could her mother—the woman she called Mother—at no time could this woman embarrass the patient with tales of her hard labor, the hours of pushing and breathing, the pain of the child actually coming out of her loins, the months following wherein she knew she would never again have that taut belly, those pert breasts. Therefore she had no guilt to lay upon her adopted child, who did not owe anything to this woman for a body robbed of youth.

But now there was a body, a mother to whom a physical debt was due.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.