Old Scores by Nicholas Delbanco

Author:Nicholas Delbanco [DELBANCO, NICHOLAS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780759521261
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2000-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

And this was true. This was her long slow recurrent nightmare that could not be dismissed as dream; this was her haunted daylit reverie: the letter from someone called Sally Axelrod who had tracked her down. It had been typed, on blue paper, and the envelope said “Please forward,” and was doubly secured with Scotch tape. “Dear Elizabeth,” the letter began. There were four pages, single-spaced, and the signature was also typed and there had been no date. The return address was a post office box in Burlington, Vermont.

On the day of her twenty-first birthday—so Sally wrote—she had asked her parents for the facts of her adoption. She herself had known too little of the story, and one of the things that this letter might do is maybe change all that, because she wanted to set an example and tell everything she knew. She had always understood, of course, that she had been adopted, and was legally entitled to the facts of her own history and on her twenty-first birthday declared that it’s time to name names. They had been sitting at breakfast, she wrote, and spending the weekend together in a way that didn’t happen much except on birthdays or holidays now, because she had grown bored with the family place in Vermont. She had attended NYU and majored there in Social Sciences, though mostly what she did was hang around the film school and hang out with her friends; they’d been working on a screenplay about a fashion photographer who was adopted and sleeps with a business executive who turns out to be her father, although she doesn’t know this, and the man’s wife, her mother, who actually runs the ad agency, dies in a car crash at the crossroads and so she marries the guy.

Then all sorts of complicated hell breaks loose, because it’s a contemporary version of the Oedipus story, from a feminist perspective, and all about child abuse and incest and how even good intentions can prove catastrophic. So one bright morning Sally woke up and decided it was time to learn about her own personal history; she didn’t mean, she meant, that she had memories of abuse or anything like that about her own particular childhood, only it became important to find out.

So she had asked her parents over orange juice and chain-link sausages and pancakes: what can you tell me, folks? Her mother didn’t want to talk, she said let’s let bygones be bygones, let’s leave well enough alone. But Dad took her side, he often did, and while he was pouring the syrup and cutting up his stack of pancakes said if Sally wants to know we have no right to hide the truth, she has the right to her personal history if she decides to own it. Let’s let sleeping dogs lie, urged her mother again, but agreed to fetch the file.

The folder wasn’t very thick, although years ago her dad had tried—not very hard, he admitted—to find out information about both of the birth parents in this case.

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.