Ch 09: Unlikely Sources

More mysteries reveal themselves.

The oversized envelope caught my eye the moment I pushed through the double doors to my dorm. The thin manila parcel pressed against my door as if the wind had blown it there and refused to let go. I’d hoped to lose myself in Lord of the Flies before dinner. Even though it was required reading, the novel's premise fascinated me and offered a welcome escape from a day of classes. But as soon as I saw the envelope, I knew my plans had changed.

I picked up the packet and held it in my hands like one would embrace a precious family heirloom. I pushed open my door, dropped my book bag on the floor, and crawled up on my bed, all the while not taking my eyes off the envelope. The return address popped off the page like a neon sign. State of Michigan Vital Records Office. I could feel my pulse quickening. My apprehension about opening it surprised me. Were the records contained in this envelope really vital, and if so, to whom?

This would be the first time I’d seen my birth certificate. Certainly, this official document would tell me the truth. Seeing Robert L. Smith listed as my birth father would put to rest any nagging questions I had. I would have legal proof of who my “real” father was.

I stared at it in what felt like suspended animation. It’s just a birth certificate, for God’s sake. I sucked in a breath, slid my finger under the flap, and carefully opened the envelope. When I pulled out the embossed paper, I ran my fingers over the back of the raised stamp before unfolding it.

As soon as I looked at the page, I knew something was wrong. A date stamped at the bottom caught my eye. Oct 25, 1962. That didn’t make sense. I was in second grade in 1962. Why was my birth certificate issued seven years after I was born?

I scanned up the page. There, under Father, wasn’t Robert L. Smith, the man my mother told me was our father, but Norman W. Marquis, the man who adopted me. What? How could he be listed as my father on my birth certificate?

Just as Dad did in making Mom throw away her photographs of Bob, history had again been rewritten. This time by the State—on my official, verified, certified, recorded, and filed birth certificate.

Critical excerpts from my birth certificate

Or had it?

Maybe the State had corrected an error it made at the time of my birth. Maybe Norm really was my father. If the State erased all evidence of the role Bob played in my life, maybe it was because he didn’t play a role. I sat back on my bed and let the pillows comfort me.

How was I going to learn who I was if all I discovered was that more evidence had been compromised? If even the State colluded with my parents to obfuscate the truth? A feeling of despair came over me as I realized I had little hope of ever knowing who my father really was. This document wasn’t going to tell me anything.

I would have to piece the puzzle of my family together on my own and, in that moment, when even the State conspired against me, it seemed like an impossible task to a teenage girl with her own secrets to keep.  

A couple years after I saw my birth certificate for the first time, my mom’s sister, Wilma, who we called Aunt Babe, sorted through a large box of photographs at her dining room table. I’d come for the weekend. Just like when I was younger, I loved visiting the farm, and because it was only an hour’s drive from school, I made it a regular part of my college routine.

Although we often spent my time there outside with the peacocks, geese, and their horde of cats, roaring thunderstorms kept us in on this day. Aunt Babe pushed a stack of photos across the large walnut table where we’d held family gatherings when, as a kid, we made the trek from Arkansas back to Michigan to visit.

“You might want these,” she said, without looking up.

I pulled the stack toward me. I immediately recognized Marlee from the grainy horse picture I had seen a few years earlier hidden in my mother’s dresser (see Ch 4: Whisperings for the backstory on this photo). I can imagine I let out an audible gasp. I know my eyes widened because I can feel that happening as I write about it.

In many of these pictures, Marlee is younger than the ten- or eleven-year-old girl who sat confidently astride a horse, although a copy of that photo was there, too. Some photos showed an infant, others a toddler, and still others a precocious child of five or six. In every picture, I saw the slender, dark-haired woman who would become my mother cuddle this child in her arms, stand beside her holding her hand, or push her along in a baby carriage. The love they felt for one another infused the images so that each photo feel warm in my hands.

When a slender man with dark hair, sporting a white t-shirt, appeared in multiple shots, I figured out who he was, but I asked anyway, “Is this Bob?” The hesitancy in my voice was unmistakable. I had no difficulty calling him Bob. Uncle Norm had become Dad, so it just seemed right to call Bob by his name. My hesitation came not from using his name but from realizing how little I looked like him.

“Um hum,” she replied, staying engrossed in the photos before her. And then, after a pause, she asked, “Haven’t you ever seen him before?”

“No,” I replied. “Mom doesn’t have any photos of him.” I answered with a nonchalance that ironically felt forced. I didn’t add that my dad made her get rid of them. I figured Aunt Babe could surmise that.

The three of them looked like a family. Their hair, their skin coloring, their dress. They belonged together. I wondered if, held up against a similar photo of the same woman with a different man and two red-haired children, I would feel the same.

Marlee, Bob, and Mom in the late 1930s

Aunt Babe said I could have the photos. I scarfed them up like they were Hershey’s chocolate squares she always had stocked for me in the cabinet behind where I sat.

“I don’t know what’s on these,” she said as she pushed a few rolls of 8 mm film toward me. “But you might find something there worth watching.” I snatched them up too.

8mm film canisters of home movies my Aunt Babe gave me

When I got back to my apartment, I didn’t look at them again—the photos or the videos. Just having them in my possession felt like I’d robbed a bank. As anxious as I was to know about my family’s history, every time I got closer, I felt myself pull back, afraid of what I might discover. I couldn’t help but feel that way now. I wanted to know, but what if I learned more than I bargained for?

I stashed the photos and the film away in a cardboard box and slid the box on to the top shelf in my closet. Someday, I’d look at them. Someday, I’d pull the photos out and study the facial features of this family that wasn’t mine. Someday, I’d borrow an 8 mm movie projector, thread the delicate film through the reels, and watch this family come to life.

But not now. As much as I yearned for the truth, I felt in my bones that I wasn’t ready to know.

Although I still hadn’t re-examined the treasure trove of photos or watched the home movies Aunt Babe gave me, the next time I was home I surprised myself with an overwhelming desire to sneak back into Mom and Dad’s bedroom to get another look at Marlee’s photo, the only vestige of the past I was aware existed in my mom’s life. I now had my own copy of the photo hidden away, but something pulled me to connect it with the one I’d seen so many years before.

I slid open the drawer quietly just like I watched Mom do so many years before. The smell of lavender wafted into the room and transported me back to that day years before. What had I learned since then? My birth certificate had been altered to reflect my adoption. The photos from Aunt Babe convinced me of how well the family of Mom, Bob, and Marlee belonged together and how out of place my brother and I would have looked with them. But that was about it. I was a sorry excuse for an investigator.

I slid my hands underneath her sweaters. Instead of encountering the single photo I’d expected, I felt a stack of papers. I carefully slipped the pages from the bottom of the drawer and immediately recognized Mom’s handwriting on the lined sheets of three-hole punched notebook paper. Paperclipped to the top of her pages was a letter with the words Reader’s Digest stamped across the top. My heart skipped a beat. Why would Mom have a letter from Reader’s Digest? It didn’t take long to find my answer. “Thank you for submitting your moving story,” it read. “Unfortunately, we are unable to publish it at this time.”

Reader’s Digest? Mom submitted a story to Reader’s Digest?

I felt as if some invisible force pushed on my chest and forced the air from my lungs. This made no sense. Mom wasn’t a writer. She’d never been a writer. Writing was so out of character for her that I might as well have discovered she’d come here from another planet. I sucked in a breath. And then another. And as I did, I sat down on the bed and began to read Mom’s words.

“My daughter died when she was just eleven.”

It’s about Marlee. Mom wrote a story about Marlee. I stared at the text in my mother’s halting handwriting, and her grief washed over me— a grief she’d already carried with her for over twenty-five years. And then, just as suddenly, the grief twisted into guilt. If I had been a better daughter, couldn’t I have assuaged her anguish, couldn’t I have done something to make it better?

I don’t remember what else she wrote. Today, I would give anything to recall more of her words, to know which memories she felt important enough to write about, which details she included, and to learn something about how she felt during that horrific tragedy. I remember thinking that the writing wasn’t very good, that I could understand why Reader’s Digest had rejected it. But on that day, I was too astonished to learn that Mom had written a story—written anything—about her life, to take in her words. I was too overwhelmed with my own insecurity about who I should be to her to focus on the content of what she wrote.

As I sat on the edge of the bed, I realized how much of my mother I didn’t know, how much she kept hidden away, and how much I was following her lead. That’s what stayed with me—the feelings we never shared, even more than the stories I never knew.

The book of Mom’s life, and by association, Marlee’s, stayed closed to me. I didn’t ask Mom about the story she had written and, of course, she never brought it up to me. Her secrets had secrets, and she was so afraid of being criticized for the things she’d done wrong, she couldn’t even share the things she’d done right.

I, too, was afraid—afraid of the answers Mom might give to my questions and afraid of the questions she might ask me in return. After I’d been exposed for having a “unsavory relationship,” (see “Ch 08 Holy Outing”) I spent most of my college days attempting to recover the trust I’d lost with my Mom, by (re-) covering up who I was becoming.  I had my own adult life to figure out and truths (and lies) to live into. Despite my nagging questions, those priorities would consume me for the next few years.

Read Chapter 10: “Intervention”

Ch 10: Intervention

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