The Most Innocent of All

for my brother, David, who has been lucky enough to be loved by many

I

One of the unforeseen outcomes of my mother’s death in my senior year of college was the A-plus I earned on the final project in my Editing and Publishing class at the University of Nevada. The assignment was to self-publish a magazine or short book. My mother, with whom I had been close, died suddenly in her sleep in early March. Come May, I passed a long night in the Kinko’s just south of Reno’s Truckee River, photocopying a small book-length account of our devoted but charged relationship on thick card stock while the single employee half dozed in a corner. After, I walked across the street to a favorite coffeehouse where I smothered a hot scone in blackberry jam as morning blanched the sky outside the window. I did not think about my mother; I refused to let grief engulf me. Instead, I kept my mind trained on the positive: I’d just wrapped up my penultimate semester of college.

I could never have anticipated the fallout from this little spiral-bound book. That June, I licked a half-dozen manila envelopes shut and, once my little memoir was in the mail, waited for family and friends to get in touch with their sympathy and—if I’m being honest—affirmation of my talent as a writer. The feedback mostly arrived as expected. My mother’s oldest friend thanked me for capturing my mother’s kindness and sincerity, while my aunt Andrea said she’d shown the book to all her friends. Everyone said how sad it was that my mother had been sick with lupus and emphysema for so long.

One response came later than the rest and maintained a chillier tone. What bothered me most about my grandfather Fred’s reply was a single statement buried in paragraph two of his typewritten letter. Of my mother—his daughter—Fred wrote: I was never aware that Vickie gave birth to a boy and had given him up for adoption. By any chance, have you more information on him?

In the book, I’d written about how when I was ten, my mother sat me on her lap and told me about the child she’d surrendered for adoption a decade before I was born. My mother’s revelation had startled me, I explained. From that moment on, I saw her as more than a parent whose existence revolved around mine. She was a woman steeped in history.

I had assumed that Fred knew my mother had had a child out of wedlock. How could he not?

Unless. Unless what was amiss here was not Fred’s ignorance but my own faulty memory. Holding Fred’s letter, I could feel my hand tremble, my cheeks grow hot. I had trusted myself to recall a conversation that took place when I was ten. What if my mother had not had a son at all?

Whom could I call? Not my father. Devasted by my mother’s death and exhausted by full-time machinist work, he had enough to worry about. Besides, what if my father, a soft-spoken man far more comfortable mending a fence than talking about his or anyone else’s past, never knew about the child?

I’ve always felt close to Andrea, my mother’s younger sister. She and my mother, Vickie, looked alike: high cheekbones, amber eyes, pale olive skin. When I was a child, Andrea would ask to be taken on comprehensive tours of my bedroom, pointing out a lovely pillow here, an interesting poster there. Whenever she visited, she would coax my hair into styles—braids, pigtails—that, simple though they were, eluded my mother.

Hand still trembling, I dialed Andrea’s number. If anyone would know the truth, she would.

“I got a letter from Fred,” I began. “He—he says he doesn’t know anything about my mom’s son.” I waited, certain Andrea was going to tell me I’d made up the whole story.

“Fred called me too.” I could almost hear Andrea shaking her head. “He doesn’t remember anything! He was the one who found the home for unwed mothers where Vickie stayed. He even drove me down to Los Angeles to visit her!”

My first feeling was profound relief. I had not misremembered. After a beat, confusion set in. “But why doesn’t Fred remember?” I asked.

“I have absolutely no idea.”

II

Vickie became pregnant in fall 1965. She was twenty, a shy alcoholic who drank alone in her room listening to one particular Bob Dylan song on repeat. She liked to sit on the floor with a six-pack of malt liquor and sway back and forth to the music, pausing only to readjust the turntable needle. Having survived years of Fred’s shaming, his rages—Iwish you’d never been born, he’d scream—Vickie was broken. Stout malt liquor was her escape.

When Fred discovered Vickie’s secret, he sent her packing. To the home for unwed mothers he’d found for her, that is, in Los Angeles, three hundred miles south of their Sacramento home. Safely away from prying eyes. Fred had a good job as a civil servant. Middle-class families simply did not have promiscuous daughters.

The following July, Vickie gave birth at Los Angeles County General Hospital. The boy was quickly placed into a transitional home, where he awaited adoption. I don’t know if Vickie was allowed to hold him. Often, social workers or adoption workers trundled children away as soon as they were born.

In the days following delivery, Vickie mailed a birth announcement to her family. Andrea recently showed it to me; she’s kept it all these years. On the front of the small Hallmark-type card is an illustration of a child in a sideways baseball cap holding a flower. “It’s a BOY,” the text declares. Inside, Vickie filled in the blanks for categories like “Weight” (7 pounds 11 ounces) “Arrived” (July 27 at 6:09 a.m.) and “Name” (Kevin). The final category is “Parents.” She wrote just one word: Vickie.

It took a long time to untangle the reasons Fred banished his grandson’s memory. At first, I simply wasn’t interested in peering into Fred’s weird psyche. He and I had never been close. While I was growing up, my mother had kept him at arm’s length, and I rarely saw him. Four years after his I-never-knew-I-had-a-grandson letter, as he lay on his deathbed, we spoke briefly by phone. His voice was thin and raspy; cancer had destroyed his lungs. I proffered a clipped “My love to you.” It struck me as less of a lie than “I love you.” Saying nothing seemed cruel. Four years after that, Fred’s second wife died, and I received a medium-sized inheritance from the sale of his home. I paid off my student loans.

I bore Fred’s curly dark hair, his love for language arts, and now a chunk of the equity that’d been in his Spanish-style home in Oceanside, California. I did not want more. I knew if I started trying to understand Fred, I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about his years of abuse toward my mother, and then her sickness and pain and death would once again unfold before me.

In recent years, I’ve developed a chronic pain condition called pudendal neuralgia, pain of a pelvic nerve, in part from long-distance cycling. My vagina hurts every single day. Pudendal comes from the Latin word meaning that of which one ought to be ashamed. Shame, shame, shame. Shame was everywhere. In my body, in my mother’s body, in the culture, in the language. Maybe it was at the root of Fred’s refusal to remember he had a grandson. My illness felt like a sign. Laid up in bed with lacerating pain in my pelvis, I started reading the reams of correspondence between Fred and his Cuban family that my friend Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra had translated years before at my aunt’s request. As I read, a story took shape before my eyes. A story almost too bizarre to be believed.

In July 1966 Vickie checked in, alone, to the Los Angeles hospital where she labored and pushed out a child she could not keep. That same month, Fred traveled to Miami to visit his foster parents, Aurora and Phillip. There, he learned a family secret of his own. He was not an orphan, as Aurora and Phillip had long claimed. He was the bastard son of a Cuban lawyer and the lawyer’s beautiful young secretary. The lawyer, Horacio Martínez Franque, and secretary, Carmenlina, had given him away. Carmenlina was still alive in Cuba. Horacio, who had been the Cuban ambassador to Nicaragua when Castro came to power, lived in exile in Nicaragua.

After Aurora confessed the truth to her foster son, Fred grew agitated. “It seemed,” Aurora would later recall, “he would lose his mind.”

III

At the dawn of Cuban independence, the countryside outside the port city of Matanzas lay ravaged by war. Sugar mills, the region’s lifeblood, had been torched or otherwise destroyed. The area’s population had been reduced by up to 30 percent, in large part due to disease and malnutrition. Bandits, taking advantage of postwar social collapse, roamed the dusty roads connecting Havana and Matanzas. One day, a bandit named Julio Ramírez passed through Ceiba Mocha, a hamlet fifteen kilometers outside Matanzas where locals, in the grip of superstition, deposited fetishistic offerings like black rooster feathers at the base of a fat old ceiba tree. One of Ceiba Mocha’s foremost charms was a fair-skinned, doe-eyed fourteen-year-old named Carmenlina, the daughter of a sugar plantation manager. Carmenlina and Julio fell in love and married. Soon after, a daughter, Rita, was born.

In time, Julio fell into legal trouble. Then a twenty-one-year-old woman of intelligence and verve, Carmenlina traveled to Matanzas to seek help from an attorney. In the Calle Independencia, Carmenlina knocked on the door of a well-known lawyer and begged him to help free her husband from jail. The attorney, Horacio Martinez, a solemn man who wore colonial-style white suits, could offer Carmenlina little in the way of legal assistance. He did avail himself in other ways, though. Besotted with her beauty, he took Carmenlina first as his secretary, then as his mistress. Before long, Carmenlina was pregnant.

Carmenlina was in a bind. Julio was in jail; her family knew he could not be the father. I don’t know whether Carmenlina told anyone about her pregnancy. I imagine her keeping the secret close.

A sepia-toned photo taken when Carmenlina was pregnant shows a young woman with high cheekbones and fair skin. Her head is angled toward one voile-clad shoulder, and her mouth is open just a fraction, revealing small, regular teeth. She has the look of someone whose smile would be both knowing and defiant.

In July 1924 Carmenlina gave birth to a baby boy. The child was immediately taken from her home to Horacio’s, and his wife and children were told that “a client of Horacio’s left him.” That same night, a great fire broke out in the Calle Independencia. Decades later, Horacio’s legitimate children would think of the fire and the arrival of this strange child, whose presence no one could adequately explain, as strangely linked.

Eventually, Fred landed with a foster family. His foster mother, Aurora, and her Danish husband, Phillip, immigrated to New York with him when Fred was seven, settling in Harlem.

At the time of Fred’s birth, an illegitimate child received the initials s.a., which stood for sin apellido, or “without surname,” on the birth record. No name; no identity; no provenance. Fred was a child who belonged nowhere and to no one.

But Cuban feminists were working to change this. One was an outspoken lawyer from Santa Clara named Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, whom photos reveal as a piercing-eyed woman with a flapper bob. Just nine months after Fred’s birth, Domínguez joined dozens of other women for the Second National Women’s Congress, held at the Baroque Revival–style Gran Teatro de La Habana. Each delegate gave a speech designed to gain support for social welfare causes. Seated in plush red velvet seats, the audience listened as Domínguez delivered a passionate speech calling for illegitimate people, who comprised 24 percent of the population, to have the same rights as legitimate ones. Children should not be punished or humiliated for their parents’ indiscretions, Domínguez insisted.

Bewilderingly, not everyone at the Gran Teatro agreed. “It seems impossible, Señora Domínguez, that you, being a lawyer, could be so sentimental,” a woman whom Domínguez identifies in her autobiography as Doctor Camín asserted. Another participant, Doctor Amelia de Vera, chimed in: “Someone who does not know how to be a mother in accordance with the law has to pay the consequences.” Granting rights to illegitimate children, de Vera said, “would mean the destruction of the family, the introduction of concubinage.” De Vera’s words were met with murmurs of approval.

Domínguez was unmoved.

“A woman who is a mother cannot drown in her breast the longing that all children should be happy, even those who come into life in conditions that are not accepted by the social environment.”

IV

Vickie never revealed the identity of her child’s father. Her first thought was to terminate the pregnancy. She knew she might qualify for a legal therapeutic abortion. And so, late that fall, as temperatures dipped into the forties and ash and sycamore leaves collected on the sidewalks, Vickie went before a Sacramento hospital abortion board. In the postwar years, such boards sometimes approved the procedure on the grounds that pregnancy exacerbated preexisting conditions such as cardiovascular disease, epilepsy, diabetes, or uterine fibroids. Or mental illness. Vickie was under the care of a psychiatrist for severe depression and anxiety.

The board presented my mother with a Faustian bargain. She could obtain an abortion, the board allowed, but only on the condition that she submit to concomitant sterilization in the form of a tubal ligation. Such a quid pro quo was not rare. Boards tended to use sterilization as a means to “cap the defective reproductive container,” i.e., the promiscuous pregnant person, reproductive rights historian Rickie Solinger asserts in a 1993 Feminist Studies article. In the 1940s and 1950s, forty percent of women receiving abortions were concomitantly sterilized, according to a report published by Kenneth Niswander in 1965. In some cases, women chose the so-called back alley rather than face sterilization, as one physician of the era, quoted in Solinger’s article, notes. A rare doctor willing to express his dismay at the coupling of therapeutic abortion and sterilization, he added: “I would like to point that out, because the package is so frequent I therefore consider them fortunate to have been illegally rather than therapeutically aborted, and thus spared sterilization.” Some women learned only after the fact that they had been sterilized.

Vickie refused the deal. She wanted a family someday. Just not under these circumstances.

Several months after Vickie gave birth, the adoption agency mailed her a photograph of her son, who’d been placed, they assured her, with a good family. Dressed in white and lying in a lace-trimmed bassinet, Kevin gazes at whoever is taking the photo with sober curiosity. My mother saved this photo, taking it out every now and again to relive this strange and shameful and heart-breaking episode of her life. Perhaps a year after she told me about her son, I happened to find the picture lying among her things in our shared bedroom. Because the photo was in black and white, I knew the child wasn’t me. My father captured all our family’s joys and sorrows in color, on his prized Nikon.

“Who’s this?” I held out the photo to my mother, who’d just walked into the room.

“Do you remember when I told you about the baby I had out of wedlock?” Certainly I did, and the memory still burned deep inside, where the hot iron of betrayal had left its smoldering mark. “That’s him. I named him Kevin.” Oh, Kevin, was it? She’d gone so far as to give him a name.

Sure enough, on the back of the photo was the word Kevin.

Now, of course, I understand: if my mother had taken what likely seemed like the easy way out and agreed to termination with sterilization, I would not be here.

My parents married in their early thirties. My father was a gentle hippie with a full beard and a slight heroin problem. Somehow, they both got sober, and nine months after a shotgun Reno wedding at which they wore matching argyle sweaters, I was born. Vickie and Ray were kind, doting parents, though there were times they stumbled, coming off as either too harsh or too lenient. There was the time I was eleven and, obsessed with the concept of showing leg, enlisted a dozen safety pins in my plot to shorten a three-tiered acid-washed jean skirt to a length that, looking back, was likely rather tame. “You look like a streetwalker” was my mother’s comment. Other times, my parents knuckled under a hail of childish pleas. Around the time I started kindergarten, my parents suggested it was time I sleep in my own room. I recall trying this for a few nights, before insisting I was afraid of the dark and wanted back in my mother’s bed (my father slept in a twin bed in a corner of the bedroom). In truth, I simply missed her: missed cuddling up to her as she read the Little House books—we were both enamored of nineteenth-century frontier life, with its wagon rides and calico dresses—missed seeing the big goofy smiles she lavished on me before lighting her morning cigarette. For her part, my mother was, I suspect, delighted I wanted to return. Not just because she liked having me there, though she did, but because she was, as she would later confess, uninterested in forms of marital intimacy that tend to be broached in a childfree bed. With me there next to her, my long tanned limbs spooled around her ample body, my father, a man as gentle and courteous as they come but who surely had certain desires, could not get close.

I would not return to my own bed until I was thirteen.

V

After his foster parents revealed his true identity, Fred struck up a correspondence with his half sister Rita, daughter of the bandit Julio, still living in Matanzas. Carmenlina was gravely ill, Rita wrote. Fred and Rita tried to arrange a phone call so Fred could talk to his mother before she died, but Carmenlina’s health took a turn for the worse, and the call never happened.

The letters that flow between Sacramento and Matanzas in the wake of Carmenlina’s death suggest a strong urge on the part of these two half siblings to make up for lost time, and to fill at least part of the void left by Carmenlina’s death. Or, in the case of Fred, by her forty-one-year absence from his life. Remember that you have a sister and, although I don’t know you, I love you because I knew you existed, Rita writes. In another letter, Rita recalls how years earlier she’d found among her mother’s things a picture of a child who must have been Fred. The baby was under a year old and . . . wearing a bonnet. On the back of the picture, all it says is CUBA—do you remember the one I mean?

In one of the most astounding feats of cognitive dissonance I’ve witnessed, Fred replies, Dear Rita, can you understand that constant thought in my mind at the moment? . . . I want to cry over this terrible tragedy. The day I cry will be the day I rejoice also in my mother’s memory, and for the first time I will discover the mystery of an infant created by love and separated by society’s judgment.

The child created by love and separated by society’s judgment had just recently settled in Aurora’s home when fifty-three kilometers away in Havana, Ofelia Domínguez Navarro smoothed her bob and launched one final effort to convince her fellow feminists in the Gran Teatro auditorium that illegitimate children deserved the same rights as legitimate ones. “In the case of an illegitimate child we are confronted with an evil that has to devolve upon somebody,” she acknowledged, “and I do not think that somebody should be the most innocent of all: the child.”

Evil. If this is the name for the moment of desire that passed between a middle-aged lawyer and his twenty-one-year-old secretary, it’s an evil that sprouted and thickened and bloomed, its branches curling across a continent and into the life of my young mother, her son, and, finally, my life too. Would I suffer a pain called shame in my most private place had my depression-addled mother not scolded and silenced me when it came to sex and my changing body?

VI

Today, at forty-six, I have faced my demons, worked through much of my shame and grief. I am a wife and mother to two young daughters, and despite ongoing chronic pain, I am content. My twins, incidentally, were born before my husband and I tied the knot, but no one in the liberal Bay Area worried over or even seemed to notice this detail.

Not long ago, I told my husband, a generous, whip-smart man who’s studying to be a psychotherapist, the story of how Fred claimed to know nothing about his grandson. “Fred was lying,” my husband offered. Scott was tired of hearing about Fred. “He sounds like an asshole. Why give him space in your writing?”

“He could have been lying,” I conceded as I adjusted my butt on the bed where I spend a good part of the day.

A few days later, on a rare autumn afternoon free of the wildfire smoke that now so often chokes the East Bay, I invited Andrea, who lives nearby, to lunch at a sidewalk café. Andrea’s in her seventies now, with only a few flashes of gray in the thick dark hair that’s our genetic signature. She often babysits the twins. Once our sandwiches were on the wrought-iron table, I broached the subject of Fred’s memory.

“Do you think he was lying?” At this point, I wasn’t sure I cared. Whether he’d repressed his grandson’s birth or merely pretended to, his larger story was swollen with irony, and I’d be thinking about it for a long time.

Andrea paused to put down her open-face salmon sandwich. “No, I don’t think so. After Fred got your book, he called me. He was shocked.

“He kept repeating, ‘No one told me I had a grandson. No one told me.’”

Read more from Issue 20.1.