“…the last person seen holding the baby was a woman named Hazel Albright,” I read, in the sheriff records room, and I felt the words go through me like cold water. The deputy note was typed on an old machine, with the letter e a little crooked. It was dated December 1947. It said that the infant girl of Lillian Sutter, aged seventeen, had been left in a pram outside the Methodist church during the Christmas pageant, and that when the mother came out, the pram was empty. Witnesses had seen Mrs. Albright carrying a bundle to a car. They had assumed it was her own.
Hazel was my mother. She had been thirty four that winter. She and my father, Ray, had lost two babies in three years, and I had known it all my life as one of those quiet family stories nobody told aloud. A sorrow in the walls of the house. I put my hand over my mouth. The clerk, a kind, plump woman named Janet, brought me a paper cup of water and sat beside me. She said, softly, “Mrs. Albright, take your time. It has been a long road to this table.”
I read the rest of the file with my glasses in my hand. Lillian Mae Sutter had never given up. She had written to the sheriff every December for thirty years. She had walked every road in the county with a photograph. In 1981 she had moved to a farm on Route 22 in Fairfield County, and the file said, in a clerk neat script, that the case remained open at her request. Not closed. Open. For seventy seven years, a seventeen year old girl and then a woman had refused to let the file be shut.
A birth certificate in a recipe box, a missing child report still open, and a name in a deputy note.
I asked Janet whether she thought Lillian was still alive. She said she did not know, but that she could find out. She went to a telephone and made three calls. When she came back, she was smiling and crying at once. She said, “Joan, there is a Lillian Mae Sutter Hollis, ninety six years old, in the Pickaway County care center, in Circleville. Her daughter is her guardian. She is sharp as a tack and sits by the window every afternoon.” I could not feel my feet. I said, “Does she know?”
I did not sleep that night. I sat in my kitchen in Lancaster, in my mother old chair, with the recipe box open on the table and Hazel note in my hand. Joan, forgive me. Lillian did not give you up. I took you. I read the note a hundred times, and each time I heard the voice of a woman who had loved me enough to do something unforgivable, and who had been punished for it every day by her own conscience. I did not know whether I could forgive her. I only knew that I could not stop loving her.
In the morning I drove to Circleville with a pot of my mother vegetable soup on the seat beside me, which seemed the only sensible thing to bring. The care center was bright and quiet. An aide led me down a corridor with a handrail to a room at the end. A tiny woman with a halo of white hair sat by the window, in a blue shawl, with a crossword on her lap. She turned her head when I came in. She looked at me for a very long time. Then she said, in a clear small voice, “You have my mother eyes.”
I knelt by her chair. I could not say a word. She put her thin, spotted hand on my cheek and held it there, and said, “They told me you had been taken to Indiana. They told me a lot of things.” I told her my name. I told her I was Joan, that I had grown up on Chestnut Street, that I had been a schoolteacher for thirty eight years, that I had three grandchildren. She listened to everything with her head tilted, like a bird. When I finished, she said, “Did you have a good life, Joan?” I said, “I had a loved one.”
That was the truth, and I did not want to hide it. I told her that Hazel had been a good mother. I told her about the apple pies, and the nightly prayers, and the way she braided my hair for school. I did not make it any smaller than it was. I told her what my mother had written. Lillian was silent. Then she took a handkerchief from her sleeve and said, with great gentleness, “Hazel lost two babies. I have thought about that all my life. I have been angry for a long time. I am very tired of being angry.”
Her daughter, Marcia, a handsome woman of fifty eight with her mother chin, arrived at three, and stood in the doorway for a full minute without moving. Then she crossed the room, and took my hands, and said, “I always knew I had a sister somewhere. Mama set a place for her at Christmas.” We looked at each other. I had never had a sibling. Now, in a care center in Circleville, in my seventy eighth year, I had a sister and a mother in one afternoon, and a place at a table.
Lillian lived another fourteen months. I visited every Tuesday and Saturday, with soup, and the recipe box, and photographs. She taught me to make her mother rye bread. The last time I saw her, she asked me to read her the label on the box, in Hazel looping hand. Joan, forgive me. She nodded slowly. Then she said, “Close the case, honey.” At the sheriff office, Janet stamped the old folder closed with a red stamp, and then, with a smile, put it in my arms. I took it home and put it in the box with the recipes.