The Lost Story

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, September/October 2002
By Susan Ito

Illustration by Bob Bechtol

It is a miraculous thing, to search for something for decades, to come to doubt its existence outside your own memory, and then to have it handed to you, solid and whole.

For 30 years I have yearned for a story that was read to me when I was 12 by a woman in a beige bathrobe, the mother of a summer friend of mine — I don't remember either of their first names anymore. The husband and father, who lived with his family in Charlotte, North Carolina, was a sales trainee of my father's. My mother and I had driven south from New Jersey to where he was working the Gift Show in the cavernous Merchandise Mart.

The man, named Roberts, was large and bearded, and I had a bit of a crush on him. He looked like Grizzly Adams, and he lumbered after my father, hugging a clipboard of order forms, trying to learn how to be a salesman. He had a girl my age, and after a day or two of playing waitress together — taking orders of coffee and biscuits for the salesmen and the customers — she invited me home for a sleep over. They lived in a small house with a big yard, almost smothered by green foliage. I remember a pleasant dinner, and bathing in the sweet drawl of their Carolina voices. The girl and I played a game with dice on the floor of their parlor, and she showed me her cheerleading outfit, and the paperback yearbook from her junior high school, and we pointed out which boy was cutest on each page.

But my eyes kept drifting to the wall of books that climbed to the ceiling of that room, and after a while I went and stood by them, holding my head sideways to read the titles. Our home did not have even one bookshelf (although we had four televisions) other than the one that was built into the desk in my bedroom. All the books in the house were mine. I had not been fully aware until that moment that adults, other than teachers and librarians, liked to read as well.

The mother must have seen me standing there, touching the spines of her books. That entire collection belonged to her. She pulled out heavy volumes and laid them in my hands, and then pulled them away again to flip excitedly through the pages, saying, "Listen. You have to listen to this." And she read to me in an emotional voice, while her daughter tapped her foot — irritated at having her friend stolen away. I was tugged between them — between Dick­ens and the feather-haired eighth grade boys in the yearbook — and I tried to be true to my peer, but in the end I sat on an ottoman while the mother drew more books down from the shelves, and the girl went to bed alone, sulking in her baby-doll pajamas.

We stayed up half the night, that woman in her 30s and I. I sat there as open as a baby bird, while she fed me stories. And as the night cooled into a gray dawn and sleepiness scratched at our eyes, she said, "Just one more."

She opened a book with fine yellowed pages. "Close your eyes, sweetheart, and listen to this," she told me. "This is Thomas Wolfe." Then she read a passage about a man trying desperately to remember his brother, who had died when he was only 12, and the man himself was four. And all he could remember was his brother's berry-colored birthmark, and how the brother tried to teach him to say his name, Grover, but he couldn't, it was too hard for his small mouth. It was a heartbreaking story of memory and loss, and trying desperately to grasp something elusive. She cried as she read it, and something about it broke my heart.

A few months later, my father informed me that Roberts was never going to make a proper salesman, and they fell off our radar forever. I tried to find that story again for years, every time I went to a bookstore or library. I searched for Thomas Wolfe, convinced that what I had heard was either from Look Homeward, Angel, or You Can't Go Home Again. That was what the story was about, wasn't it? Not being able to go home. I pored through the pages, searching for the little boy with the brother named Grover, for any mention of the birthmark. But they had disappeared as thoroughly as the Roberts family.

And I wonder how my friend's mother knew — but of course she couldn't have — that I would grow up to be like the man in the story, someone who was always searching for my own elusive beginnings. Did she know that I was adopted? That Wolfe's story would lodge in my heart and never really leave? That I have been driven my entire life to go back and back to a place before speech and memory, to find the woman who gave birth to me at midnight, who would bring me by taxi to a Manhattan agency and then flee?

I did not think of Mrs. Roberts, or that story, for many years, although it came up at strange intervals: when I had a boyfriend with a brother named Grover, when the parents of a friend of mine sold her childhood home and she wept for the room she would never see again. At the core of that yearned-after place sat a woman with a book in her hands.

Recently I found myself online in a place where people who love books join together. Readerville.com reminded me of Mrs. Roberts — it's a neighborhood she would have known well. I typed the question, never fully expecting a response: Did anybody know of a book by Thomas Wolfe, something with a boy named Grover and his brother? In less than 10 minutes someone posted an answer for me: "The Lost Boy." It had been in a 1937 short story collection by Wolfe called The Hills Beyond. There was an underlined link.

I was breathless as I clicked — and then the words unfurled. The story was all there, and as I read it, I was back in the middle of a North Carolina night, sitting in my nightshirt next to a woman who is now in her 60s. I was stunned at how it moved me, and how I understood her tears at the passing of time and people, and how places and memory crumble away.

I come from many places. One of them is a mint-green house in New Jersey, where I lived from the time I was adopted at four months old. My mother still lives alone in that house in Park Ridge, where my room has the same dark Ethan Allen furniture, and the drawers are filled with long-dry pens and folded up notes I passed to my girlfriends during math class. There are small square snapshots of my summer days at camp, of my Kee­shond dog who has been dead since I was in college.

The quarter-acre yard is the same, and every time I go back it seems to shrink by a few feet. The stilt-house that my father built with my uncles has long been torn down, although I can see a round patch from its cement foundation; and I remember my cousins and I painting the bannister that surrounded the house in rainbow colors, the bright yellow and the dull imperfect purple. I remember the tarred blacktop of the driveway and the snake that my uncle trapped underneath a tar bucket.

In my father's workshop, I can see his yellowed goggles, the great saw that whined its song through the house, the sawdust on the concrete floor. The babyfood jars filled with tiny tacks and screws are lined up on the workroom shelf, with their labels still legible in his narrow, slanted print. There is the radio that he built by hand, its giant circular speaker booming into this room, his favorite room. When I stand at his workbench and write my name in the sawdust, I can hear my father's voice lingering in the walls. "Hey Rascal," he says, and if I close my eyes I can feel it, his hand on my head, his warm breath on my face.

But I am also from another place, a place that I have never seen. I am a person built of secrets and the voices of those who made me are nothing more than whispers in my dreams. I strain back to a house I may never find, to people whose names I will never be able to pronounce. But for everything that is lost, something else is found. In my long, searching life I have somehow found words, and the capacity to build a life in story.

"The years dropped off like fallen leaves: the face came back again — the soft dark oval," Wolfe wrote in his story, "the dark eyes, the soft brown berry on the neck, the raven hair, all bending down, approaching — the whole appearing to him ghost-wise, intent and instant."

Thomas Wolfe's tale of a lost brother broke open the heart of a woman whose name I don't remember. And in the dark humid night, while everyone else slept, she gave me the key that binds us all together, those of us who have lost things, who have known suffering and joy and those moments that melt in the smallest instant and then disappear. Stories are a way of holding those moments, either true or imagined, of finding once again the brother with the berry-colored birthmark, the father who smiled through a cloud of sawdust, the anon­ymous evening when we sparked into being.

Talk about it: The Bibliolounge

—Susan Ito is the co-editor of A Ghost At Heart's Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. She is a Creative Nonfiction Editor at LiteraryMama, where she writes a monthly column about intergenerational living called "Life in the Sandwich." Her blog is ReadingWritingLiving and she is currently recommending The English American by Alison Larkin, which she describes as "a funny/sad/wise brand-spanking-new novel about a British adoptee on a journey to find her roots in Kentucky."

This article was first published in The Readerville Journal print magazine, September/October 2002.