By Blood Read Online Free

doctor’s voice then softened: And this does bring us back to the subject we were discussing before the break. Remember how we talked about the ways this mirrors your relationship with your mother, this profound sense of otherness?
    The client snorted her impatience. She loudly drummed on the arm of her seat with her fingers and turned herself this way and that amidst much creaking of leather. I told you, she said finally. I don’t want to go into this again. I
like
not knowing where I’ve come from. I
like
it. Every child thinks it must have been switched at birth, these can’t possibly be my real parents, it’s all a big mistake. Well, I just happened to have more evidence than they do. Mine really aren’t my parents. I told you this a hundred times: I am not adopted! I have
mysterious origins
!
    Dr. Schussler took in a breath and then released it. For several seconds, neither client nor therapist moved. They had arrived at last at the heart of the matter. But alas the hour was too far advanced. What came next were the softly murmured words with which every therapy session inevitably ends: Our time is up, the doctor said.

4.
     
     
    So this was the mystery the patient wished to keep hidden: She was adopted! Improbable as this may seem, it was her adopted status, not her lesbianism, that produced in me the keener excitement. For my best friend while growing up, Paul Beleiter, had been adopted, a fact he had worn as a badge of identity. I was overjoyed to think of him! When we were fifteen, Paul escaped from our meager town. His parents had threatened to withdraw financial support if he did not prepare for a course of engineering; he shrugged them off as one would shed so many ill-fitting clothes. He moved into the rooming house of an old widower, then on to an existence all his own: Manhattan, a scholarship to a special high school of art, Greenwich Village, friends who smoked Gitanes, Jewish girlfriends with haloes of frizzy hair.
    How I had longed to follow him! It was the time in my life when my ancestors had already put their damp hands on me. Any hope that I would not emulate my father was dashed (or nearly so) when I followed not his example (alcohol and pills) but the more elegant method of Virginia Woolf: into the river with stones in my pockets. I was appointed with my first mental health practitioner (she of the ivy trembling at the window). And there was Paul, already a man on his own terms, graceful and full of laughter, freed from the strict, brittle people who had raised him.
    I was certain it was the adoption that had given him the courage. Paul was not adopted as one would say “I am Protestant” or “I am from Michigan,” but as a quiddity, an indwelling trait that set him apart from we poor, owned, claimed children of our mothers’ wombs. His alien genes had blessed him; they had given him the knowledge of his difference, his singularity. Now it thrilled me to think that I, sitting quietly behind a thin door, could follow the psychological turns whereby my dear friend had extricated himself from the engulfment of family; whereby he, like the patient, had come to the realization: These are not my parents.
    If Paul—and now the patient—could extricate themselves, why not I? Why could I not learn the art of being parentless from these adoptees: these very models of self-creation?
    At that moment, it seemed to me that my relocation to San Francisco had not been a stumbling error after all. The sudden leave, the dismal house by the beach I had rented, the ad in the newspaper that had led me to this strange office building in a rough neighborhood—each of these steps now seemed a requisite stage in a propitious process designed to bring me to Room 807, to the adopted patient, and, through her, to a possible release from the clammy hand of ancestry. Such a release had been the quest of my many psychological explorations; and to think that now I sat so close—physically and psychically—to the nub