Finding Out

I had a secret to confess to my mother, who was coming from the Midwest to California to visit me. The year before, I had broken my engagement to a man. Mom knew this. What she didn’t know was the reason: I’d fallen in love with a woman. 

My mother and I had always been close, but I sometimes felt there were things about my life she could not understand. In her mind, my happiness and well-being were synonymous with marrying the right man. Still, her visit felt like the time to come clean; after all, my girlfriend lived with me.

The day my mother arrived, I poured myself a glass of wine, took a deep breath, and blurted out the whole story. She was surprised but not as shocked as I’d thought she would be. It turned out I was the one about to be shocked.

Before meeting and marrying my father, my mother said, she’d had a five-year relationship with a woman.

“Does Dad know?” I asked.

“No!” she answered, making me promise I would never tell him or anyone else in our family. I promised but felt sad that, after nearly fifty years, she still needed to be so secretive.

My mother told me she had met the woman in college. After two years, their friendship turned romantic; the woman already had a young daughter, and they became a family, but it didn’t last. My mother said their breakup so devastated her that she saw a therapist for months afterward. Only their closest friends knew about their relationship — after all, it was the 1950s, and though my mother and her lover lived in a big city, they dared not even hold hands in public.

My mother admitted that, though she’d been married twice, she had never felt that same kind of love for anyone else since. But she said she wasn’t sorry she’d married my father, because she had my brother and me to show for it.

So I was not the only keeper of secrets in the family. The guilt I’d experienced over leaving my fiancé and hiding the truth suddenly seemed like nothing compared to what my mother had endured. I still wish things could have been different for her, and I am thankful that they are different for me.

Kennedy Grace
San Diego, California

During World War ii my grandfather Frank died aboard his submarine while it was stationed in New London, Connecticut. The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the stomach, and it was ruled a suicide, though there was speculation in my family that he had been murdered or that the death had been accidental, because he’d shown no symptoms of depression.

I am named after him and grew up feeling that I had inherited his mantle, which carried with it the mystery surrounding his death. When I was fifteen, I asked my grandmother, then in her sixties, exactly how my grandfather had died. She could still barely talk about it. An inquest had been held to determine the circumstances of his death, she said, but she’d always felt that some kind of coverup had taken place.

In the winter of 2000 I found myself with a three-hour layover in the Honolulu airport, and I decided to visit Pearl Harbor. At the submarine museum a helpful curator produced a thick file on my grandfather’s sub. (It had been transferred to the Pacific and had gone on to great fame in the war.) In the file I found a letter written by a former crew member stating that my grandfather had shot himself on board the boat while it had been stationed in Connecticut. I photocopied all the papers in the file and returned to the airport just in time to catch my flight to Los Angeles.

The next morning I began looking up phone numbers for names listed in the file and eventually tracked down Captain S., my grandfather’s immediate supervisor, now in his late eighties. He told me the rest of the story.

My grandfather Frank, he said, had been sexually harassing one of the enlisted men, threatening to make his professional life miserable if he didn’t accept my grandfather’s sexual advances. The young man had decided to report the incidents to his commanding officer. Another sailor testified to similar treatment, and the captain arrested Frank and held him on the boat until he could be transferred to the base brig. He was confined to quarters when he shot himself.

Had his death been classified as a simple suicide, Captain S. told me, my grandmother, who had five young kids to raise, would not have received wartime widow benefits. So, during the inquest, the ship’s officers had closed ranks and sworn that Frank had endured severe mental hardship on their most recent patrol in the North Sea, making his death “war-related.”

“It seemed,” Captain S. said, “like the honorable thing to do.”

Francis B.
Port Townsend, Washington

I was attending art school outside Los Angeles and had been up for thirty-six hours working on a painting when the phone rang. The voice at the other end said, “Is this Susan?” 

I said yes, though I was immediately suspicious. My adoptive sister had been having her druggie friends call me on her behalf to ask for cash. I steeled myself for another appeal.

“My name is Margie Grey. I’m your sister. . . .” I waited for her to finish and say she was my sister’s friend, but instead there was silence.

“What?”

“You were born in May 1961, right?”

“Yes . . .” Her voice sounded familiar. In fact, it sounded like my own when it was recorded and played back to me.

Margie said she had been looking for me for almost ten years. She was my biological half sister.

Contrary to what I had assumed, my birth mother had not been an unwed teenager when she’d given me up for adoption at birth. She’d been thirty-six and married with a four-year-old daughter —  Margie —  and I’d been the result of an extramarital affair.

Margie’s father (my birth mother’s husband) was mentally ill and had admitted himself to a hospital. While he was institutionalized, my birth mother, Kathleen, met a gi at the local army base and had an affair with him. The gi, who was transferred to Alaska just after he learned of the pregnancy, assumed Kathleen would have an abortion across the border in Mexico. But Kathleen was Catholic. She decided to have the baby and keep it.

After her husband found out, he sent her a letter from the mental hospital, threatening to divorce her and take Margie away if she kept me. So Kathleen gave me up for adoption by a well-to-do family who already had one adopted daughter.

When I was born, Kathleen was the society editor for the newspaper in her small Southwestern town. To help her save face, a colleague arranged for the paper to report that she’d had a stillbirth. Even Margie didn’t know I existed until she became pregnant at seventeen and Kathleen told her about me.

Now Margie said Kathleen wanted to call me in a half-hour. Was that ok?

How could I say no?

Thirty minutes later the phone rang again, and my birth mother and I talked for more than an hour. I was astonishingly comfortable with her. We had the same sense of humor — even the same laugh.

We met in person during the Christmas holiday. Margie came too. Kathleen had tracked down my birth father, who was now married and had two sons. So, with that one phone call from Margie, I acquired a birth mother, a half sister, a niece and nephew, a birth father, and two half brothers.

Kathleen died of leukemia just eighteen months after I’d met her. One of the things she left me was a white box with “1961” written across the top. It was full of sympathy cards sent to her after my “stillbirth.”

Susan B.
Maplewood, New Jersey

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