Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

Dena Nordstrom, Girl Reporter

Elmwood Springs, Missouri

1978

The minute Dena walked in the door, she called Dr. Diggers and told her about her mother.

Diggers sounded as surprised as Dena had been. “Well, I must say of all the things I suspected, this was not one of them, and I should have guessed. Me of all people! When I first started in practice, half of my patients were passing. Oh, yes, unfortunately I know all about it and I tell you, it was a bitch. I don’t care if you were a Jew passing for Gentile or black passing for white, it was a tricky business no matter how you slice it. The point is: How do you feel about it?”

“Betrayed, I guess. Confused. Lost, like I never really knew my mother.”

“Sweetie pie, there was a big part of her you didn’t know. But at least now we have a pretty good explanation of why she seemed so remote. No wonder you felt she wasn’t there for you. She was probably worried to death twenty-four hours a day. Passing is a complicated issue, with a lot of serious problems that go along with it. Guilt, confused identity, feelings of isolation, deception, abandonment. It’s very stressful; I’ve seen it drive people right out of their minds.”

“I understand all that, but I just can’t understand why she didn’t tell me. I could have helped her.”

“I can’t be sure of the exact reason, but I can tell you it wasn’t because she didn’t trust you; it was just plain fear. When you live a lie like that, people tend to start to get paranoid. She probably was afraid to trust anybody.”

“But I wasn’t anybody. I was her daughter.”

“Yes, but don’t forget you were the closest thing to her. She might have been afraid of losing you, afraid if you knew, you wouldn’t love her. I’ve seen it happen before. People push away the very ones they don’t want to lose trying to hold them. Listen, I’m not saying what your mother did was right, but in her defense, she had good reason to be afraid. You have to understand how things were back then; when she was a girl, there was no such thing as integration. Black and white were still two very different worlds.”

“I know, but it was 1959—couldn’t she see things were changing? New laws were being passed?”

“No, I don’t think so. From what you’ve told me about your mother, I suspect she was not able to see much of anything going on around her. People who are passing are too busy looking over their own shoulders, trying to cover their tracks, to notice much else. She was probably stuck in the same old fear, with the same old tape running around in her head, and couldn’t see past it.”

“Do you think it had anything to do with her just disappearing like that?”

“Maybe. People who have disappeared from one life often do it again.”

“But why then? Why at Christmas? Why couldn’t she have waited?”

“Oh, sweetie, it could have been one of a hundred different reasons. She may have met someone or she may have just reached a breaking point, living with that much stress every day. You know, everybody handles stress differently. But a good possibility is that it just built up over the years and she couldn’t take the pressure any longer and one day she had some sort of psychic break, lost touch with reality. In plain English, one day she may have just snapped and took off. You hear about it all the time. People leave for the store and never come back home, just disappearing off the face of the earth.”

“Is that what you think happened?”

“Well, that would be my guess, based on what we know. But the important thing is for you to finally come to terms with the fact that her problems had nothing to do with the way she felt about you. She gave you all the love she was capable of giving under the circumstances. It wasn’t as much as you needed but there it is; it’s unfair and it’s lousy but that’s life, and at least now we know the basic cause of your problems. The next thing for us to do is to try and get beyond them and get on with your life. All right, now, when are you coming back to New York?”

“I’m not sure, I haven’t thought about it yet.”

“No, you are probably still in a state of shock. Do me a favor and take some time before you make any decisions about anything, OK?”

That night Norma and Macky brought her a hot supper.

When Dena told them what Dr. Diggers thought had happened, a look of relief came over Norma’s face. “I am so glad to finally find out what was the matter. I was always afraid it was something that we had done, or maybe it was just us she didn’t like.”

For the next three days Dena still felt dazed. But a week later, as her mind began to clear, she woke in the middle of the night and sat straight up in bed. Something was wrong. Something did not add up. She was too good a reporter not to know when a piece was missing from a story. Dr. Diggers’s theory had sounded good at the time, but it was too simple, too pat.

Her mother had loved her, she knew that now; she would not have left unless there had been something terribly wrong. Her mother had been a strong woman. There must have been another reason beyond stress. Something else her mother was afraid of. But what? There were still too many unanswered questions.

Why had her mother left Elmwood Springs so abruptly in 1948? Who was the man who spoke German?

As soon as the sun came up she made her first call.

“Christine, it’s Dena.”

“Oh, hello. How are you!”

“I have a question for you. You mentioned that there had been something in the papers about my mother’s brother, Theo, and I was wondering if you could tell me what year that was and the name of the newspaper.”

“Oh, dear, it must have been in the early forties, but I don’t have any idea what the newspaper was. I know it was one of the big ones. But I do remember the name of the woman who wrote for it; would that be of any help to you?”

“Yes.”

“Ida Baily Chambless.”

“Who was she?”

“Oh, just some stupid woman who set herself up as a society columnist of sorts. I never read it. But Daddy said she was nothing but a Georgia nobody who thought she should be invited everywhere. She had some run-in with your grandfather years before and she just went after poor Theo with a vengeance. Pretended she was on some crusade but she was just jealous. If she couldn’t pass, by God, nobody was going to pass. Honey, I was lucky she didn’t come after me.”

“Is she still alive?”

“No, thank heavens. Daddy said she finally got herself murdered.”

Dena’s heart skipped a beat. “Murdered … when?”

“Oh, a long time ago. I was still living in New York. It must have been 1948, somewhere around then.”

Dena’s heart skipped two beats. 1948 was the same year she and her mother had left Elmwood Springs in such a hurry.