Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

Janice walked the long hall, past voices behind doors, electric typewriters, obscure silences, and she looked around at the blank, dirty white ceilings, the old scrollwork nearly obliterated with curls of dust.

A young woman with short blond hair looked up.

“May I help you?”

“Am I in the birth registration department?”

“Sure are, ma’am.”

“Could you… That is, are these open to the public?”

The girl nodded. “Sign the register,” she said, turning a massive book around and handing Janice a black pen attached to the book by a beaded chain.

Janice quickly scrawled her name and the date and the girl swiveled the book back, squinting at the penmanship.

“What’s the name?”

“Templeton. Mrs. Janice Templeton.”

“Not you. The infant.”

“That’s the problem. I don’t know the infant’s name. Just the moment of birth.”

The girl raised an eyebrow, sighed, and came out from behind her tiny desk.

“That doesn’t make it easy, you know,” she said.

“I’m prepared to do all the work myself,” Janice said quickly. “If you could just show me how—”

“What year?”

“Nineteen Seventy-five.”

“You’re in luck. Anything before Nineteen Seventy-three and you’d have had to go down to the crypts. That’s the storage facility underground.”

“You mean this whole room is just for—?”

“That’s right. These are the births since January, Nineteen Seventy-three. New York is a very fertile place. Follow me. Nineteen Seventy-five is at the end of the hall.”

As they passed into the far end of the corridor, a wing opened up to view, and along the entire wall were ceiling-high metal cabinets, gray and green, with stepladders available in front. Janice paused. The vista was depressing, even overwhelming. If each cabinet was full, Janice reasoned, then the accumulated total of births would have to exceed a hundred thousand.

“Well, grab yourself a bunch of patience. This is Nineteen Seventy-five. What month was the infant born?”

“February.”

The girl strolled to the western bank of cabinets, where the front labels read “February.”

“What day?”

“The 3rd.”

“Okay, that’s your drawer up there. Get yourself a ladder. What it is, is a cross-index to registration number; you can go to the main bank behind my desk and look up the infant.”

Janice stared upward at the huge files, the dusty metal still showing where old tape had been affixed, torn away, and never washed. “How many numbers are in one drawer?”

“Never counted. I would imagine quite a few thousand. Like I said. New York must be a busy place at night. Good luck.”

The girl walked slowly back up the corridor, leaving Janice to wonder whether she was supposed to remove the drawer or take a note pad up to it. The answer was solved for her when it became clear that the drawer was permanently attached to its runners. Janice climbed back down, retrieved a pen and note pad from her purse, and climbed back up the stepladder. Perusing through the cards to find the beginning of the February 3 entries, she discovered to her dismay that each card was coated with scores of registrations, all entered in the most minuscule type she had ever seen. Worse, the entries had been accumulated in order of registration number and not time of birth, so that she would have to go through what conservatively looked like at least four thousand different numbers.

“Jesus Christ, Bill,” she moaned aloud.

After each number was the sex of the child, the exact time of delivery, family name, and two cross-reference numbers that made no sense to her.

With a deep intake of breath, Janice leaned forward, peered into the first card and began. The numbers were so small, the type so cramped, that though she squinted, it began to blur into a mass of tangled lines. It helped for her to close one eye.

After ten minutes, Janice found it easier simply to run her finger down the “Time” column, and if it read “10” on the hour, she stopped. Then she checked the AM or PM symbol behind it. If it was AM, she carefully examined the minute column. In this way, she rapidly dispensed with hundreds of numbers.

She rested her eyes. Shifting weight, she began again, with a new burst of enthusiasm. Half an hour went by, close to eight hundred registrations, until water film began forming like tears in her eyelids, but the closest she came to Ivy’s death instant was 10:50 in the morning.

“Big job,” commented the girl below her.

“What?”

The girl held up two mugs of steaming coffee.

“Take a break. Have some coffee. Then I’ll give you a hand. My name is Cathy.”

“That’s awfully kind of you,” Janice said.

She stepped gratefully down from the ladder and accepted a mug. Cathy smiled.

“I had no idea it would be like this,” Janice confessed. “I imagined it would be like checking a book out in a library.”

“It’s a real labyrinth here,” Cathy admitted.

Now Janice became aware of the extraordinary dimensions of the combined halls, and the fact that they were the only two people in it, dwarfed by tons of records.

“You looking for somebody you know?” Cathy asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Lots of mothers, they come here, looking for the kids they’ve given to adoption.”

“It’s not my own child I’m looking for.”

“You sure? Cause it’s not my business and I’d be fired for saying this, but that sort of thing just gets ugly and there’s no way it can succeed.”

“Well, I promise you, that’s not what I’m here for,” Janice said.

“Lots of times we have people from NYU or Columbia doing research. You a college person?”

“No.”

“Writer?”

“Not that, either.”

“Well, I got to admit, you got me really curious.”

Janice laughed, but she became uncomfortable under Cathy’s scrutiny.

“Let’s just say it’s a kind of coincidence I’m looking for,” Janice finally said.

Cathy shrugged. “Well, nothing else makes sense around here, either.”

By a mutual signal, they began. Cathy pulled a second stepladder to the file and, referring to the time that Janice wrote on a slip of paper, began to search through the rear files of the spacious drawer. They worked quickly, flipping cards back with mechanical monotony, pausing now and then to refresh their eyes.

In ten minutes, Cathy found a 10:43 and noted down the registration number. Janice peered over at the card to verify it. Her heart began to race. Somehow the number jumped upward from the mass of numbers and letters as though it belonged to her personally.

Fifteen minutes later, Janice came across another 10:43, but a peculiar symbol followed it. Cathy stopped to look at it.

“I think that means deceased,” Cathy said. “Copy the number and we’ll check it in the main bank.”

When they were through, fingers sore, backs twisted, they stepped down to the main floor. Cathy slammed the drawer shut, and it was like an explosion that burst over their ears.

Janice had a premonition that the other baby did, in fact, die at or before childbirth. Leaving exactly one child born at the minute Ivy’s vital functions permanently ceased. It would have been better, Janice thought, if there had been a thousand possibilities. Or none. Either way, there would have been no way to trace. Reluctantly, she followed the girl back up the corridor. They edged past the desk and went to a squat, black bin divided into internal ridges, labels affixed in poor handwriting to the outside.

Cathy checked one of the registration numbers, rolled through a hundred circular containers of microfilm, and finally pulled out a loose-wrapped strip of black film. While Janice watched, she fitted it into a machine, pulled the blinds shut, and turned on the machine light. Wheeling rapidly, Cathy came to the number.