Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

I poured us both more coffee. It was cold and thick. “It would’ve been better for you to write about the termination itself. Maybe it’d help you. I’m not just saying that because you’re using me.”

She didn’t flinch. “I don’t think it would have been better. I want to describe what someone goes through when they refuse to be a mother, or when they realize they just can’t do it. I mean, okay, so I knew what it was for me. I knew that I was afraid of yet another relationship in which I care about someone a hell of a lot more than they care about me. For that to play out between me and a kid, for all our lives… I don’t regret the termination. I know I cried all over you about it being my last shot at having a kid, but I think I’ve done all my crying over this. I hate that my life is teaching me that I can only be loved if I put my love out of reach and just drift above people until they love my remoteness. I’m not just talking about romances, but about friendships too. Whoa, Mia, you’re too intense. I get a lot of that. So I know that I won’t be loved the way I need to be. I know that’s not going to happen in my life. I’ve got other stuff to do, I can just get on and do that other stuff. But say I go ahead and print that, it’s just a sob story, easy enough for most readers to think they understand. If I’m going to talk about this thing, I don’t want to be confirming anybody’s theories about the way life goes — not even my own. So I was thinking. I was thinking, maybe I could do a well-disguised piece about Olivia Whitman. She sent Clara away. But then she raised her other two. I wondered if I could write about you and Snow for a second, but Snow isn’t your kid anyway. And then I thought about your nameless mother, and I thought she might be dead. But if she was alive…”

“Is she?”

Mia leaned forward in her chair. “Boy, don’t you get it? When I started searching, I started with the rat catcher. I thought I could find your mother through him, and that turned out to be true. I searched public records for anything connected to Frank Novak and Francis Novak and Frantisek Novak and I found a few, but none that led me to that address on Rutgers Street that my pal mailed that money to years ago. I went down to New York for two weeks and pestered poor innocent Francises and Frantiseks. I stood outside the brownstone you grew up in, trying to switch on X-ray vision. I looked up your birth certificate—”

“I haven’t got a birth certificate.” I’d been proud of that, having to enroll at high school with an affidavit sworn by the rat catcher that he was my father and that I’d been born on the date he said I’d been born on.

“It’s on record that you have. But this is stuff you could’ve looked up if you’d wanted to… anyhow, your birth certificate says your mother is Frances Novak and your father is unnamed. The Frank Novak who raised you doesn’t officially exist.”

“Doesn’t exist?”

“Not officially.”

I cackled. I couldn’t help it. She didn’t know what she was saying.

“Keep hearing me out. I’m not just talking out of my ass here. I did a lot of work on this and I can show you all the paperwork. That’s why I haven’t been around much. Maybe you thought I was moping. Maybe I hardly crossed your mind. Anyhow, my earlier searches came to nothing because I’d been looking for men. Frances Amelia Novak was born in Brooklyn in 1902. Her father, Sandor, was a Hungarian immigrant, a concert cellist turned delivery-truck driver, and her mother, Dinah, was an Irish-American seamstress who made these quilts… I went to see one of them at the folk art museum, the tiny one in Midtown. It was art, what your grandma made. Frances was a scamp with a knockout smile—”

Mia was showing me a series of xeroxed photographs. Oh, God.

“And she was super, super smart. It was a pretty mixed neighborhood — linguistically, I mean — the warmest reception a colored messenger boy would get around there in those days were questions like ‘Do you think this is Harlem?’ But Frances picked up snippets of Czech and Dutch from the neighbors, as well as speaking Magyar, her father’s first language, fluently. She brought out the best side of her more idealistic teachers, made them feel that she had just the kind of intellect they’d got into teaching to help develop. She’d ask for additional reading and extra assignments. You’d think the other kids would’ve hated her, but they were glad for her, voted her Most Likely to Succeed. She made it into Barnard on a scholarship, got her BS in her chosen field of psychology, embarked on postgraduate research, maybe with a view to becoming a faculty member… that’s what she told her friends, anyway. She knew that the first female member of the psych faculty had been taken on less than five years ago, and they’d taken her on as an unpaid lecturer. She knew that she’d need more than just a flair for the subject, more than just curiosity, she’d need to be utterly single-minded in her pursuit of a faculty position, and the research itself meant more to her than that. She was interested in sexuality. More specifically, she was interested in proving that homosexuality isn’t a mental illness. But she never finished her paper—”

“How do you know what she thought and what she was interested in?”

“I met four of her former girlfriends for coffee, and they all brought letters with them. Letters she’d written to them when they were all at Barnard together. I’d thought the friendships were platonic, but the letters get pretty raunchy in places, and all three of the ex-girlfriends said, ‘Yes, yes, we were true friends, but we were lovers as well, you know’—these serene intellectual women who only really get bashful about abstract theory. They brought me photos too. Look at her. Apparently impressionable young woman after impressionable young woman would just up and leave their boyfriends for her. I know she’s your mother, but you get the appeal, right? I don’t know when Frances started expressing a preference for females, but it was most certainly by the time she was in the final year of her BS studies.”

I shuffled through all the photos of my glamorously disheveled bluestocking mother, hair as long as Lady Godiva’s at a time when short hair was all the rage. She had the look of someone who sings inside themselves, silently and continually; at least I hope that’s what people mean when they say someone has a twinkle in their eye. Hers was there even when she was playing possessive, her arms tangled around the woman on her lap. “What happened to her, Mia?”

“This is exactly what Frances’s girlfriends wanted to know. They all showed up hoping I could tell them. She was twenty-nine and that was supposed to be the year she got her doctorate, but she skipped campus and the apartment on Morningside that she shared with two other women. She was there on a Tuesday — spotted in the library — she asked one of the women I met with to loan her some money, but her friend was just as broke as she was. Then on Wednesday she didn’t show up to a talk she’d agreed to give to some undergraduates. She’d never done anything like that; she was the kind who showed up to lectures even when she was ill. Nobody seems to remember her as being particularly highly strung, either. By Friday her friends were making active efforts to track her down. Then other friends suggested she didn’t want to be tracked down, that she was just working hard on her paper. But working where? She hadn’t returned to the Morningside apartment since Tuesday evening. Her roommates wanted to call the police but everybody said they were overreacting. Her parents ended up reporting her missing in April 1933.”

“I was born in November 1933,” I volunteered.