Track 3 I See the Moon
Track 3
I See the Moon
Beatrix
Beatrix Silver strolled along Middle Path, a ten-foot-wide tree-lined gravel walk that ran the length of the Kenyon College campus. She had been walking that same path since she’d first arrived there as a freshman over thirty years before. Now a tenured English professor and a world-renowned expert on Henry James, she still marveled at its beauty.
Kenyon College, in the small town of Gambier, Ohio, was everything one would imagine of a two-hundred-year-old liberal arts campus. Tall trees and gothic architecture towered above idealistic young minds. Walking through the grounds never got old, whether it was a spring day like today or, at other times of year, crossing the snow or fallen leaves.
A casual end-of-semester get-together was being hosted that night for the English Department at the dean’s house on Wiggins Street. Bea usually looked forward to these potluck events, a chance to socialize with faculty and show off her mother’s famous chocolate cake recipe, but baking it last night had thrown her into a hysterical fit of tears. So much so that she worried the cake would taste salty.
She had remembered that it was her daughter’s thirtieth birthday, and she hadn’t laid eyes on her since she had brought her into the world. This wasn’t something she usually cried about—not since the child was a baby or a toddler or a little girl—but something about this very adult milestone set her off.
Three decades ago, Beatrix Silver had given birth in a hospital a few towns away from school. She hadn’t even realized she was pregnant until well into her second trimester, when her best friend came to visit from New York City and saw her naked. By then, she was about five months along with a small but rather distinct baby bump. Bea hadn’t noticed either the change in her figure or the fact that she hadn’t gotten her period since the summer. She was often irregular, and her weight had fluctuated throughout college.
She was like a girl on one of those Phil shows (Doctor or Donahue) who goes to the bathroom with a stomachache and comes out with a baby.
Her friend had insisted she call her mom, who promised not to tell her dad and arrived in Gambier the next day. Bea had never even been to the gynecologist until her mother took her then. The doctor, a warm woman with cold hands, told them all they needed to know about the adoption process in Ohio. Neither Bea nor her mother raised the possibility of keeping the baby. The father was not in the picture whatsoever and really, at twenty, Bea was just a baby herself.
The pregnancy reopened wounds she was still recovering from, compounding her regret, and fueling her anger over the circumstances of the baby’s conception. It was easier, at the time, to blame what had happened on everyone but herself.
Bea hid the remainder of her pregnancy behind big flannels and leggings and glasses of ginger ale that she passed off as gin and tonics. The warm weather made her belly harder to hide, but she had managed. It helped that her boobs had gotten so large that they extended out farther than her baby bump, distracting anyone who looked at her twice.
Her mother returned to the college a week before her due date, camping out across the street at the Kenyon Inn. Beatrix went there every afternoon after class and fell asleep beside her mother in the four-poster bed while her classmates were out celebrating the end of their four years in Gambier.
The first cramps of labor started a few days later in the middle of the night. Bea slipped quietly from her dorm room and headed to the Inn. She stood at the front door knocking like a loon, not caring who she woke as long as someone let her in to see her mommy. She still called her that at the time, making it all the more absurd that she would soon become one herself.
At the hospital, her mother filled out the paperwork.
“What is your address at school?” her mom had asked.
“Just put our home address,” Bea had replied.
“No, your school address is better,” her mother had insisted.
She remembered the day like it was yesterday. The antiseptic smell of the hospital room, the pain, the pushing, the pressure inside her that felt like a freight train barreling through a pinhole. She couldn’t believe how barbaric the whole thing was.
Early the next morning, a six-pound, three-ounce lavender-eyed girl with a tuft of dark hair like Bea’s entered the world. The nurses tucked her next to Bea in her bed, giving her a chance to meet her child. For the first time during the whole ordeal, Bea fantasized about keeping her.
Not knowing what to do, and still in quite a bit of shock, Bea broke into a lullaby that her grandmother used to sing called “I See the Moon, and the Moon Sees Me.”
When she got to the second verse, the magnitude of what was happening sank in.
Once I had a heart, it was good as new.
I gave this heart from me to you.
Take care of it, like I have done.
’Cause you have two now, and I have none.
Her baby girl had already got ahold of her heart, and soon she would disappear with it. Bea thought some more about changing her mind, about keeping her, and gingerly brought it up when her mother entered the room.
“Do you want to hold her, Mommy?”
Her mother reached her hands under the baby’s bottom and scooped up the tiny pink package. Holding the infant in front of her like a football, Caroline Silver stared from her granddaughter’s lavender eyes to her daughter’s brown ones.
“Does she look like me, you know, when I was born?” Bea asked.
“A little, I think.”
“Too bad we can’t keep her,” Bea mumbled, passively challenging the plan, waiting to gauge her mother’s reaction. As was typical of her mother’s British upbringing, she remained unemotional and reserved. If her father were there, he may have been halfway out the door with the baby by now. Maybe she had confided in the wrong parent.
But when the social worker came in a few minutes later, Bea signed the papers like she had agreed to, without a word to the contrary.
It was only when she was back in the city, with post-partum hormones fueling her pain and regret, that she truly confronted her feelings.
“You did what was right by her; you were a good mother,” Caroline insisted, wiping away Bea’s tears. “There will be other babies, Beatrix, and they’ll be born under far better circumstances. I’m sure of it.”
But Beatrix never had another baby. And the song that she sang in the hospital, the one her grandmother had sung to her growing up, became their song.
Bea would look up at the night sky, wherever she was, picture her baby girl looking up at the same moon, and sing.
I see the moon, and the moon sees me,
The moon sees somebody I want to see.
God bless the moon, and God bless me.
And God bless the somebody I want to see.
Years later, when she was feeling particularly worried about her future or reflective about her past, Bea asked her mother about the specifics of the adoption.
“Why didn’t you put down our home address?” Bea asked tearfully. “Then she could have found me.”
“It was a closed adoption, honey. She’s not finding you.”
Beatrix cried some more, and her mother softened.
“It was the best decision at the time. You were a child yourself. My child. I was looking out for you. And for the baby.”
The decision, seemingly the only logical one at the time, affected everything that came after, starting with the fact that Bea never lived outside of Gambier again.
Whenever she took day trips to other quaint Ohio towns or cities, Bea would look for her daughter. She was convinced that she would recognize her in an instant. Once, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, a group came in on a field trip from a local middle school. “How old are you?” Bea had asked, inappropriately accosting a girl from the group in the bathroom. She was twelve, the same age that her baby would be. She trailed behind the group for the rest of the day, searching their faces for one that resembled her own.
The year her baby was to turn seventeen, Bea began eating her lunch on a bench on Middle Path so that she could watch the tour groups stroll through campus, studying them for some hint of recognition. The year her daughter would be starting college, Bea fantasized she would be in the incoming class at Kenyon, once again studying the faces of every girl in her lecture hall.
She went through all the steps one can take to find a child. While the agency was long gone, she registered at the Ohio Adoption Subsidies and Children and Family Services and checked back with them regularly.
And that’s how it went for years until 2007, when a private company in San Francisco began offering autosomal DNA testing for ancestry and genealogical tracing. Beatrix didn’t think twice before ordering her kit, spitting into the enclosed vial until her mouth went dry, and sending it back, hoping beyond hope it would be the answer to her prayers.
In the end, she got the opposite result. Unlike her husband, a fellow academic, whose Asian heritage meant that he barely turned up a single connection on the service, Bea was abounding in family. Being a quarter Ashkenazi Jew and a quarter Sephardic, she discovered she had sixteen hundred known relatives. She found second cousins in Israel, a few more relatives from her mom’s side in England, and was duly surprised that a girl she’d graduated college with turned out to be a distant cousin. But 23andMe never came up with a match for a child, and though she checked back often, by 2014, when her daughter would have been an adult, she had to admit to herself that if her child knew she was adopted, she clearly didn’t want to be found.
In a last-ditch effort at tracking her down, Bea even encouraged her friend, an author on Fire Island, the place where she had met her child’s father and gotten pregnant by him, to include the story of the adopted child in the book he was writing—names, birthdates, and all. But it had been over a decade since the novel was published, and nothing had come of that either.
Still, Bea never strayed from that school address, and in the back of her mind she knew it was because her baby girl would always know where to find her.
In the end, she was right.