Eleanor's Rebellion : A Mother, Her Son and Her Secret

by Siff, David

• ISBN13: 9780375401756
• ISBN10: 037540175X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-08-01
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

Eleanor's Rebellionis the extraordinary story of a man who discovered in middle age that almost nothing he had grown up believing about his parents was true. When at the age of forty David Siff learned--in the first of a series of shocks--that he was adopted, he began a roller-coaster journey into his family's past. He discovered that his biological father was not the man who had raised him, but someone he had never met: the actor Van Heflin. He discovered that he had been born out of wedlock, placed in an orphanage at birth, and subsequently adopted by his own mother. He learned that his mother had not been the contented homebody he had believed her to be. He discovered the ambitions and frustrations of the woman who had given birth to him--the adventurous, rebellious young Eleanor, in determined pursuit of a new and better world and an acting career, who suddenly detoured into marriage for the sake of her child. He discovered the roots of his puzzling behaviors, casting his own acting career in a new light. In his account of the fascinating and rocky process by which he finally came to know his mother--moving from shock to bitterness to an increasingly profound appreciation of her life--David Siff has given us a heartfelt and enriching book.

Author Biography

David Siff teaches writing at the Writers Studio.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Nineteen seventy-five. I'm standing on another line. It's a clear winter day and the cold is still on my hands and face. The bare green walls and dirty marble floor, the clerks sitting behind cages, the people filing through the room, all of it triggers vague fantasies of Ellis Island at the turn of the century, when grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins arrived one after another. Today, I'm glad to be in out of the cold, dreaming. This corner of lower Manhattan gets winds that take you like grappling hooks. There were once ponds below the streets and office buildings, ponds where holes were broken in the ice and Indians fished, huddled next to small fires.

I can't really figure out why I've let myself in for this. I'm reluctant to call this free will. I am utterly devoid of belief that I'll find my birth time. But it's become an obsession -- for an astrology chart, of all things -- like finding land must have been for Erik the Red. It's been two weeks since I was here last to get the birth certificate that didn't contain the information I was looking for. I've taken the document out of my pocket countless times and read down the grained yellow page, line by line, name, mother's name, father's name, date of birth, place of birth, hospital, attending physician, and so on. Nothing. There are 1,440 minutes in twenty-four hours. One of those minutes on September 28, 1935, is mine alone. I share September 28 with Ed Sullivan and Brigitte Bardot, but which of those 1,440 minutes with its precise subdivision of seconds belongs to me? That is the question, that's why I'm stamping on my ice-cold feet waiting in line. None of my relatives had the answer. I've tried to run down the records of a hospital that's gone out of business, of doctors dead, missing, or jailed. I've been here before, why am I back? I'm forty, the war is over, South Vietnam has surrendered, the NLF has won. It's become weird out there. A little bird named Squeaky Fromme has gotten it into her spooned-out patriotic mind to shoot Gerald Ford. All right, my hair is down to here, I smoke, drop tabs, teach Tolstoy and Carlos Casteneda to cops, but I'm like a dog with a bone: I can't let go of the idea that a sea drop of  life can be revealed in the mystic round of an astrology wheel.

The line moves slowly toward the clerk in the cage. I think of my father. He died a couple of months ago, but I'm thinking of him now because I remember an Ellis Island story of his about Uncle George getting us our family name -- Siff (as in Syph) -- the name that launched a hundred bloody noses, scraped knees, and childhood ambuscades through three generations. It was an anonymous clerk who came up with the name, some worn-out, underpaid, red-nosed, angry clock-puncher who loved jokes and hated his work. "Name?" "Ziev. Ygor Ziev." A look, three strokes of a pen, and an official stamp. "Welcome to America, George Siff." For about five years, until he began to understand English, George Siff thought his name sounded better, softer, in translation.

I have my spiel ready when my turn comes. I hold the yellow paper up and jab at it, emphasizing to the clerk how important it is to get an accurate birth time. She explains that birth times weren't always recorded back then. She can't understand why I'm fishing through the ice. I tell her I want to know about all records pertaining to my birth that may be on file at this office. The clerk asks to see the document. I give it to her and watch her peruse it. A pause, a hiatus, something. The clerk suddenly holds the paper up, pokes a finger at it, and barks: "Who gave this to you? You had no business getting this!"

I have no idea what she means -- maybe she's telling me I goofed in applying for a certificate that didn't have a birth time on it as opposed to another that does. I take the paper from her to see what it is she's trying to tell me. I look at the title. Where's the mistake? The words across the top, in large black Gothic letters are perfectly clear:

CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH

Then, suddenly, I see it. In all the times I've read and reread this document, folding it, putting it away, taking it out, reading it over line by line again and again, I've somehow missed it every time. Two small words like a name in the phone book, in plain roman print, fly up at me like a bat out of a barn door:

By Adoption

But I have no real memory of this moment. I have a picture in my mind, but going past the frozen frame of it is a little like going to the door, sticking out a hand, trying to feel the night. I have language -- and a story -- twenty-two years after the fact, but in that moment, as in the afterflash of the snapshot, there is only a negative, a face with glasses. Was the person black or white, in light-colored clothing or dark? Impossible to say. I know I held on to the document, because I still have it. But I don't remember how I got out of the room and down into the street. All I can remember is the feeling of flight, shrinking away from the interior of the Municipal Building as though from light or a cross. I remember that there was a bloodshot sunset filled with a royal canopy of dark clouds; the image is a feeling -- a sensation of flying, of somehow lifting off the ground over rooftops, neighborhoods, interfering with flight patterns from Newark and Long Island, slashing through radio signals, satellite transmissions, waves of background static, over to the West Side, up Sixth Avenue to 13th Street, all the way to my mother's door.


It is as though she has been waiting for this moment for years. She does not betray a flicker of surprise. "Oh, that," she says, looking at the certificate as though it were an overlooked parking ticket. She is a small woman, young-looking for sixty. But in her red robe she looks a little like a potted plant in the middle of her green, plumped sofa. With her head bowed, her perfectly done hair riding above her head like a sail, her glasses hanging on her nose, she is gathering herself. When she raises her head, her brown eyes are clear. "This is not what you think," she says. Her tone is light, full of irony, there is no weight at all to the history she is carrying. She explains that I am hers and my father's but that they had me out of wedlock when they were too poor to get married. That's it. They got married a couple of years later, adopted me after that to protect my legal rights.

"You know your father," she explains.

I think I do. I know that I look exactly like my mother and that my father's thinking is as clear to me as her features. I know my parents. What I don't know is that the feeling of disappointment I have in the pit of my stomach is part of my blindness, like missing the words on that birth certificate. It makes me move like a sleepwalker, someone with different energy. I am unaware of it but I am stepping out of the snapshot into the darkness, moving with my hands out.

I tell myself I'm still looking for my birth time, this I must have. I think I know where I can find it now, one last chance: the adoption record itself. That's fine, my mother says, as though she's just gotten her nails and hair done and is looking forward to dinner and an evening at Lincoln Center.

Adoption records are sealed permanently in the vast majority of the fifty states. I have my mother's blessing, but that is beside the point, the law is the law. The person who tells me this is an elderly Irish clerk at Surrogate's Court, but he does not simply send me away. He tells me I can petition the court if I wish, and maybe a judge will let me see the part of it I want, my birth time. I go ahead.

Months go by. I submit draft after draft of this petition, which the clerk looks at and corrects for me. In this time we become, if not friends, familiar with each other. He calls me Ace, as though I'm a friend of his son's or someone he occasionally runs into at Gaelic football games. I think of him as one of the old guys in Inwood Park, down by the rocks, who, when I was a kid, used to tell me stories about shad runs in the Hudson and finding arrowheads in the caves up in the hills. But, nearly three decades later, I suspect that all along I was, to him, with my long hair and dreams of Revelation Through Astrology, someone he was trying to coax back across the divide between generations. "In those days, having a kid when you weren't married, Ace, especially among immigrant families, that was a big deal -- not like it is now -- you should always keep that in mind," he told me. Finally, one day, he took me aside and sat me down on a plain black bench in the hallway outside his office.

"Ace, I'm sorry to tell you this, but I took the liberty of looking at your record, and the gentleman you thought was your father isn't your father," he said. The clerk was a long, thin man, bony but very straight. When he sat or moved it seemed as if it was in segments, like parts of a drawbridge. He sat next to me on the bench, the platform of his knees, the pillars of his legs, the stanchion of his torso, pulleys and levers of arms and hands, the tower of his head all working in harness to raise the barrier between one side of the water and the other. He explained that by law he wasn't allowed to tell me what he had seen, but that I should keep in mind I was adopted in 1941, a few months after my brother was born. He told me to be kind to my mother.

I did not hear him.

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Excerpted from Eleanor's Rebellion: A Mother, Her Son and Her Secret by David Siff
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