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already know adoption’s effect on my feelings.
    But really, said Dr. Schussler, we are just—
    It hasn’t had any effect. There is some deep-down way that my parents—my adoptive parents—don’t affect me at all.
    (Yes! I thought.)
    That can’t be so, said the analyst.
    Oh, really? What do you know about it?
    The doctor exhaled, annoyed. Then she said: Of course it is my job to know just a little about these things.
    But aren’t you supposed to listen?
    Of course.
    Then listen. There is some way that I am distant—unconnected—to my family. I will never be like them. Some core part of me is alien to them. I am … alone.
    (Exactly! I thought. The apartness Paul had always spoken of, that sense of being a singularity in the world!)
    Precisely, said the doctor. It is just this sense of being unconnected that we need to explore.
    Please just listen! It’s the story I wanted to tell you last week before we ran out of time.
    The analyst stirred in her chair. Yes, dear, she said in an odd voice.
    What’s that about? said the patient.
    What? said the therapist.
    That “yes, dear” business—and don’t say, What do
I
think it’s about.
    The doctor laughed. You have said many times that when your mother is resisting you, she says, Yes, dear.
    Hell. I don’t want to talk about Mother. What I’m talking about is older. Original. Built in. Before Mother, before Father, before school. Before I even learned to think in words. As if it came out of my bones, my nerves, my skin. Original—she gave a laugh—like sin.
    The analyst sat back amidst a great commotion of creaking leather. Please, she said. Go on.

9.
     
     
    It was Christmastime, the patient began. I was thirteen, home from boarding school on winter break. I don’t think Mother even kissed me before she said, Don’t unpack. We’re going to New York. A holiday! she sang. But I had an assignment for school, due after the break, and there I was in New York, in a hotel, sharing a room with Lizabeth,
    (Lizabeth?)
    who chattered at me all the time when she was little.
    (Ah, a sister, it seemed.)
    It had to be a report of a visit to a hospital for some reason—yes, we were studying the medical professions—and now I had to find someplace in New York. There was a Yellow Pages in the closet of our hotel room, where I found a long list of hospitals, column after column. How would I choose? Presbyterian Such-and-Such, Jewish Center for This-and-That, Mary Mother of So-and-So—then suddenly one name jumped out at me.
    She paused.
    The Manhattan Hospital for Foundlings.
    Foundlings!
she went on. What an old-fashioned word. It made me think of newborns left on doorsteps. Of Baby Moses in the reeds. And wasn’t there this medieval practice where infants were put in some sort of lazy-Susan-type thing and spun anonymously into a convent?
    Here the patient stopped, and I thought, Surely Dr. Schussler will participate now, despite the patient’s request that she merely listen. For what a grisly image the patient had conjured up: helpless infants in a trap of clanking iron, surrendered to the cold care of nuns.
    The patient gave off a little laugh. Or at least that’s what I remembered from some medieval history class, she said. I mean the lazy Susans.
    Again she waited.
    (She’s asking for help, I thought. Help her, Dr. Schussler!)
    So I called them, the patient went on. The Hospital for Foundlings. I was transferred around, and finally I had an appointment with someone—was her name Mrs. Waters? Yes, let’s say it was Mrs. Waters.
    I didn’t tell my family where I was going—oh, well, yes; they knew I had an assignment and that I was going to a hospital. But I lied about the name. I told them it was something like “General Hospital.” They never paid much attention to me, so lying was easy.
    I had to lie, you see. Adoption could not be mentioned in our family. Never—along with many other forbidden topics that came under the rubric of what Father called