Read The Mistress's Daughter for Free Online

head. I remember seeing her arm and thinking how small her bones were.
    In the distance another shadow emerges. My mother and a friend of hers are coming toward me. I imagine the two mothers meeting, colliding. This is something that can’t happen. It is entirely against the rules. No one person can have two mothers in the same room at the same time.
    â€œThere are people here whose privacy I have to protect,” I say to Ellen. She turns and runs out of the store.
    â€œWe spotted her during the reading,” my mother’s friend says.
    â€œI knew who she was immediately,” my mother says. “Are you all right?” she asks—she seems shaken.
    â€œAre you ?”
    Â 
    I’m scheduled to meet with a reporter after the reading. We sit in the basement of the bookstore, the reporter’s cassette recorder on a table between us.
    â€œIs your book autobiographical?”
    â€œIt is the most autobiographical thing I have written, but no, it is not autobiographical.”
    â€œBut you are adopted?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI heard something recently about you searching for your parents.”
    â€œI have not searched for anyone.”
    There is a pause. “Do you know who your parents are?” It seems like a strange question, like the kind of thing you’d ask someone who’d bumped their head against a wall and just regained consciousness.
    Â 
    In the morning, I take a taxi downtown. I am going to meet the father. I take a taxi because I am blind, because my mother is at work, because I can’t ask my father to drive me to meet my father. I am out of time, outside of myself. It feels like something from long ago when women didn’t drive. It is as though I am in a remake, a dramatic reenactment of a role originated by Ellen—the Visit to the Lawyer’s Office—the scene in which the pregnant woman goes to the lawyer’s office to find out what the big guy “might be able to do for her.”
    At the lawyer’s office, I present myself to the receptionist. A man comes through the interior door. Is this the lawyer, my father, or just someone who works there? Anyone could be him, he could be anyone—this is what it’s like when you don’t know who you are.
    I am reminded of the children’s book Are You My Mother? —in which a baby bird goes around asking various other animals and objects, “Are you my mother?”
    â€œAre you Norman?”
    â€œYes,” he says, surprised that I don’t already know. He shakes my hand nervously and leads me into a large conference room. We sit on opposite sides of a wide table.
    â€œMy God,” he says, looking at me. “My God.”
    â€œI cut my cornea,” I say, pointing to the patch on my eye.
    â€œReading a review of your book?”
    â€œNo, the obituaries,” I say honestly.
    â€œFine thing. Would you like a Pepsi?” On the table in front of him is a Pepsi bottle, sweating.
    I shake my head.
    The father is a big, pink-faced man, in a fancy suit, collar pin, tie. His hair is white, thin, slicked back.
    We stare at each other across the table. “Fine thing,” he keeps saying. He is smiling. He has dimples.
    Having grown up without the refracted reflections of biology, I have no idea whether he looks like me or not. I’ve brought my camera, a Polaroid.
    â€œDo you mind if I take a picture of you?” I ask.
    I take two and he just sits there flushed, embarrassed.
    â€œCould I have one of you?” he asks and I allow him to take a picture.
    It’s as though we’re making a perverse Polaroid commercial right there in the lawyer’s office—a reunion played out as a photo session. We come around the table and stand side by side, watching our images appear. It’s easier to really look at someone in a photograph than in real life—no discomfort at meeting the other person’s eye, no fear of being caught