You were to be adopted by Mrs. Inez L. who was satisfactory in every way but some one told her or saw in person that you very much resembled your father, which was true, and she thought that as people knew she was a friend of your father, they would quickly guess where you came from.

She decided at the last minute not to take you, and since the American family wanted a child, it seemed a good solution.

... I cannot make myself explain to my cousin, Maurice, who you really are. It would bring a lot of worry to him. I have already told you the fact of your birth and those circum­stances were entirely independent of my will.

I am trying to read your book of poems, Eight Minutes from the Sun, but I must admit I do not understand very much of it. I notice at the end of the book you invoke St. Francis. I wish it were true.

As ever, M

The hard facts:

I was conceived in Paris but sounded my first caterwaul in Brussels, Belgium, the love child of a French Scholar and an American priest ordained a monsignor in the Roman Catholic church the year I was born. Bundled off to the Sisters in a Catholic Home for Children on rue Chant D'Oiseaux (Birdsong Street), I spent my early childhood waking to bells for matins, studying the catechism and the lives of the saints, and more prosaically, embroidering linens sold to raise money for our African missions.

When I was almost eight years old, rumors of a European war brought two American men to the orphanage: former students of my father who had secretly instructed them to escort me to the United States after his death. This they did, aboard a ship from Antwerp to New York. For a while I was a misaddressed package refused by a California woman who claimed I so keenly resembled my father others might suspect she had dallied with him.

My life changed abruptly when I was placed with Ray and Ruth, a couple transplanted from Chicago seeking a child to help soothe their alcoholic woes and a fraying marriage. At age thirty-two Ruth died of cirrhosis of the liver, two years after I came to their Merrick, Long Island, suburban house. During summers I lived in the home of Ray's relatives in what is now the Hough section of Cleveland, Ohio: visiting with two maternal aunts, the eldest married to a piano tuner working in the theater trade. From him I learned to appreciate the piano and poetry that he read aloud each night before dinner.

Uneasy in his plight as widower, salesman Ray soon remarried a sadistic ex-show girl he met in a Flushing bar near the World's Fair grounds. Their slide into a life of bar hopping, gradual at first, soon turned precipitous. I took refuge in library books, especially poetry I read in alphabetical order by author, and found escape on a blue bicycle pedaled to innocent pastimes: to glee club practice with the county choir, and to the homes of friends who later helped me move after being thrown out of the house at age seventeen, my possessions burned in the back yard, I left my first job as a telephone operator in Freeport for better paying work as a file clerk in Manhattan, and rented a furnished room off Third Avenue in the shadow of the old "El."

A security check at one of my office jobs disclosed that my foster parents had not recorded me under the Alien Registration Acts of 1940 and 1948, and I was thus subject to deportation. I located one of the men who brought me to America, now a Virginia lawyer who gathered the papers for my citizenship application.

Through him, I learned my French mother was alive and my California born father had paid for my passage to the U.S.. Anxious to find my mother, I saved from my meager income for a back packing trip to Europe that finally took me to where she then lived in England. A withdrawn woman engaged in scholarly duties at Oxford, she hardly greeted me with open arms, but left the door ajar. I might write to her as friend with no mention of our relationship. Her family must never know.

We continued to correspond after my return home and while I worked my way to a B.A. degree in English at Hunter College—graduation, 1961. Then on to teaching junior high school classes in the South Bronx and Harlem, English as a Second Language to newcomers, and Eighth Grade Equivalency courses in anti-poverty programs. My post as a poetry workshop teacher—at New York City's New School for Social Research— began in 1974, two years after the publication of my first book of poems, The Woman Who Loved Worms, from Doubleday & Company. And I have taught poetry workshops at Columbia University since 1983.

Saul Stadtmauer, a freelance writer/journalist and I met on Monhegan Island, Maine, where we returned to honeymoon in 1964. We have remained a devoted couple inhabiting the same book-filled upper West Side Manhattan apartment for twenty-five years. When he and 1 visited my mother in France in 1986, she insisted I keep the secret of our relationship intact. This I did until her death six years later when I announced myself to her few relatives and was warmly welcomed, particularly by my cousin Maurice who invited me to Paris to share photographs and family chronicles. My father's family has not responded to my queries, preferring, no doubt, to keep alive the myth of a celibate priest.

The Papal Saw in a Roman Blind

I can almost hear the bells
rung by the priest who sired a child.
Nuncio, let that father rise
to sit at my right touch. One last
kiss to ease his grief in the afterlife.

I, his bastard, bid for calm
like a Papal See in a murmer of signs.
Confessor, hear my doubts of the Seven
Dolors of Mary, Elevation of the Host.
I can see the church walking

on its knees and offer my alms
to a ghost who cannot see the weight
of years, blood-soaked stones and
the orphanage drilling its wards
on the telling of beads.

My father, does he hear the lambs
bleating the hundredth psalm
of man's praise to God? Vicar of Christ,
here is a silver monstrance, here is
a chasuble of gold to pay for his release.

All our wrongs take refuge in the hospice
of time. I make this offering to lift up
my father's heart out of his remains,
mysterious as particles of light
flooding the earth from the sun.

Thinking of My Parisian Mother's Discretion
(Only Her Confessor Knows) in Not Telling
Her Sister or Hardly Anyone About My Birth

Don't nobody know about us, Mama,
excepting everybody in central Ohio
and south. Even your plain French
name is anagrammed in print and
your letters quoted from.

Daddy's work for God has been told
straight out in Gambler, Granville,
Westerville to the folks who listen
in the audience. I've gone on to

explain he was a man of the cloth
and paid to keep a confidence
Shooting off my mouth? Poetry's how
I keep my time from splintering

apart. Secrets, Mama. What's the point?
As long as you don't know I've made you
into literature and Daddy into a man
who fusses on stage, unsnaps his collar,
lets fall his robe beside the bed where

a woman lies down. That's you, Mama,
ready to enjoy yourself. The play's set
in the Fall and I watch its pages turn
in a long run of words I try to rake
into piles for burning.

I don't want to be buried in church lore
or dead to the child who poked
out its head between my legs.
Shoot, Mama, is that too
much to understand? They all cheered me
in Cincinnati and Steubenville.

Gascon Journey

I have set out to meet her
for the last time, to examine
a face that resembles mine
in one corner above the right eye
and in a temple vein.
Fontainebleu, Tours, Poitiers,
Angouleme. The train feeds
the voyager a dream of calm.
My mother and father, their secrets
hummed like rails, flew through
road beds and coupling cars.
Unlikely lovers.
"I'd almost forgotten', she will sigh.
"Why do you persist?" She won't look
into my eyes. I'll watch her turn away
after I leave. A flutter of a memory
too swift to catch will vanish in a meadow,
a corridor of trees. Was it her face
bent over my crib? Were her shoulders
hunched when she whispered to the priest?
What did she confess to him?
I almost see her, my rare and somber visitor,
the mother nuns said was a cousin or an aunt.
The long aisle of lies. I also sigh. I,
unknown to the few of a thinning clan,
have come this far, to see a blood stranger.
Bordeaux, Agen, Nerac, Espiens.
There are questions I will never ask.
There are answers she will never give.

[Copyright © 1988 by Colette Inez. All Rights Reserved]