Finding Alexandra

I.

I am a foundling – born, and then abandoned, in New York. This city, where almost everyone comes from somewhere else, is a good place for the forsaken. I spent my first two years in foster care. For a long time, this was all I knew of my birth and early life. In 1950, I was legally adopted by a couple I came to call Mummy and Daddy. This was extreme and sudden upward mobility for a homeless infant. They raised me in a very old-fashioned kind of luxury – a way of life inherited, along with their elegant antique furniture, from an era long gone. They lived on the Upper East Side, with a varying cast of servants, and I grew up with all the apparatus of Wasp privileges: private schools and private lessons, opera-going, debutante parties and charity balls.

Looking at me today, you would never guess that my history is as colorful as that of a much put upon heroine in a particularly overplotted nineteenth-century novel. I am a middle-aged woman with a median income, neither short nor tall, neither fat nor thin, with disorderly greying hair, pale skin, and grey eyes of an unremarkable size. “But I have a left shoulder-blade that is a miracle of loveliness. People come miles to see it.” That’s Gilbert & Sullivan, of course, and doesn’t apply to me literally, but a radiologist did once tell me, “You have the most interesting kidney I’ve ever seen.”

New York is a good home for me in many ways: the drabbest parts of it are full of drama. And even a person of dubious origins needs no special qualifications to get by as some kind of bottom-feeder intellectual, writing books and stories, and reviewing other people’s books and editing other people’s stories, which is what I do. There are so many others of my ilk here that I need never want for company. Few of them are on the Upper East Side, so except for museum-going, I don’t spend much time there these days. Now and again I see people who are still living much the way Mummy and Daddy were when I was a child; such encounters seem more like a kind of museum experience than like anything else.

Mummy was very beautiful, one of three beautiful sisters who looked so much like one another that a single description would cover all three. (Perhaps all beautiful women are the same, as Tolstoy said of happy families.) These particular beauties were all very dark, like their mother and father (unlike me). They dressed very fashionably, their features were small and regular – even their teeth were like that – and they were all very sleekly well-groomed, Mummy most of all, in fact so much so that it was a little eerie. It’s what people remember about her: “Never a hair out of place.” One of Mummy’s beautiful sisters lived in our apartment building and had two children who looked like the other members of Mummy’s dark, close, and clannish family. Mummy’s mother, my Granny, lived there, too, and also looked like the others. When Mummy introduced me to other people, she did not say, “This is my daughter” but “This is the little girl we adopted.”

Daddy did not look like them, but he did not look like me, either, except for the twinkle in his light eyes and the mischievousness of his grin. His face was long and red and by the time he and Mummy adopted me, what was left of the hair on his head was grey, and so were his eyebrows and eyelashes. He had no relations to set against Mummy’s dark legions; his parents were dead and he had long since stopped speaking to his only sibling, a half sister much older than he. A framed photo of her had been exiled to a drawer in the bottom of a linen chest. Mummy told me she had saved it from the garbage because it seemed wrong to her that he should throw away his sister’s picture for her sins. I was particularly fascinated by sins, even more than most children are, knowing my own peculiar status had something to do with them. I used to look at that photograph and wonder what that bug-eyed blonde girl in limp white lace-trimmed muslin, buxom and bursting with health, could possibly have done. Her name was Helen; because of that photograph, whenever I read about Helen of Troy I could not help picturing her in the fashions of 1910, with an enormous bow in her hair.