Three years in, Stuart Townsend, then in his internship at a hospital in the Bay Area, wrote and told me that he was studying pediatric medicine now and was not going to be returning to hisfather’s institution. He’d heard I was going to be at his alma mater to give my talk, and he was disappointed he would have to miss it. He told me I could count on his future support in any way I needed it.
In the past five years, I have given the talk a hundred times in California, and a few times in Oregon and Washington State.
And now here is an invitation to give it at an East Coast university to an auditorium that is expected to be filled to capacity.
It’s starting to happen, the amplification of what I and a handful of others like me whom I have met along the way have been trying to shout for the last five years.
I look up at Amaryllis, my niece and the daughter of my heart, and on impulse I ask her if she wants to come to New York with me.
“Really?” she says, happily surprised.
“You’ll still be on your summer break in late August. Yes, I think you should come.”
And then I sense the urge to tell her what she’s been waiting to hear since I first brought her home, what I thought I’d be telling her a few weeks from now.
The time is right. I can feel it. It is spontaneous and natural and organic to the moment.
But I want her to feel it’s the right time, too.
“Amaryllis,” I begin. “You know I’ve been waiting until you were older to tell you about your mother and Truman. And maybe you’ve noticed I haven’t shared much with you about why I am speaking out against what is happening in state institutions...” I let my voice trail off and watch her.
“Yes,” she says, not taking her eyes off me.
“I’m thinking I’ll tell you now. About both. The time seems right for it, but I want you to feel like it’s right, too.”
She nods. “I want to know.”
“What happened between your mother and Truman, I can’t fully explain. I wasn’t there. Truman died before I could ask him. But somehow my brother and your mother, they...”
“They made love,” Amaryllis says plainly.
She and I had the talk about how a baby is made when she was twelve and began to menstruate. I kept it general, without specifics, to keep it as uncomplicated as possible. There was more I would tell her when she was older. I had called it intercourse. I suppose she has heard this other term at school. I wonder what else she has heard. I try to hide my surprise.
“Uh, yes. Yes, they did. And the problem was... well...”
“The problem was my father was already married to Celine.”
Celine was a woman Amaryllis had never met, but she knew Celine was the mother of her half brother, Wilson, whom she had also never met. I told Amaryllis she had a half brother because I thought she had a right to know. She’s long since stopped wondering when she would ever meet these estranged people.
“Yes, that was the problem,” I say. “But there were other problems, too. Your mother was an orphan, and she was only seventeen, and she was living with Truman and Celine then, if you remember. She couldn’t live with them after that happened, and so the county, who was responsible for her, sent her to the place where you were born. There’s a reason why she went to that place rather than just a special home for young pregnant women who aren’t married.”
I have Amaryllis’s full attention now; unlike the other details she had deduced, she hadn’t been able to figure out why her mother had been sent to an institution.
“Rosie had an ability that most people don’t have. When she heard sounds, she would see colors. Like... like a kaleidoscope, I guess. The sounds brought the colors to her mind, just like the noise brought the sound to her ears.”
“She saw these colors all the time?” Amaryllis asked.
“I think so, yes. I was told once that other people sometimes have this ability, too. They are born with it. But the people at the institution thought her brain wasn’t working properly; they thought it was abnormal for a person to see colors when they heard a sound. These people didn’t like it when a person wasn’t like everyone else. They thought only they knew what was right and good and normal.”
Amaryllis frowns. Lines of concern are now etched across her face. “What did these people do?”
I tell her.
I tell her everything, as gently and succinctly as I can.
“The doctors there were afraidIwould also see those colors, because Rosie was my mother?” Amaryllis says when I am finished.
“Yes. That’s what they were afraid of.”
