"Your mother's story deserves to be told." That's what I told my mother. But what happens when the story turns out to be painfully different than what you expected? This story is complicated. It hurts. It leaves me confused. But I think I need to tell it, anyway. My grandmother, Margaret Murphy, was born on July 28, 1924 at Misericordia Hospital in Manhattan. Her mother was Julia Farrington, an Irish immigrant. That much I know to be true. What my grandmother believed and passed on to my mother, and subsequently what was passed on to me, was that her father, Stephen Murphy, was killed that night in a coal truck accident. Julia was severely weakened from childbirth and, freshly widowed, was too ill to care for her new baby girl. Margaret was given up for adoption through the New York Foundling, and a nice family from the Bronx, the Tracys, took her in. Margaret became Marjorie, and she lived a perfectly normal early- to mid-century life in New...