Beginning

"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 York until the day when she found the adoption papers and realized that her parents were not her birth parents. Thus began the quest for truth.

My grandmother never learned much. The Tracys did not share the story of her adoption, and Marge, as she was lovingly called, never knew who her birth parents were beyond their names. Over the years, she collected clues, such as the name of a priest who may have been present at her birth, or an address that someone vaguely remembered, but it never amounted to much.

My grandmother died a month before I was born. We never had the chance to meet. I don't know what her voice sounded like, I don't know what perfume or shade of lipstick she wore. What did her laugh sound like? In a sense, we are strangers, yet I crave to understand her beginnings in a way that makes my heart ache.

The thing is, I have always loved a good mystery. As a child, my mom entertained me with stories of her childhood, of her and her siblings investigating abandoned mansions along Long Island's North Shore, of the time when her older sister and brother accidentally locked her in a car trunk, of the general sense of wonder and freedom that seemed to permeate the suburbs in the 1950s. This, along with my penchant for musty Nancy Drew novels, surely must be why I latched on to the story of Julia and Stephen and became determined to find them. Surely, they had to be out there. Somewhere.

As I got older and learned the ways of the internet, I decided to take on the role of amateur sleuth. Somebody surely had answers, and even if most of the involved parties in my grandmother's birth and adoption were long dead, there had to be something that would explain who her parents were. It was when I joined a listserv for New York State adoptees that I realized I could try the New York Foundling for answers.

With my mother, we penned a letter to the Foundling, still in existence, and asked for information regarding my grandmother. We dutifully sent off copies of her death certificate and my mother's birth certificate, proving her identity and relation to Margaret Murphy. And we waited.

I didn't think we would hear anything back. What were the chances that this place still had records from the 1920s?

But then the packet of records arrived. And instead of the joy and glee at finally, finally having answers, our hearts broke.

We had been wrong. We had been so, so wrong.

I remember still the kind note attached to the enclosed files. "I hope that this brings you some peace," they wrote. It's as though the knew that what lay in the next few papers would shatter everything we thought we knew.

There never was a Stephen Murphy. He never existed.

Julia had been married at one point, but her husband, Joseph Murphy, had died in 1919. At Misericordia Hospital, perhaps out of shame, she lied on the birth certificate for her daughter and gave his name despite his having been deceased for years.

The next couple of years are hazy, though at some point young Margaret was treated at a number of hospitals around Manhattan before landing at the New York Foundling, who handled her adoption. Her birth father, a fellow by the name of Stephen Costello, reportedly did not want to be involved. He never visited, though he payed $4 a week in child support as ordered by the Court of Special Sessions. He had a sister who inquired about Margaret, but by then she had become Marjorie Tracy. And Julia? She had a habit of disappearing, but ultimately resurfaced in 1927 to officially release for daughter for adoption. By then she had reportedly married a new man, Robert J. McDonald, somewhere in Maryland, and she wanted to keep Margaret's existence a secret from him.

There's more, of course. But this is the basic story. The truth, I suppose.

We felt crushed. Maybe my mother more so than I did, though I felt horribly guilty for pursuing this lead without considering that maybe there were reasons the Tracys didn't want to tell their daughter the full story of her adoption. How could I not have considered that they were protecting her from feeling unwanted? How could I not have known that there must be some deep pain surrounding the ordeal?

Even now, years after we received that packet from the Foundling, I don't know how to feel. There are moments when I feel rage towards Julia for abandoning Margaret and then creating a new married life for herself, carrying on as though nothing happened. I feel disgust for Stephen for possibly being cold-hearted and abandoning Julia in her time of need. Then there are other moments when I feel so sad for Julia, imagining that she must have been so scared and lonely during that time. Where was her family? Did she have friends? Why is there no mention of any other Farringtons in my grandmother's adoption records? Mostly, I just feel confused.

But I also feel determined. After the initial shock and heartbreak, I picked up and carried on. I had details now. Names, addresses, dates. I could work with this.

This process is messy. There are so many dead ends, missing rolls of microfilm, and misspellings to deal with that some days I just want to give up and embrace that I will never find out what happened to Julia and Stephen. I could do that, right?

Ha.

No.

So this is my story. And Margaret's. And Marjorie's. And Stephen's. And Julia's. Hell, it's even Joseph's. It is imperfect and confusing, and it stalls out every now and again. And, honestly, that just has to be okay, even if I don't want it to be.

I am searching for Julia, the most illusive and mysterious of the bunch, and one day, I will find her.