All this Family

by Gregory Sarris

I’m playing tag, chasing kids around an apple tree. I tag a freckle-faced girl with missing front teeth, and she narrows her black eyes and hisses adopted. There is no mistaking this insult. The word freezes and I am alone in it.

At bedtime, I ask my mother what it means. She tells me my parents died after I was born—in an accident, an automobile accident.

Even at four or five, however old I was, I didn’t believe it. Maybe there was a real story, the true meaning of the word “adopted,” that was big and awful and she didn’t want to tell me.

I didn’t ask any more questions. For the first time, though, I saw my mother as a distinct person. She wasn’t heavy, like the mother across the street, or dark and broody, like the mother next door. Sitting on the foot of my bed, she unclasped the string of pearls she’d worn earlier to a dinner party and held them coiled in her upturned palm like a single gem. Lipstick unmarred by food or drink. Not a strand of hair out of place. I had heard adults talk, and understood that she was, as they had said, beautiful.


I wondered. I dreamed. Before I could understand heritage as something that might shape identity, I considered the careers of the men I saw around me: I followed a dairyman everywhere, hopping in and out of his rusted pickup, opening and closing gates, so that I could barrage him with questions about the business, planning my own dairy, bigger and better than any, with automatic gates. I took an interest in anything Irish, because Monsignor Cox, who was Irish, counseled my mother through her divorce. In fact, they became lovers: he was, I learned to appreciate later, the love of her life. (They broke up, shortly before the diocese transferred him to another, faraway parish.)

In time, my mother gave up on the accident story: My birth mother wasn’t married, she was young, and she had, in fact, died because of an accident, but in a hospital.

“You are Irish and German,” said my mother, “like me.” But both of us knew she was only talking about my birth mother. What about my father?

I believed she knew more. She might not have been lying, but she was holding back. She feigned calm, but I could see my questioning unnerved her. Which not only confirmed my suspicions, but made me all the more curious. The topic of my birth parents became a button to push. Sometimes I approached with an innocuous question: “Do you think my mother liked horses?” Other times I was combative. I could use the matter to bargain with her, or, worse, to insult her: “You won’t even tell me about my real parents.”

I thought she felt threatened. As if I would choose my birth parents—in this case, my birth father—over her.

I now believe she was only following the rules. In 1952, adoption records were “sealed.” Birth parents and adoptive parents were not to know each other’s identities. The adoption was private, as the doctor reminded her. She felt that by furnishing me a name—and anything else she knew—she would be betraying confidences.

She shared her own history with me: born Mary Mape, in Holland, Michigan, the second of four children; her father, Irish, a successful furniture merchant; her mother German; both good Catholics.

In 1939, when my mother was 16, her father moved a branch of his business to the Bay Area and settled the family in an affluent San Mateo neighborhood, south of San Francisco. What she often recalled, after the trip west with Rex, the family’s Great Dane, carsick in the back seat of their Packard, was her first Christmas in California: It was warm enough to play tennis.

She attended Sacred Heart Convent School and was little affected by anything beyond her neighborhood of sycamore-lined streets and fashionable Spanish-style homes. Never mind a world on the brink of war. By her own admission, she was naive.

In 1943, volunteering to serve Thanksgiving dinner to Navy officers, she saw George Sarris, an ex-Boston College center who played a season for the Detroit Lions, walk through the line—he reminded her of her father. They were married three months later. One night not long after, he didn’t come home until six in the morning. He told her not to ask questions and, to make his point, he hit her.

In 1950, they moved to Santa Rosa, a hot spot of postwar suburban development 60 miles north of The City. With a loan from my mother’s widowed mother, George opened a hardware store. He and my mother bought a new tract house. It bordered a dairy, soon to be displaced by more homes. In 2002, when my mother died, that house, bought for $12,000, sold for $600,000.

They wanted children. Everyone was having children. Perhaps my mother thought children would help their marriage. In the fall of 1951, they made arrangements for an adoption. Their family doctor identified a baby from a good background, who would soon be available.

By the time they brought me home in February, my mother was two months pregnant with my brother, Patrick. Five years later, their second child, my sister, Maryanne, was born, and two years after that, my brother Stephen.

George’s business failed. He never repaid my grandmother’s loan. He fortified his small sense of self-worth at the expense of others, most often with insults. I was a pansy; Patrick was stupid; my mother loved the family doctor more than him. Maryanne and Stephen were too young to bother with. Alcohol intensified my father’s abusiveness, which was worst at the dinner table, where none of us could escape him. My mother retaliated with good meals and a clean house. She put on a good show.

In 1964, she filed for divorce, although divorce was not allowed in the Catholic Church. Her family would have been shocked, except that her mother and sister had recently learned of the problems she faced. Her brother, a successful developer, took possession of our house so the bank wouldn’t. My mother found a part-time job selling men’s furnishings at JCPenney. She looked great. A “Peninsula” gal at the cash register, ringing up packets of Fruit of the Loom jockey shorts.


I never felt lesser, or threatened by my siblings. They never made me feel different. I was the oldest, the big brother. I was dreamy, often remote, preoccupied with my own interests, cows or whatever else. If anything, I felt my mother was closest to me. My being “adopted” seemed less determined by my physical differences—my black hair, for instance, as opposed to my blond brothers and sister—than by those pastimes my mother and I shared.

The car rides, for instance. Often, to escape George, and later, after he was gone, perhaps following a family upheaval, or maybe just because it was a nice day, my mother and I took rides. We went to the park in Sonoma, a half hour away, or west to Occidental, or all the way to Bodega Bay. We talked about people. We made sense of their lives. The dairyman’s hip-boot-wearing, unpleasant mother was controlling, because she found herself alone with five kids to feed after her husband strolled onto the front lawn one Christmas morning and blasted his brains out. Mrs. Sanchez, my friend’s mother, had reason to burn Mr. Sanchez’s clothes—the handsome Latin was a runaround. At some point, the setting and my mother’s mood permitting, I would raise my case. “So what about the father?” “You are like me: Irish and German.” No new information; I had reached an impasse.

My mother couldn’t avoid the ill effects of an unhappy marriage and divorce. Patrick got into drugs. Maryanne rebelled and ran away. Stephen got into drugs and alcohol as well.

Juvenile Court placed Maryanne in a halfway house where the family was required to gather on Thursday evenings for an encounter group. The only mandate was total honesty—about the facts of our lives and our feelings. I was 20. What concerned me? Or, as the bearded counselor asked, what was I angry about?

I had, two months before, split up with my first lover, a man 13 years older, who had been my professor at Santa Rosa Junior College. I still hadn’t come out to my family. I had dropped out of school. My problem was that my mother hadn’t been totally honest about my birth parents.

I now had my mother cornered. “You had to know,” I declared in the group. “Didn’t you see an obituary in the newspaper? I can look for it myself. Or go to the hospital and find someone to get the records. I just thought the right thing to do was to hear it from you, my mother.”

My words shot across the family semicircle, causing my mother to wince, not once but twice, as if hit by an echo of what I had said. I found her effort to maintain appearances ridiculous. Given the magnitude of our family’s problems, how could she sit there as if she were at an afternoon bridge party? The counselor was right: “We find ways to bury the hurt and, instead, should face it.”

“I am 20,” I said. “I have a right to know.”

The room grew silent. The counselor didn’t speak, even as the silence continued.

My mother leaned forward. “Mary Hartman,” she said.

The obituary was in The Press Democrat, February 25, 1952. I found it on microfiche in the public library.

Through a girlfriend of a friend, I met a nurse at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. “Amazing,” she said over the telephone after finding, in the hospital’s microfiche, records for a Bunny Hartman. “The hospital killed her.”

Cause of death: toxic uremia—caused, the nurse was able to determine from the doctor’s notes, by a mismatched blood transfusion. The death certificate was signed by Bunny’s obstetrician, a Dr. Hanzlik.

His office turned out to be a block from the hospital. A tall man, prematurely silver-haired, stately in appearance, he first told me he never knew a Bunny Hartman. Then he broke down, put his head in hands, and admitted the truth. He had administered the blood, though, technically, the lab was at fault for the mix-up.


“I must’ve been like a ghost come back to haunt him,” I told my mother. We were in the kitchen. It was a Monday morning, after a weekend I’d spent attempting every which way to distract myself from loneliness, mostly in the local gay bar with a fake I.D. My mother was stooped over a shelf below the kitchen counter, putting the toaster away. When she straightened, she looked at me and said, “I thought of something else. Our doctor said the baby’s mother liked horses, was an equestrian. I used to think of that when you liked working on that horse ranch so much.”

“Mom, come with me to find the grave—let’s go to the cemetery.”

She was chatting all the way. Mostly about the cemetery director, a former department store owner whose main street business collapsed after the arrival of a shopping mall west of town with its Emporium and JCPenney. She’d known him and his wife when she was married. “I suppose I’ll have to tell him the whole story,” she said. But it was late in the afternoon and he had left for the day.

Even with the bookkeeper’s directions, we had a hard time finding the grave. As we walked about, past unadorned headstones, we kept talking. “Do you think my father really could be Mexican?” I asked. “You don’t look it, Greg. Look at you.” Yes: six two, black hair but blue eyes and fair skin—Irish and German.

Finally seeing the grave, we became quiet. A slab of white-painted cement and nothing else—except for an upside-down horseshoe planted at the top. Inside the cast-iron crescent, tiny lettering: BUNNY HARTMAN 34-52.

Then we walked back to the car. Something beyond words had happened for us. The long-kept secrecy was over.

Once we were in the car, my mother looked in the direction of the grave and said, “You don’t abandon your kids.”


I visited Dr. Hanzlik once more. He told me that Bunny’s mother—Bernadette Maloney Hartman—stayed in Sonoma County for a few months after Bunny’s death, then disappeared. He believed they had come from Southern California. The obituary specified where Bernadette’s parents were from, Newport News, Virginia, but not Bernadette and her children. Southern California is a huge place. The grave was a closed door. I floundered in Santa Rosa a while, then enrolled in UCLA, a good school close to West Hollywood and its legendary gay community.


My sister was murdered on December 6, 1976, in Santa Barbara. She was 19.

Her killer, also 19, then murdered three other girls. He was caught after attempting to kill a fourth.

My mother wanted to meet with the detectives, in a desperate attempt, I thought, to make sense of the incomprehensible. When she arrived in Los Angeles so we could go up together, Santa Barbara was besieged by one of the worst fires in its history. So my mother never got there. We sat in my studio apartment, talking about what had happened to my sister, as if it were someone else’s story. At one point, my mother looked out the window to the hazy sky and said, “You know that Bernadette could be around here someplace. I bet she came back here.”


My brother Patrick died on October 10, 1982, in San Francisco, after a ten-month battle with leukemia. The brother of a woman being treated in the room next to Patrick’s—there’s a lot of waiting around and storytelling on oncology wards—put me in touch with Bernadette’s sister, my great-aunt, Gertie. I reached her by phone one Sunday morning in Newport News, Virginia. Her southern accent rolled over the wires thick as honey.

She told me that, four months after Bunny’s death, Bernadette had married Frank Pettyjohn, owner of a furniture store in Monterey.

“I’d been told that Bunny died in a horseback riding accident,” said Aunt Gertie. “And my sister is still telling lies. But never mind, dearie, you come from good stock, at least on this side. William Maloney, my great-grandfather, was Irish; his wife, Anne, my great-grandmother, German.”

Aunt Gertie and my mother became instant allies. They both felt that Bernadette wasn’t only an unconscionable parent who had left her daughter in a remote grave, but, as Gertie put it, Bernadette was self-centered and disingenuous, the sister who was “different from the rest,” a spitfire with coal black hair and violet eyes. She’d gone to Julliard School of Music, straining the family’s finances, and then headed for Hollywood, where she obtained small roles, singing spots in the early talkies; she dated veteran cowboy actor Randolph Scott, whose roommate was Cary Grant.

She returned to the family—five months pregnant with Bunny—because, she said, she wanted to have her first child born in Newport News, as her mother had before her. Her husband, Howard Hartman, a big shot in the May Company, was “too busy with work” to accompany her. She returned to Los Angeles when Bunny was a year old, probably not, Gertie thought, to be reunited with Hartman.

Bernadette did have a picture of Howard. “He looked Jewish,” Gertie said in a hushed whisper.


Aunt Gertie gave me Bernadette’s phone number. Bernadette and Frank Pettyjohn were retired; they “wintered” in Guaymas, Mexico, and “summered” at Lake Tahoe. Aunt Gertie also gave me the number of Bunny’s brother, Howard, Jr., who was living in Monterey.

It was 1986. I was at Stanford, beginning a doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature. Monterey was two hours away. The telephone was on my desk.

Although he made it sound as if it would be a chore, like mowing the lawn, my uncle agreed to meet me. “There’s a new breakfast place I’d like to try out,” he said with a surge of enthusiasm. It was in Capitola, a half hour north of Monterey. We met in front of the hostess booth. He didn’t look like me. He was tall and blond—more like my adopted family. We shook hands, then went to his table. Jan, his girlfriend, was there, blonde, cheery.

We talked about a car crash he’d witnessed on the highway and about sports. This was supposed to be a significant moment. I had connected with my birth family. I might as well have been talking to a random couple I met in Target. He had large hands, no wedding ring; he was divorced with two grown daughters, my cousins, which Aunt Gertie had already told me. His nose was sharp, beaklike, nothing like mine, and his small, pale blue eyes were close set. He wasn’t any more forthcoming than he had been on the phone, but his demeanor, I could see now, had nothing to do with me. He was reserved, generally nontalkative, period. He was most comfortable talking about sports. He taught P.E. Jan was more open. She studied me, tilting her head like a curious animal. I assumed she was looking for physical similarities between me and Howard.

“His big eyes are kind of like your mother’s,” she said to him.

Howard nodded. The hard stuff of families—in this case, death and scandal—was not his cup of tea. Nonetheless, he let fall that his father, Howard, Sr., had been in a sanatarium much of the time he was growing up, and died of the disease that put him there, tuberculosis, when Howard was ten. Thus, he barely remembered his father.

He remembered his last visit to Bunny in the hospital. He couldn’t see her well: She was behind an oxygen tent and looked “far away.” He was twelve then. He didn’t go to her funeral—or to his father’s before—because his mother believed attending funerals wasn’t good for children.

He said his mother would be stopping in Monterey on her way back from Mexico in a few weeks. He thought it best to tell her “all about this” then, in person.

Jan encouraged him, prompting him with questions I wouldn’t have felt permitted to ask. Yet, on his own, unrelated to whatever it was we were talking about, he mentioned being surprised by my appearance, not that the two of us didn’t resemble one another, but that I didn’t look at all like the guy Bunny had pointed to as the father of her baby—a Mexican stable boy, “all of five feet tall. My sister was short, too. It doesn’t make sense. You don’t put two five-foot-tall people together and get someone six two, 220 pounds.” He recalled a “big Hawaiian type” he’d taken his sister’s notes to on the football field. He couldn’t remember this dark football player’s name.

Then, outside the café, as we were saying goodbye, he straightened all at once, as if struck by lightning. He pointed his finger at me, an inch from my chest. “Meatloaf,” he said.

I found the nearest phone booth and called my mother. “Mom,” I said, “I finally know who I am: son of Bunny and Meatloaf.”

I drove directly to Santa Rosa. My mother had the table set for lunch, cold chicken and baked beans. It was almost four o’clock. Howard had given me a picture of Bunny as a five year old. I pushed it across the table to my mother. A generic black and white, perhaps a kindergarten picture: a full-faced child in a round-collared blouse. We both had big eyes and prominent foreheads. The similarities didn’t necessarily mark us as mother and son.

I understood then—perhaps accepted finally—that the meeting with Howard was a disappointment. It wasn’t as if Howard and I felt any affinity for one another. What had I learned about my birth mother? “It’s like he’s totally repressing everything,” I told my mother.

She got up and found a serving spoon for the beans. “Some people are like that. Don’t use your fork in the beans,” she said....