Blessed Assurance

“This is my story.”

When I heard a man’s voice on the line I said, “My name is Whitt Roundtree. Do you know who I am?”

And he answered, “Yes.”

I was at that time twenty-four years old. I was a student, a writer. I was engaged to be married. I was the daughter of a widowed woman who’d wed herself to the church; who’d drenched her tongue in Jesus; who spoke little else. She had called me days earlier, asked, “How is your Spirit?” before telling me the man whose name I carried, my Daddy, who died when I was six years old, was not actually my father.

This man—a stranger on the telephone—was my “real” father. His “yes” stopped me with its certainty, its singular finality.

“Well I—I mean—I just found out—about you, I mean,” I stammered. I could not get my mouth and my brain to work together.

Where had my questions gone?

There had been questions. In the days following my mother’s call, it had seemed imperative that I get some answers and that right quick. Call the small southern county where this man and my mother had worked in 1971, the year I was born. Find out where he had moved when he retired. Call everyone listed in that city—Jacksonville, Florida—with his name. Get some answers. Do you know who I am? Do you? Do you?

He was silent now, having said, for him, all there was to say. He knew exactly who I was.

But I kept stumbling, repeating, “I mean.” I wonder now about the list that must have run through his head, all that his simple, far from simple “yes” had summed: that I was my mother’s child; that I was my Daddy’s, a child of the man who had raised me; that I was the phone call from out of the blue long expected, and awaited, and dreaded; that I was a secret he would not tell his wife; that I was someone he would not get to know.

“Yes,” he said.

And I should have listened, paid closer attention, both to his silence and to the syllable that had preceded it.

My biological father is, for me, three telephone conversations. This, the first, ended quickly, as they would all. “I can’t talk to you right now,” he said, sending me stammering again. It seemed imperative that he stay on the line, but I could not think of anything to keep him there.

“But, but . . .” I panicked and he interrupted.

“Call me back tonight,” he said, abrupt. Hurriedly, he added, “Around eleven-thirty/twelve.” Then he hung up.

Yes, I thought. Lovers’ hours. His wife would be asleep. I was a secret, someone born from secrecy. The collusion made me happy. There was something between us now—a beginning. And now I knew something about him: that he was a man who gave orders like that. To women. To keep them calm. I would call him back and we would speak, I knew, in whispers. I would get some answers, though none—not one, I realized now—he did not want to give. He was a man who did not give more than he wanted. But he expected something of me. It made me happy. Just a phone call. Still, something.

That night when I called back he answered on the first ring, just as I expected he would. “This is your daughter,” I said, grown bolder with several hours’ waiting. This time, I even expected his silence.

“I just wanted some information,” I said, confident. “You know, this all came as a surprise to me.”

How I must have sounded! I’d found my tongue, was settling in comfortably for conversation. “I mean, can you tell me . . .” but, once again, he interrupted.

He said, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

I answered quickly. “Oh.”

One stunned matter-of-fact syllable. His silence swallowed it. Then he hung up.

I want to say I waited at least six months before making the second...