Dark Eyes Part I: My Enigmatic Grandmother

This is going to be a challenge. I don't know where to begin or where to end. I don't know how much to reveal or how much to withhold. I do know that this is the single plotline in my life that I most want to write about in detail...maybe a book, maybe a screenplay. I have to figure it all out first. I only have about two-thirds of the puzzle pieces in place.

It was never a secret that my mother and her twin brother had been adopted. Not that it was talked about frequently. We'd been told their mother had died during childbirth. There'd been the story of the poor widower who, in his grief and poverty, explained to my mother's adoptive parents that he didn't have the means to care for his already large family and would they please adopt the twins. I always imagined him speaking with an Irish accent and, maybe, wearing a cloth cap. Perhaps twisting the hat in his hands.

After our mother died in the 1980's, my sister and I decided to find out whatever we could about our maternal heritage. And through opened court documents, visits to the National Archives, and tireless correspondence, we got almost nowhere. Over twenty years had passed. Then, through a series of fast-moving and stunning coincidences, I found myself face-to-face with my half-cousin and my mother's younger half-sister. My grandmother clearly had not died during childbirth.

I knew my mother had been born in Chicago in 1925. We had her birth mother's name, but could never find any record of her. It never occurred to us that she'd had at least three marriages and used multiple variations of her name. She'd been a terrible mother to her four known children, often disappearing for months at a time. Contrary to our decades-old image of an impoverished grandmother, she'd lived well in Key West, Miami Beach, pre-Castro Havana, and Jamaica. For reasons still unknown, when she would enter nightclubs, bandleaders would immediately stop what the band was playing and change the number to Dark Eyes, a song based on an old Russian folk ballad about a heartless gypsy. It was my grandmother's theme. Literally. Imagine.

The search continues. Now with the generous help of new-found family members who are also curious, there are trails to follow that I would have never imagined on my own. There's a story here that's surprising and compelling and a little bit chilling. It's still a matter of detective work and time before, if ever, the portrait of Dark Eyes is complete.