The Upright Man by Michael Marshall Page B

believed his first name to be Paul; that I was trying to trace him; and that I had no other information whatsoever except that he might have been found wearing a sweater with his name stitched into it. The man wrote down what I said but the looks he gave me said it was going to be a long day. Finally he handed me a number, and I was released back into the milling, coughing herd of problems, psychoses, and whines.
    Two hundred thousand years later, my number came up. I was invited down a long corridor and into a room in the far back of the floor, where a middle-aged black woman was sitting behind a desk covered in paper. A sign said she was called Mrs. Muriel Dupree. The wall behind her was covered with posters in which one word in three was underlined and confidentiality was usually guaranteed.
    “I can’t help you,” she said before I even sat down.
    I sat down anyway. “Why?”
    “It’s too long ago, that’s why.” She referred to a piece of paper in front of her. “Says here it’s about a brother, and you think it was around 1967. That’s before my time, I’m hoping you realize. It was also before a lot of other big things happened. Those, for a start.” She nodded toward a computer so old I wouldn’t trust it to hold my laptop’s coat.“Only about twenty years ago all this stuff started going on computer, and then we had a bad fire in 1982 that took out the tapes and files in the basement, so we lost most of the information prior to that date anyhow. Even if something was written down about it, the old-fashioned way, and it wasn’t burned, it wouldn’t have been a whole lot and you’d have a better chance of finding God than finding it now. I don’t mean that personally. You may know Him already, which case, good for you.”
    She read the disappointment in my face, and shrugged. “Things were different then. Today no one gets ‘put up for adoption’: the mother makes an adoption plan, there’s legally binding contact arrangements, and everybody gets that a blank canvas isn’t the best thing for the child, that child needs to own the information about his or her own past, da da da. But back then it was, “Okay, you been fostered or adopted or whatever. Welcome to your new life. Don’t look back, because there ain’t nothing happy there to be found.” People would change the kids’ names, birthdays, whatever. You know how they say the expression ‘put up for adoption’ came about?”
    I shook my head. I didn’t know. I didn’t care, either, but Mrs. Dupree was evidently viewing me as a welcome five-minute break from people who would shout at her.
    “Way, way back they would take the orphaned children out of the cities on the coasts, put them on trains. They’d take them out into the country and stop at the itty-bitty stations and the kids would literally be ‘put up’ onto the platforms in the hope that some farmer with a bit of room—and a need for some more labor, of course; there was a deal going on here—would take one or two in. Here’s the kid. Feed it. That’s that. Everything prior is dead and gone. Things weren’t still that way in the sixties, I’m not saying that at all, but in some ways they kind of were. Half the time the kids wouldn’t get told they were adopted ever. Most of the rest, the parents would wait until they thought the children were old enough, which meant probably they’d been voting for a few years—they werespaced out to all hell to find out Mom and Dad could have been hundreds of miles away at the moment they were born. It was not a good system and we know that now, but at the time it was thought to be for the best—and a whole lot of those children grew up to have happy and productive lives. Honey, you okay?”
    “Yeah,” I said, looking back up at her from my hands, which I had been inspecting while wondering if I would ever prove to have a happy and productive life myself. “I didn’t expect to get so stopped, so soon. And . . . this is