Steven DeBont
In 1951 my mother would become pregnant with her third child. We were sent away to Barbara Rome’s (owner of the Tea Caddy where my mother would ultimately work when we moved to Anglesey) house for a long weekend while she supposedly gave birth to a stillborn boy. We loved staying at Auntie Barbara’s so much that Penny hid under the bed upstairs, refusing to go home with Mummy and Daddy. For this she was soundly spanked in my mother’s usual unforgiving fit of temper at anything that did not go her way.
For years and years we suffered through her terrible depressions reportedly due to the death of her little boy. We were lumped in the background as cause for her misery and depression. She hated being a mother and hated us. We were the cause of everything wrong in her life, in her marriage. She was homesick; she was married to an alcoholic philanderer. She lashed out at us above all while controlling an ever-growing number of psychotic dogs. Jilly and Chloe who had come from Wales with us when we moved to US, would be put to sleep because they contracted distemper from a third puppy who was also put to sleep. The excuse was they couldn’t afford a veterinarian.
Then we had Wendy I, Wendy II, Michele, Jonquil, Duffy and who knows because I had left home shortly after the advent of Wendy I.
One night shortly into my stay in London I was having dinner with Clive and Howard. And Clive and I stayed up talking about family gossip as was our habit when I happened to mention my stillborn baby brother. Clive nearly did a spit take across the coffee table. The brother was not dead, he was given up for adoption immediately after birth revealed Clive with a somewhat Satanic gleam in his eyes. So I wrote to my sister with this news. My sister and I promised that we would find him. There were agencies that did that sort of thing and with the advent of the Internet it would be comparatively easy.
The word got to Shirley and she instructed Penelope that we should not try to contact our brother until after their deaths. They had no interest in meeting him or knowing anything about him. So this project went on the back burner. We never did anything further about it.
One day in 1998 (my mother and I had not been speaking since my father’s death in ‘97) Shirley called and said “You remember that brother I told you about who was given up for adoption?” “Yes, you mean who Clive told me had been given up for adoption.” I replied. “Well, he’s here, do you want to speak to him.” “Sure,” I said. She put Steven on the phone. In between puffs of cigarettes (she never allowed anyone to smoke in her house) he described himself in a North London accent, not ill-educated but a bit of a yobbo all the same. Groan. I thought why couldn’t he be erudite and Ian McKellanish or Cary Grant-like. Anyway it developed that he was in US on an airline ticket that my mother had bought him (a favor she never graced either of us with during our entire lives). He took the train to Boston; my sister came up from D.C. and we spent a few days together.
Penelope hung all over him which is her way. I was very cool as I did not like him. He had to be one of the most unattractive men I have ever met: short, with toad-like face with rosacia and straight short hair. He reminded me of a baby I once saw in Children’s Hospital in Boston born to crack addicts. He was a blurred version of my father. He was pathological in behavior. Paranoid. Told great tales none of which one could believe. He also whined.
Probably there are many reasons for him ending up like this. He was adopted shortly after birth and grew up in Cambridge, England. His father was a dentist and his mother a homemaker who would soon become pregnant after his adoption, with his brother. Apparently it was an ordinary and happy life until his mother died of breast cancer when he was ten years old. From there on things are sketchy but it seems that his father had little control over him and he careened on to a life of drink and drugs being a roadie for rock bands in the 60s (coincidentally during the time I was living in London).
His father told him when he turned 18 that he was free to track down his biological parents if he wanted to. He actually did a very good job. He has a three ring notebook with an amazing amount of documentation. My parents’ birth certificates, my father’s military records and letters to my Uncle John asking for information on my mother’s whereabouts. Uncle John preferred to “Let dead dogs lie.” and refused to tell him where she could be contacted. Stephen persisted and in 1997 when my father died his contact information became available through the Freedom of Information Act. He obtained their home number and address and dialed the number. He said to my mother “Are you sitting down?” and then, “This is your son.” Her dramatic response “I knew you would find me one day.”
So ensued our reunion which did not really do it for us and we thought well perhaps it helps Shirley deal with all the history. However, it turned out that he drank too much and nearly crashed her car and would yell at her and was really quite abusive. He thought she was rather a stupid woman. An opinion we both shared at the time.
He returned to England and many late hour drunken phone calls would come our way. What seemed only months later, he proposed another trip. This time his insistence on visiting me came at a bad time. My son was going to be home from Switzerland that weekend and so he could not stay with me. I booked him into a local hotel. He was not happy about that at all. He also burned two holes in my carpet and smoked the place up while I was at work. I took him to a restaurant for lunch where he surreptitiously caressed my breast while I was reaching for the salt.
He went down to Maryland to see my sister and brother-in-law. He also smoked in the guest bedroom. Got terrifically drunk, made a pass at my sister and my brother-in-law. And upon his return to CT to my mother, he apparently tried to climb into bed with her. So that was the end of that. All three of us independently decided that was it with him. My sister told him in a subsequent phone call that unless he quit drinking, he had no future relationship with Shirley. There would be no future relationship with either of us.
My mother had given him some of her Tiffany silver to take back to London. He bemoaned the fact that the appraiser (read pawn shop) said it was not real Tiffany. I was amused.
I have been back to London three times in the ensuing five years since these events. I did not contact him at either time but on the first trip, the night I got back from Edinburgh, the phone was ringing as I walked in the door and he said a little bird had told him I was in London and I said “Yes, staying with friends, then to Scotland.” He didn’t pursue it.
Just recently after five years of silence, my mother got a message on her answering machine from him. It is April now, I guess he is planning for a summer holiday.