: Joyce Kornblatt
: Mother Tongue
: Publerati
: 9781735027326
: 1
: CHF 8.30
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 188
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Mother Tongue begins with a shocking discovery. In a powerful fiction that reads like a true story, the details of the crime and its aftermath unfold. In mid-life, Australian fiction-writer Nella Pine learns that she was kidnapped as an infant from a hospital in the United States, taken to Australia, and raised there by the woman she knew as her mother, but who was actually her abductor. 'When I was three days old, a nurse named Ruth Miller stole me from the obstetrics ward in Mercy Hospital and raised me as her own.' In four voices of those whose lives were changed forever by the abduction, the mystery of Nella's kidnapping emerges. Why was she taken? How was the secret kept for so long? What became of the family she was stolen from? Mother Tongue invites the reader to participate with these memorable characters as they unfold the impact on them of a terrible crime.

Nella

1.

 

My name is Nella Pine and this is my life’s story, as new to me as it will be to you who reads it here for the first time.

I am the secret and the one who whispers the secret into your ear.

I am the crime and the narrator-sleuth.

I came upon the facts of my existence as one who returns to her home in the midst of a burglary: here is the shattered glass, the rifled drawers, the thief with the booty still cradled in her guilty arms.

When I was three days old, a nurse named Ruth Miller stole me from the obstetrics ward in Mercy Hospital and raised me as her own. This was May 7, 1968, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In Paris, ten thousand students rioted in the streets. Martin Luther King had been dead for a month, and Robert Kennedy’s killerstruck in June. The war in Vietnam was at its peak. In the midst of these larger convulsions, a smaller one—deadly as napalm, precise as an assassin’s bullet—in the form of a nurse who kidnapped a child and vanished from sight. I was a healthy infant, with a head of dark hair and an iodine stain shaped like a butterfly in the center of my brow. During the futile search for me and my abductor, that marking would become famous for a while,the butterfly babyfeatured on news reports and front pages and missing children flyers in post offices and community centers and supermarkets all over America. By the time the authorities abandoned their hunt, the iodine stain had faded away, my most distinguishing characteristic no longer there to identify me. And as often happens to babies born with a full head of hair, that too was gone. I looked so little like the photo snapped of me in the hours following my birth that Ruth herself could begin to believe that I was a different infant entirely, not the one she’d taken from a mother in Room 32B who slept through the deed in sedated post-partum oblivion.

At the end of her shift, Ruth lifted me from my crib in the newborn nursery, settled me into a sling she wore beneath her raincoat, and walked out undetected into the balmy Pittsburgh dusk. Smoke from the steel mills still turned the air rancid then, and yielded sunsets of exquisite and memorable radiance. If I had not been stolen away, if I had been able to witness again and again the evening sky of my birthplace, I would have learned early the lesson I am struggling now to accept: beauty resides in blight, and blight in beauty—each holds the other like a seed in its hand.

 

We travelled by taxi to the airport. Ruth retrieved the suitcase and diaper bag from the locker room where she’d stowed them the day before. In the LadiesRest Room, she fed me a bottle, changed me, dressed me in a flowered fleece gown and matching knit cap large enough to pull down over th