The Orphan Spoon

Welcome to the Orphan Sister--soon I will share details about a new novel, but for now, let me offer up posts on topics related to the narrative: twins and triplets, secret lives, dogs and ferrets and boyfriends nicknamed Feet.

This isn't part of the novel, but it is part of the reason I wrote The Orphan Sister.

There is a family story--isn't there always a family story? But there is a family story about triplets, my grandmother's uncles. I imagine they are redheads but I'm not sure that's true. There were many blond and blue-eyed Wolbranskys, and I wish I had pages of photographs, but instead, I have the frame of my grandmother's telling and my own invention. My sister's youngest son, Simon, has red hair and blue eyes and he blazes and shines, and I imagine these three boys were just like that.

Anyway, the story has stuck with me, even if I've changed details in my own personal memory telephone game. They were emigrating from Russia or Poland--whichever country it was according to the border at that time--to escape the pogroms. Either way, they were most certainly unusual in that generation, triplets, long before fertility drugs or even obsessively good prenatal care.

This is how the story goes: they were at a train station. My great great grandmother was clutching her baby boys, and the men were moving the luggage, when a woman darted out of the anonymous stream of passersby. She grabbed one of the triplets and took off. I imagine a whistle of the police; I imagine this great great, this young mother, howling alarm. Someone stole her baby, but she still had two to hold.

The police caught the woman, but she didn't want to let go of the child, game, instead, for a biblical tearing apart.

"It's not fair!" she screamed, collapsing, pressing her body against him, her cabbagy odor of sweat and desire and sadness inspiring the stunned baby to his own wailing. "She has three and I have none! It's not fair! God is not fair!"

That's how the story goes. It's stuck with me like a stone in my pocket, worried and smooth, but it is also a seed of truth for fiction. How fair is it that she has three and she has none? As fair as all of nature, of thieving birds who snatch chicks or eggs, of benevolent labradors nursing kittens. As fair as the bright blaze of red hair as the triplet was returned to his mother's excessively full arms.

Comments

[Patricia Intriago]

Wow! This is going to be a good one and I cannot WAIT to read it! You amaze me, Wendy!

[Gwendolen Gross]

Thank you, Patricia! How are things with YOUR BOOK? (it's a stunner, everyone)

[Lisa Roe]

Really looking forward to reading this one! Family story?! Secret lives?! Dogs?! I'm in!

[Petra Bauer-Ryan]

red heads, triplets, a train station - what a set up! I hope we don'thave to wait too long to find out what fabulous story you will turn this material into! happy writing!

[alison]

can't wait- sounds wonderful (not surprisingly!)
congrats!

[Madeleine Beresford]

I love the voice of the narrator and can't wait to hear more. Mazel Tof!

[Cinzia D'Iorio]

Can't wait for your new arrival! It sounds as if it will be another winner. If you haven't heard, there are at least 5 sets of triplets in HHK so I am certain there are plenty of great stories to go with them. Good luck! XOXO

[Gwendolen Gross]

Thanks, Lisa--and you are an expert in at least some of the above (all?)
xo
GG

[Gwendolen Gross]

Petra! Dear Petra! Thank you! I'll let you know as soon as I have a date...

[Gwendolen Gross]

Alison, Cinzia, Madeleine--thank you very much! C--I didn't know HHK had so many triplets...do you know any of them well?
Imagine all those diapers!

[Phyllis Rosenthal]

Triplets you say? Hmmm. . . what would that kind of mothering be like? Thanks for stirring the pot of my thoughts, Wendy, and good luck with it all.

[Danielle]

I'm hooked! Can't wait to read the novel... :-)