Moms de Plume

In real life, sadly, Ellen Ballman couldn't even take care of herself.

The woman who'd put that pink-ribboned package up for adoption in 1961 turned out to have led a life that Homes shorthands as "really awful." Never married, financially and emotionally insecure, she had a neurotic neediness that reminded Homes of the Tennessee Williams character Blanche DuBois, "moving from person to person, desperate to get something, to find relief from unrelievable pain."

Head crammed with images of a fantasy being whom she had mythologized for decades, Ellen couldn't relate to the actual daughter she'd tracked down.

"You take better care of your dog than you take of me," she told her newly rediscovered offspring when Homes, wary and disoriented, wouldn't agree to an immediate meeting. "You should adopt me -- and take care of me."

Homes didn't know how to respond.

When they did meet, Ellen asked her forgiveness for letting her go.

"I forgive you. You absolutely did the right thing," Homes replied. But Ellen still frightened her. The disconnect was so great, she sensed, that she would never see this mother again.

That didn't mean she couldn't muster sympathy from a distance -- or that she wouldn't feel tremendous guilt when Ellen died, alone, in 1998.

Her birth father turned out to be unrelated to fairy-tale royalty either.

Ellen told Homes that she'd gone to work for Norman Hecht at a store called the Princess Shop, in downtown Washington, when she was 15 years old. The boss, who was married and in his 30s, took to driving her home, then out to dinner. Within a couple of years, she said, Norman was promising to get a divorce and marry her.

Didn't happen.

Homes wanted to meet him anyway. They met in his lawyer's office, where they talked about Ellen, among other things. "She was a slut who knew more than her years -- things a young girl shouldn't know," Norman said.