Ed King (11 page)

Her husband, she discovered, was an excellent father. When he came home from his constant, consuming family practice, he went immediately to Eddie. He held Eddie in his lap, talked to Eddie, and fed Eddie from a bottle. On weekend afternoons, he napped with Eddie. They’d found bliss, Alice and Dan, even if it was with someone else’s child—but was Eddie
really
someone else’s child? In the ways that mattered? In the deep and soulful ways? As Rabbi Weisfeld had said, “He who raises someone else’s child is regarded as if he had actually brought him into the world.” “Now we get that,” Dan said to Alice. “It feels like it was always meant to be.”

Maybe there was something in all of this that quickened Dan’s sluggish swimmers. Or maybe it was that, one December night, Dan and Alice ended up on the floor, coming in unison, while Alice had two pillows stuffed under her hips. Maybe it was that, afterward, because it was warm by the heat register, and because Dan was in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal—which meant she was alone and could completely relax—Alice stayed on her back with her legs up for a half-hour. Whatever
the reasons, a miracle ensued: fourteen months after adopting a son, Alice gave birth, by C-section, to another, whom she and Dan named Simon Leslie King, after Alice’s uncle Shimmel and Dan’s grandfather Eleazar.

Again the Kings went dutifully to California—this time, since there were two babies, on Western Airlines. In Pasadena, Dan’s mother insisted that “Shimmel” looked like Dan, but even more like her brother Morton in Atlantic City. Dan’s father said, “You’re nuts, Beryl, he don’t look like that shlep brother of yours. Just notice his fingers—with fingers like that, he’s Isaac Stern playing Carnegie Hall, he’s Sandy Koufax with the fastball or somebody else good, but Morton, please, don’t say Morton, this way you bring bad luck around his head.”

In San Jose, Pop held Simon in his lap and examined him critically. “This one,” he said, “this one looks like your mother, Alice. The same eyes, your mother, and, see, the earlobes? Your mother’s earlobes. I don’t believe it. So much your mother I can’t take my eyes off. I don’t
wanna
take my eyes off. Look at this, will you look already? Edeleh, what do you think of your baby brother? What do you think, of all the good luck, now you have someone to throw a ball.”

There was no need to buy formula this time around, because for Simon there was milk so constant and profuse it dripped into Alice’s sturdy bra. When she did it with Dan she was two leaky faucets; either that or, if she was on top, he squeezed milk out of her nipples as if they were squirt guns. It was good he still wanted to have sex with her, Alice felt, because since her pregnancy she was
zaftig
in her hips, rear end, and thighs. She had love handles. She had cottage-cheese skin on the backs of her legs. There was a saving grace to her general expansion, though—her breasts were swollen and, to Dan, sexy. When she wore something low, her cleavage shone as if there were a lamp down there, and in her bathing suit at the View Ridge Swim Club her big boobs tried to spill out of her top. Alice felt like Marilyn Monroe, and even went to a stylist for some chin-length curls reminiscent of Marilyn’s.

Two babies—that was twice as complicated. Still, Dan and Alice shared an ecstasy that, punctuated by upsets, astonished them with its potent, strange embrace. When Eddie started walking, Dan said, mimicking Jimmy Durante, “That’s my boy!,” and took Polaroids while Alice recorded the event in a baby journal. In fact, everything Eddie and Simey
did, all their firsts and triumphs, were noted with like exultations and recordings, and with clamorous approval and long-distance phone calls. California was notified when a boy placed a square peg in a square hole, beat a relatively rhythmical tattoo on a drum, peed in a toilet for the first time, took off his shirt and flexed his biceps, or did a somersault. When Eddie posed for a high-chair photograph slathered in spaghetti sauce, that amusing snap got sent to California, along with snaps of Eddie and Simey at the park, at the pool, in the back yard enjoying a sprinkler’s spray, in the front yard clutching red plastic baseball bats, in Dan’s arms, in Alice’s arms, in snowsuits, on the ferry to Victoria, at the Space Needle. Dan would call home from his clinic and say, “How’s Simey and Eddie?” or “How are my kings?,” and if there was something to report, Alice would: “Eddie actually
ran
today.” “Simey’s teeth look beautiful.” “Eddie is clearly ambidextrous.” “Simey ate two bananas this morning.” “Not a peep when Eddie got his diphtheria shot—not a sound.”

Dan liked to stuff his sons on weekends: oatmeal with brown sugar, melba toast, scrambled eggs from his own plate, graham crackers spread with jelly, macaroni or Rice-A-Roni, chocolate pudding after dinner. He liked to jostle Eddie and Simey in his lap while watching
Saturday Night at the Movies
. He liked to drag them around the pool while making speedboat noises. He liked to tickle their plump, dappled thighs above the knees. But then he noticed something that, as a doctor, he was concerned about—Eddie, it seemed to Dan, had excessively turned-in feet, which was affecting his gait as he toddled and scrummed and might one day affect his hips, knees, and ankles if nothing was done about it.

Alice took Eddie to a pediatric orthopedist. Yes, the boy was pigeon-toed, but that was normal, the orthopedist said, because of how the fetus sits in the uterus, and in most cases it corrected spontaneously within a year of independent walking. Three weeks passed, though, and Eddie seemed, to Dan, more pigeon-toed. To him, the boy had the excessively turned-in gait of a child with an actual orthopedic problem. Again to the specialist, who this time, under pressure from Dan, took measurements and found severe in-toeing. Eddie had lower-body X-rays showing neither a rotated hip nor a rotated calf bone, but revealing an emphatic
metatarsus adductus
, otherwise called curved feet.

Curved feet! That sounded to Dan like a congenital anomaly, and the idea that Eddie’s birth parents had passed to Eddie a congenital anomaly like
metatarsus adductus
left him upset—unfairly, he knew—with those
invisible people. Chagrined, he had his adopted son fitted for night splints, which meant his feet were joined, while he slept, by a bar fastened at each end to special shoes. So stoic was Eddie, asleep on his back, that he seemed at first not to notice this circumstance, but then his right shoe began to chafe at the ankle, and since his room was too hot, as a matter of course, his ankle got damp and stayed that way, and the tender, pink spot there became infected. Dan tried gauze, iodine, moleskin, and an antibiotic, but it was too late, Eddie had staph, his foot ballooned, and he had to go to Children’s Orthopedic, where the treatment included the draining of pus from his ankle, warm dressings, intravenous feedings, stronger antibiotics, and infant doses of codeine. After twenty-two days of this, Eddie went home, but his right foot now looked a little disfigured, and when the treatment with splints was tried again, it was implemented with footplates instead of shoes.

A silver lining: the fastest runners in the world were pigeon-toed, like Eddie. So, when the Kings got together with other young families and someone made a comment about Eddie’s gait, Dan would respond with world-record holder Bob Hayes, the hundred-meter winner at the ’64 Olympics. If that didn’t ring a bell with people, he would suggest next the image of Jackie Robinson stretching a single into a double. Alice, at the swim club, holding Eddie in the water, or watching him splash in the kiddie pool, referred to his disfigured foot, when someone asked about it, as “his little Achilles’ heel.” Often, at bedtime, she rubbed his foot with baby oil, and his persistently swollen ankle made her sad.

But really there was little to be sad about. Both Simey and Eddie started reading at an early age, each sounding out the words in a Dick and Jane primer while sitting on Alice’s lap. Both were mathematically precocious, good with puzzles, gentle with the cat, and problem solvers on a playground. Eddie was well coordinated and could throw a tennis ball over the net from the midline, whereas Simey was prone to earaches on the plane to California, and to car sickness when they drove. At four, Eddie dove off the low board into deep water. His baby fat was gone, and, flying through the air with eager courage, suntanned, arms spread, muscles wet and gleaming, he left Dan and Alice giddy with pride. This fearless, charming, intelligent, and enormously nice-to-look-at child was a spring of good feeling that never stopped flowing, an answered prayer, a gift from God—just like Simey, their birth child.

Eddie and Simey, Simey and Eddie—they had their portrait taken by
a professional photographer, Eddie in a bow tie and sweater vest with Simey in his lap, then Eddie and Simey under the cherry tree in the back yard, then Eddie and Simey with Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys. The best one was Eddie and Simey on the living-room floor, cheek to cheek, giggling. “Such a nice big brother,” Alice said as the photographer snapped away with a camera on a tripod. “That’s my big, good boy, my darling Eddie.”

“Ick,” Eddie answered. “Simey smells bad.”

They sent the photograph to San Jose and Pasadena, framed and ready for hanging. Pop called long-distance on a Sunday night, because Sunday night was cheaper than other nights; already the picture was on his wall, he announced, adding that he’d gone to the hardware store for hooks, which came “in a package of total five hooks, the other four are now in the drawer where I keep the screwdriver and pliers, but that’s not the main thing, the main thing is, a very nice picture, but different, those two.”

“Kids don’t have to look alike,” said Alice.

“What’s the big deal?” added Dan.

“Maybe one day they ask,” said Pop. “ ‘How come he’s tall, I’m not so tall, he’s got his nose, I got my nose, his hair, the other hair’—what you gonna say to your boychiks then? Huh, Dr. Dan? I’m waiting for you! This one, he’s hitting home runs from the left side of the plate; the other, he’s making like Einstein in science class; one allergic maybe to nothing, one don’t leave home without having asthma; one is this, one that, one up, one down, one yes, one no—so what do you say, Mr. Know-It-All?”

“We stick with the mystery of genetics,” answered Dan. “It couldn’t be simpler, Pop.”

“Simple?” Pop said. “How is it simple? One day, Edeleh finds out.”

“We stick with the mystery of genetics,” Dan repeated. “If no one slips up or spills the beans, he isn’t adopted. Let’s all remember that.”

Pop sneezed into the phone. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s lying, this business. The tooth fairy’s lying, the
golem
is lying, Santa Claus is lying, all of it lying, but this, Mr. Eddie, not adopted, that’s
lying
lying, that’s Number Nine of the Ten Commandments lying. Listen, Daniel, I’m telling you from my heart, you want more
tsuris
than you already got? Go ahead—tell this lie!”

Dan looked at Alice, pointed at the phone, then made the loony-bird sign at his ear—a rotating index finger.

“Pop,” said Alice, seizing the receiver, which until now Dan had held at an angle while both of them tipped an ear toward it, “you’re having a heart attack over nothing. All of the specialists say the same thing, better that the child doesn’t know about adoption. This is like a white lie or a lie of omission, this is for the good of our Eddie.”

“Okay, forget it, I don’t know nothing,” Pop answered. “Since when is it up to me yes or no, Alice and Dr. Dan should lie or not lie? Go ahead, it isn’t my business, not the
alter kocker
’s business. Only,
a glick ahf dir
, see what comes of it!”

Alice and Dan did what many American Jews did when, after fleeing their parents, they themselves became parents: join a Reform synagogue and celebrate a few holidays. At Temple Beth David, where Nate Weisfeld was now rabbi-in-chief, Sukkoth came with fruit pies and ice cream eaten in a sukkah constructed by sixth-graders, Purim brought a carnival for kids and a costumed musical extravaganza, and Hanukkah was funded to compete with Christmas. Dan and Alice approved of the ambience. They paid for access to it. Neither believed in the God of the burning bush, or even in his modern, more nebulous iteration, but both believed there was vaguely more than met the eye, generally speaking, in the universe. Belief, however, was beside the point—what mattered was that Eddie and Simey should have an identity and not just wander through their lives like lost sheep; Eddie and Simey should know whence they came (even though Eddie came from who knows where, technically); Eddie and Simey should have a cultural experience and be nurtured in the embrace of a community. When push came to shove—when it came to their kids—the community the Kings wanted was a community of Jews, not bearded Jews who made no sense but rational Jews who didn’t believe in the God of the Torah or, for that matter, in the Torah itself. The earth was made 5,728 years ago? Come off it, no one in their right mind could believe such crap. Adam and Eve? A curse on the sons of Ham? Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt? Please. Spare us. Ancient tribal myths. Fortunately, Rabbi Weisfeld could spin Torah dross into contemporary gold, and do it at a level kids could understand, complete with life lessons, liberalism, and a seasoning of eternal mystery. Things at Beth David were at the right pitch, not too irrational, laughable, or boring, not too embarrassing, ancient, or foreign. Secular as it was, though, watered down to nearly
nothing, Beth David remained strong on the Chosen People motif. God liked Jews a notch more than anyone else. God had made a special pact with the Jews, which explained their smarts, Israel, and pastrami. At Beth David, the King boys learned that Jews were special—the smartest, the most sensitive and moral, the greatest artists and writers, the greatest scientists and scholars, the best at making money and at giving it away. Einstein, Marx, and Freud were Jews, so were a lot of the the Bomb inventors, and so was nearly everyone in show biz. Yes, there’d been a Holocaust recently, during which Jews had been marched into gas chambers, but since then they’d risen from the ashes, won the Six-Day War, garnered Nobels, and beat polio. Still on top!