Public Enemy (9 page)

Chesa dropped on our little family unit without the expected nine-months’ notice and without any groundwork—suddenly, there he was, and what had been one thing quickly became another. Having a third biological kid, or even a planned adoption, would have involved warning and the possibility of preparation. This was not that. This was a bombshell from beyond the beyond, an accident of fate, a collision of chance and choice, and most of all a leap of faith and foolishness for us, and we knew it.

Bernardine and I checked in with each other morning, noon, and night about our observations and interactions, the latest developments, how he seemed to be doing, how the other kids were handling everything, how we were each holding up. From the start Chesa was an easy child, perhaps too easy—agreeable, eager to please, a bit compliant. Act your age, we’d think to ourselves and whisper to each other. He was never fussy, never demanding. But it was weird as well—his play lacked spark and his explorations of his world were rather reluctant; he watched his new brothers playing and painting from a distance, but only joined in when Malik reached out to him, and then only tentatively. This easygoing kid was suffering silently, and yet he impressed everyone, especially those with the least experience with toddlers, with what “a good kid” he was—no drama, no resistance. To us he seemed to display a troubling blandness: he never exhibited much enthusiasm for anything, and both his physical strength and his emotions seemed to be hovering at low ebb. And we didn’t like the way he took to new adults, crawling immediately onto their laps—which they universally loved—without any wariness or toddler-normal stranger anxiety.

We talked and talked with each other, but never a peep of concern to Leonard or Jean, Kathy or David. They were in another world, a world of pain and pressure, and we wanted to reassure them that this was at least one place where they could feel safe and secure, that Chesa would be fine, and that we had everything completely in hand. It wasn’t true, not even close, but when one of us would begin to feel overwhelmed or underprepared for this new family we now had, the other would try to buck up and rise to the occasion. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, and we were both paddling as hard as we could to stay above water and on course.

When we took Chesa, we of course adopted an entire village—looking back it’s so obvious, but at the time it came as a complete and not entirely welcome revelation—and a more far-flung, outsized, and bizarre village is hard to picture. At the center are two imprisoned parents, grieving or defiant for what they had done, aching merely to touch their child on their best days, and on their worst days filled with recrimination and guilt, begging to wake up from the nightmare and rewind life’s clock. Next to them, four grandparents, all of them at an age when they should be sitting in rocking chairs surveying and considering their lives from a place of calm and relative comfort, thrust suddenly into an unwelcome place of dislocation and darkness, sleeplessness and necessary action. Frantic about the fate of their own kids and desperate to do the right thing by their newly discovered grandson, each was bombarded by a riot of emotions from anger and resentment to reconciliation and resignation. From there, it only got weirder.

Bernardine and the kids and I met Jean and Leonard at Shopsins Grocery and Diner often, or visited them in their Village home, and they trekked up to our fifth-floor walk-up when they could, bringing food or books and games. David’s parents, too, living outside Boston, came when possible, and all four of them, while crowding at moments, became wonderfully engaged grandparents to all three kids. For us the loveliest surprise was Leonard, whom we’d known as a renowned radical lawyer, a powerful intellectual, and a forceful presence in any room he entered. Here, though, in this space and role, he was transformed into an affectionate and devoted grandpa—available and responsive, fascinated and connected, patient to the point of serenity, and remarkably light-hearted and fun-loving. He would slip off his coat and tie and pile all three boys onto his lap to read them a book, let them take off his glasses without complaint, or kneel down next to the bathtub (and get soaked), helping out before bedtime. He played catch with Malik for hours on end, and he introduced both Malik and Zayd to chess—Leonard, who loved the game, had famously played with Che Guevara in Cuba in 1963. He visited their classrooms and became something of a legend, taking on all comers, moving from desk to desk and defeating them all. He played marathon matches in our living room until, years later, Zayd and Malik could each finally defeat the old champion. It was a revelation to us, and perhaps at that time to Leonard as well: he was born to be a grandfather.

One Sunday morning soon after Chesa came to live with us, Leonard called: they were nearby, meeting friends for brunch, and could they grab us some bagels and stop up to say hello. Yes, of course, and within minutes a half-dozen people had climbed the stairs and were crowded into our living room watching delightedly as the kids played. It was all well-intended, to be sure, but it felt oddly like surveillance as well—the friends included the heads of the Horace Mann and the Bank Street schools, a child psychiatrist from New Haven, and a federal judge. Thus began a pattern that continued for years, acquaintances and associates parading up our five flights or assembling at BJ’s Kids to get a glimpse of the Little Prince in his natural settings. And, of course, Leonard and Jean being who they were, early visitors included Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a visionary founder of
Ms
. magazine; Judith Viorst, the enchanting children’s book author; Helena Kennedy, a radical “people’s lawyer” who would later become a British MP; Corliss Lamont, the founder of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee; I. F. Stone, the celebrated journalist and Jean’s brother-in-law; Eqbal Ahmad, the Pakistani revolutionary and famous internationalist, and his wife, Julie Diamond, an education researcher and writer; Daniel Ellsberg; and Dr. Benjamin Spock himself. Had we been less secure about how we were raising our kids or how we were living our lives, this onslaught might have driven us over the edge, but we weren’t and it didn’t. It was a bit strange, and it could become a minor annoyance on occasion, like the first time Chesa got an ear infection—he was subject to every sore throat and ear infection that circled nearby in those early days—which we had dealt with adequately, we thought, by seeing our own pediatrician, only to have Leonard and Dr. Spock appear at our door for a “second opinion.” It’s an ear infection, for Christ’s sake; do we really need Dr. Spock? But it was mostly fun and occasionally funny for all of us, and it was, after all, Ben Spock.

Our pediatrician, Dr. Catherine Lodyjensky, was a celebrity in her own right, at least in our neighborhood. Bernardine had given birth to Malik in our own bed just blocks from her office. When I called the New York Health Department to report his arrival a few days later, there was a long silence on the other end. “Where is the patient now?” the voice asked tentatively. There’s no patient, I explained, just a baby and a mother, and I’d like to get a birth certificate. Pause. “Go immediately to an emergency room,” she advised, and when I said that Bernardine was not going to a place for the sick and the wounded, she transferred me through a bewildering set of agencies and departments, landing me finally at the Office of the Visiting Nurse, the first person who didn’t act as if I were entirely out of my mind. A couple of days later two lovely women climbed the endless stairs and registered Malik under his false name—the older one, African American and from the Deep South, surveyed our all-natural hullabaloo and settled in happily for tea and homemade oatmeal cookies, while the other, a recent immigrant from Haiti, kept a stiff distance. The younger one eventually asked Bernardine a series of prescribed questions and recorded the answers on a proper form, pausing at one point to ask me to leave the room, since the next few questions were quite personal. When Bernardine insisted that I need not leave the room, she read out with some embarrassment, “What was the date of your last period?”

We took Malik to see Dr. Lodyjensky a week after his birth—full head of dark hair and shockingly alert and active—and she peered and poked and probed and pronounced him perfect. And then in her lovely lilting Russian accent she added, “I see he has a
mano de azabache
,” the tiny black hand worn around the wrist on a gold chain to ward off evil spirits, this one a gift from his Uncle Mickey, a Puerto Rican nationalist and
independista
. How do you know about the
mano?
I asked, thinking this is the hippest old Russian immigrant in all of New York City. “Oh, I remove them from baby’s stomachs and throats all the time,” she said calmly, smiling, and without another word Malik’s
mano
was history, and we were on our own versus the evil spirits.

Shortly after Chesa joined our crew, Robby and Ellie Meeropol, friends from college, called to offer support and soon came to visit with their kids. Robby had been three years old and his brother Michael six when their parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed by the US government as communist spies at the height of the Cold War anti-communist frenzy. The boys were adopted by the songwriter Abel Meeropol (he wrote the Billie Holiday classic “Strange Fruit”) and his wife, Ann. Years later Michael and Robby wrote
We Are Your Sons
, publicly and proudly acknowledging their biological parents as well as their brilliant second parents and reclaiming the full scope of their heritage.

“I have no words of wisdom at all,” Robby said then. “You’re doing a wonderful thing, but there’s no road map to what’s ahead for him or for you.” He thought that Chesa looked great, but that he would probably be angry, depressed, and filled with questions in turn—as he himself had been—and that we’d likely all need some professional help down the road. Bernardine and I—born skeptics when it comes to “professional help”—were hugely grateful for their visit and concern. “His loss is bottomless,” Robby said, “but who knows where that might take him?”

Later we spent a weekend with Bernardine’s best friend from law school—twenty years beyond graduation. Flip, a brilliant, passionate, wildly funny, and hugely successful Boston lawyer brought T-shirts for everyone emblazoned with a motto he’d authored for the weekend: “Twenty Years of
Mens Rea
”—the Latin phrase meaning “guilty intent,” the silent partner and evil twin of
actus reas
, or the “guilty action,” both halves of which are necessary to win a conviction for certain crimes. We smoked too much and drank too much, we ate too much and we laughed too hard. Late at night, the talk turned to our kids, and Flip and Toddy, his partner and a genius high school teacher, began to share details of their lives with their middle child, just a few years older than Chesa. We sobered up fast, and all the noise and commotion and partying faded into the background. Their beautiful adopted daughter tended to be wary, disconnected, and low-keyed; she was often paralyzed by indecision, and she was practically pathologically accident-prone. All of it struck us as eerily familiar and as yet unspoken. We were riveted by Flip and Toddy, and felt that we might have entered some protective and intensely intimate embrace.

Flip eventually got rolling: “All those ads for adoption with the soft tones and the pink heart backgrounds, and those adorable faces looking directly at you like puppy dogs or cuddly kittens or Keane paintings, drive me right over the cliff—just too much bullshit, especially the mindlessly seductive tag-line:
All this child needs is love
. Are you fucking kidding? Of course this kid needs love; we all need love, but is that
all
she needs? That’s it? Love, yes, and help, lots and lots and lots of help. And if you take that kid—don’t be gullible, don’t fool yourself—
you
will need help, too, and love, and then even more help.” We realized later that we were joining a subculture that night, invisible to outsiders as most subcultures are, but as real as dirt to its members: the informal and hidden society of frantic adoptive parents. “I sit against the farthest back wall when we see her psychiatrist, taking notes,” Flip said. “I hate it, but I’m desperate.”

When Chesa’s mild melancholy gave way, its successor was red-hot rage; the strange case of Dr. Jekyll conjuring the evil Edward Hyde came close, or the bland Dr. Bruce Banner morphing inexorably into the Incredible Hulk. Like Hyde and the Hulk, Chesa’s transformations seemed beyond his control and, when the process began, irrevocable.

Two-year-olds’ outbursts may be as common as mud, and the “terrible twos” a cliché, but a temper tantrum had about the same relationship to Chesa’s furious transient madness as a peashooter had to a machine gun. The trigger could be a small transition (We have to start to clean up now), a common command (Let’s get dressed before we go out), an everyday frustration (Oh, we’re out of milk; we’ll get more at the store later today), or something new and utterly unpredictable. What followed was awe-inspiring. Chesa’s eyes narrowed as a storm cloud passed in front of his face, he clenched both fists and stomped his feet, and he sobbed
No
! Then he let loose, throwing himself on the floor without regard to hurt or harm, screaming and ranting, sweating, choking and vomiting, and he kept at a berserk high pitch past all previous records——twenty minutes, forty minutes, sixty minutes, or until he passed out from exhaustion. It was scary.

Scarier still was getting up early one Saturday morning and finding Chesa sitting on the floor in the corner of our little living room facing the wall and staring blankly ahead, banging his head repeatedly against the wall, holding himself and rocking back and forth. Autism, we said to each other, alarmed. We need help, we said; we need
professional
help.

What followed was an avalanche of appointments, interviews, evaluations, examinations, visitations, assessments, theories, analyses, and all the requisite accompanying meetings with psychiatrists, psychologists, brain scientists, learning specialists, speech therapists, shrinks and charlatans, some of whom we quite liked. When, in the midst of it all, Bernardine and I were sure we noticed an unusual pattern of rapid blinking, and when Dr. Lodyjensky confirmed our observation and pronounced it
petit mal
, and Dr. Spock concurred, off we went to a series of neurologists—all of them, regardless of age or gender, remarkably named Dr. Singh, and we thought for a moment we’d entered, not a specialty, but a secret camp—for scans and screenings and electroencephalograms (we didn’t even try to say it), and spoonfuls of bright pink medicine every night, and then, suddenly, a break in the storm, a clearing, and a plan of action. At three Chesa began seeing Dr. Berlin, a young psychiatrist of the Freudian persuasion whose shabby office was bare save for a large and lovely portrait on the wall behind his desk of a youngish Sigmund Freud looking curiously like Berlin himself—same beard and haircut, same glasses and tilt of the head, same waistcoat and tie. Coincidence? I’m no professional and so I can’t say, but I don’t think so. In any case it felt extremely weird facing the two of them in conversation, two big brains who together knew, well, everything.