Ed King Read online

  A singular and fantastic season for Little. Eleven and a half weeks of the royal treatment, including a lot more warm milk than he needed and a lot of talcum powder between the waist and knees. Little quickly developed chin blubber and passed his waking hours in a satisfied dolor that smelled of Breck, Crest, Yardley of London, egg-salad sandwiches, and Diet Rite. Then, one day, out of nowhere, he was dressed too warmly and carried outside by his new adoptive mother, Alice King, who afterward would always associate the smell of roses with his first hour in her arms. This was because not far from her car door were wildly proliferating coral-colored blooms, long-thorned and red-tipped, with a thick, tangy scent. They were so beautiful and perfect she wanted to have one to dry and press in a keepsake book, and so, with her free hand, she reached for a likely flower, one with time left on it, thinking she might twist it free or bend it over a fingernail. Instead, she was painfully pricked in her thumb, which she withdrew and sucked. A single dark drop of her blood, she saw, had fallen on, and stained, her new baby’s blanket. This seemed to her an unhappy omen, and she said as much to her husband, Dan. “You don’t believe in omens,” he reminded her.

  Until now, the Kings had been childless. Dan had been in medical school, in residency, taking boards, volunteering for the UN Medical Services in Madagascar, and establishing his family practice in a Seattle suburb, while Alice took a master’s in political science and worked for the mayor’s office. In their early thirties, they tried to have children, and then—worried—got serious about the effort. They did what a specialist told them to do, which didn’t help, because, as it turned out, Dan was shooting such a high percentage of blanks that the odds of success were almost nil. He was devastated by news of his insufficiency, and told Alice and the fertility specialist who’d delivered the guilty verdict that no one, obviously, felt good on hearing that he was an evolutionary failure. After that, his inability to impregnate Alice affected his sexual performance. When Dan tried to do it, he would find himself thinking about his sperm’s bad motility, about all those sluggish, unmotivated losers wandering into blind alleys or just losing steam, dissolving in place, uninterested in destiny. In a depressing and insidious way, he identified with their incompetence. “That’s me,” he thought. “It’s a metaphor for me.” In that frame of mind, he couldn’t consummate.

  Then a light went on. Dan and Alice, though only nominally Jewish and avoiders of synagogues, went to visit a young rabbi recommended by friends. He was dressed in shirtsleeves to see them in his office, a beardless guy named Nathan Weisfeld. A popular recent addition to Temple Beth David, Weisfeld was a supporter of John Kennedy even if Joe Kennedy was an anti-Semite and Nixon was maybe better for Israel. John Kennedy had a nice wife and children, John Kennedy had been wounded in World War II, John Kennedy came from immigrants, John Kennedy was a liberal. As for adoption, “He who raises someone else’s child is regarded as if he had actually brought him into the world.” It was an act of chesed, it made a contribution, it served so beautifully the endeavor of world repair, “which we call tikkun.” Weisfeld shrugged. “Of course you should adopt,” he said. “Nothing in Jewish law says no, nowhere is there an admonition.” He shrugged again. “I can only say mazel tov. Wonderful news. Now go and build a Jewish home together.”

  Conveniently, it was time for the annual Passover trip to Dan’s parents. They lived in Pasadena with air conditioning, but were originally from Pinsk. “In Pinsk,” Dan’s father, Al, asked, when Dan told them what he and Alice were considering, “was there a Jew who adopted, Beryl?” Dan’s mother said no, it was unheard of in Pinsk, this was not something Jewish people did. “She’s right,” said his father. “Your mother is right, Daniel.” “Adoption!” said his mother. “Did your brothers or your sisters adopt? They didn’t adopt. No, every one of them with their own children, our grandchildren, seven grandchildren, and not one is adopted.”

  “This is what I live with,” Dan said to Alice, as soon as they were out the door. “Textbook Yids.”

  They set out for San Jose to see Alice’s father. Dan stopped at pay phones to check on his patients. Alice read So You’re Thinking of Adopting! At a roadside picnic table they ate sandwiches and potato chips, and talked about the new pieces of contemporary furniture they were considering for their living room. Alice wanted to donate the old pieces to the Jewish Family & Child Service. They talked about their exasperating parents; Alice’s sister, Bernice, and her marital problems; the cost of joining a private swim club where Alice’s best friend and her husband were members; and, more than the rest of it put together, adoption.

  In San Jose, Alice’s father, Dave Levine—sitting on his deck in tennis shorts, thighs splooching where they pressed against his lawn chair—said that someone named Marty Ashkanazi had been adopted after his family got “wiped out” in the Holocaust. This Marty was “today a perfectly good guy,” which Pop felt was proof of something. If Marty could be adopted and turn out so well, who was to say about adoption? “Only an idiot could say yes or no,” said Pop, “adoption yes or adoption no, so let me be an idiot and say to you something—when you adopt, it’s true, you take your chances.”

  “That’s obvious,” answered Dan. “But isn’t it also taking a chance to have biological kids? Either way, you do the best you can, but you don’t really control what happens.”

  “Take Alice, for example,” Alice’s father agreed. “Look what happened to my baby girl Alice. She marries a guy who is admittedly a nice guy, only problem is he carts her somewhere else, then she forgets back home in San Jose, now I only see her maybe twice a year, three times if she has tsuris.”

  “We come more than that, Pop, so stop with the guilt.”

  “Four times.”

  They hauled him all the way up to the city so he could visit his ill sister in the Mission District, where she lived behind barred windows and a double lock. “Only one more thing,” Pop insisted, when Dan told him for the third time that he and Alice had to get on the road, and so, before taking him all the way back to San Jose, they stopped at Home of Peace in Colma. “Please God, this is where I end up,” Pop said, “in the ground beside your mother. When it’s my time. Which might not be for a long time, or which might be driving home in a few minutes with this meshugenah here.” He pointed at Dan, then threw up his hands. “Okay, here, my final word,” he said. “My commentary, take it or leave it. And what I’m thinking is, an adopted is like the Jews, okay? Without a country, because he has two countries, his home country and the Promised Land. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’—maybe an adopted is saying this in his head, he thinks something is missing, always something is not right or perfect, he has longings. Maybe his parents are Dr. Daniel and Alice, perfectly nice people, loving people, concerned people for the good of the whole world, liberal people who care about other human beings, which is a wonderful way to be, I’m not discounting it; still, here is this adopted, wondering always who he is, not at peace in his heart, restless about everything, a striver, a historian, a what-do-you-call-it, a genealogist type of guy, never satisfied, always asking questions, maybe even rebellious against his perfectly loving parents. Why? Because they aren’t his parents and he knows it—and also he’s mad at his real parents.”

  “We wouldn’t tell him,” said Dan. “He wouldn’t know he was adopted.”

  “Nobody would tell him,” Alice added. “Everyone would have to keep the secret.”

  “Oy,” said Pop.

  But in the end he hugged his daughter and stroked her hair, which was honey-colored, thick, and worn loose, to her shoulders. “Alice,” he said, “if you and Dr. Daniel must do this, adopt, please do it with both eyes open, can you promise? Both eyes open, please, knowing ahead maybe you can’t see what there is to see, maybe it’s a wrecked train, maybe not, who knows?”

  “We know,” said Dan. “Things can go wrong. It isn’t news to us, the risks of adoption.”

  Pop shook his finger at him over Alice’s shoulder. “This is what I mean,” he sa
id. “This is what I’m nervous of, exactly. Listen to Dr. Daniel when he speaks. He thinks this will happen to other people. He doesn’t think it will happen to him. How could it happen to the wonderful Dr. Daniel, who has such a wonderful life?”

  “You’re right, Daniel’s like that,” said Alice.

  They situated Pop in his quarters again, and finally, relieved—their forebearers in their wake—got on the freeway. For fifty fast and therapeutic miles they shared their generational amusement and gave their familial irritation full rein, laughing because their parents were archaic, and angry because they were know-it-alls. When that was exhausted, and for the next two hundred miles, they talked as if against a deadline about adoption, and, partly because their parents were so difficult—because their parents’ concerns about adoption were so ridiculous—they decided to go ahead with it. That night there was motel sex as confirmation. There were earnest convictions, virtuous feeling, outrage, and the will to make a statement. Let their parents think what they want to think, let them be oppressed by tradition and reservation, by Darwinian smallness, and by fear of the unknown—they, Dan and Alice, were adopting.

  Without delay, then, they started the process. They had to jump through hoops, waste reams of paper, and, Dan felt, put up with nonsense. They had to answer every question, fill in every blank, and be patient while invisible wheels turned; they had to expect things to proceed in tiny increments that inevitably triggered another invoice. During all of this, Alice got up to speed on adoption. She read studies and how-to books. When Dan complained about exasperating forms, Alice said that people who gave up because adoption was tediously bureaucratic, not to mention expensive, couldn’t be counted on as parents anyway, and if they were going to complain, as Dan was complaining, about the “home study,” if letting someone in the door to poke around a little was going to be treated like a deal breaker, well, said Alice, there were plenty of other people who wanted kids. Dan, demurring, left the details to Alice, except for the writing of checks, which he complained about, too. The whole thing was one big ongoing eye opener, but he felt vindicated when, in the same hour Alice pricked her finger on a rosebush in front of the Aid Society Home, he, like his wife, fell in love with their adopted son.

  Driving home from Portland with their miracle child, Dan and Alice had fun with names, then chose Edward Aaron King, after her mother, Eidel, and his grandfather, Avrom, but also, just between the two of them, because the middle name was Elvis’s middle name, and Dan, especially, was an Elvis fan.

  The next day, at the hospital to which he was attached in Seattle, Dan took the elevator up to Maternity and dug out a blank Certificate of Live Birth. He filled it in to convey that Edward Aaron King was the son by birth of Alice and Daniel King, and forged the unreadable signature—approximated from one that was prevalent in the files—of an attending obstetrician. After putting this in the mail to the Seattle–King County Department of Public Health, Vital Statistics Section, he called Alice, who told him that she was “busy, busy, busy.” First thing that morning, she’d done what a friend advised, which was to dribble warm formula from a baby bottle onto her breast and let it roll toward her nipple for Eddie. Eddie had taken from a bottle with greed, but during lulls she’d doused her areolas with formula and encouraged him to latch on by poking him with her nipple. The sequence—she didn’t tell Dan this—gave her gooseflesh. It was like trying to catch a nibbling fish. She said, “Come on, come on, that’s right, good boy,” and “Mama’s so sorry she doesn’t have her own milk for you,” and “Look at you, such a handsome, handsome boy,” and “Do you know Mama loves you and will always love you, my baby Eddie, no matter what?”

  It surprised Alice to discover that she enjoyed changing Eddie’s diapers. What a pleasure it was, after wiping him clean and dusting him with Johnson’s, to coo at Eddie while he aired out on the changing table, and to tell him how beautiful he looked. Tidying him up, taking care with the pins, nosing his belly, and smelling his skin—it was thrilling and a little bit addictive. At the first sign of rash, Alice was there with ointment; at the first cough or cry in the night, she popped up. How quickly the meaning of her life changed from staffing issues at the mayor’s office to every new wrinkle, each fresh manifestation, of Eddie’s needs. And what a revelation it was to find that she enjoyed this more than anything else, the faux suckling, the wiping, the rocking, the holding, the scent of him, the miracle of Eddie, especially when he gazed into her eyes, curiously at first, as if studying her essential mystery, but then to behold her with what she knew was a deep, maybe even a spiritual, sense of who she was, at a level so basic it was beyond what words could express. There was no point in trying to explain it, except to say how much she loved their adopted boy, what a miracle he was, how devoted she felt, and how unexpected this all was, this change in her from one person to another, one woman to another; still, none of these avowals got to the heart of it, which was the feeling she had when Eddie looked her in the eye as if to close an unclosable gap.

  Her days now passed in a succession of achievements—not her own, but Eddie’s. Eddie discovered his thumbs, which was astounding. Then he squeezed Alice’s finger, smiled—or maybe smiled—lifted his head, and got the hang of a pacifier. Then his eyes followed the little monkeys, elephants, giraffes, and zebras when she set his mobile in motion. Then he held a rattle and threw it. He flopped over and squirmed, and at the pediatrician’s he was off-the-charts tall. Whatever happened, Alice basked in it. His hair was the same color as hers—honey-hued—which meant they were meant for each other. When she cleaned his navel with a cotton swab, Eddie giggled. Giving him a sponge bath in her lap was fun, and so was cutting his nails while he dozed. He was adorable in pajamas, and the soft spot in his head, his fontanel, pulsed with the beating of his heart.

  Nine a.m. and she’s bathing Eddie. Ten a.m. and she’s using a toothpick to clear a baby-bottle nipple while on the stovetop sterilized formula cools. Eleven a.m. and she’s searching in Dr. Spock for the meaning, if any, of Eddie’s erections. Noon—scraping Eddie’s bowel movement from his diaper into the toilet. Twelve-thirty, folding Eddie’s diapers, fresh from the dryer. One-thirty, fresh air for Eddie in his accordion-roofed stroller; two-thirty, with Eddie at the A&P; three-thirty, reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich while Eddie takes his nap. Five-thirty, cooking liver and onions with peas and rice while holding Eddie; six o’clock, tossing a salad while Dan holds Eddie. Eight o’clock, watching TV beside Dan—with Eddie in her arms; nine, taking a shower but not shampooing, because Dan liked her to come to bed showered but not with wet hair. That was her day, and as for her nights, the doctor was now back in business in a big way, and told her that the smell of formula on her breasts was fantastically arousing—in fact, he loved it, in the wee hours, when she brought Eddie to their bed so he could watch her dribble formula down her breasts.

  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.