by Larry Levin
There was a soft knock and the door opened. Shelly, a social worker who assisted with birth parents and who had flown out to meet and return with the boys and their mother, came in with the babies, one cradled in each arm. The boys were wrapped in white blankets festooned with yellow stars. Shelly was grinning from ear to ear; just about five feet tall, with red hair, she reminded me of a leprechaun.
“Here,” she said. She handed one of the boys to Jennifer. “One for you,” she said, and turned, handed me the other boy, and said, “and one for you.”
Then she left, closing the door softly behind her, and the staff left the four of us alone for twenty minutes.
I had never before held a newborn child. He was sleeping. It felt as if I were holding a pillow.
The first thing I said to Jennifer was, “Oh, my goodness.”
The boy I was holding had a tiny, wrinkled red face that was so pushed in it looked as if it had been hit by a shovel. His hands appeared shriveled, like little monkey hands. I looked at the boy Jennifer was holding, and he looked exactly the same way. I said, “They’re really funny-looking. I think they look like ET.”
“Trust me,” Jennifer said. Her mascara was streaming down her face again. “They’re beautiful.”
I had no idea how she could tell that, but she proved to be right.
I was not sure what we should do next. They were asleep, so there was no sense in rocking them.
“Okay,” I said to the one I was holding. “Who are you?”
There was not a lot of talking to be done. We were simply awestruck at the sudden sequence of events. We sat on the couch and placed the boys between us and stared at them. Then we switched boys. After that, we each experienced holding both of them. We must have used the word amazing eight times. They did not open their eyes, so we had no idea what color they were. They did not wake up. It was inconceivable to imagine the power they now held over us. And there had been a subtle but critically important change within me, although I was not to realize it for years to come. I was no longer afraid of being a father — now I was afraid of not being a good one.
Then Susan and the agency’s director returned to fill us in on the boys’ family history. A brother of theirs, who was three years older than our boys, had been adopted when he was several weeks old and was living in New England.
This time, the birth parents had contacted Golden Cradle three days before the due date to arrange for adoption. At the time they contacted Golden Cradle, however, they did not know that they were about to become the parents of twins. In the sonograms, one of the boys was in front of or on top of the other, and no one appeared to have paid much attention to what was really going on in there. After the first boy was born, we were told, their mother said, “I don’t think I’m done yet.” She was rushed into surgery, and the second boy was delivered by C-section twenty minutes after she had delivered the first.
We also learned that the birth parents initially asked for the twins to be placed with their brother in New England, but the couple who had adopted the boys’ brother responded that they were not in a position to adopt twins. Shelly discussed other adoption possibilities with the birth parents, then flew to their home state a day before the births occurred with the files of several prospective adoptive couples in whom the birth parents had expressed interest. Then, after we were selected, and after the twins had been delivered, Shelly had to scramble to call Golden Cradle to see if Jennifer and I had preapproved twins. The agency would not place twins separately and would place them only with a couple who had agreed ahead of time that they would accept multiple siblings in the event that occurred.
We had been fascinated with the notion of twins for years, ever since an old friend of mine had visited with his three-month-old twin sons. Watching their similarities and the way they interacted with one another even at so young an age revealed a special bond that seemed to add another dimension to their relationship with each other as well as with the overall family dynamic. As a result, we had preapproved twins, but we had never expected that the adoption process would yield such a result.
On the way out of Golden Cradle that morning, Susan gave us a black-and-white copy of a photograph of the boys’ older brother at six months.
“Here,” she said. “This will give you some idea of what your sons are going to look like.”
As it turned out, it really didn’t. Their brother has dark hair and dark skin. Noah and Dan are strawberry blonds. Both are taller than their brother. The three do share gray green eyes, however, and similar builds, lean and muscular.
The boys’ birth mother had flown with them to Golden Cradle and was still there the day we went to pick them up so that she could nurse them until the surrender occurred. She wanted to make sure that she would give them the best possible start in life. We were told that when she was leaving, she looked at them for the last time and said, “These boys are Levins.”
Our visit to Golden Cradle lasted about an hour and a half, and at some point someone took a picture of me sitting on the couch with both boys on my lap. I look stunned. My eyes appear murky, unfocused, as though I had not slept in days. Perhaps I was beginning to crash from the adrenaline rush of the preceding several hours. I had never been jacked that high before, and I could not have had any idea what all of this would come to mean.
On the way over to Golden Cradle that morning, Jennifer and I, for the first time, had begun tossing around possible names. It was kind of like buying a house, involving lots of trial and error until we both could agree on something. We knew we both had to agree, because the results of the decision would be permanent. Very quickly we happily settled on Noah as the name of the firstborn. This was an easy choice because the boys had come two by two. Then, once we had agreed on Noah as the name for boy number one, we agreed that the second boy should also have a biblical first name. That second name proved more difficult to decide upon. Over the next several days, we tried out different names one after the other — Aaron, Adam, Ari, Benjamin, Caleb, David, Eli, Ezekiel, Gabriel, Gideon, Isaiah, Jonah — but we were unable to agree on a name for our second son. None of them seemed to fit with Levin. Until we agreed on a second name, the boys were “Baby One” and “Baby Two” by order of birth. Finally, we settled on Daniel for the younger boy. We could not recall a single Dan we had ever known who was not a stand-up guy. Dan’s middle name, Garrett (which for several of his early years he thought was “Carrot”), was for his maternal grandfather, Gershon. In Jewish tradition, one uses the initial of a deceased person and not the name. Noah was initially Noah Alexander, for no other reason than it sounded nice.
One of the ironies in all this is that the day we received the stork call from Golden Cradle, my dad had gone to the emergency room with severe stomach pains, which is why my parents had not been at home when we called to tell them that they were finally grandparents. These stomach pains proved to be the precursor of the cancer that killed him four months later. He did not get to enjoy our boys for long, but at least when he died he knew he was a grandfather. As the boys’ adoptions had not been finalized at the time of my father’s death, we changed Noah’s middle name to Harte, for Herbert, my dad’s first name.
In their infancy, we color-coded everything in order to distinguish what belonged to whom. All of Noah’s bottles had red dots appended to them. Dan’s bottles had blue dots. Noah had the red blanket and the red socks, Dan the blue. We never dressed them alike. We always made it a point to stress their individuality.
During the first six months, there might have been an hour out of every twenty-four, if we were lucky, in which both boys were asleep at the same time. As a result, Jennifer and I were constantly and completely exhausted. In fact, we were barely functioning. I would sleep from just after dinner until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., when Jennifer would awaken me and I would take over while she went to sleep until 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., when I would shower and dress and stumble to work. When I came home, I would fall asleep on the floor or wherever I happen
ed to be when I could no longer stay awake, while whoever was in the house took no notice and walked around me as if I were simply another piece of furniture. The boys’ ability to sleep for extended periods gradually increased, but it was not until they were almost three years old that both of them slept through the night on a regular basis. Until then, whichever one of us could manage to get up and respond to whichever one of them was awake did so.
Jennifer’s parents came up from Maryland to help as often as they could, usually every other week. Before my dad died, he and my mom visited on three or four occasions, but under the circumstances, there was no assumption of responsibility for the lives of the boys as there was with Jennifer’s parents. Other relatives of mine would also drop by periodically, my closest aunt and uncle, Esther and Bernie, the most often, and they were also the most help next to Jennifer’s parents. After my father died, my mom would come by for very short visits — she would stay longer if other family members were there, for dinner, say — sometimes only for ten minutes, “to see how the boys were doing.” She could not stay away, but she also made it clear that she did not feel comfortable in our home, as though it were an imposition.
We went through enough diapers to warrant our own landfill. There were regular sorties for diapers, formula, and, when they had outgrown the need for formula, juice. We spent many Friday and Saturday nights over the next two years shopping. In fact, shopping pretty much came to define the way we spent our weekends. One evening at the market when I was buying juice and diapers, as I stood in front of the cashier, I started laughing out loud. The checkout girl looked at me, puzzled. “In one end and out the other,” I explained. She did not see the humor in this.
Seeing newborn twins, total strangers wondered regularly about the birthing experience; time and time again, their temerity in asking personal questions amazed us. It was never easy explaining to people we did not know and would never see again what it was like to be the parents of twins when they would not have had any reason to suspect that we were not the birth parents. For example, because Jennifer is so petite, it was not unusual for another mother to comment, “But you’re so small! Was it hard having twins?” “No,” Jennifer would answer. “It wasn’t.” People we had never met before asked Jennifer how she had lost the weight so quickly. “It wasn’t really a problem for me,” she would respond serenely. We decided very early on that it was no business of strangers that the boys were adopted; that was something they could tell people if they wanted to. Initially, I had felt some urge to tell people, which I now think represented some attempt to distance myself from fatherhood. But as time passed, and the overwhelming experience proved to be one of joy and marvel at the bounty with which we had been blessed, my reluctance, born of the fear of failure, faded. The very labor of nurturing paid immeasurable dividends, and after several months, after my head had stopped whirling at what had happened and I had accepted it as part of my life, I became their father, and all our lives were joined. There was nothing to distinguish me from them.
Watching their personalities emerge was a constantly rewarding experience. They were home for only a few weeks before they earned nicknames. Noah became “the Professor” because he was so contemplative. He seemed constantly to look at things as though he were trying to figure out what they were, what they were supposed to do, and how they went about doing exactly whatever it was they were supposed to accomplish. Dan was nicknamed “Jarhead” because of his bald, round dome and absolute determination, his commanding sense of bravado.
The first time I heard the boys giggling uncontrollably, I sensed that it was a sound I had never heard before or made. As it turned out, everything about the way the boys grew up would be different from my own childhood experiences.
When I was three years old, my sister, Susie, died of leukemia. She was two years older than me, three years younger than my brother. I have only two memories of her.
One is of our father holding her in his arms in the alley behind our house, on a block of semidetached houses in West Philadelphia. It is a hot summer day, and our dad is using a handkerchief to shoo away a yellow jacket that has been buzzing around Susie and frightening her. She is crying, and he is speaking soothingly to her. Since in reality he proved to be powerless to protect her, I guess that it is understandable why I hold on to this.
Susie is not present in the only other memory I have of her. She is in the hospital, dying. She may already have died. It is a Sunday morning. My parents and I, accompanied by my aunt Esther, have driven to the hospital from our house. Another aunt is home with my brother. The car is suffused with an aura of grim resignation; there is only one inevitable conclusion to the events of the morning. I am too young to be admitted to the hospital, so I sit outside in the car alone. I do not to this day understand why my parents even brought me. I remember a black steel fence and a massive yellow brick building visible from where the car was parked on the street. I remember Aunt Esther coming to the car, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, to say that Susie had died.
In the house I grew up in, there was only one picture of Susie to be found — just one picture for as long as we owned the house, which was another twenty-three years. It sat on the piano along with a number of other photos of different family members, events, gatherings, and occasions. This one photograph showed a beaming little face with dimples and two long, golden braids. I would look at the picture for minutes at a time, trying to get to know the girl in it, but it never felt like anything more than a picture. The little girl had been my sister, but the photograph could have been of anyone. There was no connection.
My parents seem to have assumed that my brother, being older, could deal with Susie’s death, and I guess it was also thought that, as young as I was, the event wouldn’t have an impact on my life. Each of these assumptions demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about the capability of young children to understand events that are happening around them. At my mother’s insistence, no one talked or reminisced about Susie, so why things had happened and were happening was never clarified. Nobody was ever asked how he or she felt about Susie’s death. We were never asked if we wanted to talk about it. My mother’s way of coping seemed to have been to pretend that Susie had never lived. If she had never lived, she could not have died.
My father must have been a brash young man. At sixteen, he was the youngest-ever graduate of the most academically elite of the city’s public high schools and finished Wharton by the time he was nineteen. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, played semipro basketball, and was heavily involved in local politics at the street level (which takes a particular kind of toughness) — first as a committeeman, then as a ward leader, getting out the votes for the Democratic machine. He rose through the ranks and eventually became the lawyer for the city’s Democratic Party. This suggests a confidence and focus that no doubt enabled him also to successfully woo my mother, a noted local beauty. Ultimately, the party awarded my dad the judgeship he had coveted his entire professional life.
My father had a keen intellect; his interests were diverse. As a lawyer in private practice, he argued and won the first case in Pennsylvania to hold that a man who had committed murder was not guilty by reason of insanity, and every year until that man passed, he sent our family a Christmas card. My dad loved history and language, was an avid golfer, gardener, and fisherman, and was an ardent Zionist. He played the piano regularly until, in old age, he couldn’t read sheet music anymore. In my favorite photograph of him, he is sitting at the piano, glasses pushed all the way up on his forehead, squinting at the notes swimming before him. As both a judge and a lawyer, he was recognized for his honesty, humanity, and candor, and he was much beloved by many, a mentor to countless up-and-coming attorneys.
I would not describe his relationship with me in the same way. Perhaps he embraced the opportunity to nurture those who were not his children because he was unable to understand his own. After Susie died, my father’s need to be in control
seemed to have, understandably, increased. He judged me, and I did not satisfy his standards. From my perspective, he was aloof and often seemed angry and unapproachable. Afraid of incurring his wrath and his disappointment, I kept secrets from him, and keeping secrets created walls. Did I remind my father of his ultimate powerlessness to control what mattered? Did I remind him every day of Susie?
After my dad was diagnosed with cancer, he used the time he had left to take everyone who mattered to him out to lunch or to dinner. The last thing he did before he died was his taxes. The morning he died, I went into the bedroom where he lay and sat next to him. I looked at him. I had no real sense of the man who lay in front of me. I had no sense of personal loss, that I had somehow been diminished. The body in front of me might as well have been that of a stranger. There was no connection; it was like the experience I had had when I examined the picture of my sister.
The lives of the dead set examples for us. It makes sense that having a sister die when I was only three left me afraid of a lot of things. It explains why the unexpected phone call is always bad news. It accounts for why, until I became a father, I was many times filled with an emotion I could articulate only as “the nameless dread.”
An incident that is emblematic of my outlook at the time I became a father arose late one Wednesday morning. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the scariest day in Jewish theology, when God writes down what will happen to you in the next year based on your piety and observance of Jewish law. Jennifer and I had gone to services at a local university, and when they ended, we walked to our car only to find that we had received a parking ticket. That seemed a disastrous omen for what awaited us. I was shaken and angry.