A Mother's Trial

by Wright, Nancy

  The occasion was not joyful: Steve had been notified that his mother had cancer and was probably dying. But Steve and Priscilla intended to spend a week together before he returned to South Carolina. She wondered how it would feel to be with him again. She had planned a lot of things for them to do.

  “Pris!” He was flying across the grass to meet her, arms wide, an enormous grin splitting his wide face. They hugged and patted each other, both talking at once.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” he said, his eyes moist.

  “Of course I’d be here, you big dummy!” she said. “Where do you think I’d be?”

  “Out having a big ole time with one of your Indian friends,” he answered.

  “Oh, that’s over. You know I wrote you that’s over.”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t sure I believed you, Pris.”

  Priscilla leaned against him and drew him down for a long kiss. “Now do you believe me?” She offered a coquettish smile.

  “Wow! You know it, lady!”

  They spent the day touring San Francisco. Priscilla showed him Fisherman’s Wharf, and they snapped photographs of each other and laughed and kissed.

  “It’s like we’ve never been apart,” Steve said. “I was so nervous about this, but it’s just beautiful.”

  “I know,” said Priscilla. “I feel like that, too.”

  That night, Priscilla brought Steve home to her new apartment on Sacramento Street she had recently rented with a Japanese-American friend from graduate school.

  They had a spare couch in the living room, but Steve didn’t sleep there. Priscilla took him to her room and to her bed.

  Sometime later, and before they were married the following June, they discussed their plans for children.

  “Let’s have lots of kids,” Steve said.

  “Well, maybe two of our own. And then we could adopt more. Okay?” Priscilla answered.

  “Okay. Sounds pretty damn good to me.”

  3

  It was awfully late for Erik and Jason to be up, Steve thought for the tenth time. He wasn’t so sure that they should even have brought the boys to the airport, but Pris was set that the whole family should greet Tia when she landed.

  They had left hours ago for the San Jose Airport—way too early. He and Priscilla had fought endlessly about what time to leave, what route to take. Would 101 be faster or 17? What should the boys wear? Would it be cold at nine-thirty on a November night? Would Tia even be on the flight from Los Angeles? Technically they should have flown to L.A. to meet the plane from Korea, but by chance a social worker on the Korean flight was continuing on to the Bay Area from Los Angeles and had agreed to bring Tia with her—if she could make the connecting flight.

  It was a big if. They had no description of the social worker who would be carrying Tia except that she was blond. To make matters worse, the boys were falling apart from excitement and fatigue. Five-year-old Erik was streaking about the deserted airport, and Jason, just three, was clinging to Steve’s leg, weary-eyed and whiny.

  Steve shifted in his chair and a big weight of anxiety resting heavily in his stomach moved along with him. Had they done the right thing with this adoption? he wondered. Would he love this child as much as he did his own? How would he really feel about a Korean child in their family? How would the boys react?

  He got up and half-ran after Erik, who was just disappearing from sight at the far end of the terminal. That boy was a handful sometimes, Steve thought. They had nicknamed him Bam-Bam after the destructive little kid in The Flintstones. He’d been rambunctious from the beginning, deciding to sail into life on his own timetable almost a month early—February 6, 1970. They had taken Lamaze classes and were prepared for natural childbirth, but the delivery was hard, and they had to pull Erik out with forceps. He had the ugliest forceps marks Steve had ever seen, and his skin was yellow, but to Steve he was beautiful. The jaundice had worsened, though, and they had taken Erik back to the hospital after a few days at home for a complete blood transfusion.

  Erik recovered but life around him was never easy; he found all kinds of trouble. He had his skull X-rayed twice already—once after he had been thrown to the floor in the truck—stitches a couple of times, both a sprained and a fractured foot and numerous treatments for his lazy eye. Jason had pulled down his share of problems, too, Steve realized. A year ago he had practically drowned at Crazy Horse campground and Steve had gone down on hands and knees to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  The seven and a half years since their marriage had not rolled smoothly. First Steve’s mother had died; then a year later they discovered his father had cancer, too, and in July 1969, he had followed his wife to the grave. It had torn Steve apart.

  The next year had worn particularly hard. The problems resulted from a combination of factors, Steve knew. Priscilla was in early pregnancy with Erik and was experiencing severe morning sickness and back pain. After Steve took a job as a guard at San Quentin, everything slid solidly downhill. Steve had been casting around for a career. Correctional work appealed to him, as did the thought of an army career, but Priscilla was against the service. He tried part-time work as a commodities broker and attended school at a junior college while Priscilla finished her last year of graduate school, but he hadn’t hit on anything he wanted to do. Priscilla pressed him to return to school full time, but her pregnancy put an end to that possibility because the Marin County Department of Social Services mandated a leave seven months into pregnancy.

  The pressures of San Quentin almost brought their marriage to a halt. Steve could look at that now with a measure of objectivity, but at that time he had lived daily with controlled fear. The inmates were as scared as he was; it didn’t take long to figure that out. In that place, fear was the governing factor. The Chicanos and the whites played off against each other, with the blacks holding the balance of power, and everybody looked sideways at everybody else. He had had to deal with them on their own level, and he had been good at defusing the situation when it threatened to get hot.

  At home, though, he hadn’t been as successful. He and Priscilla spent the year screaming at each other. She wanted him to assume control of his life while he could hardly control what was happening at work. And he knew he relied on her for a lot; the army had made him peculiarly dependent, and with his parents both gone, he’d leaned hard on her.

  They’d had some real high-level hassles, he remembered. One time Priscilla had been worried enough about the possible effects of all this emotional stress on the baby she was carrying that she’d even gone down to Kaiser to talk to a psychologist about it.

  But one day he had been talking to a friend at work who had put it all in perspective for Steve.

  “Do you love her?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then get your head out of your ass and do something about it!”

  Steve had gone home, and he and Priscilla had sat on the couch and talked and cried, and from that point on they’d both known they were working toward building something instead of fighting each other every damn step of the way.

  Things had picked up from that point, Steve thought as he grabbed at and caught Erik’s waving shirttail. He latched onto the boy’s hand and walked him firmly back down to the gate where Tia’s plane was due to land.

  He had left San Quentin on schedule the summer of 1970, to attend school full time at Sonoma State. Priscilla had really encouraged him, insisting that he was smart, that he just had to learn how to study. He had started out on probation because of his poor record, but he had done well, and after a year and a half of intensive study he had earned a B.A. in Sociology. By then Priscilla was working full time in the Homefinders unit at Marin County’s Health and Human Services, and she was pregnant again.

  The second pregnancy had been difficult from the beginning, and by the end Priscilla’s high blood pressure and signs of toxemia landed her in the hospital for several weeks of complete bed rest. The doctor finally induced de
livery three weeks early. Steve began working for the state Department of Vocational Rehabilitation in Oakland doing disability evaluations. It wasn’t what he wanted—he hoped to work at Marin County juvenile hall, but jobs were tight and he took what he could. But his main satisfaction was his family. He wasn’t embarrassed at how important his boys were to him. He always cared for them as much as Priscilla. To him, childcare was a fifty-fifty proposition—he and Pris had no argument there. He couldn’t understand families where the women did all the work in the home and the father sat with his feet propped up and a beer in his hand. Steve even participated at Erik’s nursery school. His kids were an extension of himself, he felt, and he owed it to them to give them what they needed. And that came down to changing their diapers and fixing them meals—doing whatever was necessary.

  Then in 1974, a job opened up in juvenile hall and Steve grabbed it. He had been there a year and a half now, and found it incredibly exciting. He was working in an open program for young boys—there were no locks on the doors—and he was really making some progress toward rehabilitating these kids.

  He could see the effect. He was good at counseling. The kids trusted him and he felt he was particularly strong at evaluating whether he was dealing with retardation, or a learning disability, or delinquency, or a neurological problem, or a problem with diet.

  Steve’s home life was stable, too. Later he would look back at this period as one of his happiest. They had started talking about adoption right after Priscilla’s hysterectomy in January of last year. She had never fully recovered from childbirth with Jason, never stopped bleeding; it had turned her into a wreck, so she had needed the surgery. There had been a few complications but she’d come out of there a new woman, Steve had bragged to everyone, smirking.

  They decided to try for a Vietnamese baby. For one thing, there had been tremendous coverage on TV about the mixed-race children of American GIs whom nobody wanted, and also it was increasingly difficult to adopt white American infants. It turned out they had both been considering a Vietnamese child but neither one had said anything to the other. Priscilla thought he wouldn’t accept a racially mixed child, she told him—but he didn’t care at all. “A child is a child,” he said.

  So Priscilla wrote letters to various agencies, and after she was released from the hospital, she attended a meeting of prospective parents at Catholic Social Service in San Francisco. Then they sent in an application asking for a girl any age up to Erik’s age. It was important not to get one older than Erik, Priscilla said, to avoid giving the oldest child’s place to a newcomer in the family. After the home study—including interviews and physicals—was completed, the social worker sent their application to Vietnam to be matched with a child. That was in the fall of 1974. Then they waited.

  In January of 1975, Priscilla returned to work, and in April the Vietnamese babylift into Travis Air Force Base began. Priscilla volunteered to help process the children as they landed, ferrying a number of them into San Francisco in the middle of the night. She met the director of the New York agency there and asked whether all the children had been assigned to adoptive parents. Ninety-five percent of them had, it turned out, and soon they learned they weren’t going to get one of the others.

  They had been terribly disappointed, but then their social worker asked them if they’d be interested in a Korean child, and of course they were. Just a couple of months later—in July 1975—they had received a preliminary report on a Korean child. Surprisingly it was an infant.

  Pris was so goddamned excited; Steve would never forget her reaction. She had called him at work, screaming and crying that the social worker had a two-month-old baby girl for them and that they needed to drive to the city, see her picture and the report on her, and decide whether they wanted to keep her.

  Priscilla couldn’t wait another minute. She took the afternoon off—Steve was just finishing for the day—so they could both go over there at once. They had wanted that little girl immediately. No question about that, Steve remembered. The social worker handed them some forms to fill out, immigration questionnaires, papers to be notarized, other forms for the bank to process. They completed all the paperwork the next day—Pris rushing them around like there was no tomorrow. They even had to be fingerprinted at the sheriff’s department at the Marin County Civic Center where Pris worked. She was talking a mile a minute about working out her schedule so she could get time off when the baby came.

  The wait had been the hardest. Priscilla spent the time collecting new baby things and fixing up Tia’s room—right next to theirs. She bought a baby book especially for adopted children—she was religious about that sort of thing: Erik and Jason’s baby books were all filled in to the last detail. Then they were given an arrival date, but it was canceled and the waiting began again.

  Steve peered up into the overcast night and thought he saw the red and green wing lights flashing not too far above. He watched as the plane circled and landed. The plane sported a big painted smile and Steve grinned back suddenly in response.

  Beside him the boys wriggled and punched at one another. Priscilla’s face tightened as she searched the incoming passengers. Steve felt his heart jerking in his chest.

  “There!” said Priscilla suddenly. She pointed.

  “No, that child is too old,” said Steve, studying the child she had indicated.

  “You’re right. There’s a blond lady—but I don’t see a baby. Where’s the baby?”

  “Which one?”

  “That one! The blond lady—the one with the orange comforter over her arm. See, she’s looking around.”

  Priscilla rushed up to her, and in a minute was unwrapping the comforter the woman carried.

  “Oh, Steve, look! She’s so tiny. She’s so beautiful.”

  They crowded around, and Steve looked down at the tiny pale face of the six-month-old child. He felt the breath leave him in a rush. It was just like when Erik and Jason had been born. It took your damned breath away. She looked up at him with big black eyes and he thought he would cry. Priscilla was already crying, and laughing, the baby jiggling in her arms.

  Together they brought Tia to the airport nursery and changed her. She had a terrible rash.

  “I think it’s more than a diaper rash,” Priscilla said. “Look, she even has blisters on her elbow—and there’s a couple on her thumb.”

  “What have we got to feed her?” asked Steve. The blond woman had given them a bottle and some formula in a Korean can but they couldn’t read the directions.

  “Oh, I bought some baby formula. Dr. Shimoda told me what to get. Don’t worry, she’ll be all right. Won’t you, little Tia?” She bent over, smiling into the little face and received an answering smile.

  “Look, Steve, she smiled at me! Oh, look, Jason—see how tiny she is, Erik?”

  Steve watched as his family closed around Tia. His eyes were full and he raised a hand to them. His family was complete,

  4

  “Dearly beloved, baptism is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, through which grace we become partakers of life eternal and heirs to God’s righteousness. Those receiving the sacrament are thereby marked as Christian Disciples and initiated into Christ’s holy Church.

  “Our Lord has expressly given to the little children a place among the people of God, which privilege must not be denied them. Remember how Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me. Do not forbid them, for to such belong the kingdom of God.’

  “Beloved, do you in presenting this child for baptism confess your faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

  “We do.”

  “Do you accept as your duty and privilege to live before this child lives that become the Gospel, to exercise all godly care that she be brought up in the Christian faith, that she learn to give attendance upon the private and the public worship of God, that she be taught the Holy Scriptures?”

  “We do.”

  “Will you endeavor to keep this child unde
r the ministry and guidance of the Church until she by the power of God shall accept for herself the gift of salvation and be confirmed as a full and responsible member of Christ’s holy Church?”

  “We will.”

  “What name shall be given to this child?”

  “Tia Michelle Phillips.”

  “Tia Michelle Phillips, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Reverend Jim Hutchison dipped his finger into the holy water and made the mark of the cross on the baby’s forehead, and she looked up at him peacefully.

  Then the thirty-seven-year-old minister with the map-of-Ireland face and the vivid blue, wide-set eyes, returned the baby to Priscilla’s arms, turned toward the congregation, and commended Tia to its care. The ninety-minute Methodist service ended with the Benediction, and at once the congregation separated into little clumps to talk and drink coffee. One large clump surrounded the Phillips family to congratulate them and see the baby.

  Many of the parishioners came up to Jim as he walked about outside the church during the little social time he had established after Sunday worship.

  “Lovely service, Jim.”

  “Thank you, Marj. How are the kids? Are the girls watching the little ones?” He gestured across the way at the room where day care was provided for the children of the congregation who were too young to attend the service.

  “Yes,” she answered. They chatted for a minute. Marj Dunlavy was one of Jim’s favorite parishioners—she knew everyone and was comfortable and a little motherly, and Jim liked that. Women had always tended to see him as a little lost boy, and he supposed he had always been looking for a mother. He had lost his when he was only five years old, back when his father and eight older brothers and sisters still lived in Bray, near Dublin.