CHAPTER NINETEEN
Off in the distance a police siren pierced the night air. It felt much later than it actually was. Richard stood on the corner, looking up at his living room window, then back down at the front door of his apartment building. The light was still on in the living room, and the only person who’d left the building was the lanky man in 610 who’d come out ten minutes earlier. At first Richard stuck around to make sure Carol didn’t leave Christopher alone in the apartment, but deep down he knew she wouldn’t do that. After their fight he’d told her he was leaving to get some air. She’d nodded and turned off the light by the bed. This was the first time she’d been alone with Christopher since they’d sent him away to school.
“What are you doing here?”
Startled, Richard turned and bumped into a short, round neighborhood security guard, clinching his club. He’d seen the man, walking the neighborhood around East 63rd, fingering his club and occasionally saying something into the band around his wrist, but they’d never spoken to each other before.
“I’m with Bulldog Security. You are required to respond to me.”
“I live here.”
“On this corner? At midnight? Don’t think so.”
“No, really. I live in that building over there.” He pulled out his wallet and showed the guard his ID. “I’m just heading out.”
“Better get heading then.”
The guard just stood there, sticking out his chest like he was expecting a fight. Richard wondered if he should go back home, but he turned around and headed down the street. After a while he made it to Park Avenue and turned to look behind him. The guard was long gone.
Richard passed the Christian Science Church on the corner. Didn’t he have an aunt who was a Christian Scientist? Or a great aunt? Yes, Aunt Ellen, a smiling woman who would always remind him to look on the bright side. “No matter what you look for,” she’d tell him, “you find it. So look for the good.”
As Richard turned south on Park Avenue, he pulled Harold Solomon’s business card out of his jeans pockets. “Richard, let us help.” How could they help? What did they need to help with? None of it made any sense to Richard, but maybe the meeting would provide some answers.
He stepped into the street and hailed a cab.
The cab took him to an area of the city Richard knew well from his Columbia days. They drove through the low 100’s, the Morningside Heights area. All the shops on the first floor of the old apartment buildings were closed. This section of Broadway wasn’t all that far from the theatre district, but worlds away. No stars, no glamour. A bagel store...a bookstore...maybe a dry cleaners or a shoe store. And, every so often, a cheap place where Columbia students could grab a slice of New York style pizza. All run-down and maybe a little scary to someone from a nicer part of town. But, as a student, Richard never gave the area a second thought. For him, the worst local dive was better than the law school library.
Past the wall surrounding Columbia, the cab turned left on 122nd, heading for the Hudson, then right on Riverside Drive. Some of Richard’s classmates used to joke about this being the most religious section of the world per square foot. Within a few blocks were the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, Riverside Church, and who knew what else scattered among the neighborhood streets.
Richard wished he’d been here a little sooner to hear the midnight bells. He hadn’t really gone to church since he was a kid, but as a law student he’d spent hours trying to study in Sakura Park so he could be near the Riverside Church tower when the bells rang.
The cab stopped at a dark apartment building on Riverside, just half a block up from Sakura Park. Richard paid the driver and got out of the cab. He was the only person on the street. He walked up to the front door of the building and rang the buzzer to apartment 512. There was no answer, so he rang the buzzer again. Finally, he heard a faint voice over the static.
“Who is this? We’re in bed.”
“I’m sorry. I was told there would be a meeting here.”
“Who told you?”
“Harold Solomon.”
There was a clicking sound, and the door opened.
CHAPTER TWENTY
There was no counter or security person, only a camera mounted near the doorway. The staircase was out in the open, fairly safe, so Richard took the stairs. He kept asking himself why this building seemed so familiar, and finally, as he got to the fifth floor, he remembered that one of his law school classmates had lived in this building with his wife and son. They weren’t friends—Richard couldn’t even remember the guy’s name—but they’d studied together once for the Criminal Law final in his apartment here.
Richard was about to knock on the door to 512 when the peep hole darkened. Someone was looking at him. Richard heard someone say, “It’s him,” and then the door opened. It was Harold.
“Hurry up. Come in,” Harold whispered.
Richard came in the apartment and waited while Harold locked the four door locks. The apartment was dark, with little light coming from the living room down the long, narrow hall. The hardwood floor sloped off to the left, and the walls were thick with chipped plaster. Harold walked around Richard and motioned him to follow.
Richard was surprised to see six other people in the living room: four women and two men. They all sat on the floor, serious and secretive looking, but it was too dark to really make out any faces in the light of the single lamp. Nobody got up when the two came in.
“Go ahead and sit down, Richard,” Harold said in a low voice. “We’re glad you came. Let me introduce you to everyone.” Richard found a piece of the floor to sit on, and Harold sat next to him.
“Like, just tell us who he is,” a man sitting in a dark corner off to the right said in a rough voice. “He can find out who we are later, if he needs to.”
“This is the man I was just starting to tell you about,” Harold said, “Richard Carson. He’s a lawyer, but he’s staying home full-time right now to work on his novel.” Richard looked up at Harold, surprised. He didn’t like some stranger knowing so much about him. “His son—”
“Let’s leave my son out of this,” Richard said. “I didn’t come to talk about him. I just came to listen.”
“Then listen to this, man,” the rough voice said, “your son is what this is all about. Too late to leave him out.”
“His son is Christopher,” Harold said, “six years old, and his wife is Carol, a successful, well-respected attorney. They got Christopher out on the sabbatical.”
This last statement obviously meant a lot to the group, as everyone immediately started talking with one another.
“Look,” Richard said, purposely not whispering, “what’s this about? What are you, a bunch of thirteen-year-olds playing around with a secret club or something?”
Richard started to get up, but Harold touched his knee and looked at him, pleading for him to stay.
“What have you got,” that same coarse voice from the corner said, “that’s more important than this?”
“It’s my fault,” Harold said. “I figured if I told him very much he would think we were delusional or something and would never meet with us. Let me tell you what’s going on, Richard.”
Richard looked around the room, trying to see faces. “That would be nice,” he finally said, quieter. “But you’re a bit late if you were trying to stop me from thinking you’re delusional.”
“All of us have children at the Newman Home,” Harold said, “just like you. There are other concerned parents, but we don’t meet all together because we don’t want to attract attention. Too big a risk.”
“Now that’s what I mean, Harold, this bit about risk. I’ve hated that school since the day I looked at their brochure, but I’m not holding meetings in dark rooms at midnight. Don’t you think you’re all a little...uh....”
“Paranoid?” Harold asked.
“Well, yes.”
“Let me ask you so
mething,” Harold said, “when you saw me at Macy’s two or three times before we finally spoke, what were you thinking? You seemed a little nervous.”
“Well, I wasn’t—”
“Honestly, what were you thinking?”
Richard looked down at his hands. “I wondered if you were from the school.”
“A little paranoid, Carson?” the coarse voice said. “I mean, like why didn’t you think he was a store cop, or just some guy having a tough time shopping, or even some mass murderer who stalked his victims in department stores?”
“Okay,” Richard said, “all that proves is that I had an irrational fear.”
“No, all that proves is that you have good instincts,” a woman across from Richard said, almost to herself. “Let me give you some evidence.” As she leaned forward, the light from the lamp illuminated her face. She was very white, even pale, and she had beautiful, soft-looking skin. She had arranged her long black hair into a tight bun, but instead of making her look stern, it somehow made her look compassionate.
“I’m Rebecca Solomon. Harold and I have a son, Joshua. He’s a handsome boy. Big, brown eyes, so dark you can’t see the pupils. Thick black hair that curls if you let it grow long enough. And believe me, at Newman, they don’t let it grow long enough.”
Rebecca took a deep breath before she continued. “We enrolled Joshua at the Newman Home, convinced we loved him so much we were willing to give him up for a while. Like the story of Hannah, I suppose. We borrowed the extra money from Harold’s parents. We wanted what was best for Joshua, not what was convenient for us. I’d always wanted to stay home with our children. We wanted to give him the best education, the greatest chance at being happy and successful. Besides, if it didn’t work out, we could always take him out.”
Richard nodded. “I’d always held onto that hope, but my wife sees it differently.”
“That’s just it. Harold and I saw it exactly the same. Any problems? Bring Joshua home. So, we enrolled him. We downloaded our videos. He came home for a couple of quarterly visits. Everything seemed like it was going well for the first couple of years.”
“Then we were blessed with Sarah,” Harold said. “And we brought Joshua home for his first Hanukkah with his little sister.”
“Did he not treat her well?” Richard asked.
“Oh no, no, he was wonderful to her,” Rebecca said. “That wasn’t the problem.” She stopped. For a moment she didn’t even try to say something, as she struggled to keep her composure. Harold offered his hand, and she held it. No one else spoke.
“He was well behaved,” she said. “He ate everything we placed before him. He wasn’t fussy, didn’t jump on the furniture, no tantrums. For two days Harold and I spent every waking minute with our son and daughter. We took them places...we played with them...we hugged them and kissed them.”
“Then what was wrong?” Richard asked.
“He never kissed back,” she said, staring straight at Richard for the first time. “He would put his arms around us, he would put his lips against our cheeks, but there was nothing there. He would speak only if spoken to. We wanted our little boy, not a well-trained dog.”
“His eyes,” Harold whispered, shaking his head.
“Ah, his eyes,” she said. “Those big, brown, loving eyes. Empty. He wasn’t seeing everything for the first time anymore. He wasn’t even looking anymore. It’s difficult to explain.”
“I know what you mean,” Richard said. “I’ve seen that look.”
“We returned him to the school and tried to resume our lives, but we couldn’t. We felt horrible, couldn’t bear having him away from us. After a week, we called them and said we’d decided to withdraw him. They said we couldn’t. We had a contract. They said that he was happy at Newman and only seemed distant when he was at home, with us. We told them to keep the money, we wanted our son. They finally agreed and said it would take a couple days to process the papers.”
“So, what happened?” Richard said.
“He’s almost ten now, and he’s still in the school. We can’t even take him out for quarterly visits anymore. We have to visit him there. Sometimes, Harold and I take turns trying to see him at the playground.”
“I don’t get it,” Richard said. “They can’t keep him against your will, not if you both want to take him out.”
“You have no idea how connected the school is to everyone in power, do you?” the coarse voice said. “Get a clue, Richard.”
Richard stared at the corner, trying to see the face that belonged to the voice, wishing he’d just keep quiet.
The shadows covered Rebecca’s face as she leaned back.
“We called every day,” Rebecca said. “We contacted the city. We had our lawyer contact the school. One day, while Harold was at work and I was home alone with Sarah, someone from the school came to our apartment with a social worker. They had papers. Psychiatrists had examined Joshua and concluded we had done some sort of damage to him during his visits. They had a video of him talking about how we mistreated him.”
“They left us a copy and we watched it over and over” Harold said. “Can you imagine what it’s like to hear your little boy say such things about you, like you’re monsters? We weren’t fit to be parents, they said, and the social worker was going to visit our home repeatedly, unannounced, to make certain we changed. Otherwise, the state would take our daughter away from us.”
“They can’t do that—” Richard said.
“They can do whatever they want, man,” the voice rasped.
Everyone was quiet.
“It was like Sophie’s Choice,” Rebecca said. “Try to win our son, we lose our daughter.”
“We fight in ways we can,” Harold whispered. “That is part of what these meetings are about. We meet. We talk. We read. We watch. We have Sarah with us, and someday we’ll have what we need to get Joshua back. I don’t know how yet, but someday we’ll get all our children back.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
One by one, each parent talked about how they were connected to the Solomons and to Newman. The grandmother, Joan, said she had placed her granddaughter in the school when her daughter and son-in-law had lost their lives in an auto accident. She soon regretted enrolling the girl, but when she mentioned her concerns to Harold, her accountant, she realized she’d better not try to take her out—at least for now.
Sandra, an attractive woman in her late twenties with short blonde hair, said she and her husband had enrolled their little girl in Newman because of how enthusiastic their neighbors, the Solomons, had been when they were considering the school. But after seeing what had happened with Joshua, Sandra wanted to take their daughter out. Her husband, though, said there were two sides to every story and that the Solomons may have exaggerated their situation.
The next people to speak were a couple, Paul and Lauren. Paul’s was the coarse, sarcastic voice, but now Lauren did most of the talking. When Paul did speak, he was quiet, almost reverent. They were both Ph.D. students at Columbia; he was studying philosophy, and she was studying biochemistry. The group was meeting in their apartment. The two had a daughter and had made arrangements with a friend, whose husband was also attending Columbia, to babysit her while they were in their classes. After just a couple of months, though, the babysitter’s husband dropped out of school and they moved away. Paul and Lauren tried a series of other arrangements for taking care of their daughter, but none worked out. Finally, Lauren’s parents offered to pay the costs of Newman for their granddaughter.
“That was three years ago,” Lauren said. “But like the Solomons’ boy, our daughter just seemed to be losing her spirit. I guess we didn’t really notice it at first—maybe we were too busy. Anyway, we decided to un-enroll her, you know, talked to some friends, started figuring out how we could trade off working on our dissertations. But about a month ago, we met Rebecca in the park with her little girl. She told us what had happened with their son, and we started attending these meetings.”
“Not at first. We kept telling ourselves that our case was different.”
“But then we heard about Joseph’s son,” Paul spoke up, “and that put a new light on everything. I think it did for everybody.”
“Joseph’s son?” Richard asked.
Paul looked at his wife, and neither spoke. Richard couldn’t catch anybody’s eye.
“It’s past two,” Harold said. “I think it’s time we break. Should we meet next week—”
Richard heard a new voice: “I will speak about it.” A man emerged from the shadows and moved closer to the lamp, where everyone could plainly see his face. “He would want me to speak of it, if it can help.
“I’m Joseph Thomas. I’m a professor at Harvard Law and have a home in Cambridge. Almost eight years ago, my wife and I had a son, Samuel. Joanne died in childbirth.”
“I’m sorry,” Richard said.
“That left me alone,” Joseph continued, “with a wonderful little baby, and a new academic career, and a law practice on the side. He didn’t have a mother, and how could I give him what he needed? I talked to several experts, spent weeks researching what was best for Samuel. I read about the Newman program here in New York and contacted the school.” Joseph rubbed his hands together. “Newman admitted him. They said he was like a little leopard, fast on his feet because he was fast in his mind.”
“Everything is about the jungle over there,” Richard said.
“More than you realize,” Joseph said. “He looked so happy in the videos, so I figured he was reserved at home because he wasn’t used to the surroundings. But when he came home last Christmas, Samuel wasn’t a little boy anymore. He was getting increasingly distant. More and more it just seemed that what was happening at Newman was some sort of experiment. I told the superintendent I was removing my son from the facility.”
Joseph paused and looked around the room. He took a deep breath.
The Newman Resident Page 8