Interesting. Still, I supposed couples arrived at decisions in different time frames.
“What changed his mind?”
Ellie’s burnt-sugar eyes lit up. “This,” she said simply. She reached toward the coffee table and lifted a child’s school binder notebook covered in plastic and decorated with a crescent moon.
“This is our Baby Notebook,” she explained, opening the clasp. Inside were two folders, one with a sun and one with a star on the cover. She pulled open the rings and took out the sun folder.
“I sent for this without telling Josh,” she said, handing me a desktop-edited newsletter with the logo of a sleeping baby and the word Dreamchild on top. Under the masthead were articles on how to make contact with birth mothers, how to arrange private adoptions, reviews of books on adoption no prospective parent should be without. Happy stories of adoptive parents who “finally, after years of avoiding other people’s baby showers, had our own for little Melissa Marie.”
I opened the newsletter. On the next-to-last page were the ads. “COUPLE WHO HAS EVERYTHING—EXCEPT A BABY TO LOVE. WE LIVE IN SUBURBAN SAINT LOUIS, IN A BIG WHITE HOUSE THAT FEELS EMPTY WITHOUT THE LAUGHTER OF A CHILD. MARRIED TEN YEARS, STILL DEEPLY IN LOVE, WE PRAY FOR A BIRTH MOTHER TO TRUST US WITH HER BABY. WE PROMISE YOU WON’T BE SORRY. WHITE ONLY. BOX 89743.”
I read on. The only constant was the “white only” refrain. “Is this necessary?” I asked Ellie, pointing to the words in the first ad. I recalled the television room of Amber’s group home, full of white teenagers bursting with soon-to-be-born white infants for the carriage trade.
“Well, yes,” she answered, her eyes begging me to understand the pain behind the perky presentations. “We went to an agency first, and because Josh is over fifty and I’m over forty, they told us we couldn’t have a white infant. But they said they could get us an older child or a baby with a medical problem, or a nonwhite baby. Josh had a fit. Not that he’s a racist, because he’s not, but when you’re adopting a baby, you want one that looks like you. That could be your own.”
“So that’s why you chose a private placement adoption?” I asked, hoping she couldn’t tell that I’d never heard the term before last week.
“Yes. I read about it in the Dreamchild newsletter. And I read about Marla. So I contacted her without Josh knowing, and she put me on a waiting list while I worked on Josh. At first, he wouldn’t hear about adoption. The agency thing really soured him. He wanted me to call a Park Avenue infertility specialist he’d heard about from one of his clients. But,” she paused for a delicate shudder, “I just couldn’t go through that one more time. You have no idea how humiliating it is, how degrading, to be some doctor’s experimental animal.”
“So what changed your husband’s mind?” She gave me a startled look, and I added, “About adoption, I mean.”
“Oh, he started reading the newsletter and saw Amber’s ad. I remember, we were sitting up in bed, watching Charlie Rose, and he pointed to the ad and said, ‘This is the one.’ Just like that,” she said, shaking her head and smiling at the vagaries of the male sex. “‘This is the one for us.’ And it was Amber’s.”
“Then birth mothers advertise, too?” I was surprised. “I thought it was kind of a seller’s market.” The look that crossed Ellie Greenspan’s face made me blush. Without thinking, I had brought Marla’s hard-boiled way of looking at adoption into the room.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Didn’t mean it to come out like that.”
She smiled an apology, but the wariness in her eyes didn’t go away. It would be a while before she trusted me with another true feeling.
She reached for the notebook and opened the purple folder with the blue star on the front. Inside was another copy of Dreamchild, open to the ads page, with one ad highlighted in yellow. I remembered highlighters from my law school days; it was a surprise to see one used out of context.
The ad read: “WANTED: A TRULY LOVING COUPLE FOR A TRULY SPECIAL BABY. AGE UNIMPORTANT. WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS THAT YOU WANT TO GIVE A HOME TO A CHILD IN NEED. MY BABY NEEDS WHAT I CANNOT GIVE—A STABLE HOME WITH TWO LOVING PARENTS. NEW YORK AREA A +. PLEASE HEAR MY VOICE: I NEED YOU AS MUCH AS YOU NEED ME. AMBER, BOX 49350.”
“What was so special?” I asked. “Not that this isn’t a nice ad,” I amended, hoping I hadn’t hurt her feelings again. “And now that I’ve met Amber, I think she is special. But from this ad—”
“I know what you mean,” Ellie said. “When he first read it to me, I thought it was just like all the others. Except that this girl didn’t mind about age and actually wanted somebody from New York. A lot of the birth mothers are from other parts of the country, and they think New York is a terrible place to raise a child. That was one strike against us. And then there’s our ages, and the fact that Josh is Jewish. Most of the birth mothers want their children raised as Christians, and we’re committed to giving our child the benefit of both his heritages. So just from the words ‘New York a plus’ Josh thought this girl might be more open to us. And,” she finished with a triumphant smile, “he was right. Amber loved Josh’s being Jewish, and she said her own parents were older when she was born, so she realized we could give her child a mature kind of love.”
“Sounds like a match made in heaven,” I remarked. Not much else to say in the face of that radiant smile.
“Oh, by the way,” I added, “where is Josh? I have something for him.” I reached in my bag to get the birthday card Amber had pressed on me.
Josh Greenspan set my teeth on edge the minute he came out of his office. He wasn’t tall, but his barrel chest and thick arms weighed down the room. He resembled the huge cactus squatting in his wife’s terrarium, soaking up all the moisture and covering a soft interior with scary-looking spikes. At least, I hoped it was a soft interior, for the sake of the child his wife wanted so badly.
“Can’t you order your client to obey Dr. Scanlon’s orders?” he began, not bothering with pleasantries. “Marla says Amber’s out at the mall right now, in spite of what the doctor told her. Don’t you have any control over her?” He thrust out his chin, not his hand. The challenge hung in the air.
“Josh, please,” Ellie’s little-girl voice broke in. “I know how you feel, but—”
“But nothing,” the bearded architect interrupted with a shake of his head. “Look, we’re paying the bills, baby, we ought to have something to say about—”
“Josh!” Dusky patches appeared on Ellie Greenspan’s cheeks. Her eyes sought mine, offering the kind of wordless apology women give one another when their men embarrass them. I tried to accept it in the same manner, shrugging ever so slightly.
The big man grinned, holding up a large paw in conciliation. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we’re getting so close to Amber’s delivery date. If anything were to go wrong now—” He shrugged an apology.
“I understand,” I said, meeting his grin with a cool smile. “If I could make Amber listen to Doc Scanlon, I would. But the real reason I’m here is that Amber asked me to bring you something, and since I live in the neighborhood …” I let my voice trail off; technically I was not a Heights resident, since my home-office was on the wrong side of Atlantic Avenue, but there was no point in advertising that minor fact.
Greenspan’s eyes narrowed. “Bringing something? That’s a new one.” His laugh was a harsh sound and held no hint of humor. “Seems to me our Amber is usually asking for something, taking something. It’s not like her to give back.”
“Josh,” came Ellie’s admonitory voice. She sounded like she was getting into practice for speaking to a recalcitrant child. “I thought we agreed that Amber needed those things we gave her.”
“What things?” Part of my mind said it was none of my business, but the other part remembered the words of the Domestic Relations Law governing permissible expenses to be paid by adoptive parents to birth mothers. I wasn’t about to be Marla’s patsy in covering up illegal payments.
“Oh, little things,” Ellie said hastily
. It was clear she grasped the meaning of my question. “Like paying her phone bill so she can call her family back home in Kansas, her sister in Baltimore. Nothing out of the ordinary or unreasonable.” The look she gave her husband was meant to insure his agreement.
It worked. He shrugged, then said, “Yeah, I guess sometimes I make more out of it than I should. I just hate to see you pouring money—and affection, too, don’t forget that—down a bottomless pit like Amber. She’d suck you dry if she could, Ellie, you know she would.”
Ellie shook her head. She moved as if to get up from the couch, then changed her mind and leaned back. “She’s not much more than a child herself, Josh,” she said. “She needs to know we care about her as a person, not just as someone carrying our child.”
“I still think you romanticize her, baby,” Josh said, his voice heavy with disapproval.
Then a slow smile spread across his face, a smile that took years off his age. He walked toward the palomino couch and parked himself next to his wife. He leaned toward her and grazed her golden cheek with his full lips.
“But that’s why I love you, El. You have so much to give, so much love. I can’t wait to see you holding our baby.”
It was to throw up.
I handed over the card, watching the yellow envelope all but disappear into Josh’s heavy, hairy hand. He opened it with a single rip, Ellie following his every move with hungry eyes.
He pulled out the card. It had a teddy bear on it, drawn in primary crayon colors, as if by a small child. “Happy Birthday, Daddy,” it read. Either Amber had decided Josh was her surrogate daddy or she was sending him a birthday card on behalf of his unborn child. Either way, the card was weird as hell.
But Ellie, predictably, didn’t see it that way. Tears welled in her eyes as she gazed on the sappy message inside, a message that hailed Josh as a wonderful daddy. “Oh, it’s so beautiful,” she breathed. “I’m putting it in the Baby Notebook, next to the one she gave me for my birthday.” I was willing to bet Ellie’s card had a similarly childlike motif and was addressed to Mommy.
Josh held the card with thick fingers that shook ever so slightly. I glanced at his face; his jaw was clenched and his mouth was set in anger. His face held all the thunder of a spring storm in the desert.
A white paper fell into Josh’s lap. Ellie reached for it with her slender, elegant fingers. “A gift certificate from Baby Gap,” she said delightedly.
“Nice,” I commented. “A thoughtful gesture.”
“Yeah,” Josh chimed agreement, but his tone was wry. “A thoughtful gesture with our money. You don’t really suppose she spent her own cash on this, do you, babe?”
“Josh, why do you have to be so cynical? Why can’t you take something at face value, for a change?”
“Because with Amber, nothing is face value, that’s why. She uses us, she takes and takes. I can’t wait,” he finished, emphasizing his words with the slap of his huge palm on the bleached coffee table, “till this baby’s ours and that woman is out of our lives forever.”
I hadn’t known much about adoptions when I took this case, but I’d read a book or two since meeting Marla in the motion part, and one thing I’d learned about open adoptions was that the birth mother and the adoptive parents were supposed to be able to keep up contact after the baby was born. It didn’t sound as if Josh was entering into the open adoption spirit at all. Out of our lives forever wasn’t particularly realistic, since Amber knew the name and address of the people who were going to raise her child.
I left the carriage house with a feeling of trepidation that swept through me like the icy wind off the river.
“It just bothers me, that’s all,” Mickey Dechter said. We were not quite partners, since a lawyer is forbidden to go into practice with a non-lawyer, but she had an office next to mine and she gave social work services to many of the same clients I represented in court. I had without quite realizing it taken Amber’s case in the secure belief that she’d help me with it, that she’d lend her considerable knowledge of human behavior to the enterprise. Now she was flatly refusing to have anything to do with an adoption.
“Oh, and it doesn’t bother me?” I countered, trying to keep a lid on my rising anger, without much success. “Because I’m just an insensitive lawyer, right? I’m too crass, too—”
“I didn’t say that,” she retorted. Her voice held an edge of exasperated resentment. “If you’d just let me explain.”
I sat back against my high-backed leather chair and said, “Explain already.” I folded my arms across my chest to convey my earnest desire to listen with an open mind.
“I don’t like adoptions,” she said flatly. “I don’t like the way they’re conducted in this country, and I—”
Mickey and I had degenerated to conversation by interruption. It was my turn to break into her train of thought.
“What do you mean, the way adoptions are conducted in this country?” I stood up and walked toward the coffeepot for a refill, prepared to warm up Mickey’s cup as well. Even a knock-down, drag-out argument was no excuse for depriving someone of coffee.
She waved her hand over her mug to signal that she’d had enough. This after I’d brewed total decaf in deference to her. I filled my own cup, took the pot back to the stove, and sat down to mix in the desired amounts of milk and sweetener.
“Do you realize,” she began, fixing me with her earnest eyes, “that adoption agencies in the U.S. discriminate in ways the local McDonald’s would get sued for? That in an adoption it’s not only permissible but required to classify people on the basis of race, age, religion?”
I nodded. “Ellie told me she and Josh had trouble with the agencies because of their ages and their mixed marriage.”
“That’s what I mean,” Mickey said. “If he was being fired from his job because he was Jewish or because of his age, he’d have a discrimination case, right?”
“Right.”
“But it’s okay for an adoption agency to deny him a child because he’s too old or because his wife isn’t Jewish. And don’t get me started on race,” she went on. I didn’t; I didn’t say a word, but she was off and running anyway.
“It used to be that white couples could adopt nonwhite babies, but now there’s a big emphasis put on same-race adoptions. Which leaves a huge number of nonwhite children without homes while white babies are at a premium.”
She leaned forward and lowered her voice, as if afraid of microphones in the coffee mugs. “They even try to match skin color among nonwhite families,” she said. “As if a dark family shouldn’t raise a light child.”
“But doesn’t it make sense for the adoption agency to give a baby to people who look as much like him as possible?” I asked. “Skin color is part of that; I suppose they look at other factors as well before they match—”
“Who says that’s the only basis to make a family?” Mickey shot back. “Who says blond parents can’t love a dark-haired child or that only light-skinned parents should raise a light-skinned child? Where is it written that an adoptive family is a second-best copy of a ‘real’ family?”
I opened my mouth to reply, then pulled myself back to the real issue at hand. “What does all this have to do with Amber?” I asked. “Her case has nothing to do with agencies.”
“Oh, yes, it does,” Mickey countered. She leaned forward on the couch—no easy feat at eight and one-half months pregnant—and tossed the words at me with a passionate intensity that would have gone down well on “The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.”
“It has everything to do with society’s bias toward biology. Look at the way we pay for babies. I’ll bet every visit your Ellie Greenspan made to a fertility specialist was covered by insurance. But no one pays the costs of adoption. Which is society’s way of saying that if you choose to reproduce yourself, in spite of all the children already born who need homes, we’ll subsidize you. And if you can’t have your own, we’ll help you find a white infant if you’re the right age, the right r
eligion, live in the right place, and have lots of money. If not—” she shrugged and held her out hands in a gesture that said, You know the rest.
“If not, what?” I demanded, deliberately obtuse.
“If not,” she continued, letting her hands come to rest on her swollen belly in a protective manner I was seeing more and more as the delivery date loomed, “then you go into the marketplace and make the best deal you can with some poor kid who doesn’t know which end is up, who’s going through her own crisis, who needs counseling before she makes a decision that will affect her and her baby for life—and all she gets is a desperate older couple waving money in her face. She gets whipsawed between society’s supposed belief in adoption and its vilification of a mother who gives up her baby.”
I shook my head, recalling the “HEADLESS CORPSE” T-shirt. “You haven’t met Amber,” I said. “A poor helpless kid she’s not. Besides, if you think she needs counseling, give it to her. That’s why I need you, Mickey.”
“Don’t you get it, Cass?” Mickey fixed me with eyes that had already decided, eyes that couldn’t be reached. “I refuse to take part in the adoption system. I refuse to participate in something that came about because of society’s basic lack of respect for children. It’s a direct result of the narcissistic search for a perfect little replica—which can only be satisfied by a white baby. And in a capitalist society, we therefore justify the creation by science of white babies and the sale of white babies by birth mothers.”
“Oh, now I’m a baby-seller?” I flung myself back on the couch and shot a look of pure hatred at my friend and colleague.
“Nobody is selling a baby here,” I went on, aware of the sullen edge to my voice. “Amber’s expenses are going to be documented in affidavits filed in court. No payments are being made over and above what the law allows.”
This remark was greeted by a superior smirk designed to let me know that only a naif with a law degree would believe such a fairy tale.
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