The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  At the corner, Donny was nowhere to be seen, but the two little girls were kicking their feet in the play pen and screaming like fire engines. I tucked a howling baby under each arm and climbed the back steps to the kitchen. Donny was already there, peanut butter everywhere except on the sandwich he was trying to make.

  “Time for lunch,” he said.

  “I know it,” I answered grimly, blowing the hair out of my eyes. “And both your sisters are starved for their bottles. See this?” I dropped two small oxfords on the floor and shifted my grip on the babies. “Mama finally found your shoes.”

  “Oh,” Donny said, his mind as full of peanut butter as his mouth. “Was they lost?”

  . . .

  Still, when I made the rounds as I tucked them in at night, when I looked at their sleeping, angelic faces, I knew that everything was worth what it cost. When I wasn’t too tired, I really enjoyed the children. Donny was a responsive little fellow, with a curiosity and eager zest for life that were contagious. Susie was too frail yet for much handling, but chubby little Laura loved to be cuddled as much as I loved doing it. When she smiled at me out of her intriguing almond-shaped brown eyes, as if to say, Hello, Mother. I’m your daughter, I found my own eyes a little misty in my happiness.

  Visitors were attracted to healthy, happy little Laura. “What a little beauty!” they would exclaim, as they came out of her bedroom. Her exquisite ivory skin, her pink-cheeked, china-doll features, entranced everyone.

  They were strangely silent after peeking into Susie’s crib. After an embarrassed pause, the polite ones would suddenly change the subject. Others were more blunt, and shook their heads. “Doesn’t really look as if she would live to grow up, does it?”

  One night Susan had convulsions. She moaned, chomping her toothless gums, waving her thin arms and jerking oddly, with her head thrown back and her eyes rolled up. While I waited the frightening half hour it took the doctor to arrive, my shaking hands wrapped her in warm, wet towels. When the doctor came, he gave her some injections. The convulsions eased off and she fell into a deep coma, sleeping for two days without waking for meals, not stirring when I changed her.

  If I had thought she was dying when she suffered the convulsions, I was even more fearful of it during those long hours when she lay nearly lifeless, scarcely breathing. Every night I went in to kneel by her crib, a dozen times in the night; every hour in the day, when I passed her door, I bowed my head in desperate petition.

  When Susie finally fought back to life from her coma, she began to gain strength. By the time she was six months old, rosy cheeks had displaced the sallow complexion and she was almost as chubby as Laura. Her eyes had lost their sunken, red rims.

  The ugly birthmark, however, had continued to grow until it dominated her face like an oversized strawberry plastered upon her forehead.

  “Some birthmarks eventually absorb and disappear,” our doctor told us. “The treatment for each type is different.” Since Susan’s type might continue to grow, he recommended that it be removed with radium treatments.

  We took Susan to a clinic in Chicago, a hundred-and-twenty-mile round trip, every two weeks for six long months. Laura had a tiny birthmark on her arm which was treated at the same time. Our family became a familiar sight at the hospital, Carl and I each lugging a baby girl in a basket, Donny clutching a paper sack of lunch. The baby baskets were piled high with extra diapers, blankets, bottles of formula, orange juice, Kleenex, and baby toys. These fortnightly trips were like moving day.

  Going up in the hospital elevator, a white-haired lady plucked at my sleeve and whispered, “I’ve seen you here before. Are these all your children?”

  I nodded.

  “Both these sweet babies, too?”

  “Yes,” I smiled. “Two little girls.”

  “Twins, I suppose?”

  “Not exactly.” I nodded at Susie, who lay wide-eyed among the bundles in the basket I carried. “This one is two months younger than the other.”

  Her face puzzled, she peeked toward Carl’s basket, where Laura lay asleep on her tummy, her face hidden. “Dear me, yes,” she said, her face clearing. “I can see that the other one’s considerable bigger than this little mite. The one you’ve got is blue-eyed and little, like you. I suppose the other one takes after your husband?”

  I thought that the dear old soul was merely hard-of-hearing, until Carl and I were leaving the elevator at our floor. She plucked at my sleeve.

  “But my dear,” she whispered, “wasn’t it hard on you, having two babies so close together?”

  Carl and I and our three children waited in a small examining room until one of the clinic doctors made the routine general health check-ups on the girls. During the noon hour we held the babies for their bottles, then put them in their baskets for naps; Donny, Carl and I ate sandwiches and apples, and shared a quart of milk. At two o’clock the radiologist and several nurses came in to strap the capsules of radium over the babies’ birthmarks.

  Our main problem at these bi-weekly sessions was to keep track of Donny, now nearly four years old. Completely unafraid of strange people and surroundings, he would slip away and disappear like a pebble dropped into a lake. One day he wandered out to the main corridor, down in the elevator, to the first-floor pharmacy, where he was having an animated conversation with the druggist. On the next hospital visit we finally discovered him several floors up, cheering an old grandmother in the chronic ward. Again we located him in the surgical ward on another floor; he was helping a doctor and nurses chip the cast from a broken leg, and the doctor insisted he was about ready to take Donny on as an intern.

  After our girls had finished two hours of treatment, the doctor and nurses returned to remove the radium, which was encased in wooden blocks and strapped into place with adhesive tape. The invisible radium rays could not be felt, and the adhesive tape, on her smooth arm, did not bother placid little Laura. For Susan, the removal of the radium blocks was more painful. No matter how gently the tape was pulled from the sparse hair, Susie screeched with all her lung power; just having her head held tightly was equally resented. She soon came to the point where she started screaming as soon as she saw doctor or nurse coming.

  With the completion of the half year’s treatment, Susie’s birthmark, like Laura’s, had melted completely away. Yet there was an emotional aftermath. Susie had become hysterically afraid of strangers. From her earliest memory, almost all the strangers who came close to her would hurt her, and she couldn’t trust outsiders. When we took Susie to church, and a strange woman swooped upon her with coos of delight, Susie retaliated by screaming for five minutes without stopping.

  Carl and I decided she must be ignored by strangers, until she felt so safe in their midst that she was ready to make the first overtures of friendship herself. When we went to church for services, social doings, or potluck suppers, I hung signs around Susie’s neck, front and back, like a small sandwich board. They read:

  DO NOT TOUCH ME!

  I AM SHY.

  JUST PRETEND I’M NOT HERE,

  PLEASE!

  As long as nobody made a direct move toward her, Susie felt safe enough to accompany me anywhere. I often took Donny and the two little girls with me to the afternoon meetings of our church women’s societies, held in the homes of the members. Laura loved these meetings; completely feminine, even then, she toddled around the hostess’s living room, watching the women, studying their make-up, their gestures, the way they crossed their legs. Donny usually managed to wander away and get lost. I didn’t worry. He always found his way back in time for refreshments.

  At first Susie would crawl under my chair, or behind it, for the whole meeting. She even felt it was too risky to venture out when refreshments were served. Later, she became brave enough to dart out and slip a cookie from my plate, but she ate it in her sanctuary behind my chair. Once in a while a lady would find Susie irresistible, would forget and give her a motherly pat. This would be a setback, for Susie would div
e into her hiding place, howling as if she had been stuck with pins.

  As the months went by, Susie became even more irresistible. She was not only robust and healthy, but also pert and pretty, with long-lashed blue eyes and softly curling blonde hair. Yet she was too shy to talk, and showed no signs of wanting to be sociable.

  Were Carl and I wrong in thinking she could work her own way out of the fears that shackled her? Always Susie seemed surprised that nobody hurt her, that people outside her family usually ignored her; but she was content to cling, speechless, to my side. With no apparent envy she watched Donny and Laura mingling with the ladies, petted and made over. There seemed to be no desire on her own face, as she watched her brother and sister helping themselves to cookies and punch at refreshment time.

  At last came the day when her need for recognition became so strong it snapped the fetters of her shyness. She toddled over between Laura and Don, and pulled at the skirt of the lady who was passing out cookies.

  “Me, too,” she demanded, pointing to the cookie plate. “Su-sie tookie, too.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Like Topsy, We Grow

  CARL and I might have been satisfied with three children, but our son was not. When Donny was four, he watched his two baby sisters scoot about the floor on their hands and knees.

  “You and Daddy got each other,” he said wistfully. “And Laura and Susie got each other to play with. But Mama, there isn’t nobody in this house the right size of me!”

  I took him onto my lap. “That’s true, isn’t it? Mama has the little family she always wanted. Daddy’s going to school to get what he wants. I don’t see why we can’t help you get what you want.”

  I started saving money for stamps, and every time I could get three cents together, I sent a letter to another adoption agency on my list. My letters, to all the states in the union, asked, “Do you have a boy about four years old, of any mixed or minority ancestry, who needs a home?”

  Two agencies answered. One, in a nearby state, offered a Mexican-Indian baby girl named Rita. The other, on the West Coast, had a Filipino-Malayan-Spanish boy named Teddy. Nobody wanted to adopt these little youngsters, with their dark hair and dark skins.

  “Not that baby girl,” Donny said. “We got enough baby girls around here already. “Let’s get that Teddy for me.”

  “That Teddy’s not the size of you,” I explained. “According to this letter, he’s only a couple of months older than the girls.”

  “Yeah, but we two boys could stick together,” Donny said.

  “Don’t I have anything to say about this?” Carl said. “I told you before, ‘No,’ and I say again, ‘NO.’ How can I work my way through seminary with four children?”

  “It’s only one more than three,” I said.

  “I can count!” Carl thundered. “Wait until I get through school, and then you can adopt a dozen, if you must.”

  “Who’s asking for a dozen? I’m not crazy.”

  “No?” Carl said. “I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “Just one more,” I pleaded. “That will give us two girls and two boys—a nice, well-rounded family.”

  “I don’t want to be well-rounded,” Carl grumbled, as he retired behind a schoolbook. “I’d rather try to get square for a change. Financially square.”

  I sat in his lap, put his book down, and mussed the top of his head where his hair used to be. “Look, honey, how can you bear it, knowing that nobody wants this little fellow, and when we could, if we wanted to put our minds to it—”

  “All right,” Carl said. “So we could take him, if we put our minds to it. Well, you’ve put so much mind to it, there isn’t any space left for mine.”

  “Darling!” I said. “You will?”

  Carl took out his date book, riffling the pages. “Let’s see. My spring vacation comes up in three weeks. I’ll stay home and study and take care of the girls. You and Donny can take the train west, and bring home this Teddy.”

  “Whoopee!” Donny yelled.

  “But this is the last one,” Carl hollered, waving his date book in my face. “The very last one, do you understand?”

  I squeezed our budget until it whimpered. We ate beans instead of hamburger. We appropriated the little sum that was supposed to grow into a washing machine. Three weeks later, when Carl’s spring vacation came up, we had enough saved for my round-trip ticket by chair car. There was no money for eating in the dining car, so I took along a shopping bag full of food—perishables for the first day, plus enough staples, such as canned milk, graham crackers, and tins of fruit and vegetable juices, to last for the balance of the trip.

  “You look as if you had everything along except the dog and the kitchen sink,” Carl said, as he hoisted Donny and me, and our lumpy bundles, onto the train at Woodstock.

  “A dog wouldn’t complicate this trip a bit more than Donny will,” I predicted darkly, as I watched our small son whizz around the corner and down the aisle, kicking up his heels like a spring lamb. “I’ll bet Donny keeps me in hot water for the whole trip.”

  Donny did.

  First, I made the mistake of leaving him alone in our seat with a color book, while I went to the women’s washroom. As I came back down the aisle, I heard people chuckling, and I just stopped in time when I started to drop into my seat. Donny had a picnic spread all over the place. With his fingers he was eating cottage cheese from my seat, where it had spilled.

  I cleaned up the mess the best I could and marched Donny down to the women’s room. After I had him washed and dressed in clean clothes, I made another mistake. I turned my back to comb my frazzled hair. Donny lost no time. He crawled under the washbowl and unscrewed the bottle attached to the liquid-soap dispenser. The bottle crashed down, spilling a slippery mess of soap jelly over the floor. Just then two plump dowagers opened the door, and the train lurched around a curve. The poor ladies lost their balance and skidded across the cubicle, screeching and clutching at everything in sight, to the wide-eyed amazement of Donny.

  I tried to keep him out of trouble by amusing him with the bag of color books, crayons, and toys I had assembled especially for the trip; but such inanimate things, inedible in the bargain, could not hold his attention for long. Every time I was lulled into a doze by the clicketty-clicketty-click of the wheels, Donny disappeared. I would find him three cars back, sharing a box of homemade cookies with some soldiers, or up ahead in the dining car with a sweet old lady, being treated to a bottle of soda pop. He would be chattering like a squirrel, as much at home as if he had run into delightful old friends.

  At the start of the trip he had been eager to tell everyone where we were going, and why. While we waited to change trains at the Chicago and Northwestern station, he galloped between the benches like a junior Paul Revere.

  “We’re going to get a brand new little brother for me!” he proclaimed to all who were interested, and a good many who were not.

  “It isn’t polite to bother strangers with our private affairs,” I told him, when I coralled him. “Shall we make it our very own secret?”

  The secret evidently was too important to be kept. All during the trip to the coast I wondered why the soldiers across the aisle were so solicitous. They leaped across the aisle to help every time I reached for a suitcase or lumpy parcel in the rack overhead.

  “Your Donny told us about the addition you expect soon,” one confided at the end of the trip, as he helped me off the train with my luggage. “Hope it’s another boy! Donny seems so sure it’s going to be a brother.”

  For once Donny had been a help. The assistance had been welcome, because we had no money to tip a porter.

  At the adoption agency, Donny immediately made friends with the secretary in the outer office. He climbed in her lap to watch her typewriter work, while the social worker took me into her office to explain about Teddy’s background.

  “This little boy has been in undesirable boarding homes since birth,” she said. “The last woman who has been paid to car
e for him has several older children of her own, but Teddy, with his bright eyes and quick mind, has become her favorite. She even applied to adopt him. As much as we at the agency want Teddy to have a home of his own, we just couldn’t see him permanently in this home.”

  “Was the home so bad?”

  She shook her head. “It was a hopeless home for any child, slovenly, broken by drink, a contempt for education. It would be especially bad for a bright little youngster like Teddy, who needs understanding and college opportunities.

  “Was the boarding mother resigned to giving him up, then?”

  “Hardly. She has tried to fight our agency in the most underhanded way she could—through little Teddy. She has tried to bind him to her emotionally, to make him so fearful of all strange women, that he wouldn’t adjust to another home. When one of us from the office makes a required supervisory visit, this woman snatches Teddy into her arms and whispers, ‘Don’t cry. I won’t let that bad lady hurt you. I won’t let that bad lady take you away!’ Teddy was such a friendly, outgoing little fellow before, and now she has him almost hysterical.”

  The agency had been fully aware of the situation, but what could be done? Nobody wanted even to board a little brown-skinned boy of mixed race, much less adopt him. No wonder they had been so happy to receive our letter and references, especially because Teddy would have another Eurasian child for a sister.

  The social worker left to fetch our new son. An hour later, when she brought him into the office, I wasn’t surprised to see the little tyke sobbing in her arms. When I held him, he shrieked through his torrent of tears, his large brown eyes round with fear.

  I had planned to stop for a visit with Carl’s family at Chico, nearby in California, but I never guessed what an ordeal that extra short ride would be. Even after we boarded the bus to go to my father-in-law’s ranch, Teddy was determined to have nothing to do with me. Although he was worn out with crying and it was past his nap time, I couldn’t soothe him to sleep. To make things worse, the bus went around one too many nauseating curves, and Donny lost his dinner all over the place. Donny started to wail, Teddy was sobbing, and I was tempted to join them. We were ignored by everyone except a large man with a serene black face and grizzled white hair who sat across the aisle. He gathered the white cloths from the back of his seat, and from several empty seats, and came over.