The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  “You’ve got more than you can handle, little lady,” he said, handing me the cloths. “Let me rock the baby to sleep, while you take care of the other little boy.”

  Teddy looked into the understanding dark face, settled himself into the gentle arms, and fell asleep. When we reached Chico, the Negro gentleman was still holding Teddy. After he was handed back to me, Teddy again began to scream hysterically. Luckily, Carl’s family was waiting outside the bus.

  “Here,” my father-in-law said. “Let me carry that little fellow for you.”

  Teddy’s arms went quickly around his grandfather’s neck. “Daddy!” he cried, and his tears stopped. The boarding woman had forgotten to make Teddy fearful of men.

  Donny continued to feel upset that night. “I ate too much candy and pop on the train,” he groaned. “My tummy isn’t used to it.”

  In the morning his temperature shot up and his breathing became labored. A hastily summoned doctor gave him a shot of penicillin.

  “Pneumonia,” the doctor said. “Rig up a steam tent over his bed. That will help his breathing.”

  For two days, for two fearful, dragging nights, I sat by Donny’s bed, listening to his hoarse and raspy breathing inside the sheet which was draped, umbrella-fashion, over his bed. I didn’t dare doze off when he needed the kettle boiling for steam. The sheet or bedclothes might drag across the electric hot plate, and set us all on fire.

  All this time I was too busy to see much of Teddy, but Teddy didn’t care. Carl’s younger brothers were home at the time, and Teddy followed his new uncles and his grandfather around the ranch, happily calling them all “Daddy.”

  The crisis past, Donny’s abundant good health stood him in good stead. He convalesced quickly. By the end of the week, the doctor said he was well enough to make the trip, if I kept him quiet and warm. By this time Teddy was getting used to seeing me around. His complete rejection and fear had progressed to a tolerant putting-up-with-me. On the train going home, he seemed in good spirits as he chuckled and played peek-a-boo and patty-cake with Donny. All the way home I told him about his Daddy and his two little sisters waiting for him, and I gave him snapshots of Carl and the girls.

  When our train arrived in Chicago, we took the local north to Woodstock. Here friends met us, and drove us the remaining ten miles to Hebron. I carried my new son up the steps and stood him on our front porch, while Donny rang the doorbell.

  Carl came out, kissed Donny and me, and then knelt down. “So this is Teddy! You know, that’s a good name for you, son, because you look just like a little brown Teddy bear.

  Teddy looked him over gravely. Then he scooted over to wrap his small brown arms around Carl’s neck.

  “Daddy!” he said.

  At first Teddy refused to play with his two little sisters. While Laura and Susie dug in the sandbox, Teddy withdrew, his eyes like those of a wounded fawn. After a while he would run to a far corner of the yard, throw himself on his face and beat his head upon the ground, screaming. When I picked him up, he quieted immediately, clinging to me like a baby opossum to its mother. I would carry him indoors and rock him, singing folk songs and lullabies, and he would be outwardly calm for another day. After about two weeks, Teddy stopped beating his head, gave up the hysterical tantrums. He joined the sandbox play with his sisters, becoming both their pal and their little guardian.

  His first sentences were full of concern for them. As Susie would start down the long stairs, Teddy would rush to take her hand, cautioning, “Careful, Thu-thie. Careful, don’t fall.” If one of the little girls stumbled or hurt herself, Teddy was there first to help his sister to her feet. His arms would go around the small shoulders as he pulled a Kleenex from his pocket to dry the tears, consoling, “Too bad. Too, too bad. Blow, now.”

  Teddy was as different from his older brother as night is from day. Donny was the loud, rowdy, happy-go-lucky kind of boy who rackets through the house and never shuts a door behind him, who wouldn’t be caught dead hanging up his clothes. Teddy was a neat and orderly little fellow, who preferred to put his things away systematically so he could find them when he wanted them. He would even stop to close a door or drawer that someone else, usually Donny, had left open.

  Teddy was thing-conscious, with the scientific turn of mind that enjoys collecting and cataloguing, and finding out what makes things tick. We always had to check under any car parked in our yard before it was driven away, to make sure that Teddy wasn’t under it. He would lie under an automobile for an hour without moving anything but his dark eyes, just trying to figure out how the gears made the car run.

  Donny was essentially people-conscious. He had no interest in things, except as they related to people. He was supremely interested in finding out what makes people tick. One day we drove past a cornfield where an airplane had crashed. Teddy was full of questions: Why was it smashed? What happened to the motors? Why couldn’t he land on the wheels? How did they fix a broken plane?

  Donny had only one question: “Was anybody hurt?”

  Although Teddy’s conscious self had become happy and adjusted within the first few weeks, his subconscious was still hurt, still puzzled and frightened, from his boarding-house experience. An emotional wound is deep and must heal from the inside out; it takes a long time, and sometimes the scar is always there. We knew, because of Teddy’s nightmares. He would go to sleep with a smile on his little brown face, his Teddy bear in his arms. Two or three times a night he would scream out in his sleep. His crib was in the room next to mine, so I could rush to take him in my arms.

  “Teddy,” I’d whisper softly. “Don’t cry. Mama’s right here.” He would be all right the minute I woke him; even with his face wet with tears, he didn’t know he had been crying.

  As the months went by, the nightmares came only a few times a week, and eventually the time came when the emotional wounds in Teddy’s subconscious seemed to be completely healed. He never cried out in his sleep any more. When he was nearly three, I heard Laura tell him, “Sometimes when I in bed, sleeping, I got pictures in my eyes. Pretty pictures.”

  “That’s dreams,” Teddy said. “Me, too, but always bad ones.”

  “Always bad?”

  Teddy nodded. “Bad animals scare me, lots of bad things.”

  A year later the children were talking about dreams again.

  “I had a bad dream,” Susie reported to the rest. She had been frightened by a large, stray dog the day before. “I had a dream that a giant big dog chased me and tried to bite pieces out of me, but I climbed a tree.”

  “I don’t have any dreams,” Teddy said, “except once in a while. When I dream, I have good dreams, and sometimes I laugh.”

  . . .

  “There’s only one trouble with Teddy,” Donny said when he was five years old.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “He’s not big enough,” Donny said. “He’s just exactly the right size of the girls, and there still isn’t nobody the right size of me.”

  I promised Donny I would think about it. The more I thought about it, the more I felt I ought to write some more letters. This time I didn’t tell Donny I was writing, because I didn’t want him disappointed if I could not find a boy his size. And I didn’t tell Carl. Why should he be all stirred up for nothing, if I didn’t find a boy?

  I didn’t find a boy, but I did get a letter that stirred us up. It was from the agency which had written before, about the Mexican-Indian girl named Rita.

  “So you still haven’t found a boy the size of your Donny?” the letter began. “We are sorry that we do not have a five-year-old boy of any kind, for adoption. Little Rita is still here, though. She is nearly a year and a half now, and still nobody wants to adopt her. Since our agency is only equipped to care for infants under a year old, and since she shows signs of being slightly retarded, the only place left for her to go is our state institution for the feeble-minded.”

  I met tremendous opposition all the way around, trying to bring her into
our family.

  First Carl balked. “No!” he hollered. “I’m going in circles now, to find enough time for studies and church work. We can barely scrape along with four children already, and you want to bring another one home. For the last time, no!”

  Then the church stepped in to add its two cents’ worth. The church year was up, and the official board offered Carl the pulpit for another year—on condition that we have no more children. I doubt if the board members knew we were thrashing over talk about another adoption; but we had adopted three in two years, and I suppose they just thought we didn’t know how to stop once we got started. Racial prejudice was not involved, because the congregation had accepted all of our youngsters with real affection. The main issue was that Carl had little enough time for the church, and an expanding family might hinder his work.

  Carl wasn’t the least interested in having any more, but the ultimatum made him stubborn. It was the principle of the thing, he informed the board. “Having children is a private matter, between a man and wife, and God.” He added his sincere regrets that, under the circumstances, he would not be serving them the following year.

  The members of the board held another meeting and decided that the number of our children was not their rightful business. They unanimously asked Carl to return for another year, no strings attached. Any additions to our family would be solely up to the discretion of Carl, our Maker, and me.

  I was jubilant. “Now can we drive over and get Rita?”

  “I’m being pushed,” Carl complained. But the next week he drove us to the agency in the next state.

  “This little girl does seem retarded,” the agency director admitted, when we arrived. “She has started to toddle, but there is no inclination to begin to talk, feed herself, use the toilet chair, or any other such things other children her age begin to do.” Before she brought Rita down from the nursery she warned, “Don’t be alarmed if she wails when she sees you. She seems to be quite fearful of strangers.”

  She was not afraid with us. Carl and I took turns holding her on our laps, and she clung shyly, black eyes shining. She had a creamy-beige complexion, and sweeping black lashes that matched her patent-leather hair.

  “Pretty baby,” Teddy said, patting Rita. “We take this baby home, okay?”

  Laura looked dubious, a hint of jealousy sparking in her almond eyes, but Susie agreed with Teddy. “Nice baby,” she lisped. “I sink we need zis baby.”

  At first, I was afraid that Rita, nearly a year younger than the two-year-old “triplets,” would have trouble holding her own. The first morning after we brought her home, Rita gathered blocks to make a tower. Laura, Susie, and Teddy put their heads together in a conspiracy in another corner of the room, obviously hatching up some plot, along with much pointing at Rita and giggling behind hands. The huddle over, Laura ambled across the room, snatched one of Rita’s blocks, and ran off with it. Susan followed, pilfering another. Then Teddy tiptoed over, his eyes dancing with mischief, and reached for the top of Rita’s tower.

  Rita was ready for him. She grabbed a long block and promptly clonked Teddy on the head. A new respect was established for the newcomer, and she was accepted into the fold.

  After less than a month, Rita was no longer backward. She did everything other children her age did, and she jabbered continually, talking as well as the older three. All she had needed, to make progress, was the love and security of a family all her own.

  My next opposition on Rita came from the state welfare department, which had to approve the out-of-state adoption before the final petition could be granted in our local superior court. The state social worker who came to see us was already familiar with our family; she had supervised the adoptions of Laura, Susan and Teddy.

  “I don’t like the reports on this latest one you’ve taken,” she said, as she sat in our living room. “I see that the agency had thought to send her to a state home for feeble-minded children.”

  “But that was only because nobody wanted to adopt her,” I pointed out. “There was no other place for her to go”

  The social worker pulled Rita’s case history from her brief case. “Yes, but there was good reason for sending her there. According to the test reports made on her, just before you took her, she wasn’t too bright. In fact, she registered too low to be tested. You and your husband will have problems enough, when you adopt children who are different from you in racial background. Now must you take one that is mentally retarded in the bargain?”

  “She’s not the least bit mentally retarded, now,” I said. “She was just lost and lonely in the institutional surroundings where she spent her first year. She didn’t have any reason to try to do things, then.”

  “I’m only trying to consider your best welfare,” she said, “and the best welfare of Rita, too. Here you have Teddy, Laura, and Susan, just a little older than Rita, all bright, all sharp competition during Rita’s formative years. Look at Susie, who is nearest Rita’s age.” She checked her notes. “Susie not only belongs to the dominant race, but also has beautiful blue eyes and blonde hair. How will poor little Rita feel, when the neighbor girls invite Susie to their birthday parties, their dances and slumber parties, and Rita isn’t asked? And later, when Susie has dates, and Rita hasn’t?”

  “You haven’t seen Rita,” I said, “or you wouldn’t worry.”

  “Nevertheless,” she said, tapping her pencil on her notes, “the facts are here before you. You have to face the facts.”

  Just then I heard some of the children waking from their naps, so I excused myself. Laura and Teddy were still asleep, but I dressed Susie and Rita, and they started down the stairs. Susie was still in her painfully shy stage. When she saw a visitor in the living room, she scooted behind the couch like a frightened rabbit.

  Rita came in singing, like a petite, ebony-haired princess, not the least ruffled to find a stranger there. Poised and happy, she pranced over to the social worker as if she owned the place. She leaned against the lady’s lap, grinned her utterly bewitching smile, and flirted through her long, curling black lashes. They exchanged names, but Rita couldn’t stand still for long. She never has.

  Dancing around the room on toes as twinkling as a miniature Pavlova, she gathered treasured toys to heap in our visitor’s lap. She swept down the playroom slide backwards and did a couple of graceful somersaults. Then she flitted out through the back of the house, and returned with a glass jar containing some ladybugs.

  “She’s a budding entomologist,” I explained.

  Rita climbed into the lady’s lap, her black eyes sparkling and beautiful, her creamy-brown face lighted with her vivacity. “You like my baby bugs?” she asked. “I keeps them in a bopple, den I puts them in the gar-den.”

  She hopped down and raced out to the back yard, her patent-leather hair bobbing on her shoulders. Susie crept from her hiding place, gave one frightened look, and sped after Rita.

  “Well,” I said, “what do you think?”

  The social worker looked thoughtful. “I was just thinking about Susie, growing up with Rita.” She turned toward me, her face concerned. “Does Susie show any particular talents? When she’s older, if she could have piano, or dancing lessons—do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Snow Country

  UNTIL I was eighteen, I had lived most of my life in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, and never thought of the midwestern climate as a hardship. Since then I had lived ten years in Southern California, and that had spoiled me.

  It was Carl’s first experience in snow country, and he loved it. He had never owned an overcoat; now he couldn’t afford one, and said it didn’t matter. It worried the good ladies of our church to see their young pastor striding down the wintry streets, his thin raincoat flapping in the icy wind, his almost-bald head distressingly bare. One neighbor brought me a heavy overcoat which had become too small for her husband, and begged me to get Carl to wear
it. He packed it in a box for overseas relief.

  “They need it over there more than I do.” Carl was always concerned about others, but never about himself.

  I tried to be philosophical about the weather the way Carl was, but more often I was like a nervous hen who has just hatched chicks. So many tiny children under my feet, a balky furnace which worked only on week ends when Carl was home, and the times we got snowed in, were all periodically frustrating.

  Any day, summer or winter, was a good day for the children to drop trinkets down through the furnace grating; but this game gained momentum with the first chill of autumn, and reached new highs during the long, cooped-up days until spring. The heat from our furnace was caught in an outer shell, which funneled up from the basement to a large register set in the living-room floor. The holes in the grating of the register were the right size to allow about half of the children’s toys to go through, which they soon did. In spite of all I could do, every loose button, coin, toy, wheel, pin, pencil, spoon, or trinket that little fingers could find, eventually wound up in that secret and inaccessible place between the inner and outer shells of the furnace. It was a rare game, more fun than mailing letters or playing drop-the-clothespin-in-the-bottle.

  The worst things they ever stuffed down the furnace were the balloons. Somebody had given us a huge box of balloons which, with frugality, should have provided fun for ten years. One freezing morning I gave each child a brightly colored balloon to play with, so they would be amused and stay out of mischief while I went to the basement to wrestle with the furnace. It took sweat, tears, and the last of my patience to get the fire going, but by the time I left the basement and started back upstairs, it was really roaring.