The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  Donny and I were bundled in hats and overcoats and sweaters, but, even with our blue fingers, we were in a state of comfort compared to the small ones. If I kept them wrapped enough to be warm, their fevers and itching sent them into paroxysms of crying; if I uncovered them so I could relieve the itching with cool applications, the water almost froze on their bodies. I was afraid that if I didn’t do anything, their fevers would keep rising and they would have their pox all infected, and that if I did try to cool them with wet cloths, I might give them pneumonia. I kept praying under my breath, “Please, God, help me keep my head.” For the children’s sake, I must keep cheerful.

  Just as dark began to shut the swirling whiteness from the windows, I heard someone rattling at the front door. I stumbled down the stairs, thanking God that somebody had heard my prayers and stopped by. As I dashed toward the door, there was Carl. I fell in his arms. Never in my whole life was I so glad to see anyone.

  Within a short time Carl was back with the doctor, some kerosene, and two buckets of coal.

  The girls, the doctor said, had a severe case of pox, but should come along all right. It was Teddy who continued to grow worse, tossing with fever and delirium. When the doctor left, he told us he had done everything possible, and that we shouldn’t worry; but I could see by the tiredness in his face that he was worried himself.

  As soon as the front door closed, I clutched Carl’s coat front. “What did he tell you, while I was still upstairs? Tell me the truth! Teddy is very sick, like the boy that died, isn’t he?”

  Carl didn’t hedge. He took my hands. His steady eyes, looking into mine, renewed my faltering faith and courage. “The crisis will come tonight. We’ll know by morning.”

  “You didn’t tell me, yet,” I said, sagging against Carl’s shoulder, drawing strength from his arms. “How did you happen to come home in the middle of the week? Just when I needed you?”

  “That’s why I came, I guess,” he said. “I was in the college chapel after supper last night, and all of a sudden there came this intense feeling I should hurry home—something was wrong. I tried to phone, but the operator said a storm had the lines into Hebron down.”

  “I tried to call out. I thought it was just our own phone dead, the way it always is in bad weather.”

  “When I couldn’t get you,” Carl said, “I knew I must go home.” Usually he made the trip in an hour and a half, but it took him eight hours just to reach Woodstock, after fighting drifts and blinding snow, and getting stalled behind abandoned cars and a wrecked truck. He could go no farther; the road into Hebron was completely snowed over with deep drifts. “I barged in on the Methodist minister at Woodstock,” Carl finished, “and stayed there the rest of the night. This afternoon when the snowplow came through, I was the first car following it.”

  Teddy was restless and kept crying for me, in a weak, hoarse whisper. I wrapped him in a blanket and took him downstairs to the rocking chair. I rocked him most of the night, singing softly his favorite songs and hymns, and he finally fell into a troubled sleep. Gray morning was creeping through the windows when he stirred awake. His fever had broken, and I tucked him back in bed.

  Donny joined us in holding hands at the breakfast table that morning. Carl and I had tears in our eyes as we sang the doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow . . .”

  CHAPTER 6

  Taro

  “MAMA,” Donny asked, “do you think it’s fair?”

  “What?”

  “All those four little kids,” he said. “All the same size of each other and having so much fun. And nobody my size.”

  I kissed him. “We did try to find a bigger brother, you know.”

  “You could try again, couldn’t you?” he pleaded.

  It didn’t seem like an impossible request. I was willing to go as high as six children, and even Carl wouldn’t mind too much, once he got used to the idea. So I tried again.

  Several weeks later, when Carl came back from school, I broached the subject. “Donny’s still jealous of the fun that Teddy, Laura, Susie, and Rita have together.”

  Carl kept taking books out of his brief case. “Then why doesn’t he join in the fun?”

  “He gets tired of their baby games. He’s so consistent in his wish for a boy his size, I think we ought to get one.”

  Carl slammed down a book. “Well I don’t. So don’t start writing any more letters.”

  “I already did.”

  Carl dropped into a chair and held his head in his hands. “I tell her,” he said, talking to himself, “I tell her and tell her, and she thinks I’m just talking for the exercise.”

  “Look, honey,” I said, “I got a letter already this morning.” I pulled it from my pocket and smoothed it open. “This orphanage isn’t too far away. We could drive there and back, Sunday afternoon. She didn’t say she had a boy, but she didn’t say she didn’t, either. She’d like to talk to us.”

  The next Sunday afternoon, one of the ladies in our congregation volunteered to baby-sit while Carl and I drove to the orphanage. When we arrived, the director showed us through the dormitories, dining hall, and grounds, then took us to her office.

  “I was most interested in your willingness to take a child of any race,” she said. “This is what I am wondering—while you are waiting to find a child for adoption, would you be interested in boarding a foster child?”

  “I doubt it,” Carl began. “You see we already—”

  “At least we could think it over,” I said quickly. The eager hope I had brought with me collapsed like a punctured balloon. A foster child, boarded for pay, is no substitute when you are wanting to adopt a child of your own, a child who takes the family name and all the legal rights of kinship.

  “A foster child would be easier for you financially,” the director said persuasively. “You wouldn’t have to carry the full load of the child’s expenses, as you must do when you adopt. If you took a foster child for temporary care, you would receive forty dollars a month, to cover his board and room.”

  “We’d really prefer to adopt,” I said. “We could make out, financially. And a foster child would be so hard to give up—”

  “But we don’t have a single child, for adoption,” she said. “Yet we do have a five-year-old boy who needs a temporary foster home. Our dormitories are full. You see, he is Japanese-Filipino, and most homes wouldn’t accept such a child to board.”

  The orphanage director looked at me so expectantly, I couldn’t let her down. So that was how Taro came to spend a year with us.

  While Carl and I might have been equally dubious about the wisdom of bringing home a foster child, Donny was not. He whooped with delight when we brought home the chunky little boy with the round, Oriental face.

  “Oh boy, oh boy” he crowed, jumping about the room like a cricket. “You’re just the right size of me!”

  Taro took a while to get adjusted to us. We weren’t surprised, for tragedy had haunted his family ever since Pearl Harbor. Before the war, his Japanese father had been a truck farmer in California. He and his Filipino wife owned their own home and had three sons and a daughter; their oldest son was starting his first year of college, studying to be a doctor. When the war hit, they found themselves the objects of suspicion by jittery neighbors. Then, before there was time to adequately settle their affairs, they were herded into “relocation centers” along with all the other Japanese-Americans of the West Coast.

  As if the ignominy of concentration-camp type of life were not enough for Taro’s America-loving father, steadily increasing trouble closed in. His ranch, leased to inept white farmers, who reaped the first crop and then neglected the land, was foreclosed; before the war was over he had lost both ranch and home. His oldest son volunteered for the 442nd Combat Team in the army and was killed in action, defending the freedom which his own family did not have. Even this did not end the chain of tragedy. Living in the drafty, cracker-box barracks which housed so many families without adequate privacy, the
middle son developed rheumatic fever; when flu swept through the camp, both the boy and his mother, in weakened condition, died.

  A year before the war ended, Taro’s father was given the routine clearance by the FBI, so he could go to Chicago and work in a defense plant. There were only two children left in the family: little Taro, and his seven-year-old sister.

  “Your daughter has a slight tonsil inflammation,” the camp doctors told Taro’s father, as the family was going through the red tape of being checked out of camp. “Nothing serious, but we advise a tonsillectomy before she leaves.”

  The father was reluctant, but he was persuaded that there would be no danger; she would be ready to leave the hospital the next day, and her susceptibility to colds would be reduced.

  After his daughter entered the hospital, Taro’s father never saw her again. Not alive, for the doctors reported regretfully that she had died on the operating table. It was undoubtedly one of those rare, unpredictable, and unavoidable accidents in an otherwise safe kind of operation; but these facts could have been of no comfort to the grief-laden father. He came to Chicago with Taro, the only surviving member of his family. Together they had lived in a small boarding-house room; the father had taken his son every morning to an all-day nursery, worked from eight to five in a defense plant, picked up his son at night and returned to their cheerless room.

  “Why won’t Taro play with me?” Donny asked, the second day. “He just sits in a corner and sucks his thumb, and never says anything.”

  I put my arms around Donny and tried to explain. “Taro has lost so much, more than we can really understand,” I said. “More than he can understand. We’ve just got to give him lots and lots of love and attention, so he can learn to be happy again.”

  In less than a month, Taro was a different boy, laughing, saucy, full of energy. He stopped sucking his thumb and brooding in corners, and entered into our family life like one of us, even calling Carl and me “Daddy” and “Mama.”

  Now that I had six children in the house, I was not as harassed and busy as I had been with five. Taro, nearly always working on some constructive project with sand, clay, blocks, or lumber and tools, was a good influence on Donny. Instead of being a ringleader in a perpetual round of mischief, Donny now found a companionable outlet for his superabundant energies by working along with Taro.

  Taro’s father continued his job in the Chicago defense plant. Every two weeks he took a bus to a neighboring town, where we met him with our car, bringing him home to spend Saturday night and Sunday with us. He was a small, stocky man, scarcely as tall as I; but his heart was as big as the whole outdoors.

  “It is so good of you to come get me,” he always said, in his gracious way, when we met his bus. “So good that you invite me to stay overnight, so I have a longer time with my boy.”

  How could this man, who had lost almost everything that was precious to him, have any capacity left for gratitude and thankfulness? But he did, with an abundance that made me feel humble. He was always bringing us little presents. Whenever he brought a new shirt, or bright-colored socks, or a new toy for Taro, he brought a twin gift for Donny.

  Taro had the same stocky build, typically Japanese round face, and “slanted” eyes as his father. But Taro’s oldest brother, who died an American hero, apparently looked more Filipino, like his mother.

  On one of his visits, Taro’s father was holding Teddy in his lap. “You remind me of my first-born son, when he was a small boy like you,” he said, and then his voice seemed to get stuck in his throat.

  “Tell me,” Teddy said.

  “He was brown, like you,” Taro’s father said, after a moment. “He had large, expressive brown eyes like you, too, only they turned up just a little at the corners. He—he looked very much like my dear wife.”

  Again he was unable to go on, until Teddy wiggled and asked, “Tell me a story, hmmm?”

  “I’ll tell you a story,” he said, after another moment, and Donny, who always loved a story, moved in closer, blue eyes wide. “I’ll tell you something my wife used to tell my first-born son, when he was a little brown boy like you. It is a Filipino legend, handed down from generation to generation among her people.”

  “What’s ginger-ration?” Donny asked.

  “Generation? Well, that’s from father to son, father to—” He stopped, wiped his eyes, polished his glasses, and put them back slowly. Then he smiled at Teddy and Donny.

  “Once upon a time, God created the sky and the earth. Then he put upon it all kinds of plants and animals to live.”

  “Snakes, too?” Teddy asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Poison snakes, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poison snakes!” Teddy shook his head. “I think God make a mistake.”

  “Perhaps, but more likely God has some good purpose in mind for everything he does, even if we don’t always understand his purposes. Now God looked about at the plants and animals, and he liked what he had created. But he felt that something was missing.

  “So he decided to create Man.

  “He took clay and modeled a being in his own image. He put it into his divine oven to bake, and went about his other business. When he came back and opened the oven, he found his creation had burned black. Now God could not let his handiwork be wasted, so he stood this creature on its feet, breathed the breath of Life into him, and sent him on his way. Thus was born the Negro race.

  “God took some more clay, modeled another being in his own image, and put it into his divine oven. This time he sat close by, to make sure it would not be burnt. After a few short minutes, he took it out. Alas! This man was underdone, and pasty white! Still, not wanting it to be wasted, God stood the creature up, breathed the breath of Life into him, and sent him on his way. Thus was born the white race.

  “God made up his mind that his third try would be perfect. He took more clay, molded it into his own image, and slipped it into the divine oven. This time he neither baked it for too long a time, nor too short. When he took it from the oven, it was a beautiful, warm-toned brown, and just exactly the way a man should be. With great pride he stood this final creation on its feet and breathed the breath of Life into him. And thus were born the Filipino people.”

  “I’ll never forget that story,” Donny said. “That was a real good story.”

  “When Teddy gets older, you’ll have to tell it to him again,” Taro’s father said. “He’s too young to remember it now.”

  “I will,” Donny said. “I will.”

  The next month we had company. My youngest sister, Jane, came a few days before Thanksgiving to spend a week, while her husband went to California to see about a new job. Jane brought along her two boys, who were close in age to Taro and Donny. The four boys hit it off immediately and had wild and woolly times racing through our house.

  When Carl came home Friday night, he stepped into a volley of that “Ack-ack-ack-ack” noise peculiar to boys.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Taro greeted him, pointing to Donny’s blond cousins hiding in the bushes. “We’re playing war, and Donny and me are the Americans, and those guys over there are the Japs!”

  It was not incongruous to the children, for to their unprejudiced eyes Taro looked as normal and American as the three blond boys. Only once, when Taro clowned at breakfast one morning, did the other boys ever put a race tag on him, and then only in jest. Taro had two fingers hooked into each corner of his mouth, stretching it wide in a grimace to show his teeth, as boys will do when making faces, and he had his eyes squinted almost shut. Donny’s cousins didn’t know that Taro was Japanese in ancestry, but they had seen the prevalent cartoons of the Japanese military in the newspapers, distorted sketches with huge, toothy grins. They both roared, thinking their jibe an original joke, funny because nothing could be farther from the truth.

  “Hey, stop making that funny face,” they shouted, doubled over with giggles. “It makes you look like a Jap!”

  Taro’s father had the
Thanksgiving week end off, so he was invited to share Thanksgiving dinner with us. We expected him to arrive the evening before, and telephone us when his bus arrived in the next town.

  That evening, my sister Jane was baking some beautiful mince and pumpkin pies, and I was sorting cranberries. Carl, home that week to do church work, came into the kitchen from outside. He sniffed with anticipation and rubbed his cold hands.

  “Smells good in here.”

  “Did you finish your calling?” I asked.

  “Most of it,” Carl said. “Has Taro’s father phoned yet?”

  “No.” I glanced at the clock. “Seems like he should have, by now.”

  Carl snitched a bite of Jane’s mincemeat. “Ummm, good. I have to run down the block and see the organist yet tonight. The call will probaby come while I’m gone. Just tell him to wait at that drugstore, and I’ll be right over.”

  Jane put the last pies into the oven, and I finished the cranberries and put them on to cook. Carl came back.

  “Did he phone?” he asked. “I can run over there for him now.”

  I stirred the cranberry sauce. “He hasn’t called yet.” The spoon slid slowly from my fingers and I looked at Carl, worried. “You don’t think anything happened? He always calls before this.”

  “I’ll go ahead and settle the four boys in bed,” Carl said. “I’ll tell Taro he can see his father in the morning.”

  “All right. Jane and I are going to make the stuffing. Teddy and the little girls are asleep already, so tell the big boys to be quiet upstairs.”

  “I’ll read them a story when they’re in their pajamas,” Carl said. “Call me down as soon as the telephone rings.”

  The telephone didn’t ring.

  Jane and I finished the bread stuffing, put the pies and cranberry sauce out on the back porch to cool, and went into the living room to listen to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony on records. Our Unfinished Symphony was really unfinished now, because Donny had sat on the last record in the album.