Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other

by Scott Simon

  Our daughters can become brain surgeons, coal miners, desperados, paratroopers, or prima ballerinas. But each time I look at them some eye in my soul will see them ages six and three, finger painting and giggling on our kitchen floor. No doubt parents’ view of their children is often sentimental and deficient. But it’s distinctly ours. We will remember their nightmares and always see their innocence. We become their advocates for life. The way we see our children as all ages at once is part of how having children rewires our souls. It is the special vision that makes us parents.

  The stories I share from other families aren’t meant to prove anything in particular. Lives cannot be stamped like supermarket products, and adoptions cannot be graded. What we take to be life’s lessons are often obscure and inconsistent, and they can change over time. But every adoption is, more or less, a success because every child who is adopted embodies a fresh new chance for the world.

  Frank, Carol, Alex, and Scarlet

  FOR FRANK and Carol Deford, adoption was the only chance they had to expand their family. Their daughter, Alex, had died in January of 1980, after an eight-year battle from birth with cystic fibrosis. Alex was a luminous child, whose sweetness and ferocity as she faced death inspired those around her, and those who read about her in Frank’s powerful 1983 memoir, Alex: The Life of a Child. Trying to have another biological child was out of the question for Carol and Frank. Though their oldest child, son Chris, was healthy, cystic fibrosis is hereditary. The risk that a third child would be born with it was too great.

  Frank remembers that Carol suggested adoption early in the summer that followed Alex’s death. He also recalls that he said yes with no joy in his heart, more to placate the wife that he cherished than from any wish to begin another intense and draining process when they had just lived through (“barely lived through” might be a better phrase) their most piercing loss.

  “I thought it wouldn’t work out anyway,” he says today. “So I thought, ‘Might as well humor her.’”

  Frank was already in his mid-forties. While accomplished and prominent, he was certain that their ages would put them far down on any eligibility list. He asked his brother, Mac, for advice. Mac ran the Merrill Lynch office in Manila and knew a renowned local figure there named Marietta Santos. She told Mac that, in fact, she had learned of a fifteen-year-old who was about to give birth. But that baby had already been promised to a diplomat from a Muslim country. The baby was born on September 6, 1981, and when Marietta called the diplomat’s wife to tell him that they had become parents, she asked, “What is it?”

  “What is it?” Frank says she repeated.

  “What is it—boy or girl?” And when she answered, “A beautiful baby girl,” the ambassador’s wife said, “Thanks, but we don’t want it.” Which is why to this day, Frank likes to tell people that if Scarlet had been a boy, he would be a Muslim living in Kuala Lumpur.

  Marietta Santos phoned Mac Deford. “The Defords lost a girl, right?” she asked him. “Well, I have a baby for them.” Scarlet was in Mac Deford’s house in Manila within thirty-six hours of her birth.

  And then four months of bureaucracy ensued …

  IT WAS WHAT PROVED to be the last years of the Marcos regime, in the last months of martial law. There was no formal, legal, mandated program in the Philippines to assist and certify the adoption of Philippine children by foreign families, so bureaucrats sensed opportunity for corruption in all its beguiling forms. Carol, Frank, and Chris flew over bearing gratitude, finally expressing their appreciation to a court stenographer with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. Baby Scarlet came back to Connecticut with Carol and Frank on a cracking cold January 22, 1981.

  “Adoption is a miracle,” says Frank. “I look back, and what are the odds? A million to one? My age. Our loss. A baby promised to someone else. In a country that didn’t have overseas adoptions. And our daughter comes home—it must have been ten degrees below zero—one year to the day that we had buried Alex.” He looks at his daughter across the room and smiles. She is in her late twenties, an artist, and has just been married. Scarlet shrugs teasingly and smiles back. “I mean,” says Frank, “what are the odds?”

  SCARLET DEFORD grew up in Connecticut as the only Filipina kid that she knew, or that other families knew (though her friend Meredith was adopted from Korea. America—where any little girl from any family can grow up with a name that could come from a tennis trophy at the Newport Yacht Club). Scarlet always knew that she was adopted; her visibly different appearance permitted no guesswork on that, even if Carol and Frank had been so inclined. (“But she has dimples like mine,” Frank points out. “I assume they were there before we got her.”)

  Nowadays there would be workshops, encounter groups, and language and culture classes. But in the early 1980s, there was nothing to distract Scarlet from fitting in to her family’s life with a minimum of analysis and evaluation. Carol and Frank, who are well-read people, read no books about being parents, or how to love, protect, and instruct their children. They didn’t seek out support groups or associations. They didn’t have the time, much less interest.

  Frank traveled a lot, to cover Super Bowls and the World Series, give speeches, and profile Muhammad Ali (Frank Deford is, in my judgment, and not mine alone, the greatest sportswriter in America, and one of the best prose stylists in any form). But he also liked to take his family along. They went to Africa to see animals, and to Amsterdam to see Van Goghs. Scarlet went to many Mets games with her father and met all her favorite, cutest players (e.g. Ron Darling, now a team announcer). She worked at two Wimbledon tournaments with her father and met Pete Sampras and Tim Henman. She joined Frank at the 25th anniversary party for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, and when a fan gave Elle Macpherson a bouquet of long-stemmed yellow roses, she handed them off to Scarlet. She says that she never dreamed of, idealized, or fantasized about the birth mother and father that she had never met.

  (Indeed, as I read over the previous paragraph, I find myself fantasizing about being Carol and Frank Deford’s child.)

  Once, and perhaps, just once, Scarlet says she remembers a time when she thought that her adoption or race was being mocked. During the summer between seventh and eighth grades, she went to a ranch camp in Wyoming, where parents paid dearly for their Darien or Winnetka daughters with pink rooms and multifarious Barbies to ride horses, herd cows, and muck stables. A girl walked into their cabin, met Scarlet, and said, “What are you?”

  “That set me back,” she says now. “I hadn’t heard anything like that before.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I forget,” says Scarlet. “Nothing. Nothing special. It was the only time it happened. I never thought that I was different from anyone else.”

  “Do you know what happened to the kid who said that?”

  Scarlet smiles.

  “Oh. We wound up being friends. She was just talking.”

  “YOU WERE JUST so damn healthy,” says Frank. “That was the thing. After all we’d been through. We were just so happy that you were healthy.”

  Alex’s death from cystic fibrosis had seared and exhausted Carol and Frank. To hold your child as life slips away, and know that neither your love nor the latest genius of modern medical science can stop her from leaving … The pain is too terrible to contemplate or recollect.

  “We were just so amazed—just felt so blessed—to see you so damn healthy,” Frank keeps saying. They saw the little girl—one who nowadays might be classified and defined by experts as the daughter in a transracial adoption—as a little girl they were unabashedly delighted to see growing up in good health. They were relieved to have a daughter who could never be troubled by their genetic makeup.

  Alex: The Life of a Child was published when Scarlet was two and a half. She grew up as a semipublic figure, not only Frank and Carol Deford’s daughter but also the little girl who came into their family after the loss of a little girl whose life had inspired so many. The very first page of the bests
eller says, “For Scarlet. So you will know Alex.”

  “I have to ask …” I begin.

  “No,” she says firmly. “I never felt that I was filling Alex’s shoes. I always just felt very lucky to be here.”

  “Show him your tattoo,” Frank suggests with a smile. Most fathers would not be so eager for their daughters to display tattoos. Scarlet lifts her sleeve to reveal a set of initials inscribed in lowercase script across her wrist: f∼c∼a∼c∼s.

  Frank, Carol, Alex, Christian, and Scarlet.

  “I always felt that Alex looked over me,” she says. “As a child I remember having the feeling as if someone was in the room at night or following me down the hallways. I don’t know if it was just a typical kid being scared of the dark and being alone. But when I look back now, I can believe it was Alex, checking out the new kid and watching over me.”

  THE DEFORDS went to the Philippines when Scarlet was fourteen, bringing along her friend Lindsay (another name that sounds like it’s from a debutante’s ball). As they came off the airplane, Scarlet turned to her parents and announced, “I’m in the majority now!”

  When they went around town, strangers assumed that Lindsay was the daughter, and Scarlet her friend and traveling companion. But Scarlet made no effort to locate her birth mother or the suspected father, even though the redoubtable Marietta Santos would surely know something.

  “If she was fifteen when I was born, she’d be married and have her own family then. I didn’t want to disturb her,” Scarlet says. “Besides, I never felt the need to look. If she’s had other children, it would be interesting to see if I had other brothers and sisters …” Interesting, her voice suggests, but not urgent.

  “When we were in the Philippines, you were what—five foot five and a half?” asked Frank.

  “Tall as college guys,” she confirms.

  “And yet, when you were a little baby, you were the smallest. I guess that’s environment,” says Frank. He remembers that on their first night of their visit back, Marietta Santos organized a dinner to celebrate Scarlet’s homecoming. “Jet lag, lost luggage, everything had happened,” he said. “The mayor of Makati”—Manila’s financial district, so inevitably described as the Manhattan of Manila—“cabinet ministers, everyone. We were exhausted. We were wrung out. They brought out this huge fish. They said she should eat the head.” Frank shakes his own, and points at Scarlet, who was the guest of honor. “I have no idea how she did it.”

  As a young adult, Scarlet has lived in Jersey City, and met many Filipinos who are amused to speak to her in Tagalog, only to hear her reply, “Uh, oh, sorry. I just speak English.”

  “I’d like to go back to the Philippines for another visit someday,” she says.

  “Do you think,” I say slowly, “that you might discover … something of yourself there?”

  “I just think there’s more I could learn,” she says simply. “Everywhere.”

  “I guess we just weren’t very good at all that,” says Frank without conviction. He is talking to Scarlet, and turns away from me. “We just thought of you as this wonderful little kid who was whole. We never made a big deal out of being adopted. You were just a joy. And Chris!” Carol and Frank’s first child, ten years older than Scarlet. “He’d gone through this absolutely awful experience of losing his only sister. Then, we dump this new sister on him. We were worried about him, some kind of breaking point. But he was great. Just great.”

  “More overprotective than you,” Scarlet laughs.

  “I can’t ever remember a moment when you were growing up that I caught you crying,” says Frank. “Sometimes, I thought you were so normal, you must be holding it back.” Now he laughs. “I dunno—maybe you still are.”

  SCARLET FINALLY comes up with something.

  “I had a conversation with a friend once,” Scarlet volunteers. “I said to him that I wonder why I’ve always had one close girlfriend. Lindsay, or Meredith. But I never had a group I hung out with. You know, no Sex and the City pack of friends to go to lunch or dinner with and shop and talk. And my friend said, ‘I know several people who are adopted, and it’s the same story with them. Maybe you don’t trust a lot of women because your mother gave you up.’”

  Frank leans forward slightly, the tender father briefly supplanted by a curious journalist.

  “If that’s the case,” he asks, “I wonder why you should be so friendly with the one girl? I mean, if the idea is that you don’t trust women, because of what happened, if you were scared of something like that happening again, why would you always have the one close girlfriend? Wouldn’t that be harder?”

  We all look at each other and shrug—then laugh.

  WHAT I HOPE I might learn from the Defords is that while adoption is a miracle, miracles finally take their places in our lives alongside more mundane things on our shelves and blend together. Adoption is a fact of life, not a trauma to overcome.

  Carol and Frank had lost a daughter to an illness that had lurked in their genes. They had a son who had to watch his little sister die. Frank asks, “Do you know how many marriages break up after a child has died? The mother and father can’t depend on each other to pick each other up, because they’re both sad about the same thing. They blame themselves, and then they don’t know whom to blame. And you, this little thing, so healthy,” he says, gesturing across the room to Scarlet. “I’m not saying that we would have broken up. I’m not saying, ‘She saved us.’ But Scarlet made us whole.”

  SCARLET TELLS ME later that her feelings about her family are so strong that she must hold herself back when she speaks of them. “Sometimes I am just overwhelmed with the feelings that I have in being so lucky and the loving people I have in my life,” she says.

  She is twenty-nine, a jewelry designer in New York, and recently married. (Marietta Santos left tropical Manila to fly to Connecticut in January, occupying the honored position of a grandmother in the wedding party). When her brother, Chris, got married just a few weeks later, Scarlet didn’t ponder the toast she would give in advance, figuring she would walk around in some kind of puddle as thoughts and feelings overflowed. She trusted that something would come to her when she needed to speak. When the moment came, Scarlet cried so hard that she could barely form words. Friends and family were astonished to see the happy, composed girl that they knew overcome with emotion. A Deford unable to speak! As her father, Frank, had been at her wedding.

  I take a chance on something with Scarlet: “Do you and your husband have plans for children?” She pauses.

  “We’d love to have one of our own,” she says. “And adopt one.”

  Frank sits back, a little winded. “You never told me that before,” he says, then adds more softly, “That’s nice.”

  “Just seeing how my own life has been changed,” Scarlet says, turning to me. “To be able to offer that to someone else?” I don’t think she means the safaris, Pete Sampras, and Elle Macpherson’s roses.

  Carol Deford, a trim, striking blond woman, returns home with shopping bags in her arms. There are kisses and kidding all around, crinkling bags, a shooshing faucet, and the bustling sounds of a family that has had dinner nine thousand times before beginning to prepare the nine thousand and first. They begin to gossip and laugh.

  “I’m sorry that we’re not more interesting,” says Frank, as he slips a long arm around my shoulder at the door. But he’s smiling gently, of course, at the preposterousness of what he’s said. All the way to the elevator, I hear laughter from their door. I take the smile that they give me out into the street and all the way home to our daughters.

  I OFTEN SPEAK with young people who say, “I want to get married, then adopt a whole bunch of kids who need love.” I think that’s lovely, and I encourage them. But I wonder how many of them follow through (my impression is—and the numbers would suggest—not many). Adoption is rewarding. But the process, as we have already detailed in some particulars, can be expensive, exhausting, and hard to sustain on a dream, much less a
whim.

  Children without homes don’t need just people who are willing to love them. They need parents. Parents aren’t simply good-hearted people who swoop in with hugs, candy, and promises. They are people who astonish even themselves with how gladly and rapidly they put their children at the center of their lives. Parents don’t altogether stop trying to be cool, staying up late, or telling naughty jokes. But with their first cries, children call us to be less selfish and more humble (even humiliated). They give us a living stake in the world beyond our own short lives. Children reset our emotional and even biological clocks as we realize that they will, if we are blessed, live two, three, or more minutes for every one that we have left: we shouldn’t squander a second.

  At the same time, parents know that we would instantly throw all our remaining seconds in front of a speeding train if it would save our child.

  I was sixteen when my father died. He was forty-eight, and drank himself into depression, then the grave. My grandmother was seventy-six and, because of crankiness and dottiness, had come to be regarded by many as a ridiculous figure. But when she stood over the casket of her middle-aged son and cried out, “Oh, God, take me! Take me instead!” it was the first time I’d really seen into the love of a parent, beating in a fragile, noble, naked heart.

  Parents are the kind of people who are enthralled and fascinated, even as they are often exhausted and appalled, by the challenges and vexations of children. There is no pretending that picking snot out of a child’s nose is as fun or rewarding as making Halloween costumes. Mothers and fathers will get angry and exasperated, will despair over a thousand irritations and affronts. But when their child throws himself or herself on the floor, banging fists and spitting epithets, something inside a true parent smiles and says, “We can figure this out.”