Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other

by Scott Simon

  My wife and I often feel that our lives did not truly begin until we met our children (actually, I say that my life didn’t begin until I met Caroline; friends who have known me all my life agree). But it’s only wise for us to remember that our daughters’ lives did not begin with us. Come to think of it, remembering that someone else’s life did not begin the moment we met them is something good for most of us to recall in any relationship, whether with friends, spouses, or foreign countries.

  Cold, Mama, Cold

  WHEN ELISE was about two, Caroline and I put her into bed between us on a winter’s night in Chicago. At some point, she stirred and shivered. The sheet and blankets had slipped off her as she squirmed, and she called out to Caroline—or perhaps to the world?—“Cowd, Mama, cowd!”

  Caroline hiked the blankets back up around her chin. We both hugged her. Our baby, huddled and shivering, calling out for her mother’s touch. Trusting that all she had to do was call, and her mother would be there.

  Elise had no memory of that moment the next day. But since then, she’s heard the story plenty. It’s become a comedy routine between us. When we cross a windy Michigan Avenue or Broadway corner, she shouts, “Cowd, Baba, cowd!” to me, even though she now pronounces her l’s as precisely as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. “Cowd, Baba, cowd!”

  But one night a few years later as Caroline tucked her into bed, Elise asked about how her mother had left her in front of the factory in China. She was wrapped in a blanket, Caroline told her. All clean, the tiny little blanket pulled up to her chin.

  “Was I cold?” Elise asked.

  Caroline took a breath.

  “No, darling. Your mother loved you. She watched to make certain that you were found and were all right. She made sure you had clothing and a blanket. You were not cold.”

  A while later, all of the circumstances we usually try to avoid conspired. We were in a restaurant with some family members, and service was slow. Dinner dragged on. Children scampered. Crayons wore down. It edged past nine. Our girls erupted. Caroline took them outside, with apologies. I scooped up Elise’s shoes, Caroline’s purse, and two of Lina’s stuffed animals and joined them on the sidewalk. People stared and shook their heads. I glimpsed a few smiles of the kind that usually say “Boy, do I remember” (or “Glad it’s not me”). I hailed a cab. It was one of those moments when you wonder, “Will anyone ask, ‘What are those two white people doing packing two screaming young Asian girls into a taxicab?’” But this is America. The driver (an Iranian man) said, “Hey, my son cries like that.”

  Elise held on tight. She began to yawn as she sobbed into Caroline’s shoulder.

  “I didn’t get enough to eat,” Elise said.

  “You left plenty of food on your plate back there,” Caroline pointed out. “If you were hungry, you should have eaten it.”

  “No. In her stomach,” said Elise, “I was always hungry. Why weren’t you there?”

  My darlings, we came as soon as we could.

  Like Steve Levitt, I do not think it is possible that our daughters possess any actual memories of their first months. But as we tell them the little that we know of their stories, their imaginations improvise the missing parts that we cannot know. As they get older and smarter, they will realize how little we really know, and anxieties may take their place; they often do.

  (Elise told us the next day that when she was in her birth mother’s stomach, she was fed only broccoli—any child’s nightmare.)

  So while I don’t accept the idea that children who are adopted suffer a primal wound, I believe that they may have to deal with some kind of fundamental anxiety about how they came to their place in the world. And as my wife recounted for me the words of comfort that she cooed (in French) into our daughter’s sleepy, weepy face, I found myself wondering how many of us would have been reassured to hear such a speech on some of our worst days of growing up:

  “When you’re young, you want to be like everyone else,” she told Elise. “I know. People used to make fun of my hair, my clothes, my accent. But when you’re older, you’ll see that it’s good to be different. You don’t want to be like everybody else. The things that make you different make you more interesting. We went all the way around the world to get you. When you’re older—just a little older—you’ll realize that everything you think is a problem now is actually something good. They’ll be your strong points. And you will be strong.”

  “I Was Never in Her Shoes”

  EVERY ADOPTION STORY has both its own place and time. For our daughters, it begins with being born in China under laws that oppress millions. But our girls also belong to a distinct group of 55,000 or so babies from China who have been adopted by families in the West. Studies, books, and movies will purport to follow their progress as a group, what Anchee Min has called “the little blossoms from China.”

  Steve Sagri was part of a less publicized program. Not so long ago, some Western nations also shipped away children who had been cast aside.

  Steve was born in the port city of Ancona, Italy, in 1952. His mother was the kind of woman who is often enviously described as a free spirit—a poet, writer, operagoer, a passionate woman who did not always contemplate or accept responsibility for passion’s consequences. Steve has discovered that she had some Jewish lineage, which, with complicit friends, she took care to obscure in Fascist Italy, changing her name from Segré to Sagri. He says that it was known around town that his mother wrote some Fascist propaganda for people in power and had other opportunistic liaisons with local army commanders and officials.

  “I don’t criticize,” Steve declares. “She had to survive. I was never in her shoes.”

  Steve does not know his father. “I just have my suspicions,” he says with a small, spiritless laugh. His mother placed him in the local orphanage shortly after his birth. She had a small apartment and it was hard to provide for children in the deprivation, rubble, and disorder of postwar Italy.

  “A Catholic orphanage,” Steve stresses, although there was no other kind in Ancona at the time. “That way, if anything happened again, we’d be protected.” It was one thing that a mother as harmed by history as Steve’s could do for her son: put him someplace that Jewish children might be safe should Fascists return.

  “At least that’s what I like to think,” he adds.

  Steve spent most of his first years in two different orphanages, seeing his mother only on weekends or an occasional weekday. She had another son, with another father, and Steve acquired a brother, Alphonse, who got sent to the same orphanage. Their mother died when Steve was nine and his brother just over a year old, apparently of a heart condition. Steve says he was not surprised. He had never seen her free spirit very happy.

  Catholic Charities had a program then that permitted American families to take in children from Italian orphanages. Two years later, in August 1963, Steve and his brother landed in New York. He remembers their first meal, eaten in a dank, sweltering welfare hotel: baloney (in no way to be confused with Bologna) sandwiches on Wonder Bread. Steve looked around at slimy walls crawling with insects, heard wailing sirens in the night, and looked down at a meager meal between two spongy tissue slices.

  “This is America?” he says he asked. “Where are the streets paved with gold?”

  Steve and his brother were adopted by an Italian American family that lived in Hillside, Illinois. They had a son who was younger than Steve and older than Al. “Things just didn’t work out,” Steve says, with more graciousness than seems necessary. The couple conspicuously favored the son who had been born to them. When Al wet his bed, he was beaten for it. To this day, Steve says that he cannot fathom why the couple ever thought that they wanted to bring two more children into their home. They seemed only cold and suspicious toward the boys. Steve wonders today if the family was trying only to impress their priest or qualify for some kind of stipend.

  One day, the brothers were taken for a car ride and saw a skyline looming. “Are we go
ing to Chicago?” Steve asked. They were—to the Angel Guardian Orphanage on the north side.

  “They sat my brother on the counter,” Steve recalls. “Just left us there, like some kind of delivery parcel.”

  Steve and his brother stayed at Angel Guardian for about a year and a half, until Steve made it through the eighth grade. Then they were moved to Hoosier Boys Town, a community for orphans and youngsters from troubled families that had been founded by the venerable Father Michael Campagna. Boys Town was located on lovely, rolling grounds in an Indiana suburb of Chicago. It was run by compassionate Chicago priests and exacting Italian nuns, and it received generous support from prominent Chicago mobsters who were keen to be regarded by their church, if not by the Illinois Crime Commission, as civic benefactors.

  “Those holiday parties!” Steve still remembers. “The food, the desserts, the gifts …”

  A family who wanted a younger child eventually adopted Al. Steve became the only boy in Boys Town who didn’t have at least one older relative—an uncle, a distant cousin—who came to visit. An older couple named Stoney and Dolly Monestere came to Boys Town and asked Father Michael if they could take a boy home for the Christmas holidays. Steve went home with them and eventually spent weekends and other holidays in their home. Modern readers may be tempted to reproach the couple for not taking Steve into their family full time. But they were older, not set up for children, and besides, in the 1960s, Hoosier Boys Town was considered almost a prep school among orphanages. Short of being adopted by a Kennedy, Boys Town was considered just about the most advantageous background you could give a child who had lost his parents.

  Steve says that in later years he heard that Stoney Monestere told his friends that he had come to consider Steve a son to him. But he never said that to Steve. Steve, meanwhile, says, “I never had a father, so I made one up.” He began to fantasize that his father must have been a valiant Royal Air Force pilot who had helped liberate Italy in 1944 (the math doesn’t quite work out for a son born eight years later, but of course, it’s a fantasy). He told himself that one of Britain’s noblest few didn’t know that he’d fathered a son with the wild, free-spirited woman with whom he had spent a weekend to dispel the loneliness and grimness of war. Steve told himself that if only he knew, he would surely come soaring back.

  But he had no interest in reaching the man that he had good reason to believe was his father. Steve was certain that in reality he would only be rejected—again.

  TODAY STEVE LIVES in suburban Cleveland and is one of the most successful vendors and scholars of fine timepieces in the United States. He also flies, paints, dives, takes award-winning photographs (including a joyful, poignant portrait of small boys in an Italian orphanage), and studies martial arts. Steve Sagri seems to do nothing casually. When he takes a photograph, it’s to win first place. When he dives, it’s to find treasure. He is among the busiest, most effective people I know. He says that the circumstances of how he was born and how he grew up have everything to do with becoming the accomplished and interesting man that he is today—and that’s the problem.

  “I haven’t had an exactly successful family life,” he volunteers. He was close to his brother, Al, but has had three marriages, producing two children.

  “But even with my daughters, even when they were adorable little kids, I never felt real comfortable,” he says. “I never knew how to behave around them. I didn’t know how to be a parent. How would I? I’d never seen it done. I still feel awkward when I talk to them. And it really hurts because I know it’s my fault. It comes from me, and something I’ve never been able to come to terms with. Maybe I should have gone into therapy thirty years ago, except people didn’t do that then. I see other people and know that I’ve missed out on a hell of a lot.” This from a man who goes from oceans to skies.

  “We have a forty-five-hundred-square-foot house,” Steve notes, “and I can’t stay at home for more than five minutes. I always have to keep moving. I can’t settle into anything. If we go antiquing, I can’t just look, I have to take pictures. I study martial arts even though, at this point, how much more can I learn? It’s the constant fear, I guess. That something will happen. That I always have to be ready. That I always might have to move.

  “Maybe my real fear is of getting hurt,” he muses. “Maybe that’s why I’ve built so many ten-foot walls around me. Maybe it’s because I was rejected as a kid that I don’t want to give anyone the chance to reject me now. So I just keep moving. If you always expect rejection, you’ll never be disappointed, right? Or so I tell myself. Or so I think.

  “No doubt about it. I blame myself. And I blame my mother for a lot. She gave me up. She didn’t care. Then she took the easy way out by dying, so she’d never have to see me or my brother again.”

  “Well, you can’t really tell …” I begin to gently suggest to Steve, but he preempts me.

  “I may not like her, but I don’t criticize,” he repeats. “I wasn’t in her shoes.”

  THIS IS WHERE a friend needs to step in. I will, because I know Steve as a generous and thoughtful friend, and I don’t believe that that quality comes from nothing. He says he may be more comfortable with friends because he can pull back with them and not hurt or disappoint as he would with a spouse or child. “I get close, I get fearful,” he says. “That’s the story of my life.”

  Steve says that he wouldn’t mind getting a call or a note some day from a Segré who claimed to be related. “But I’d have to wonder,” he says. “What do they want from me? Is that the only reason they called? I guess I’m not set up for emotional joy.”

  I think that at this point in his life, Steve has earned some of the same generosity of spirit he would extend in judgment of a friend. We know one of Steve’s daughters. She’s a fine young woman, just beginning a career in law. She has known Steve’s warmth and love, even if he wishes he had been better at it. Those of us who know his capacity for kindness can wish that Steve Sagri and his brother, born to a restless, charming woman who spurned the chance to be a mother to her children, had found the love of an adoptive family.

  Love Above and Beyond

  STEPHEN SEGALLER figures that he’s always had the ability to discover more about his birth parents, but hasn’t seized an opportunity. Stephen was born in postwar England and adopted on what he calls a “prehistoric private basis.” His mother and father, Joyce and Denis, felt it would be a good idea for their ten-year-old son to have a brother. So a family friend arranged for them to meet a young woman who was about to have a baby.

  The young woman had an Irish name. About ten years ago, Stephen learned that his birth mother was an Irish nurse who had immigrated to Great Britain. He has inferred that his birth father was probably a doctor, with the Irish nurse’s pregnancy handled as a hushed-up embarrassment in a village hospital. That story seems more plausible than Steve Sagri’s valiant RAF fighter pilot father fantasy, but Stephen has so far chosen not to undertake any of the kind of investigation that might resolve all doubt. His mother, Joyce, lives in a nursing home now, and he sweeps aside all the bromidic notions that he worries his mother would feel rejected or betrayed by any discoveries.

  “It would just seem like second-guessing,” says Stephen, “of one of the great things you can do for a human being, which is to adopt them and love them.”

  Stephen says that his mother told him his birth mother made just one request: that the child to whom she was about to give birth be raised as a Catholic.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he says his mother told her. “We’re atheists. We won’t raise him with any religion at all.”

  Stephen was never close to the brother for whom he was supposed to be some kind of balancing presence. They were ten and a half years apart in age—almost the same signature difference as Elvis Presley and the Beatles—and didn’t play football in the park, bicycle, listen to the Troggs, or dance the frug together. “More of an affectionate uncle,” Stephen explains. They’re closer now for what they’ve sha
red as adults.

  Stephen has learned that his birth mother already had a little girl, which would have complicated her plight even more and made her decision to find a family—quickly—for the baby that she was about to have even clearer.

  “To have a half or full sibling somewhere—that is a kind of resonant or a provocative thought,” says Stephen. But so far, only a thought.

  “What I know is enough to know for the moment,” he says. “And I suppose the prospect of some awkward surprise is always in the back of my mind. What if I meet some people to whom I am related, and I discover that we have nothing truly important in common and I just don’t want to be part of their lives?”

  Stephen’s father was an accomplished linguist, and Stephen evinced a gift for languages—Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian—at an early age. His school gave him a battery of tests. He apparently scored well. The headmaster said, “I’d like to know more about that boy’s father,” figuring any discoveries could contribute a case study to the ongoing argument about how to gauge the relative importance of nature and nurture in personality and aptitudes. Could Stephen’s talents all be attributed to the father who had adopted him? Or was there also a trace to be discovered in the history of his birth father? The more we discover about DNA, the more impressive its influence.

  “But the more we learn about genetics,” Stephen points out, “the more it seems to be a lottery anyway.” He has produced, among many other television programs in the United States and Great Britain, the series A Question of Genes: Inherited Risks. There is no genetic guarantee that Stephen Hawking’s children can balance a checkbook any better than descendants of the engineers who forgot to make the metric conversions for the $125 million Mars orbiter that they mistakenly sent sailing past the planet in 1999.