Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other

by Scott Simon

  “I have to answer NA—not applicable—on a lot of medical stuff,” says Stephen Segaller. “I have no information on any hereditary illnesses. I don’t know anything about any history of cancer or diabetes, and I’m not sure my life would be more intelligible or richer if I did know.” (Whereas our daughters have been relieved—no, giddy and delighted—to learn that because we have no genetic link, they cannot inherit diabetes from me.)

  Stephen grew up devoutly unchurched. When he came home from school and said something favorable about so much as the music of any religious observance that the school had required him to attend, his parents would grumble, “Rubbish, absolute rubbish.”

  When Stephen was thirteen, some sporting exploit got him written up—“for the first and last time, I assure you”—in the local Surrey Advertiser. His parents got a phone call. A woman introduced herself as the young athlete’s cousin. Stephen said she came out for “a very genteel tea,” during which she reported to Stephen’s father that they belonged to an extended Jewish family. In a way, it seemed more startling—and certainly more pertinent and revealing—for Stephen to hear this than anything that he might learn about his birth parents.

  Joyce and Denis’s marriage fell apart. Ironically, his mother then spent some of her happiest years teaching physical education in a Catholic school in which the nuns cherished her and she revered the nuns, their devotion to organized spiritual rubbish notwithstanding. Stephen’s father went to work for UNESCO, where the atheist who had never suspected that he was in any trace Jewish became a Buddhist. Stephen’s mother pronounced that as perfect, for reasons that an ex-wife is entitled to observe and that Stephen dismisses with bemusement.

  He says that he knew strongly, from the age of fourteen or fifteen, that he wanted to be a parent, not just a father. He loved babies. He loved being around children. Stephen got married, and when he and his wife, Merrill, had a son and a daughter, he says that she joshed that he wanted to breastfeed them. He even looked forward to three A.M. feedings as a chance to hold his children close and hear their gurgles against his ear.

  STEPHEN SEGALLER is head of national production for a great metropolitan television station (WNET, New York), and he is known as (to rely on a single word) a gentleman. He shows up on time. He keeps his word. He returns calls and treats people with respect—all traits so rare in broadcasting they are practically regarded as Gandhian.

  He says that he cannot recall ascribing any of the usual insecurities of childhood or adolescence to being adopted.

  “I am tempted to say it’s the opposite,” he ventures. “When you are the person who is the object of a voluntary act of love and commitment, it’s a tremendously affirming experience. I mean, what greater sense of value can you give to a baby or a child than to say, ‘We are going to embrace you, and commit to give our lives to you’?

  “Pregnancies can be accidental,” he reminds us. “Adoptions never are. Those of us who are adopted have every reason to feel snug and secure. Loved above and beyond, really.”

  DENIS HAS DIED, and Joyce Segaller is fading a bit now, living in a nursing home in Great Britain. Stephen says that when he comes to visit, the every-second-of-every-day exasperations and indignities of walking, sitting, eating, seeing, hearing, and going to the bathroom seem to have pushed his mother’s emotions closer to the surface. Stephen brought along his son, the actor Adam Segaller, on a recent visit. Adam hadn’t seen his grandmother for a couple of years. Realistically, when might he ever see her again?

  Stephen Segaller says that he and his son took turns to bend down and kiss his mother in her chair. Before Adam could step back she grabbed his arm and gripped his hand in her own.

  “You know, Adam,” she told him, “that’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. Standing right behind you.”

  There is a long pause and an audible rasp of his office chair before Stephen asks, “How much more of a parent do I need to go and find than that?”

  Don’t Be Afraid to Ask

  “CAN I LOVE someone else’s child as much as I would love my own?”

  I’ve been asked that question by dozens of people, who invariably seem apologetic and embarrassed. My own answer is short and explicit (“Yes! Yes! At least as much and more!”). But I try to answer with respect for the candor, even the nerve, that it takes to pose the question to someone who, from all the evidence, could be offended.

  Any parent must wonder whether they can love any child. They’re endearing, yes. But children howl, mewl, and throw up on your best clothes. They interrupt your happy life. It is not villainous to ask ourselves if we really want to admit these demanding interlopers into our future. When a baby is the result of nature’s taking its course, you can hardly argue that it’s not meant to be. But why go out of your way?

  My wife and I knew that Elise and Lina were our babies from the moment we received their postage-stamp portraits. Logically, I know that’s not possible. But I also know that’s how my heart, mind, and body—my very chromosomes, I am quite sure—reacted to their pictures. This little girl was on the other side of the world. But somehow, she needed us. I felt a real, physical ache to hold her. Every day, if I had wanted, I could have set aside time to worry about the millions of children left to languish in the orphanages of China. But I didn’t. Then one day, one of those multitudes was made a part of our family. It was just on forms and in a picture, but I suddenly felt the tugging of some huge extraordinary cord from the other side of the globe, and I knew that no power on earth would keep us away from that child. We would kick down the Great Wall of China to get to her.

  I would take the photo out of my wallet in the weeks before we left to get each of our girls and hold it against my lips to whisper, “We’re coming, baby.” Something inside was set off by seeing those faces and knowing they had been set in the path of my life. I heard a call. I don’t know what kinds of wiring genes and nature have provided. But think that’s how human beings have been conditioned for centuries: to take care of children who have been cast aside. No matter how or from whom they began, they become ours.

  AFTER ALL THE BOOKS and workshops that warned about hard stares and careless remarks, we’ve had a far bigger problem almost missing planes because people coo, ooh, and try to amuse our daughters.

  “Are the two of you sisters?” many ask. Elise steps up.

  “Yes. We’re from the same province,” she adds, sometimes shaking a finger. “But not the same orphanage.”

  I suppose that some people are moved to stop us because we are not, after all, complete strangers to them (they’ve heard or seen me; they’ve heard about us). Many people seem touched by the beauty of our family (with me, the toad, holding up the back end) and what they infer from it. Sometimes we want to tell them, “Adorable? Yes. But you ought to try getting them to put their shoes on. You ought to try telling them that they can’t have another jelly vitamin. You ought to try …”

  We don’t want our girls to be walking advertisements for anything (unless it’s Chanel or Hermès and contracts have been signed). We want them to be free to have tantrums and spew at their parents without feeling that they somehow disappoint people by being human.

  But even at that, a few tantrums ago, Elise wound up crying and pounding the floor in an airport after a long day (what traveler hasn’t wanted to do that?). I sat on the floor to be with her while she cried the demons out. Then she began to scream them out. My wife stood a few steps away holding Lina, who squirmed in her arms to join Elise’s fun on the floor. People walked by, smiling. It occurred to me later: What made everyone so sure that the squalling, crying, raging little girl pounding her fists into the ground was ours?

  I guess it was the way that the four of us took each other for granted, the way we do in families: something that says, even in a shrug or rolling eye, that we’ll wait this out together.

  Kind of an Average Guy

  CHRIS LEONARD is one of those people who make it a point to call themselves “kind of an
average guy.” Are they ever?

  Chris is forty-one and lives in North Carolina, where he works in a corner office for a furniture manufacturer, developing marketing systems and support functions. In his younger, wilder days he “did something in computers” in graphics and printing. He grew up in Lexington, North Carolina, went to Appalachian State, and always knew that his parents, Briggs and Glenda Leonard, had adopted him through the Children’s Home Society.

  “I don’t remember a time that I didn’t know. I don’t remember anyone telling me for the first time. My parents were always willing to talk about it. They never made me feel that it was something that shouldn’t be talked about. It was there, like my hair color. But no big thing.”

  Chris, in fact, has sandy-red hair, now graying gently, and figures that might have drawn more attention to him as he grew up than the fact that he had been adopted.

  “You know kids,” he says. “I can remember one or two times when someone tried to dig at me. But it never really worked. Being adopted was no big thing to much of anybody. My parents just always made me feel loved and lucky—even if I didn’t know then how truly damn lucky I was.”

  Chris met his wife, Karen, while they were both in college, and discovered that they had both been adopted. They considered themselves blessed and fortunate, but they didn’t talk about sharing that circumstance so much as knowing that they did made them (or at least Chris) feel that it could go unspoken. “Maybe it’s a male-female thing,” he laughs. “Guys seem not to want to talk about any of that stuff. Women seem to feel that you have to talk about everything.”

  Karen spoke about finding her birth mother and father one day. Chris told her that he was just never interested, or at least interested enough to take any steps to discover who had brought him into being.

  “I never idealized or fantasized about birth parents,” he said. “They just had no place in my thoughts whatever. I thought, ‘Yes, there may be people out there, maybe not, and good people, or maybe not. But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ I guess that’s what I thought.”

  Chris was in Philadelphia on business and Karen had flown up to join him for a Van Morrison concert. They came back home to find a FedEx slip under the door, and the next morning, a uniformed employee delivered a letter to Chris Leonard from his birth mother.

  Her name was Diane. At age seventeen she had had a brief “relationship” (a real genteelism) with a charming local bad boy, who she sensed was not the great love of her life. But she wanted to have her baby. She and her sister shared a single room in Durham, and she was not prepared to be a parent. But she wanted to have her baby.

  “It was—it is—the most beautiful letter in the world,” Chris Leonard says. “I will cherish it till the day I die. The real gist of it was: I was wanted. I may not have been planned, and I may not have been kept. But I was definitely wanted.

  “She saw me three times in the month after she had me, while they found a family. Now, as a father myself”—two boys and a girl—“I realize what a hard thing she went through to do the best thing for me. She didn’t have me ‘taken care of.’ Even if she couldn’t care for me, as a mother. She had me, and loved me, and did the best thing that she could do for me.”

  Chris and Karen remembered what it had been like to hold their first child, Justin, in their arms, look down into his face, and see evidence of their own faces. To grasp their baby’s delicate toy fingers, and feel their hearts racing. Someone else, created from you, was alive and needy. They could not imagine how a seventeen-year-old girl had found the courage and love to do what Diane did: bring her child into the world, then put him in a better position to be happy.

  Chris told his parents, Briggs and Glenda, that they needed to get together. Family business. Briggs and Glenda thought that Chris and Karen must be expecting again. Well, yes, in a way. Chris showed them Diane’s letter. He pointed to a line in which she said, “If I never hear from you, I understand.”

  “And I understand,” Chris told his parents, “if you don’t want me to write back or ever see her. After what you did for me …” He explains now, “They, not Diane, were absolutely my primary concern. I knew they would support me, even if it hurt them. But I didn’t want to hurt them. I had to be sure they weren’t just covering up. Once again, as parents do, not letting on that we’ve hurt them. Hell, I didn’t know what I thought.”

  Briggs and Glenda Leonard said that Diane sounded like a fine woman who had made a mistake, handled it well, and now deserved to meet the son she had done so much for.

  They met at a nice restaurant in Raleigh. Diane came with her two children. They had known about Chris all their lives, and even observed his birthday (September 23). The four of them just stood there, teary-eyed and grinning.

  “This almost-sixty-year-old woman,” says Chris, “standing there with all of us, and I looked more like her than her kids did, and everyone in the room could see it. I wonder what the hell they must have thought.”

  DIANE ASKED CHRIS at some point, “Would you like to see a picture of your birth father?”

  Diane had a picture. You wouldn’t need to be a master spy to detect a flabbergasting resemblance. Chris Leonard and the man in the photo had the same graceful profile, the same slight slope to the forehead. They had the same grayish sandy-red hair, albeit in different proportions. Now that Chris was pushing forty, he could also see their hairlines receding along the same contours. The man in the photo had an assertive grin. He knew how to hold himself and smile into a lens, and not just at birthday parties and sales department awards luncheons.

  Chris, who had once been a graphic artist, could tell that the photo had been carefully and artfully composed. The face wasn’t familiar (except that it was similar to the one Chris saw in his mirror), but it radiated celebrity. The man wore conspicuously fine clothes, carefully tailored. He had a beard, so Chris thought that he must be some Hollywood figure, a producer, director, or celebrity agent.

  Chris looked at the photo and said to himself, “That’s the prick that didn’t care about anything other than himself.”

  “It’s Alexander Julian,” Diane told him.

  The name was faintly familiar, but no more than any other you could glance past in the boldface of celebrity columns that Chris glossed over. Chris Leonard had to Google his birth father. Alexander Julian had won five Coty Awards and been on the International Best Dressed List nine times. But the first item that made any kind of connection with Chris was the one that read “Redesigned the University of North Carolina Tarheels men’s basketball uniforms.”

  “Then I knew I’d heard of him,” said Chris.

  (A short personal detour here. Alex Julian is a very close friend, whom my family and I love very much. In fact, we are extended family: Caroline and Alex’s wife, Meagan, are cousins; our daughters consider their sons and daughters their cousins. Caroline and I were married at Alex’s house. He is one of the best, kindest, most generous human beings, a devoted husband and father, and an artful designer; if you’re wearing brightly colored men’s underwear, you have Alex to thank. He and Meagan have a warm, close, wonderful marriage and family that they have built over more than twenty years. But there was a time in his life when Alex would have been voted Father of the Year only if the title were awarded on the basis of sheer volume. As he said to me once, “I was one of the few straight designers on the street, and I didn’t let that go to waste.”)

  Chris read on, and nothing that he read moved him to try to reach his birth father. Diane seemed to be just a small-town secret stashed in Alex’s glitzy, jet-setting life, and Chris felt suddenly and urgently loyal to the woman who had delivered and given him up, with great grief and heartbreak, while this satyr galloped off to New York and Rome. Chris Leonard is a loving and responsible father. He looked at Alex Julian’s picture and thought, “We have nothing in common except that we look alike.” And while he didn’t like Alex at a distance, he didn’t want to risk hurting a stranger by unveiling a new so
n in his life.

  “I’m a guy. I was a young guy,” says Chris. “I can’t say that I wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

  And he didn’t want Diane to be hurt again by any of the human clutter that can fall out of a family attic when you go digging for skeletons. “It was pretty clear to me,” says Chris, “that Alex was a lot more important to her than she had ever been to him.”

  A YEAR and a half passed. Chris’s anger cooled. As he notes now, Alex and Diane have different recollections of the period in which Chris was conceived and born. Chris wants to be a son, not a detective or judge.

  Chris went to a furniture show in Las Vegas for his firm. As he and some coworkers and friends ranged around hotels for meetings and receptions, he saw placards showing a man with a grayish sandy-red beard, grinning over his new furniture line.

  And then Chris Leonard saw his birth father on the casino floor of the MGM Grand. Bells pealed, lights sizzled, and silver dollars clanged—but then, it was Las Vegas. Alex and Meagan were strolling through the gaming floor, not twenty feet from Chris. He almost ripped an arm off a friend who was standing with him. “You know who that is?” he asked. His friend knew the story.

  Chris decided to follow Alex and Meagan, but then couldn’t find them. He went to a company cocktail party, but couldn’t carry on a coherent conversation. He stalked out, dazed and sweating, and walked the casino floor for an hour and a half. He must have seen ten thousand people, but not Alexander Julian. He had a drink—alone. He went to bed. He stared up at the ceiling and out his window at the skyscape of rippling neon lights and thought: “It’s different seeing him in person. Seeing the picture, he’s Alexander Julian. Famous guy I don’t know. Some guy who wasn’t there. Seeing him in person, I felt something. He was there now. I felt something.”

  Alex left Las Vegas the next morning. But like a lot of famous people, he is almost ridiculously easy to contact. Chris called Alex’s studio in Connecticut, and the next thing he knew …