The Things I Want Most (5 page)

So I got up and gave her a hug.

She pushed me back at arm's, length. “So, is this ‘The Talk'?”

“Yeah,” I said, chuckling, “I guess so. I have to get back to work.”

“You don't want to talk about it.”

“Sue, I'm all talked out.”

Once the children's home understood Sue was actually serious about Mike, they started raising objections.

The Old English word for
harbor
or
harbour
was
haven
. The Germans still use it, although they pronounce it “hah-ven,” as in the famous port of Bremerhaven, which means Bremer or Bremen Harbor. A harbor, as everyone knows, is a place out of the weather where you can safely unload or refit, and The Harbour Program implied a place for children to tie up out of the storm, take on supplies, and refit their lives. A safe haven. But it's still a
version of foster care—a new version and, as a therapeutic version, one quite different from the standard pattern, but it's still foster care.

And sadly, foster care isn't 100 percent safe and has the reputation of not doing much in terms of mainstreaming children, especially difficult children. It's not that foster care as a whole isn't chock-full of warm and loving families who do the best they can for their charges. It's just that an abundance of problems stem from its role as emergency or temporary shelter.

Even given the best of motives, child-care workers, who can each have sixty or seventy cases at one time, find it impossible to cope with the flood of children washed up into the system and to monitor foster parents closely Because the families they're dealing with are often in “crisis,” as the terminology has it, children have to be whisked out of one environment and into foster care at all hours of the day or night. Then, once placed in foster care, the children immediately slide backward in priority as the heavy caseload spawns another crisis and yet another placement.

Who goes back and carefully evaluates the child's stay in the foster home? The social workers bitterly complain about that. This situation and the lousy pay are the main reasons there are so many ex-social workers around.

Almost all of the family specialists at Harbour are ex-social workers. During our training each had reams to say about the frustration of the caseload they used to deal with and their continual anxiety over the children they had to shuffle around.

Many foster parents complain about it, too. Children placed in the middle of the night and left with no comprehensive medical records or school information. Older children who are sexual predators; younger children who are sexually vulnerable. Children with special medical needs, diets, routines that nobody can sort out until days or weeks later.

In some ways the system often fails the very young lives it was meant to shelter. About the only thing worse is leaving children where they are. But there is a third alternative, the institution—the child village, group home, residence, children's home, or, as we used to say, the orphanage.

Society at large, the courts, and the child welfare agencies believe almost as an article of faith that orphanages should be the last resort. That first and foremost children belong in families—if not their own, then another. I tend to agree that children are usually much better off with their families, even if the families are homeless and wandering the countryside, as it is usually only in families that children learn the struggle and social skills they need later on in life because paradoxically, parents, particularly mothers, force children into a pattern of long-term effort. Even in something as prosaic as table manners, a useful skill if you intend to eat in public, mothers will insist that the child keep struggling with his knife and fork until he gets it right. In fact, while we laugh about such situations in comedy shows on TV, an unmarried child can be thirty-five years old and his mother will still nag him about holding his fork like a shovel, the way he dresses, or the person he's dating, if she feels he's acting inappropriately. Mothers just don't give up prompting the child to perform. Institutions, on the other hand, tend to diagnose and accommodate and so relieve the child from the effort. If little Johnny can't handle his knife and fork at the normal age for children to master that skill, they won't settle down for a lifelong campaign on the issue. Instead, they'll diagnose him as lacking age-appropriate small motor skills and write a dietary order to the kitchen requiring his food to be cut up for him. And, of course, Johnny never learns.

But people working in institutions come at the issue from a profoundly different point of view. They're concerned with safety. They just deal with too many smashed up children coming
out of families and out of foster care, for that matter. Therefore, one of their toughest assignments is sending a child back into the family or back into the foster-care system.

And that's how the children's home felt about Mike.

And about us.

Foster care, foster care, preadoption placement, psychiatric placement, foster care. That had been Mike's cycle before he came to them. Now that they had him walking and talking, going to school and not wetting his pants when he was awake, now that for three years nobody had hurt Mike, they were loath to let him go. Particularly into foster care.

The Dutchess County Department of Social Services had the final say, however, and Social Services had referred Mike to The Harbour Program. But they could always change their minds, particularly if the staff of professional therapists and counselors retained by the home sniffed out the faintest danger to Mike.

They started with his physical condition.

Mike was about five feet tall and weighed less than seventy pounds. Either emaciated or deathly thin, take your pick, he looked like a concentration camp inmate, and the home felt that he should have a hospital placement for two weeks while nutritionists and doctors examined him.

Once Sue realized what was happening, that tiny door opened and the flames roared out.

She had already been frustrated for a long time before the first visit, while Mike restabilized after a suicide attempt. Now that she had seen him, now that she had had him to lunch, she wasn't about to be told that his weight problem had to stabilize also.

“One,” she told me, “I can feed children. Two, if they lick his weight problem—and I doubt they will after three years of trying—they're going to tell me he has a mineral imbalance,
then that he has to complete a battery of allergy tests, then that he has a hearing problem or needs a new eyeglass prescription or maybe orthopedic shoes.

“No,” she said, stabbing her left palm with her right forefinger, “I have to trump this process. What's the name of that social worker at Dutchess DSS who has legal guardianship?”

“Uh, Gerri, I think.”

Thus the phone calls began.

The second and main level of our inn contains a large butlers pantry, our private apartment, and what was once a ponderous, dimly lit dining room with dark wooden coffered ceilings, heavy gray peeling wallpaper, and a somber stone fireplace. I had converted this room into a light and fanciful office for Sue's tax and financial planning business with new woodwork and dividers, efficient wiring, raspberry-ice walls with a flowery wallpaper border, and all-white trim. The swinging door to Sues office opens onto the short hall of the house and is directly across from the stairs down to the barroom and kitchen. I have to walk past it all the time on my way out, in, or downstairs, and invariably during the days that followed her first call to Gerri, I'd overhear snatches of conversation as Sue tried to force the agreement she wanted between Social Services and the children's home.

“All my boys went through a cycle. They thinned out, fattened up, grew some more, and then thinned out again. I can shovel three squares into him as well as they can.”

“Believe it or not, we have nutritionists and doctors in Ulster County, too. Where do you think we're living over here, on the other side of the river—Bangladesh?”

“Would you
please
get in your car and come look at my boys? Every one of them was born at between six and seven pounds, and they're all weight lifters today. Just tell me how that happened!”

Then one day, “If he's wasting away to nothing anyway, goddammit, why can't he die happy, playing with a dog?”

I stuck my head into the office on that one. “Isn't that just a tad too dramatic?”

“Hey,” she said with her hand over the phone, “I'm tired. What do you expect—Peggy Noonan?”

At that point it looked like she was going to be beaten. Even Harbour was predicting it would be months before the pre™ placement visit happened, and the belief hardened in Sues mind that the home was the enemy. But then, as her dogged seesawing discussion went forward into the following week, Sue's tone suddenly became much quieter.

Kathy, a member of the senior staff at the home, and Sue had become friends, and Sue began to preface her conversations with me with the phrase, “Kathy told me”: “Kathy told me that three years ago Mike was still defecating in his pants.” “Kathy told me Mike's gait problem gets severe with exercise; that at the end of a walk he can barely get one foot in front of the other.” “Kathy told me …”

Finally one day Sue went up and met Kathy face-to-face, and when she came back I realized they had become complete co-conspirators. “Kathy says if we really want to do this,” Sue related, “the last step is to get past their educational specialist, and here's how we do that….”

A week later Joanne called and announced brightly, “Okay, we're all set up for the week's visit, and if that goes all right we'll set a date for the placement.”

I was in the office with Sue at the time, and she spun on her heels with her right fist clenched sin front of her face.

“Yes!”

It was a downhill slide from there.

Until we held a family meeting with what was left of us. Richard was out on the West Coast, Henry was up in Norwich, and Frank was spending the summer with his grandmother in
the Adirondacks. So the family group included Sue, me, Liam, Brendan, and Susanne, and we were all preoccupied by preparations for Susanne's wedding. It was just four weeks away.

Our house sits on fifteen acres of ground in Clintondale, New York. We had moved down here from the Mountain Road home four years before. Long ago the old place was a functioning inn, but had since been abandoned. With most of our restoration efforts concentrated inside and on getting the grounds cleared of sumac and brambles, we had not repainted the outside. It was still an old gloomy pile, nicely trimmed and finished off years ago, but now with thousands of square feet of cedar shingle to be restained a pleasing gray and all that trim yet to be scraped and painted.

Brendan, Sue, our future son-in-law, David Warren, Susanne's high school sweetheart, and I had been working on it each and every evening after work. By this time we were about half done and anxiously watching the calendar. The wedding was to be on the back lawn on August 14. There was to be a large tent, about 150 guests, a caterer, an open bar in the barroom. We had relatives coming long distances, many of whom had never seen the place, many of whom would be staying over.

It wasn't necessarily the best time in the world to bring a child into the home. Particularly not one who was labeled emotionally disturbed.

But Sue was happy and determined. She was also certain that our children would view this move as a positive event for their mother and father. She was looking forward to telling them.

After dark the family gathered in the barroom. We were all exhausted, sunburned, and spattered with gray stain. We had a cold dinner and then, groaning, I got up stiffly to make drinks while Sue sprang the news.

“I have an announcement to make. It looks like we're taking
Mike. Dad and I had him over for lunch, and he behaved like a little gentleman. Then we had to work out some problems with the home. Next we're going to have him for a week, and then, after the wedding, hell be coming to live with us.”

Silence. Just the muted clink of ice cubes as we sipped our Cokes.

Nineteen-year-old Brendan spoke first, with his expressive eyes large and angry. “That's
it?
Not ‘Can we discuss this?' Just ‘We're taking him'? Into our home! Jesus, we don't even know this person.”

I hadn't expected this. Brendan is the easiest of people, caring and considerate, one whose quiet demeanor and helpful humor always seem to attract the best of people.

Embarrassed, Sue turned to Susanne for support.

She didn't get it.

Susanne is twenty-five years old, tiny, only about five one, a hundred pounds. Usually she is very soft-spoken, quiet, and reasonable. But she is as strong-willed as Sue is, every bit the match for her mother when she wants to be.

Now she weighed in with a baseball bat.

“Mom, you two don't know what you're getting into. I worked after school at the Pediatric Center for a long, long time. These welfare children are a horror. They break things, start fires, they're loud and abusive, they steal. They're dirty.”

Sue was taken aback and just sputtered, “He's just a child, Susanne. He hasn't a mother or a father.”

“No, he's not just a child, he's something different. Believe me, I know.” She was punctuating her voice with her forefinger—“yes, yes, yes”—as Sue shook her head.

Wow, I thought, and I got up to make myself a real drink—a real big drink.

Sue tried to reason with her. “Susanne, honey, David was an orphan, and you're going to marry him in less than a month.
You're in love with the guy. You two have been going out since high school.”

“You wait,” she said, “you just wait, and don't ever compare David to any of those people.”

Then both of us cringed and looked over at sixteen-year-old Liam. Slim, almost gaunt at just under six feet, with blue eyes and brown hair, he was our ascetic, working out constantly, monitoring his diet, profoundly interested in religion. He was a wild card. Besides, we knew from long experience that there are 843 things parents can do to embarrass a sixteen-year-old. We hadn't expected such a vehement reaction from Susanne, or from Brendan, for that matter, but we were absolutely confident we'd get one from him.