By Blood (5 page)

It was Christmastime, the patient began. I was thirteen, home from boarding school on winter break. I don’t think Mother even kissed me before she said, Don’t unpack. We’re going to New York. A holiday! she sang. But I had an assignment for school, due after the break, and there I was in New York, in a hotel, sharing a room with Lizabeth,

(Lizabeth?)

who chattered at me all the time when she was little.

(Ah, a sister, it seemed.)

It had to be a report of a visit to a hospital for some reason—yes, we were studying the medical professions—and now I had to find someplace in New York. There was a Yellow Pages in the closet of our hotel room, where I found a long list of hospitals, column after column. How would I choose? Presbyterian Such-and-Such, Jewish Center for This-and-That, Mary Mother of So-and-So—then suddenly one name jumped out at me.

She paused.

The Manhattan Hospital for Foundlings.

Foundlings!
she went on. What an old-fashioned word. It made me think of newborns left on doorsteps. Of Baby Moses in the reeds. And wasn’t there this medieval practice where infants were put in some sort of lazy-Susan-type thing and spun anonymously into a convent?

Here the patient stopped, and I thought, Surely Dr. Schussler will participate now, despite the patient’s request that she merely listen. For what a grisly image the patient had conjured up: helpless infants in a trap of clanking iron, surrendered to the cold care of nuns.

The patient gave off a little laugh. Or at least that’s what I remembered from some medieval history class, she said. I mean the lazy Susans.

Again she waited.

(She’s asking for help, I thought. Help her, Dr. Schussler!)

So I called them, the patient went on. The Hospital for Foundlings. I was transferred around, and finally I had an appointment with someone—was her name Mrs. Waters? Yes, let’s say it was Mrs. Waters.

I didn’t tell my family where I was going—oh, well, yes; they knew I had an assignment and that I was going to a hospital. But I lied about the name. I told them it was something like “General Hospital.” They never paid much attention to me, so lying was easy.

I had to lie, you see. Adoption could not be mentioned in our family. Never—along with many other forbidden topics that came under the rubric of what Father called “interpersonal matters.” Of course everyone knew I was adopted. But it was not to be discussed, not to be mentioned. But Father could not control everyone, much as he would have liked to. There was always the occasional stupid person meeting us for the first time who would say, Now which one of you is the real one?

Oh, yeah, said the patient with a laugh. I always used to think, Lizabeth’s the real one and I’m the phantom. How do you do, ma’am. Shake hands with me and I’ll give you a good squeeze to show you how real I am.

(Lizabeth. The sister. A “natural” one. How horrid for the patient to be followed by a “wet” child!)

The patient laughed again.

Besides, she quickly went on, it was very easy to keep the fiction going. From the outside, we seemed such a well-matched family. Father with his sandy hair and blue eyes. Mother also blue-eyed and blond—and getting chemically blonder by the year. Lizabeth still towheaded, her hair so light her eyebrows disappeared. And there I am: blond, too. Well, “dirty blond,” Mother was sure to point out; perhaps we should fix that, she’d say. And then there were my hazel eyes. Don’t squint so, she’d always say. It makes your eyes go dark.

The patient stopped.

I … Never mind, she said.

So Mother gave me money for a taxi, the patient went on, to get to the hospital—the subway was out of the question, said Father; perverts were everywhere in New York. The hotel doorman helped me into a cab, and then I rode up a broad, bustling avenue. I have no idea which it was, only that life was exploding all around me. People, cars, trucks, buses, taxis, horns, shouts, lights; policemen blowing their whistles and waving their arms to hold back the crowds: a magnificent craziness. It was cold, snowing; the taxi window fogged. I couldn’t bear having it between me and the world. So I rolled it down and rode with my head stuck out in the air like a dog. The snow swirled around in the windy street, and all the people and cars seemed to swirl with it, me along with everyone and everything, and I had a moment—oh!—that I thought signaled the opening of my life at last; the sort of moment I thought would come again and again and again.

Ha, said the patient. She paused.

What? asked the doctor.

(What? The doctor had to ask “what”? Of course it was the adult understanding that such moments did not come again and again!)

Nothing.

(The doctor let it pass. Fool!)

Anyhow, said the patient, then went on:

Finally—too soon—we came to the foundling hospital. It was at the back of a gated courtyard; I had to circle and circle the building, tramping in the snow, before I found the door. I went to a reception desk, asked for Mrs. Waters, and was given a seat in a large waiting area. It was crowded with women and babies; noisy with the babies’ cries; steamy with the heated, melted snow from everyone’s boots and coats and hats. The minutes went by, and soon the pile of winter clothes in my lap began to thaw. I began to panic. I imagined my skirt with a large wet stain right in the front; my white blouse gone see-through, everyone able to see my bra, which I had just started wearing that year. My sweater sleeves would hang damp, my skirt would look like I’d just peed in it, my new stretchy bra would be on view for everyone to see—the little red rose in the middle like a bull’s-eye. I wished suddenly that I had never come here, had never lied to my parents, had never done anything relating to foundlings or babies or children or adoption. I prayed earnestly to be transported back in time, to the hotel room with Lizabeth, where we would be planning our outfits for an outing to a museum.

Suddenly, a tall woman loomed over me. I was staring into the crotch of a very fitted skirt in a nubby sort of fabric, the skirt clinging in an hourglass sort of way, so that I could see very clearly the woman’s hips and panty line, even the bumps of her garters. Now a hand came toward me. I’m Mrs. Waters, said the woman. Let’s see if we can’t help you with that project of yours.

She was wearing a skirt suit and the highest heels I had ever seen. Her hair was nearly black, cut to chin length. She wore deep red lipstick—she was beautiful in a frightening sort of way. I somehow found my own hand from under my pile of clothes, offered it to her in return, and stood up awkwardly, trying to hold on to my coat and scarf and hat, and at the same time keep everything in front of me, to hide the water stains.

I followed Mrs. Waters across a wide lobby. Along the way I checked myself and saw, to my enormous relief, that my skirt and blouse were only wrinkled and damp, not wet through. And now I could concentrate on the sight of Mrs. Waters’s high, high heels as they clicked their way across the white marble floor.

She led me into an elevator. It was very dark in there—black glass panels, black floor, pinpoint lights above—so that all I could see of Mrs. Waters’s face were her cheekbones, everything else disappearing into black sockets. It seemed that we rode up for a long time, silently, just a whistle of a ventilator coming from somewhere, finally arriving at a floor Mrs. Waters called “the wards.”

The elevator door opened to blinding light: bright, greenish fluorescent lights leading off in long trails across what seemed a mile-long ceiling. And noise. Hundreds of cries and wails and screams. Under the trail of the lights, I saw what looked like an endless line of cribs. It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at: ward after ward of babies, room after room, row after row. I had never seen so many babies in my life. And were all of them “foundlings”? I asked Mrs. Waters, Are all of these babies without parents? And she said yes. And then I asked, Where did they come from? From the courts, she said. From unwed mothers. From lawyers and social workers. From the police, who sometimes found infants in trash bins.

(Trash bins! Dr. Schussler: Where are you?)

Trash bins! said the patient. My God! Then before I could get over this, Mrs. Waters led me back into that night-dark elevator, where she turned a key in a lock on the elevator panel and then pressed a button for a floor. This lock, the darkness, brought back the anxiety I had been feeling while I had waited to meet her. And in the confinement of the elevator, during the long, quiet ride, with only that whistling ventilator—I suddenly felt that I was in extreme danger. I clutched my damp clothes and held my breath, the way I did as a kid passing a cemetery, as if just inhaling would let in whatever horrible thing was out there. All at once it came to me that I was making a terrible mistake. I was trespassing. I was doing something totally, completely, utterly forbidden: finding out where abandoned babies came from.

The elevator door abruptly opened, and now I had no choice but to follow Mrs. Waters, who clip-clopped ahead of me down a long, stark hallway, finally opening a door and waiting for me to enter. It was very dim in there, almost as dark as the elevator, and I could make out several people sitting before a panel full of knobs and buttons, some sort of controls, I thought.

This is where we test the children, said Mrs. Waters, gesturing as she said this toward what at first had seemed to be some sort of screen but that I now saw was a glass, a one-way mirror, and on the other side, being looked at by the people in the booth or control room, were several babies—I don’t mean babies, exactly; they were sitting up by themselves, so maybe they were six months old or so. I found all this very strange. Those babies, the people observing them, the darkness, the locks, the knobs and buttons—what were they for? And what exactly did they control? Although there was nothing at all sinister about what the babies were doing. They were sitting there playing, in a patty-cake sort of way, with blocks and stuffed animals and puzzles and colored shapes, all very normal. And it seemed they were mostly enjoying themselves, just a few tears now and then, but only in that quick way children have of crying when they’re thwarted for a minute.

Then Mrs. Waters explained the purpose of the booth: They were investigating the psychological health of the children. We need to understand them before we can offer them for adoption, she said. We place the children in both comfortable and less comfortable conditions. We want to see how they react, whether they’re sturdy or fearful children, or maybe truly disturbed, all of which has a bearing on what we would tell the prospective adoptive parents, or if we would consider them adoptable at all. For instance, we can make the room instantly dark, or we can introduce a very loud noise, and see what is called their “startle” response. Strange people can suddenly walk in; or already-reliable people can play with them, then suddenly leave. We’re stressing them psychologically, it’s true, but only briefly and under the most controlled conditions—and all in the interest of placing them in suitable, happy homes.

Mrs. Waters stood over me, so tall, so imposing. The investigators kept their backs to me and said nothing, only adjusted the controls before them. And I looked over at the babies, playing, trusting, all unsuspecting, about to be put through some terrible gauntlet before they could leave this strange hospital and find a home. Which one, I wondered, was the unlucky one: the one who might not be “adoptable at all”?

At that moment, several people entered the room on the other side of the glass, picked up the babies, and carried them away—I don’t know where they went. Then Mrs. Waters said, Why don’t you sit here quietly, and you can watch us put the next batch through their paces.

And so the next “batch” came in, three babies of about the same age as the previous group—girls, each one held by a woman. The women put the babies on a table and sat down beside them, and then they played with the babies, each woman with the baby she had carried in. This went on for some time. They played coochie-coo and patty-cake and hide-and-seek behind their hands. The women held up squeaky toys and rattles, balls and stuffed animals. They kissed and hugged the babies, who were laughing and squealing.

Then at some point—there must have been a signal I wasn’t aware of—each woman picked up her own version of the same appealing toy, a sort of head with feathers and shiny bits, which rattled and squeaked as the women played with it in front of the babies. All the babies reached out eagerly to touch the toy. But the women just kept holding it, shaking it, rattling it. Then the women reached down and picked up something from the floor, which turned out to be tall metal cylinders. After giving the babies one more chance to see and reach for the toy, each woman placed her toy in her respective cylinder. Then they stood up and left the room.

For a moment, all three babies just looked at the cylinders, which really were quite tall in comparison with their little bodies, almost the whole length of their arms. Then one, the little girl in the middle, reached right in and retrieved the toy. The baby on the left patted the outside of the cylinder, gave off some quick cries and tears, then began tentatively exploring it, gradually going deeper until, with a great cry of glee, she came up with the toy in her hand.

But the last baby … the last one could not bring herself to reach inside. She began wailing and screaming and hitting the top of the cylinder, so hard I thought she would make her hand bleed. The happiness of the other two babies just seemed to make her more miserable, because she watched them, saw their happiness, their delight, then screamed and hit her cylinder again and again. I thought I had never seen such misery in my life, such raw, terrible unhappiness, her whole body turning nearly inside out with cries.

I looked at the researchers. How could they put this child through such a trial? None of them spoke. They just watched and took notes, while this baby was tortured with desire for the toy they themselves had made her want.

Finally I turned to Mrs. Waters and asked, What does this show? What does this tell you? She nodded at one of the researchers at the control panel, who said, That this child is very fearful. That she’s afraid to explore, is easily overcome by stress, even when given a great deal of love and attention. It’s too bad. She’ll have a hard time in this world.