Oogy The Dog Only a Family Could Love (7 page)

During the first six months, there might have been an hour out of every twenty-four, if we were lucky, in which both boys were asleep at the same time. As a result, Jennifer and I were constantly and completely exhausted. In fact, we were barely functioning. I would sleep from just after dinner until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., when Jennifer would awaken me and I would take over while she went to sleep until 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., when I would shower and dress and stumble to work. When I came home, I would fall asleep on the floor or wherever I happened to be when I could no longer stay awake, while whoever was in the house took no notice and walked around me as if I were simply another piece of furniture. The boys’ ability to sleep for extended periods gradually increased, but it was not until they were almost three years old that both of them slept through the night on a regular basis. Until then, whichever one of us could manage to get up and respond to whichever one of them was awake did so.

Jennifer’s parents came up from Maryland to help as often as they could, usually every other week. Before my dad died, he and my mom visited on three or four occasions, but under the circumstances, there was no assumption of responsibility for the lives of the boys as there was with Jennifer’s parents. Other relatives of mine would also drop by periodically, my closest aunt and uncle, Esther and Bernie, the most often, and they were also the most help next to Jennifer’s parents. After my father died, my mom would come by for very short visits — she would stay longer if other family members were there, for dinner, say — sometimes only for ten minutes, “to see how the boys were doing.” She could not stay away, but she also made it clear that she did not feel comfortable in our home, as though it were an imposition.

We went through enough diapers to warrant our own landfill. There were regular sorties for diapers, formula, and, when they had outgrown the need for formula, juice. We spent many Friday and Saturday nights over the next two years shopping. In fact, shopping pretty much came to define the way we spent our weekends. One evening at the market when I was buying juice and diapers, as I stood in front of the cashier, I started laughing out loud. The checkout girl looked at me, puzzled. “In one end and out the other,” I explained. She did not see the humor in this.

Seeing newborn twins, total strangers wondered regularly about the birthing experience; time and time again, their temerity in asking personal questions amazed us. It was never easy explaining to people we did not know and would never see again what it was like to be the parents of twins when they would not have had any reason to suspect that we were not the birth parents. For example, because Jennifer is so petite, it was not unusual for another mother to comment, “But you’re so small! Was it hard having twins?” “No,” Jennifer would answer. “It wasn’t.” People we had never met before asked Jennifer how she had lost the weight so quickly. “It wasn’t really a problem for me,” she would respond serenely. We decided very early on that it was no business of strangers that the boys were adopted; that was something they could tell people if they wanted to. Initially, I had felt some urge to tell people, which I now think represented some attempt to distance myself from fatherhood. But as time passed, and the overwhelming experience proved to be one of joy and marvel at the bounty with which we had been blessed, my reluctance, born of the fear of failure, faded. The very labor of nurturing paid immeasurable dividends, and after several months, after my head had stopped whirling at what had happened and I had accepted it as part of my life, I became their father, and all our lives were joined. There was nothing to distinguish me from them.

Watching their personalities emerge was a constantly rewarding experience. They were home for only a few weeks before they earned nicknames. Noah became “the Professor” because he was so contemplative. He seemed constantly to look at things as though he were trying to figure out what they were, what they were supposed to do, and how they went about doing exactly whatever it was they were supposed to accomplish. Dan was nicknamed “Jarhead” because of his bald, round dome and absolute determination, his commanding sense of bravado.

The first time I heard the boys giggling uncontrollably, I sensed that it was a sound I had never heard before or made. As it turned out, everything about the way the boys grew up would be different from my own childhood experiences.

When I was three years old, my sister, Susie, died of leukemia. She was two years older than me, three years younger than my brother. I have only two memories of her.

One is of our father holding her in his arms in the alley behind our house, on a block of semidetached houses in West Philadelphia. It is a hot summer day, and our dad is using a handkerchief to shoo away a yellow jacket that has been buzzing around Susie and frightening her. She is crying, and he is speaking soothingly to her. Since in reality he proved to be powerless to protect her, I guess that it is understandable why I hold on to this.

Susie is not present in the only other memory I have of her. She is in the hospital, dying. She may already have died. It is a Sunday morning. My parents and I, accompanied by my aunt Esther, have driven to the hospital from our house. Another aunt is home with my brother. The car is suffused with an aura of grim resignation; there is only one inevitable conclusion to the events of the morning. I am too young to be admitted to the hospital, so I sit outside in the car alone. I do not to this day understand why my parents even brought me. I remember a black steel fence and a massive yellow brick building visible from where the car was parked on the street. I remember Aunt Esther coming to the car, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, to say that Susie had died.

In the house I grew up in, there was only one picture of Susie to be found — just one picture for as long as we owned the house, which was another twenty-three years. It sat on the piano along with a number of other photos of different family members, events, gatherings, and occasions. This one photograph showed a beaming little face with dimples and two long, golden braids. I would look at the picture for minutes at a time, trying to get to know the girl in it, but it never felt like anything more than a picture. The little girl had been my sister, but the photograph could have been of anyone. There was no connection.

My parents seem to have assumed that my brother, being older, could deal with Susie’s death, and I guess it was also thought that, as young as I was, the event wouldn’t have an impact on my life. Each of these assumptions demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about the capability of young children to understand events that are happening around them. At my mother’s insistence, no one talked or reminisced about Susie, so why things had happened and were happening was never clarified. Nobody was ever asked how he or she felt about Susie’s death. We were never asked if we wanted to talk about it. My mother’s way of coping seemed to have been to pretend that Susie had never lived. If she had never lived, she could not have died.

My father must have been a brash young man. At sixteen, he was the youngest-ever graduate of the most academically elite of the city’s public high schools and finished Wharton by the time he was nineteen. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, played semipro basketball, and was heavily involved in local politics at the street level (which takes a particular kind of toughness) — first as a committeeman, then as a ward leader, getting out the votes for the Democratic machine. He rose through the ranks and eventually became the lawyer for the city’s Democratic Party. This suggests a confidence and focus that no doubt enabled him also to successfully woo my mother, a noted local beauty. Ultimately, the party awarded my dad the judgeship he had coveted his entire professional life.

My father had a keen intellect; his interests were diverse. As a lawyer in private practice, he argued and won the first case in Pennsylvania to hold that a man who had committed murder was not guilty by reason of insanity, and every year until that man passed, he sent our family a Christmas card. My dad loved history and language, was an avid golfer, gardener, and fisherman, and was an ardent Zionist. He played the piano regularly until, in old age, he couldn’t read sheet music anymore. In my favorite photograph of him, he is sitting at the piano, glasses pushed all the way up on his forehead, squinting at the notes swimming before him. As both a judge and a lawyer, he was recognized for his honesty, humanity, and candor, and he was much beloved by many, a mentor to countless up-and-coming attorneys.

I would not describe his relationship with me in the same way. Perhaps he embraced the opportunity to nurture those who were not his children because he was unable to understand his own. After Susie died, my father’s need to be in control seemed to have, understandably, increased. He judged me, and I did not satisfy his standards. From my perspective, he was aloof and often seemed angry and unapproachable. Afraid of incurring his wrath and his disappointment, I kept secrets from him, and keeping secrets created walls. Did I remind my father of his ultimate powerlessness to control what mattered? Did I remind him every day of Susie?

After my dad was diagnosed with cancer, he used the time he had left to take everyone who mattered to him out to lunch or to dinner. The last thing he did before he died was his taxes. The morning he died, I went into the bedroom where he lay and sat next to him. I looked at him. I had no real sense of the man who lay in front of me. I had no sense of personal loss, that I had somehow been diminished. The body in front of me might as well have been that of a stranger. There was no connection; it was like the experience I had had when I examined the picture of my sister.

The lives of the dead set examples for us. It makes sense that having a sister die when I was only three left me afraid of a lot of things. It explains why the unexpected phone call is always bad news. It accounts for why, until I became a father, I was many times filled with an emotion I could articulate only as “the nameless dread.”

An incident that is emblematic of my outlook at the time I became a father arose late one Wednesday morning. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the scariest day in Jewish theology, when God writes down what will happen to you in the next year based on your piety and observance of Jewish law. Jennifer and I had gone to services at a local university, and when they ended, we walked to our car only to find that we had received a parking ticket. That seemed a disastrous omen for what awaited us. I was shaken and angry.

Three days later, we got our stork call.

As one of my cousins described it, the boys literally, and on many levels, brought new life into the family.

When I became a father, I felt about as ready for the responsibility as would someone with a degree from a culinary school who has just been hauled on deck and told to steer a ship. As it turns out, the only way to learn how to be a father is to become one. I am grateful that my father inculcated certain core values that have proved to be beneficial guides, but I recall no open, candid conversations with him about serious personal issues. However, I can remember several moments when I learned how
not
to act — such as how damaging and counterproductive it is when a father loses his temper. My most disappointing moments as a father have been when I felt that I had acted too authoritarian and interjected anger into the moment. I would feel keen disappointment that I had become my father. His anger had driven me away; it had created a wedge between us. I desperately did not want my children to be afraid of me.

And certainly nothing that I have learned over the past thirty years of being a lawyer is of any use in being a father. One of the things drilled into new lawyers is never to ask a question to which you do not know the answer, because it could potentially damage your case. Of course, as a father you don’t always have that luxury. Sometimes you
have
to ask questions you don’t know the answer to, even if the answer might well be something you really would prefer not to hear.

When Noah and Dan were born, they were named by their birth parents, respectively, Thaddeus and Basil. (One of our friends suggested that they were given these names so that when they were adopted and given “normal” names, they would be eternally grateful.) One day in fifth grade, it was Noah’s turn to be Star of the Week. Sooner or later, every kid in his class was given the opportunity to tell the others about his or her life: siblings, pets, what Mom and Dad were like, what their parents did for a living. So, Noah being Noah, I figured his birth story would be a part of what he told people. When I picked them up at school that day, after they had climbed into the backseat and gotten buckled in, I asked, “So how was your day, boys?”

“Great,” Dan said immediately.

“Fine,” said Noah curtly, almost dismissively, looking out the window. So I knew, or at least had a sense, that he was going through something. And then came the moment — the first time I had to ask a question when I had no idea what the answer or its ramifications would be. But I wasn’t looking to prove a point or buttress an argument.

I asked, “Do you guys feel differently from your friends because you’re adopted?”

“Not at all,” said Dan.

“Yeah, sometimes I do,” Noah said.

“Really?” I asked, looking at him in the rearview mirror. “How do you feel differently?”

“Well, sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if we hadn’t been adopted.”

Dan immediately reached across the backseat and punched Noah in his left shoulder. “Well, for one thing,” Dan said, “you’d have been Thaddeus and I’d have been Basil.”

This cracked the ice as the moodiness dissolved in laughter.

Before I became a father, I relished my solitude. At the start of Labor Day weekend of the boys’ senior year of high school, our plans to go to the Jersey shore to relax and shut down the house there were interrupted when an unexpected preschool project came up that required Noah to stay home. As Dan did not want to go without Noah, and Jennifer felt uncomfortable leaving them both alone, I went by myself.