Janis Cooke Newman

When we find her, my grandmother is lying on a bed, her body barely
asserting its shape on her housedress. I think that if we’d come much later all we would have found would be the dress flat on the bed. Coarse gray hairs grow from her upper lip and her nose is bent to one side, as if the bone has gone back to cartilage. I have to remind my grandmother several times who I am, and at first I think it’s because it’s been more than a year since I’ve traveled across the country to see her. But 10 minutes later, she refers to me as her dear Polish friend and I understand that her lack of recognition has nothing to do with absence.

“Did you see my mother?” she asks me, and I have to tell her that the small Italian lady I remember as a gray head leaning out of a second-floor window has been dead for 40 years. In fact, everyone my grandmother asks about is dead; her brother, her sister, her daughter (my mother). She becomes so accustomed to this response that when she inquires about my other brother, George, she doesn’t wait for us to tell her that he is home with his new baby. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she shouts, pleased with having figured it out for herself.

My grandmother’s voice has changed, grown old and sexless. I used to love to listen to her talk. When she was a child, her mother took her to Italy, to show her off to the family that had remained behind. While they stayed in a small town outside of Naples, the rest of the world began a war, and my grandmother was not allowed to return to America for seven years. Ever since, her English has been idiosyncratic, as if the Italian had somehow slipped itself between the English words and their meaning. “He’d take his pants off for you,” my grandmother would say when she wanted you to know how generous someone was. “My foot got loose,” she explained one, when we asked her how she could hit another car while stopped at a red light.

“Do you love your mother?” she now asks my son in the voice I don’t recognize. And Alex hides behind my shoulder and nods his head.

From the time I was Alex’s age, I would spend every Saturday night with my grandmother. She’d open her sofa bed for us, the one that was called a Castro Convertible, and we’d watch the Million Dollar Movie on television together. During the commercials, she’d make tea for me, sweet and pale with milk. Afterward, I’d fall asleep with the metal bar of the Castro Convertible pressing into my hip, the sound of her thunderous snoring in my ears.

A large woman carrying a tray comes into my grandmother’s room and shouts at her. “Lunch time, Mary,” she says, and lifts the plastic dome with burnt edges that covers my grandmother’s meal. The food is brown and white, soft and steamy.

“I don’t like the food here,” my grandmother tells me. “I don’t like the way it smells.”

“I don’t blame you, Nana,” I say. “It smells awful.” And my grandmother narrows her eyes at me and laughs, thrilled by our scandalous behavior. I look to see if Alex is watching, but he’s busy turning over the tissue-thin pages of my grandmother’s Bible.

When I was a child my grandmother would take me with her on Cassar bus tours. Washington. Gettysburg, Pa. Atlantic City. We’d sit side by side on prickly seats that would make the backs of my legs itch, watching the sights fly past the big windows. On the trip to Atlantic City, we wandered along the splintered boardwalk and my grandmother bought me a bag of fortune cookies. That night I fell asleep in a bed littered with little paper fortunes.

My grandmother took me everyplace with her. Nothing seemed to make her happier than my company. “You’re my favorite,” she’d tell me, and in her presence I was no longer a skinny bookish child with teeth so crooked I couldn’t close my mouth over them. I was Karen, the Mouseketeer I would most often pretend to be, putting my pajama bottoms on my head and turning the flannel legs into long blond hair.

Before we leave the nursing home, I kiss my grandmother’s cheek where the skin has begun to smell sour, and assure her for the sixth or seventh time that I will arrange for her to have her hair permed.

“Do you want to give your Nana a kiss?” my grandmother asks Alex. He stands behind me, chews on the edge of my jacket.

“He’s shy,” I tell her.

My brother’s children only know Nana as the elderly woman who had to be locked out of her own basement because she kept going down there to look for her parents; the old lady who had to be declared incompetent because she tried to withdraw all her money from the bank to buy cans of Italian tomatoes. They don’t know the woman who spent 30 years traveling across the George Washington Bridge by bus to New York to sew strips of vinyl together for baby carriages. The woman who made her own ravioli, covering the kitchen table with them until they rose like small hills under the dishtowel.

Alex will never know that woman either. His only memory of her will be of a very old person who kept wanting to touch him.

The next day, as Alex and I walk past the shiny black marquee of Radio City Music Hall, I tell him, “My grandma used to take me there.”

“When?” he asks, and I find myself telling him about the Christmases when my grandmother and I would come into New York to see the Rockettes. We’d stand in the line that snaked around Rockefeller Center, freezing in the icy wind. When we’d turn the last corner, my grandmother would send me across the street to the Sabrett Hot Dog stand for roasted chestnuts. We’d eat two or three, then stuff the rest into our pockets to keep our hands warm.

I tell Alex all of this in a rush, not certain whether he’s understanding any of it, or if he has already lost interest. But a day later, as we’re driving up Sixth Avenue in a taxi, he points to Radio City Music Hall and says, “That’s where your grandma took you.” So I tell him about how after the Rockettes, my grandmother and I would go to the Automat for dinner. She’d give me a handful of quarters and let me feed them into the enormous vending machines, releasing the plates of hot food from behind little plastic doors.

Alex makes me tell the story of the Automat over and over. He wants to go there, wants to make the plastic doors pop open on the plates of mashed potatoes, the turkey sandwiches. But like the people my grandmother has asked about, the Automat is gone.

Over the next week, I tell Alex more Nana stories. The Easter mornings we’d get up early for sunrise service, the only ones awake in the dark house. The way she’d press dollar bills into my palm, closing my fingers over the money and telling me not to say anything to my brothers. The St. Joseph’s Day cakes she’d make for me every spring, crescent-shaped turnovers filled with puried chick peas and oil of cinnamon.

“What did they taste like?” Alex asks me.

“They were sweet,” I tell him, “and a little spicy.”

“Can we make them?” he wants to know.

I’ve only cooked St. Joseph’s cakes once, using a recipe my grandmother dictated to my mother. I remember that I scraped the skin off my knuckles pushing the chick peas through the colander, burned myself on the hot oil the turnovers were fried in.

“Yes, we can make them,” I tell Alex, thinking that perhaps these pastries meant to celebrate a minor saint will give him a taste of what it was like to grow up with Nana. Thinking also that they might help me remember what it felt like to receive her special dispensation.

Merrell doesn’t have an adopted child. But I do. My son, Alex, was adopted from a Russian orphanage at 16 months — nearly the same age as Michael Latham, the Romanian boy in Merrell’s book. Like Michael, my son is now 5 years old. Unlike Michael, he has never hit another child with a rock or spread feces over anything. He has, on occasion, offered to kill me with his Qui-Gon Jinn lightsaber, but I suspect that has less to do with his months in the orphanage than with his being a normal 5-year-old boy.

Michael, on the other hand, is not considered normal. In “A Member of the Family,” he’s described as “poison,” “the devil incarnate” and a “load of human trash.” His adoptive mother thinks of him as a virus that’s killing the family. In fact, Michael seems almost preternaturally bad — throughout the novel, a foul smell rises from below the Lathams’ porch, only vanishing when Michael is sent away.

“I know his kind,” says Alice Dunn, a character in the book. “Des was like him.”

Des Dunn is the novel’s other adopted character. Alice and Martin, his adoptive parents, believe he is responsible for the car accident that killed their biological son, Jack. Des’ uncle says of him, “He was a bad little boy, and a bad teenager, and I’m sure he turned into a bad man.”

In contrast, Alice and Martin spend most of the novel mourning the loss of their biological son. “He was a good boy,” Alice says. And Deborah Latham — the same mother who considers her adopted child a virus — says of her biological daughter, “By her very existence, Caroline Latham made the world not only beautiful, but right.”

Merrell’s message in “A Member of the Family” is clear: Biological children are better than adopted children — even (or especially) to their parents.

These days, no one would dream of writing a book in which every African-American character sold drugs or every gay character was promiscuous. Yet Merrell has written a novel in which all of the adopted characters are inherently evil. And it’s unlikely that anyone will protest. Not when adoptive parents are routinely asked, “Is that your real child?” and even young children know they can tease a sibling by accusing him or her of being adopted.

I was lucky. I didn’t adopt a child like Michael. If I had, I believe it’s possible I might have eventually run out of patience, skill and love. I might have decided to send him away. I don’t think any mother knows where her breaking point lies, and it’s a subject worth exploring. But how much better, and more interesting, this book would have been had Merrell looked beyond the stereotypes, perhaps making both of Deborah Latham’s children adopted — the one she chooses to send away as well as the one she chooses to protect.

It’s this inability to move beyond stereotype, this failure to give the reader more than generic situations and emotions, that keeps “A Member of the Family” from being a good book. And at a time when so many well-written first novels don’t get published, I suspect this one was accepted because someone believed the story of a mother who gives up her adopted Romanian son would sell.

American families adopt more children from the former Soviet Union than they do from any other country: 12,000 since 1992, 4,348 in 1999 alone. Many of these children have lived through the violence of war. Most of them, like my son, have spent their first years in institutions.

Since these adoptions began, television programs like “20/20,” “48 Hours” and “PrimeTime Live” have featured stories about children from Eastern European orphanages. They have chosen to focus on children who must take medication before they can be allowed out to play, who cannot stand to be hugged or kissed by their adoptive parents, who have threatened to kill their brothers and sisters when they’re sleeping. Not long ago, the New York Times Magazine published a piece about Eastern European adoptees, printing the words “Disturbed, Detached, Unreachable” over the distorted image of a screaming child.

It’s obvious that these “bad” adopted children make good copy. So good that now Merrell has found it necessary to give us a fictional version, as if the number of stories about real damaged children were not sufficient.

When I read yet another story about Russian adoptees who bang their heads against the floor until they’re bloodied or see another program about Romanian orphans who become violent for no reason, it’s impossible for me not to be angry. These are the stories that are being told to my son — stories about who he is and where he came from. And each new one makes me wonder how many bright, shiny adoption books I’ll have to read to him to compensate. How many histories of Russian writers and composers I’ll need to put on his shelves. How many good stories it will take to keep him from believing that, like Michael Latham, there is something in him that is so bad, I could give him away.

I averted my eyes from the cellophane packages of men’s briefs, the display of chainsaws shining in the sun, remembering how I’d prepared for this journey. Like a child preparing for her first communion, I’d spent hours memorizing the Italian for tomato (pomodoro), basil (basilico), and garlic (aglio) — the holy trinity of Italian cooking. I’d repeated hallowed expressions over and over like a catechism: Come si fa questa piatto? (How does one make this dish?) and E possibile prepare le salse prima? (Is it possible to prepare the sauce first?).

A gastronomical pilgrim, I’d come in search of a pure food experience. Instead I’d discovered plastic ice cube trays and push-up bras lurking among the smooth-skinned apricots like the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

I surveyed Panzano’s market square, looking for salvation. My 3-year-old son, Alex, was leaning too far over into the town’s goldfish pond. My husband was trying to photograph a couple of elderly Italian men who possessed six teeth between them. I went to stand before an altar of pale green and yellow lettuces.

A young Italian woman in a sarong skirt was arguing with the lettuce man. Each time she shook her head, the sun glinted on her nose ring, making it look as if she were shooting off sparks. I listened to her rapid-fire Italian and understood that she was questioning the freshness of the escarole the lettuce man was shaking at her.

“Beh!” the woman exclaimed, in the eloquent Italian explosion meant to connote disgust. She was unmoved by the lettuce man’s desperate cries of, “Si, signora. Fresca! Fresca!” I watched her with awe, impressed by her ability to discern the crispness of a head of lettuce from 6 feet away.

The following day, we visited the market in San Casciano — a lovely town with warm yellow buildings and cobbled streets. San Casciano’s market went on for blocks, the booths crammed with summer shifts, enormous cans of tuna packed in olive oil and cassette tapes of Italian pop music played at ear-splitting volume.

My husband stopped at a stand displaying wire brushes, pink sponges and bicycle horns. “We need these,” he said, grabbing up two lemon-yellow citronella candles. Surely we would be allowed this one indulgence, I told myself, scratching a mosquito bite on my ankle with the sole of my other shoe. The night before, as we’d sat outside our rented house eating grilled sausages made from wild boar, ruthless Italian mosquitoes had devoured every inch of our exposed flesh.

In the next street, Alex dragged us over to a stall with a display of what looked like small red pumpkins. “Che cosa questi?” (What are these?), I asked the vendor, and he told me they were a kind of tomato that could only be grown in the soil near Florence. “Acido” (acidic), he said. “Non e dolce.”

While Alex stacked up the Florentine tomatoes, the man explained how they should be served — sliced thin, salted, then dragged in olive oil. His hands flew as he demonstrated the proper way to soak up the olive oil, moving in the air above my head as if he were blessing me.

A few days later, we traveled to San Gimignano for the Friday market. In San Gimignano, everyone wanted us to gusta — taste. The roast chicken woman gave Alex an entire bag of fried potatoes. The salami man handed my husband a tall stack of fatty salame toscano. The cheese vendor, who had Paul Newman-blue eyes, bewitched me with a hunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Letting the cheese’s sharp saltiness melt in my mouth, I was afraid of what the fish woman standing behind an entire octopus might offer us if we stopped by to pick up some calamari.

As we strolled through the market, I watched Italian housewives rub their fingers across the fabric of the summer dresses hanging in the stalls, testing the material the way they might test the flesh of a peach. At a booth filled with shoes, I saw them try on pumps and sneakers, placing their feet on the cardboard tops of shoe boxes to keep the soles clean. I found myself sorely tempted by a pair of sandals with gold buckles, but was able to resist thanks to Alex’s desperate plea for a lollipop attached to a rubber monster finger.

The next day, we made a pilgrimage to the market in Castellina-in-Chianti to visit the stand of Duccio Fontani’s Erbe Aromatiche. Heads bowed, we stood before Duccio like supplicants waiting for the communion wafer to be placed upon our tongues. He opened one of the small jars of organic herbs he dries and mixes, and held it in the air as if offering it up for divine sanction before passing it under our noses. Reverently I inhaled, and the scent of mustard, rosemary and sage sent me into rapture. Duccio moved another small jar under my nostrils. Thyme, oregano and garlic. It was a breath of heaven.

And then, just as I was bending my head to sniff a wickedly spicy mix of garlic and pepperoncini, I spied an alluring little leather bag in the next booth.

It was so pliant, so smooth, so cheap — I couldn’t resist it. That leather bag was equivalent to the first bet for a compulsive gambler, the first belt of scotch for an alcoholic. A few days later, at the Wednesday market in Siena, I practically pushed aside a picturesque old man selling packets of zucchini seeds in order to get closer to a booth jammed with summer clothes. While my husband photographed the man and Alex mixed up his seeds, I succumbed to a clingy sleeveless shift (only 30,000 lira!). Then I allowed myself to be enticed by a couple of plastic ice cube trays, reasoning that our evening Campari-and-sodas really would be better with ice.

After that, I was unstoppable. The following Saturday, at the market in Greve, I barely stopped to pay homage to a beautiful porchetta, a whole roast pig stuffed with rosemary and garlic. Instead, I left Alex soaking himself in the public drinking fountain while I bargained for a pair of white linen curtains.

After the market, the three of us sat in a cafe eating mortadella sandwiches and watching the vendors pack up. Across from us, in a stall overflowing with ravioli rolling pins and green-and-white pasta bowls, I spotted a sleek silver Bialetti coffeemaker and sent my husband over to price it.

As I watched him go, I understood that my sin must certainly be greater than Eve’s, for I had given in to temptations far more wicked than ripe produce. Yet as I ordered another glass of cool Vernaccia and waited to examine my shiny new coffeemaker, I was unrepentant. Surely surrendering to temptation was the purest Italian experience.

“You made that up,” he says.

I hold up my guidebook. “It’s right here.”

The guidebook also contains several “Traveler’s Tips” for avoiding the “inevitable long lines to view the dead leader,” but besides the two cold-looking guards and us, no one else appears to be interested in the father of the Soviet Union.

“I don’t think it’s open,” Ken says.

“It’s supposed to be,” I tell him.

We walk back and forth in front of the low black building, but can find no entrance, not even a sign. The guards do not seem approachable, in spite of the wide-brimmed Russian military hats that make them look like children playing dress-up.

I flip through my guidebook, desperate to find the Traveler’s Tip that will get us admitted into “one of Moscow’s most popular attractions.” I need this to be one of those rare travel days: the one where the greengrocer in Tuscany gives you a packet of seeds for the odd little zucchini that tastes like nothing you’ve ever eaten, or the pub owner in Galway opens up just to serve you a fortifying pint of Guinness because you’ve hiked all this way and isn’t it a lovely walk then. The kind of day that makes you feel adventurous and lucky, and keeps you from thinking about a baby in an orphanage with a knotted-up rag for a diaper.

We’ve traveled to Moscow to see the little boy we are going to adopt. To see him, and then as the Moscow Center for Adoption requires, leave him behind for three months until he is released from the Russian database and can be adopted by foreigners.

Yesterday, in the room where the women who work at the orphanage take their tea break, I held his thin body for the first time. Russian disco music played from a pink plastic radio, and glasses of bitter black tea sat steaming on the cracked vinyl tablecloth in front of me. A woman in a white lab coat brought him in — a little boy with dark circles under his eyes and hair that stood up in tufts like a baby bird’s. I rested my cheek on his head and it smelled of boiled cabbage and sleep.

“Can we go back?” I asked our Russian coordinator, a man with small decayed teeth and a bristling fur hat, the next morning. “Just for an hour?” I wanted to sit in the room where the women drank their tea and hold my son again, memorizing the whorls of his ear, the dark blond hairs that grew between his arched eyebrows, the small dent like a thumbprint between his nose and mouth.

“No,” our coordinator told us, lighting a fresh
Marlboro from the one in his mouth. “Is not possible.” Then he suggested we go to Red Square instead.

Ken and I walk across the square to St. Basil’s Cathedral, its green and yellow striped domes looking like hot air balloons tethered against the cold blue sky. At a scratched plexiglass ticket booth, an ancient woman with two woolen babushkas tied over her head sells us tickets for more rubles than any of the prices printed on her sign.

Inside the cathedral, the walls and ceilings seem to have been painted in a rush with wide-eyed Madonnas and red, turquoise and yellow flowers, but a thick film of smoke and dirt covers everything. Icy wind blows through windows that are covered only with chicken wire, and after 10 minutes, we are too cold to explore the small dark chapels under the fanciful domes. Shivering, we hurry back into the harsh sunlight.

“Let’s try the Kremlin,” I say, because the map in my guidebook shows it to be made up of numerous buildings, a few of which I think must be heated.

We walk along the high wall that surrounds the center of the Russian government, its turrets and gold-faced clock tower reminding me of a castle in a storybook I once had about a young czar and an enchanted bird. I look up at the narrow openings that have been worked into the red brick and imagine medieval sentries with huge crossbows, watching us. At last, we come to a tall doorway flanked by guards, but when we try to enter, one of them hurries over, wagging his finger back and forth at us and saying, “Nyet, nyet.” We back away, feeling embarrassed and unwelcome.

- – - – - – - – - -

“Why don’t we have lunch?” Ken says, and I agree, thinking of the warmth of a cold vodka.

We decide on the Slavyansky Bazaar because, as the guidebook assures us, “they serve up exquisite blinis in a romantic atmosphere that hasn’t changed since Stanislavsky sat in a corner booth dreaming about the Moscow Arts Theatre.”

“What street is it on?” Ken asks, trying to unfold a Moscow city map in the wind.

“Nikolskaya,” I tell him.

“What does an ‘N’ look like?”

“Like an ‘H,’” I say.

I stamp my frozen feet on the cobbles of Red Square while Ken looks at the map.

“It’s not here,” he says, and tries to show me, but the wind whips away a corner of the map and flattens it against his coat.

“Until 1991,” I read from the guidebook, “Nikolskaya Street was called 25th of October Street.”

“What does that look like in Russian letters?” he asks.

“It doesn’t say.”

A man with several bottles of vodka clinking against each other in a plastic shopping bag pushes past us. “Nikolskaya?” Ken shouts after him.

“Nikolskaya?” the man says, shaking his head back and forth.

“Slavyansky Bazaar?” Ken tries, and the man takes Ken’s arm and drags him down the block. I run after them and when we stop, the man is pointing to a small alley across the street. Before we can say “spahseebah,” the Russian word for “thank you,” he runs away, his vodka bottles sounding like sleigh bells.

Six lanes of traffic roar between us and Nikolskaya Street. There is no crosswalk.

“I don’t know how we’re going to get over there,” Ken says.

“They all did.” I point to the people rushing around on the other side.

“Maybe they were born there,” he mutters.

We walk until we come to concrete steps that lead underground, and we take them, hoping they might miraculously transport us to the other side.

Under the street, it is damp and smells of urine. We step around a man in sandals and thick socks who squats next to a little stack of cassette tapes he’s set out on a blanket printed with characters from the “Lion King.” A little farther along, we see a gypsy woman dressed in what looks like overlapping pieces of material without any sleeves or legs sewn in. She is nursing a baby, holding out a dirty hand to the people who pass by. Her child looks to be the same age as my little boy, and I want to put something in her brown palm, but I do not know the value of the rubles in my pocket, and all the zeros make me think it would be too much. At the end of the tunnel, we climb another set of concrete steps and come up near the unmarked alley the man with the clinking bottles had pointed out.

The sky has clouded over and it’s colder. We walk the narrow street searching for a sign with a letter ‘C,’ followed by something that looks like a little end table. I wrap my scarf over my mouth and the moisture from my breath freezes there and makes the wool cold and scratchy against my face. At the end of the street, we turn and walk back, checking every building in case we’ve missed it. We are searching for the Slavyansky Bazaar the way you search for a favorite shirt when you are certain if you don’t find it, you’ve lost not only your shirt, but every good memory you ever had wearing it.

Halfway up the street, Ken stops in front of a padlocked door with large Moorish windows. The sign above is so faded I can barely make out the words.

“This is it,” he says. I peer in and see up-ended tables, chrome sinks and cast-iron burners scattered across the bare wood floor. A crumpled stove has been pushed up against the door as if at one time it had been needed as a barricade. I stand there letting my breath cloud the window until I can no longer see inside.

What will I tell my Russian son, I wonder, when he is 10, or
12, or 15, and wants to know what the city he was born in was like? As it is, I can tell him nothing about his mother — the woman who gave birth to him in a Moscow hospital and three days later disappeared back to Ukraine. I have no stories about the day he was born, how he learned to crawl, the first thing that made him laugh. I was counting on Moscow to give me something to replace these stories; the fairy-tale domes of St. Basil’s, the blinis stuffed with sour cream and caviar, the Russian spirit that could survive the harshness of both communism and democracy — things that would become a history for Alex. Now, it looked as if I would be able to tell him nothing about his city, nothing except the cold, the people who did not smile and the feeling of not belonging.

“Let’s go back to Red Square,” Ken says, taking my hand. “We should be able to find something to eat there.”

We trudge along past shops selling tinned herring and canister vacuum cleaners to the back entrance of GUM, the largest department store in Russia. The GUM building is a mile and a half long, with three levels of tiny shops connected by black wrought-iron footbridges. The front of every shop is blocked by the broad backs of women in fur coats, and I can only see what is being sold inside when one of the women turns around with a piece of linen, a child’s dress, a pair of fur-topped boots to examine it in the natural light that falls from the arched glass ceiling.

I stand on the end of a long line of women heading toward a sign my phrasebook translates as “Ladies Toilet.” At the front of the line, a woman with thick legs and gray ankle socks sits on a folding chair and collects a coin from each of the waiting women before allowing her back to the stalls. I search my pockets for a coin the same size and shape as the one the woman is grabbing out of each hand, fingers pointed like the beak of a ravenous bird. When it is my turn, I wait until I feel the dry rasp of the woman’s fingertips in my palm before moving toward an open stall.

I have the thin metal door in my hand when a woman who’s been standing behind me, bumping her shopping bags into the backs of my legs, shouts out in Russian. I turn to see her fluttering her fingers as if plucking something out of the air. She points her other hand at a shelf covered with small squares of brown paper.

I pick up a couple of the squares and wave them at the woman, showing her I’ve understood. She nods her head and smiles at me, and her smile makes me feel like a young child whose ignorance of the basic practicalities of living she has found especially endearing.

“Spaseebah,” I say, thanking her for this small moment of grace. Spaseebah for this kind gesture I will one day tell my son about.

The downside to having all this expertise is that I’m terrified I’m
not doing enough. I think that if I let Alex watch the cartoon elephant in
the green suit instead of the real elephants in the National Geographic
special I’m sentencing him to a lifetime of summer school.

This is when I make myself go back and remember how Alex spent the
first half of those all-important three years.

For the first 15 months of his life, Alex lived in an
orphanage in Moscow, an old building with mint green walls and a smell of
boiled cabbage. He and 12 other children his age spent their
days in a large playpen surrounded by a painted pink-and-white railing.
Four women took turns caring for the children, never more than two at a
time for all 12. Most often it was Nadia, a woman who dressed in a
white lab coat, a babushka and men’s tube socks with sandals.

There was no “Sesame Street,” no Mister Rogers, no Barney — only a small
plastic radio that was left on all day, tuned to a station that alternated
between disco music and loud Russian talking. The toys Alex played with
had not been chosen for their educational value. Some had been bought by
the orphanage, some had been left by other Americans who had come to
pick up the children they were adopting. The nicer toys were kept out of
reach on a shelf, and during the two weeks my husband, Ken, and I spent
visiting the orphanage, waiting for Alex’s papers to be signed, I never saw
them taken down.

Although all the children in Alex’s group were well over a year
old, none of them had learned to walk. During that first week, I began to
take Alex out of the big playpen and put on a pair of canvas shoes from a
communal pile over the footed terry cloth jumpsuit all the children wore.
Back and forth, along the long wall where 12 cribs were lined up in a
row, I’d walk Alex while Ken videotaped. The day he walked the short
distance between the cribs and the railing of the playpen by himself was
the first time we saw him smile.

Once or twice a week, Nadia would climb into the big playpen with
a large stuffed dog. She’d hold the dog up and point to its ears, its
nose, its eyes, saying the word for each, while the children gathered
around, mostly just to touch her arm, her leg. Then she’d sing a Russian
song with a lot of clapping and the lesson would be over.

At 15 months, Alex didn’t talk. None of the children did.
They didn’t try out sounds or babble, and when they played together in the
big playpen, they were silent. Watching them was like watching television
with the sound off. The only time I heard any noise was when Nadia took
one of them out to be fed. Then, the rest would crowd around the pink-and-white railing and cry to be next.

At the orphanage, Ken and I talked to Alex constantly. Sometimes
we’d sing to him, old songs from musicals by George Gershwin and Irving
Berlin. One day, Nadia let us take him outside, to the weeds and patches
of dirt and old swing sets where the older children played. We sat by a
small carved wooden playhouse that looked as if it belonged in a Russian
fairy tale, and Ken sang, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” our wedding song.
When he stopped, he heard a soft, high voice in his ear. Alex was singing
along.

After we brought Alex home, I opened my books on early childhood
development and read about infants’ playing with rattles that developed
coordination, newborns’ being given teddy bears that stimulated their sense
of touch and parents who spoke French to their babies while they were
still in the womb. I was afraid that Alex’s time in the orphanage would
mean he’d have to go through life with one hand tied behind his back.

Today, Alex is almost 3. His fine motor skills are so well
developed he can open a childproof lock faster than I can. Not only does
he run and jump and climb with no problem, he can also do a pretty
impressive flip over the headboard of our bed. And his language skills are
so strong he can ask a theoretical question in the future tense, such as,
“When you get bigger, Mommy, will you have a penis?”

I find this question very comforting. It makes me remember that
children are incredibly resilient and that Alex will not have lifelong
learning problems if I sometimes let him play with a Power Ranger instead of
his Phonics Desk.

So I remind Meg that Alex did not hear one word of English until he was 15 months old, and that he can still carry on a five-minute conversation about dog poo.

And then I go into the living room and hold Alex, and while I’m at it, I pick up the wooden puzzle of farm animals so we can work on his spatial relationships.