CRADLE TO GRAVE
December 7, 1991
He still had a trace of those delectable cheeks that dominate the face in babyhood, those round apples just below his eyes. In the photograph he is smiling. Despite it all.
Adam Mann was on television this week. For fifty-two minutes his story unraveled in a devastating Frontline documentary made by a producer named Carole Langer. She had followed him from cradle to grave; in Adam’s case, the journey took only five years. He was beaten to death in March 1990 for eating a piece of cake. The last frame of the film was the little boy, the cheeks still round, in his casket. The caskets for kids are smaller. They cost less.
Who Killed Adam Mann? the film was called. His parents were charged with second-degree murder. His father pleaded guilty to manslaughter, his mother to assault. Both of them are in jail.
But Adam Mann had a guardian, too, and that guardian was supposed to be the City of New York and its Child Welfare Administration. Ms. Langer met the Mann children for the first time in 1983 when she was doing a documentary on caseworkers who investigate child-abuse complaints. The child in that film was Keith Mann; in one fourteen-month period he would suffer fractures of the face, ribs, arms, and skull. From the moment he was born and held in protective custody in the hospital nursery, Adam, Keith’s younger brother, would be part of the city’s vast child welfare system.
Reporters who cover the Child Welfare Administration know the drill. When you call about a case you are given a boilerplate response: Because of state laws of confidentiality, officials cannot provide any information. We go through the motions but we know that it is in vain. And we know that, no matter what the intent of the state law, the effect of it is to protect from scrutiny an agency that has historically served its citizens as poorly as any in the City of New York.
Ms. Langer obtained confidential documents on this case. To read them doesn’t compromise these kids, Adam and his three brothers—it merely indicts the system that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year, allegedly to care for children like them.
The Fatality Review Board report described caseworkers who failed to visit the home for months, who mistakenly filed the case away, who reported that the children seemed to be happy at around the same time that one was brought to the hospital, badly beaten, with a broken leg. Adam Mann’s autopsy report detailed so many injuries that it looked like an annotated illustration from some medieval medical text. Doctors said that at one time nearly every bone in his body had been broken. His liver was split in two by his final beating.
The C.W.A.’s own confidential report concluded that the agency “completely failed to assess the nature, cause and seriousness of the family’s problems and the danger to these children.” No wonder it was confidential.
Who failed Adam Mann? A system that obviously needs a massive overhaul and independent oversight. A system that explains its failures to no one, even when its clients die. (In news stories about Adam’s death, a representative of the C.W.A. “declined to say whether the agency was involved with the Mann children.”) Robert Little, who has been its commissioner for a year now, says the Mann case “represents all that we came here to correct.”
Adam Mann’s mother is eligible for parole soon. A representative of the C.W.A. said at a recent hearing, according to those involved in the case, that it was the agency’s intention to reunite her with her children. Commissioner Little says that decision will be made not by one person but by several. He talks about “family-friendly” procedures, and I think about broken bones. If Michelle Mann gets her children back, will there be regular visits from a caseworker? Will there be family therapy?
Will someone mistakenly put the file into the out box or become so overworked that, once again, the Mann children will become regular visitors to the emergency room? Will these kids, who are so damaged that one says he wants to join his brother in Heaven and another has run in front of a car, finally manage to keep a light burning in someone’s mind? Who killed Adam Mann? And did anyone learn anything from his death within the system that so grievously failed him?
WITH BABIES ON BOARD
June 3, 1990
They say that travel broadens a person, and I believe it. This may seem strange, considering that I have gone beyond the continental boundaries of the United States only twice in my life. Once I spent two weeks on the Caribbean island of St. Barts, which was a little like going to heaven. Once I spent two weeks in the Soviet Union, which was a little like going to Mars.
Nevertheless I have traveled a good deal, most of it in a large car with small children. None of the three children currently traveling with me are babies, although as recently as last year one of them was. There are two kinds of baby travelers. One kind equates the rumble of a moving car with the constant quiet stirring of the amniotic fluid. These are called ignition babies, and they are crackerjack travelers. You can turn the key in the ignition, and at precisely the same moment the engine will turn over and the baby will fall asleep, its big head flopping onto its bandy chest so that it looks even more misshapen than usual.
Then you can drive from New York to L.A. by way of Tahoe and never hear from this baby until you’re pulling into the parking lot at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
The other kind of baby is called The Baby from Hell. You know. We had one, but she grew up. Otherwise I would have stayed home.
I cross state lines for the purposes of rural adventure with these three children twice a week, and a broadening experience it is indeed. There are many scenic attractions you visit with children that you never get to see when you are just a married couple and think the Jacuzzi in the hotel room is a relaxation device, not the home base for King Kruger the No. 1 Avenging Water Commando Who Wants to Make His Brother Cry. Frequently I have visited places that I would never have seen without the children, like the Land of Make Believe, the Blue Mountain Snake and Turtle Museum, assorted country fairs, and every McDonald’s between New York and Scranton.
I have also seen the inside of many men’s rooms since my sons reached the age at which they refused to use a toilet hiding behind a door with the silhouette of a woman’s head. Mostly I have gone to the kind of places I first visited thirty years ago, traveling in a big yellow bus with a signed permission slip. These trips are just about the same today, except that I have to carry money. I still get sick on the Tilt-A-Whirl, I still can’t knock over three suspicious-looking milk bottles with a hard ball, and I still can’t see a damn thing in the World of Darkness exhibit. On the other hand, I can buy cotton candy with impunity because no one suspects it is for me.
All this has been very broadening, and I see lots of things that I would never notice otherwise. Such as:
“Oooooh, Mom, check out that deer on the side of the road. Look at its head, ooooh.”
“Mom, how come that lady wasn’t wearing a top to her bathing suit?”
“The kids in that red car have Fruit Roll-ups. If one of them tried to pass one over, can I take it?”
“Christopher, that raccoon is still there that got killed last week. Gross!”
The former Baby from Hell hoots along, then chucks a couple of stack-em toys at the back of my head.
“Cool!!!”
Of course this probably does not sound to you much like regular travel, which I am told includes gondola rides, shopping for couture, and lots of truffles, the kind that are chocolate and the kind that looks like something a dermatologist should be dealing with. But I have found that even in the course of regular travel children often transform the experience. For example, this spring these three children went on a trip to our nation’s capital. It was the weekend when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, and every family in America had taken its kids to Washington. It so happened that all of them chose to gather at lunch Saturday in the cafeteria at the Natural History branch of the Smithsonian. After the Smithsonian, we had our choice of the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the White House, Mount Vernon—the whole “This land is
my land” routine. We decided to leave the decision-making up to the kids. (NOTE: Do not try this at home!)
“Room service!” shouted the second child.
“Good choice,” said the first. “I’ve had room service, and room service was good.”
So the high point of Washington was $14 pancakes and the ability to run back and forth for simultaneous viewing of the Smurfs on the television in the bedroom and Chip N’Dale on the one in the living area.
You can certainly see that this is a unique perspective on the sights and sounds of America, but it is not what is most broadening about my travel with these children. Incredibly, both boys were ignition babies, and so they seem to have a special spiritual feeling for riding in the car. While once the gentle swaying and strangled whoosh-whoosh of the ventilation system elicited sleep, now it clearly puts them in touch with their deepest selves, their hopes, their dreams, their karma if you will (I won’t). So that it is commonplace to be driving along a superhighway, looking into the rearview mirror to see whether the state police car hiding behind that hillock has put on its cherry lights, to hear a small voice say:
“Mom, remember the sperm—”
(See trip from Pennsylvania to New Jersey in a driving snow-storm with frozen windshield wipers, Part 1.)
“—and the egg—”
(See bumper-to-bumper traffic occasioned by jackknifed tractor trailer complicated by Baby from Hell Cuts Teeth.)
“Well, how does the sperm get with the egg in the first place?”
Even before this sentence draws to a close I know that I must put my foot on the brake, since there is sure to be an accident ahead that I must maneuver around while explaining the miracle of conception. Sure enough, a Volvo has rear-ended a truck filled with Virginia hams.
“Cool,” says the same voice. “How come something like that has never happened to us? Mom, can we go to Great Adventure tomorrow?”
“No.”
“The Living Historical Farm?”
“No.”
“Burger King?”
“Maybe.”
I wait for the continuation of the sperm-and-egg conversation. Suddenly:
“Christopher, I smell skunk!”
The rip of rending Velcro tears through the back of the car as the former Baby from Hell removes her pink sneakers. Children in the car ahead of us flash the peace sign and the finger. If I were alone in this car I might not even notice them, or the possum that bought it at the curve up ahead. It occurs to me that I now look at the world a little the way David Lynch does. I look down at my gas gauge. The needle points to “empty.” “Mom, when the sperm and the egg get together …” begins a voice from the back, and I reflexively put my foot on the brake.
RABBIT PUNCH
April 15, 1991
It is a difficult thing to rise up and decry those traditions and symbols that have become national customs. Although it is widely accepted that Mother’s Day is a tool of crass commercial interests, a man attacks it (or forgets it) at his peril. Those lone voices that complain about the joylessness of Christmas are silenced by the rum-pum-pum-pum of Muzak carols in elevators.
Little attention was paid to the courage of one man, Calvin Trillin, when he suggested, a dozen years ago, that we stop talking turkey on Thanksgiving. Mr. Trillin was an eloquent representative of those of us who believe that, in taste tests, Americans served erasable bond with gravy and stuffing will swear it is good. The so-called Trillin movement to substitute spaghetti carbonara for turkey as the national harvest-feast dish has gone nowhere, except that there are now photographs of the man in the barns of many poultry farms, above the feed bin, with orders to peck to kill.
So it was not easy to make the decision to publicly trash the Easter Bunny. The Easter Bunny has always troubled me. Santa Claus stands for giving, warmth, the magic of childhood.
The Easter Bunny stands for sugar.
I embrace tradition, custom, legend. I believe that children should have grounding in those events that make the year go round: their birthdays, my birthday, the first day of trout season, opening day at Yankee Stadium. And I believe in family myths and legends, those small moments, preserved in the amber of memory, that give a sense of continuity to life, like that wacky afternoon when Mom drove the wrong way down Eighth Avenue after she found the Jello-O Jigglers in her purse.
But the Easter Bunny is so unsatisfactory a holiday icon that no one even knows what he does. Does he color the eggs? Lay the eggs? Hide the eggs? What is his visual image? Is he a human-size rabbit (terrifying) or an average-size rabbit (well, then, how does he carry baskets?)? Some people imagine him wearing a pale blue velvet jacket. This is in fact Peter Rabbit, not the Easter Bunny; the confusion is a function of the fact that people think all rabbits look alike. A few people imagine the Easter Bunny wearing a top hat; these are readers of men’s magazines.
What about transportation? Santa has a sleigh, the Tooth Fairy has wings. How does the Easter Bunny get from house to house? I have a child here who thinks the Easter Bunny drives a pickup truck. What kind of holiday symbol could conceivably drive a pickup truck? The Easter Bubba?
Background material is scanty. Most books note that the hare was a symbol of fecundity in ancient times.
Fecundity … chocolate … dyed chicks—oh, now I get it.
You know and I know that you can trace the rise of the Easter Bunny directly back to the rise of candy manufacturing in the United States. I support candy manufacturing. The only part of a chocolate rabbit I have no use for is the empty space in the center, and, of course, the best part of Easter is eating your children’s candy while they are sleeping and trying to convince them the next morning that the chocolate rabbit came with one ear.
But all this is very confusing to today’s children, who are always being fed things like kale. They meander along, living their whole-wheat lives, and then one Sunday they wake up and discover there is nothing on the menu but jellybeans and ham. I was so struck by this contrast that I once prepared a politically correct Easter basket filled with lovely bath surprises. The child’s father peeked inside and said, “Duck soap?” in a tone of derision. And that was that.
Mr. Trillin advises that messing with the holidays is risky business and brings reader mail. He reports that even more unpopular than his Thanksgiving attack on turkey was his Christmas attack on fruitcake. Mr. Trillin likes to say that no one has ever been known to sigh, “Boy, I could really go for a piece of fruitcake right now.” And he is right. I have insulated my family from fruitcake, but not from the Easter Bunny. Once a year some child has the wit to say, “Cool! He brought all the stuff that she never lets us eat!” Fecundity … plastic grass … marshmallow chicks—fill me in here.
ANOTHER KID IN THE KITCHEN
April 15, 1990
It is crowded in the kitchen. In a corner the baby leans back in her walker, gumming a biscuit. In another a toddler is eating Alphabits. A teenage boy, a skyscraper to the little ones, passes through with that sullen silence teenage boys own. A teenage girl, her hair a corn-colored tail down her back, scoops ice cream at the counter.
The mother of them all sits at the table, getting through the day on tea and cigarettes. The only one of her children missing is the middle one, the four-year-old, Melissa, nicknamed Sassy, known to the world as Baby M.
“I got the celebrity status without having a celebrity life,” said Mary Beth Whitehead-Gould.
It’s hard to believe, in this pretty, child-choked house on Long Island, that this woman blew her life to bits for the sake of another kid in the kitchen. The teenagers, Tuesday and Ryan, are Mary Beth’s children by her first marriage. Austin and Morgan, the little ones, are the children of Dean Gould, whom she married three years ago.
And Sassy is the child of contract. Mary Beth was inseminated in an arrangement with Bill Stern, a biochemist who was to pay ten thousand dollars when she turned the baby over to him and his doctor wife. When she decided it was unnatural to do so, one of the
nastiest custody battles of the century began. “It’s a typical divorce,” she said. “I have the kind of visitation fathers have—some weekends and a couple of weeks in summer.”
Her credit cards say simply “Mary Gould,” but she is recognized everywhere. Sometimes when she is out with Morgan, who is nine months old, people will whisper, “That’s Baby M.”
“They’ve frozen her in time,” her modier says of Melissa. “To the public she’ll always be a baby.”
Public opinion is like that. We make up our minds and freeze the judgment, a leaf in the ice of the pond. There’s no need to give it a second thought, except that those involved have to live with our first ones. “People are afraid of me,” says the woman adjudged unstable by experts for pathology ranging from inadequate patty-cake to dyed hair. “I have to live with this reputation as an absolute wacko.” This seems histrionic—one diagnosis at the trial—until three of my friends ask the same question: Is she nuts?
Well, she uses a lot of Windex and she seems a little obsessed with floral wallpaper, but her sanity is clear. Public opinion is sometimes wacko, too. While feminists were insisting that surrogacy was the exploitation of poor women by rich ones, I saw Mary Beth Whitehead as the have, and the Sterns as the have-nots. She had kids; they didn’t. I sided with the Sterns.
I was wrong. I figured that out after reading Mrs. Gould’s surprisingly eloquent book about the New Jersey Supreme Court’s predictably eloquent decision. In one sentence it became clear: “We do not know of, and cannot conceive of, any other case where a perfectly fit mother was expected to surrender her newly born infant, perhaps forever, and was then told she was a bad mother because she did not.”
Mary Beth is bound by court order not to talk about Melissa, but you can tell that the polarization of class and attitude so evident in the courtroom condnues, diough the rancor has subsided. In one household Sassy is the middle of five children whose thirty-three-year-old mother does not work outside the home; in another she is the only child of two professionals approaching middle age. Fruit Loops and cartoons in one place, raisins and the ballet in another. “Maybe it’s the best of both worlds,” says her mother, sounding unconvinced.
Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) Page 9
