The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  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 s
weetheart, 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.

  Liam just shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll play with him and try to get along. Show him how to do things. Look out for him.”

  Sue’s mouth dropped open. Then she bowed her head with exaggerated courtesy. “Thank you, Liam.”

  I got a lump in my throat as an image of Liam came to mind. When we first moved into this place we were standing together at the break of the hill above the old hay meadow. It was dusk on a clear, cold autumn evening. The maples on the far side had faded from bright orange and red to a dusty ocher, and the darkening sedge in the field was hazy with mist. The sun had been setting west over Shawangunk, and just a few shafts of light remained. One of them reached arrow straight from the top of the mountain ten miles away and lit up a spot in the meadow about three hundred yards away.

  I said to Liam quickly, “Can you run out and catch that before it goes?”

  The boy ran down the hill in the darkness, through the swampy brush, along the deer run, and far out into the field. In the instant that the light disappeared I saw him there, a far-off, tiny figure jumping around with his arms raised, twinkling golden in the rushing darkness.

  The stars were out when he came back.

  “Liam,” I said, “to me you’ll always be the last light in the meadow.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  visiting home

  The wedding was only fourteen days away when Joanne drove up with Mike for the weeks preplacement visit and I barely noticed, just waving at the two of them from the back lawn. Brendan and I were awfully busy. The caterers wanted some temporary electrical lines run, so I had been stringing wire earlier that morning and trying to avoid the men from the tent company driving tent stakes when I noticed a pungent smell coming from down below, where a contractor was spreading stone for more parking. The leach field from the septic tank had expired.

  When I had talked to him the contractor just shook his head. “If I bring more equipment in to open it up, I’ll wipe out your new road and grind up the grass.”

  “I can’t do that. I have a wedding here in two weeks. How else can I get it done?”

  “Well,” the man said, squinting out over the property, “you can let the field set and run a new line from the distribution box, snaking it down along that old lane through the woods.”

  “Okay,” I said doubtfully.

  “Not okay,” the guy said. “You’d have to find some idiot who’d dig two hundred feet of trench by hand. I can’t get my equipment in there either.”

  “Brendan!”

  So Brendan and I were digging the trench in about one hundred degrees of August heat when Mike showed up with Sue. I cut a good picture with big rubber boots and blown-out dungarees spattered with a lot of dark, grungy matter that kept other people standing upwind.

  Sue and Mike went into the house. Brendan and I went back to our shovels. I’d see Mike at dinner.

  About an hour later I felt rain. Surprised, I looked up out of the trench at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in it. Then I turned around. Mike was standing on a pile of dirt, sprinkling me with the garden hose.

  “Mike,” I said, “don’t do that.”

  Then I got the first flavor of the literal mind.

  “Sue said I could spray the hose if I wanted to.”

  “Yes, but not on us, kid. Spray the lawn or the flowers.”

  “I did spray the flowers.”

  I stood there in the muddy trench, getting wet down and looking at a child who stood up to my shoulder but was reasoning like a two-year-old. I put a lot of ice into my voice.

  “Mike, spray that hose somewhere else.”

  A blank look. “Why are you working when I’m here?”

  “Mike, spray that hose somewhere else.”

  Reluctantly he moved the spray off me and trudged up the hill, dragging the hose.

  From far down the trench Brendan chuckled.

  All that hot afternoon I shoveled and watched Mike out of the corner of my eye. He stayed with the hose. He sprayed the lawn, the house, chased butterflies with it. He sprayed straight up in the air and stood under it; he sprayed the dogs, the trees, the walk. He sprayed for about six hours straight.

  Brendan watched him, too. “He’s retarded, Dad.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. I wanted to say “No, he’s not,” but the longer Mike played with the hose like a two-year-old that long, hot summer afternoon, the more bizarre the behavior appeared.

  After dark and after Brendan and I took the hose away from Mike to wash each other down outside and then took long, hot showers, we sat down for a meal of grilled ham
burgers and salads. The serving plates were passed around to Mike first as the guest. He heaped up everything he could until the food overflowed from his plate onto the table, meanwhile talking like a machine gun and just as loud.

  “I have a family already. I have a dog and a grandmother. My room is upstairs in the attic. I sleep in the same room as my brother, Tom. We have chickens and a goat.”

  “What home, Mike?” Brendan asked, looking at the food mess that surrounded him.

  “Mama Johnson and her mother and dad. That’s where I really live. But I was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania; that’s where I was born. I remember it.”

  Sue and I studied each other’s reaction. We knew Mike had been born in a trailer park outside Poughkeepsie.

  Toward the end of the meal there was one hamburger left on the serving plate and Mike basically hadn’t eaten anything. Sue asked me, “Do you want that last hamburger?”

  “That’s mine,” Mike yelled. Embarrassed, Sue handed him the plate. He took it, put it on top of his other hamburger, and squirted about half the ketchup bottle over it.

  Brendan raised his eyebrows at me to say, “See?”

  But later on I tried a test. We were sitting around the table drinking coffee, and somehow the subject of restaurants and tipping came up. Sue mentioned fifteen percent, and Mike insisted he could do percentages. It was evident, however, that he couldn’t—in fact, hadn’t the foggiest idea what they were. So while Sue was cleaning up I took Mike into the office and closed the door.

  “Look, Mike,” I said, “can you write the number one hundred?”

  And he did, scrawling it in huge numbers on a piece of paper.

  “Good, good. Now, tell me what three percent of one hundred is.”

  “Fifteen!”

  “No. Now listen carefully …” and I explained that if you have the number one hundred written down you can move a decimal point two places to the left to get one percent. We did it together several times to calculate one percent of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, etc. Then I showed him it works with any number. Then that if you know what one percent is, you can multiply that number by the percentage you want—one percent times fifteen is fifteen percent, etc. We did that together over and over again, and then I put all the papers away.