The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  The morning of the appointment Sue laid out a silk blouse, burgundy business suit, ivory jewelry, long black leather coat, and high heels. After all those years she spent in suits and dresses and high heels, Sue delights in dressing down, working away at her big executive desk in jeans and a sweatshirt, floppy old slippers, and a thick sweater. But today she wanted to make an impression.

  Still, she didn’t get off to a good start with this old fellow. Mike made an epic scene in the doctor’s examining room, talking wildly and loudly about his real mother, his brother and sister who were living in a different family, shouting about Rockland State Psychiatric Hospital. And, of course, correcting everything the doctor had to say. Just generally acting like a nut.

  And the way Sue was dressed had the opposite effect she intended.

  The doctor almost sneered at her as he fingered the Medicaid card. “Miss Miniter, just how many children do you have?”

  “Six others.”

  “I don’t suppose, of course, that Michael’s father is still in the picture?”

  “No,” said Sue, puzzled.

  “I didn’t think so. Now, are the rest of your children normal? Are there any other full siblings?”

  “Huh?”

  “How many different fathers did your children have?”

  “What!”

  “I asked, how many fathers?”

  Sue exploded, “I heard what you said. I just can’t believe you asked that—and it’s Mrs, Miniter. I’ve been married twenty-seven years to the same man. All of my children have had the same father!”

  Now the doctor looked confused and extremely embarrassed. “Then, what is Mike? He has a different last name.”

  “Mike is a foster child. Who did you think he was?”

  The doctor was taken aback. The only thing he could think of to say was even more stupidly awkward. “You don’t look like a foster mother.”

  Sues eyes went blank and hard, her pupils little black arrowheads. “And just what does a foster mother look like?”

  “Mrs. Miniter, Mike is severely disturbed. I don’t know you—I’ve never seen you or Mike before. I thought he came from a badly confused family situation, and I wanted to see if there were any other full brothers or sisters who had any history of emotional problems.”

  “Well, look,” Sue said, trying to calm down and remember what she was there for, “Mike’s not having the best day. That’s true. But what I want to know is, how is he physically?”

  The doctor huffed a little bit. “I don’t have his medical records, and I haven’t done any workups, but he appears fine— maybe a little too thin. Is that why you’re here—just that?”

  “No,” said Sue, trying to force a smile. She extracted a form from her pocketbook. “He was released from the children’s home close to two months ago, and the physician there had prescribed some medication.”

  She handed over the page from Mike’s file.

  Dr. O’Mara read it and said, “Oh, yes, I see. You want a new prescription.”

  “No,” said Sue again, “Dr. John Reis in Kingston suggested we wean him off; that perhaps a lot of his muscle tension and maybe his facial tic will ameliorate; that perhaps, at the least, we could establish a baseline for new dosages if we got him off it for a while.”

  “Oh, I know John,” Dr. O’Mara said. Then he looked sharply at Sue. “Did Dr. Reis examine him?”

  This was the crucial point of the talk, as far as Sue was concerned, but she was ready. “He consulted as a professional courtesy. But his practice doesn’t take Medicaid patients, and Kingston is a long way He suggested we develop a relationship with a local physician who’d be in a better position to keep an eye on things.”

  Dr. O’Mara opened his mouth as if to speak, looked at the paper again, back up at Sue, smiling confidently, and then back at the paper. “Yes, of course, now I understand. Well, if that’s what John wants to do, I don’t have any problem in going that route. Why not start immediately, then—in fact, right now? Make an appointment with me for next week or the week after, and we’ll see what changes, if any, crop up.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked innocently.

  “Oh, absolutely. John knows his stuff. God knows—” and here he laughed gruffly, still embarrassed “—the boy’s behavior couldn’t be much worse.”

  “Doctor, one other thing: Would you recommend a nutritionist at this time?”

  “Well, no,” the doctor said. “Let’s wait and see if the boy gains weight.”

  “Thank you.”

  On the way out the doctor took Sue’s arm. “I apologize for the earlier misunderstanding, Mrs. Miniter. This is a wonderful thing you’re doing. God bless you.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Doctor.”

  When she got home, she canceled the appointments with the next two doctors on her list.

  If Richard Nixon had had Sue for a chief of staff, he might have served two full terms. Maybe three or four.

  A few days after the doctor’s appointment, Mike was sitting quietly in the barroom when Sue and I traipsed down to start dinner.

  We stood there for a long moment and looked at him. The set of his thin little shoulders was much different—loosened, slack somehow—and his facial tic seemed to be gone. But he looked whipped and tired, defeated.

  He saw us there out of the corner of his eye. “Did you ever send any of them back for being bad?” he asked in a low, conversational tone of voice. No anger; no biting, accusatory tone of voice; no cursing. That barbed edge to him had disappeared. But his head was down, and he was fidgeting with his fingers.

  Sue answered with a question. “Any of who, Mike?”

  You could see he was trying to force his thoughts down a certain path. “Richard, Henry, Frank, Brendan, or Liam.”

  Sue was genuinely puzzled. “Send them back where?” she asked.

  “Back to the foster-children people.”

  Sue’s back got very straight, and she slowly sat down next to him. Her hand reached out to his shoulder, stopped, and then withdrew. “Mike, the boys aren’t foster children. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  A shrug of those tiny, thin shoulders. “No—uh, yes—I guess so.”

  “Mike.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you ask that?”

  A long pause. Then, “When I first came here, Henry, Frank, and Brendan were here, but then they had to pack their bags and leave.”

  Sue looked up at me, but I just shrugged. I didn’t know what to say.

  Finally, Sue did reach out and touch him. “Mike, we’d never send you back. When you’re older, you have to go to college. That’s where the boys went. They’ll be back for Thanksgiving and Christmas.” She shook him gently. “Mike, we’d never send you back. We chose you, and you chose us.”

  Silence.

  I said, “Look, Mike, Brendan is at George Mason in Virginia, and Frank and Henry are at Norwich.”

  More silence.

  Sue said, “We weren’t going to say anything; we wanted to see how you were acting. But you’ve really calmed down over the last couple of days, and now we can tell you. Next week you’ll come to Vermont with us for a long weekend. You’re going to get to see Norwich when the leaves are out.”

  Mike looked up at her with wary interest, followed suddenly by blooming suspicion. His eyes narrowed, and for the first time since we’d been speaking his head twitched.

  “Do they ever keep kids up at Norwich? Kids who’ve been bad?”

  “Mike, this is only a visit. It’ll be a minivacation for the three of us. We’ll be back here, all of us, three days later.”

  “They keep kids up there?”

  “Men,” I said quietly. “No kids, Mike. There are only men at Norwich.”

  He didn’t believe us.

  Our son Henry once said about Norwich, “This is my place,” and indeed, now that he’s graduated, it’s hard to think of the school without him there.

  In fact, it’s hard now to picture
the family as it was before its having touched Norwich and come away colored by gold and crimson and cadet gray, autumn leaves, bright October air, company banners, drums and guns, and sons on the old tree-shaded upper parade ground.

  There was a time when we thought some of our boys were dropping off life’s map. Richard, our eldest, was always an academic. Susanne, as well—she spent her teens, when she wasn’t candy-striping at the hospital, in her room studying. But Henry and Frank, the next two along, were a despair during high school. In fact, I think they stayed the course only because they knew Sue and I would poison their morning cereal if they dropped out. Both of them severely abused our hands-off style of parenting by swimming down to the bottom of their class and then staying there, holding their breath, for four years. If sixty-five was passing in a subject, they’d meticulously come in with a sixty-six. If the bottom line was seventy, they’d produce a seventy-one. If their interest in academics was anything above zero, it was so small it required electron microscopy to measure.

  Sue and I were so upset by this attitude that we’d violate our own rules and rant and rave when the report cards came in the mail. But it was like shouting down a well. Occasionally you hear a little echo back, but most of the time, whatever you have to say just disappears into a hole in the ground.

  What Henry and Frank were interested in was hunting and fishing. When they should have been reading Melville, they were studying the latest edition of American Hunter or Field and Stream. Instead of practicing math, they were practicing turkey calls or tracking techniques or how to lie still under a pile of wet leaves for four or five hours. As far as I can remember, during their entire career in high school, the only test they ever scored a hundred on was the New York State hunter safety training course exam.

  “These guys,” I said to Sue on more than one occasion, “are headed for a life of pumping gas and driving blown-out pickup trucks.”

  But in truth I should have had much more confidence in the two of them than I did. Because when high school was over, one after the other seemed to shrug as if to say, “Okay, that’s over,” dust themselves off, and decide to get serious about the rest of their lives.

  Henry came to me first. It was February 1990. “Dad, I’ve decided where I want to go to college.”

  “College?” I wanted to scream. “You just spent four years dragging one wing with your head under the other! How do you expect to handle college?”

  But instead I asked, “What do you have in mind?”

  Henry looked back at me, deadpan.” I want you to drive me up to Norwich for their open house. I’m ninety percent sure it’s where I’ll be going.”

  “Norwich?” I asked. “What’s Norwich?”

  “I’ll show you,” he said.

  One hundred seventy-five years old, the university looms like a stone-and-brick fortress on a hill ten miles south of Montpelier, Vermont. For most of its history Norwich has sent cavalry and, later, armored officers into the army, but in recent years many graduates have chosen to become marine, navy, and air force officers, as well. A small school with perhaps a thousand cadets, it prides itself on intense undergraduate education. Not particularly difficult academically to get into, it is extremely difficult to stay with. Every student must apply to the self-governing corps of cadets, and although there is a regular army commandant, the cadet officers and NCOs exact a rigorous fee in discipline, training, and submission. The first term is called Rookdom, and in some years, in some companies, a huge percentage of the incoming freshmen give up before Recognition Day, a day never announced in advance, at which the cadet colonel signals the fact that the rest of the corps has finally recognized the freshmen arrivals as members.

  By 1993 both Henry, a senior, and Frank, a second-year man, were there, and as always, we were determined to get up for parents’ weekend in mid-October,

  But this year was low-key. Only Sue, Mike, and I would be making the long drive.

  The year before, almost everybody had gone—Richard and his girlfriend came up from Washington, Susanne came, plus Liam, Sue, and I. We rented a nine-passenger van. It was raining, great sheets of cold spray flogging in and out of the valleys, and we were late. But we rushed up the slick granite steps to the upper parade ground just in time to see a shimmering vision out of the last century. The corps of cadets was standing at attention in the sheeting cold rain, rank after rank, company after serried gray company, coming in and out of view as the autumn squall gusted through, a silent sea of wet flags, drawn swords, officers in front, the dressed files of men as motionless as stone, patiently, rigidly soaking in their high-collared gray tunics, waiting for the drums to strike. Then, just as if those thousand men were waiting for us to crouch down into place under our umbrellas, the drums thundered down and they stepped off.

  We never could pick our sons out as they swung by. We marked the company flags, but the ranks looked all the same—shaved heads, strict gray uniforms, all the cadets with the crossed cavalry sabers on their collars marching eyes front. The boys materialized later, momentarily strangers; eyes hidden under the brim of their covers, tan and trim and fit, Henry with the broad stripes of a cadet sergeant on his sleeves, Frank slim and smiling in his cocky way.

  I was determined that Mike see that—not with the eyes of an overweening parent, of course, but as someone not all that far apart in age from Henry and Frank, who might begin to understand that there is a certain progression in life. That from the house he is living in now, can come boys whom drums can be beaten about.

  This year the three of us crossed the Vermont line in the early morning and three hours later checked into our usual B & B in Bethel, Vermont. We had called the owner earlier and explained Mikes problem with bed-wetting. He said not to worry, we were old customers; just bring a rubber mattress cover, and they wouldn’t have any problem stripping the bed.

  But Mike was nervous about his room assignment. While we were unpacking, he kept walking from his room through the double connecting doors into our room. The facial tic was back and he was stuttering.

  “I can sleep in there.”

  “Of course you can, Mike. Besides, it’s got twin beds, and Frank will be sharing it with you. We’re bringing him out for dinner and to spend at least one night away from the school.”

  Those eyes again. We’re lying to him, they’re saying. “Can I stay here when you go to Norwich?”

  “No, honey. They don’t allow children to stay by themselves all day. You have to trust us. Norwich is the boys’ school. We are just going to visit.”

  His face twitched. Now there was anger there, as well as resignation.

  Sue bent over and looked him full in the face. “Mike, we never lie to you. We will never lie to you. I don’t care what happened in the past. Rich and I will never, ever lie to you about anything. You—” and she poked him in the chest “—are coming back home with us.”

  He turned his back and walked through the doors.

  Sue looked at me helplessly. “He still doesn’t believe anything we say.”

  I shrugged. “Remember what Joanne said.”

  We were back up on the upper parade ground, and the corps was mustering on the grass.

  Mike had gotten out of the car with his head down, but perked up when we started up the endless stone steps. He saw the uniforms, watched the tick, tick, of the drums keeping step as the band took its place.

  His first words: “This isn’t a school.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s an army man place.”

  “It’s that and a school, Mike. We’ll see Frank and Henry after the parade.”

  Silence.

  “It’s not a children’s home, is it, Mike?”

  More silence.

  “We don’t lie to you about anything, Mike.”

  Silence.

  Mike and I walked together up the little grassy knoll by the Band Company, where we had a good view. Sue stayed on the steps in front of Jackman Hall. Close by us w
as the saluting battery of 76-mm howitzers. Mike kept looking at the guns, and then finally wandered over close to them.

  “Mike, come back here. When those guns go off, you’ll get knocked over.”

  Mike looked at me and then back at the guns.

  He almost sneered. “They’re not real. There’s no way they are going to shoot those.”

  “Mike, I’m not lying to you, and those guns are real. They’ll knock you over.”

  “No.”

  “Mike, I will never lie to you.”

  He turned his back and walked closer.

  I heard the bass drum out on the parade ground begin to boom and the battery came to attention. The number-one cadet gun captain looked back over his shoulder at Mike and then up at me with a gesture of his chin.

  I looked at Mike’s thin, defiant little back and all of a sudden felt really sorry for him. Defiance, after all, was the only thing he had. I felt something else, too—something perhaps prompted by the two of us being alone among all these strangers on this sunny day and then added to by the image of other boys out on the parade ground preparing to march off to life. I was starting to care about the skinny little drink of water—I was beginning to feel like a dad.

  But parenthood has worn me down. When you’re new to being a father, it’s easy to wax hard and academic about teaching your children the tough lessons, to sit back and let them take a chance on being hurt. It’s easy then, when you haven’t seen all that many real tears, to stay convinced that you’re doing the right thing by letting them go. Mike needed a lesson, a big lesson. I just wasn’t all that certain I had the stomach for it.

  I heard Sue calling me; she had seen Mike.

  But somehow the decision made itself, and I waved my hand at the gun captain. “Leave him there.”

  I saw Sue start across to get him, and I tried to will her back into the crowd. “For Gods sake, let him see I was telling the truth.”

  She didn’t have enough time.

  The battery commander did a right face and saluted. Number-one gun captain barked a command, and the gun went off.