Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Read online

  Next came the interviews with a social worker. Clean the house! Toss out the Roach Motels! This was no joke. Rich and I had hastily moved into a two-bedroom apartment in our building to meet the standard adoption requirement of a separate bedroom for the child-to-be. The apartment turned out to be infested with roaches and water bugs so big you could saddle them. Then there was the paperwork. Someone later told me that the Chinese believe that the more important a transaction, the more seals the paperwork ratifying that transaction should have. I guess this speaks well of the official Chinese attitude toward overseas adoption because our documents—birth certificates, employment verification, doctors’ reports, personal testimonies by friends—had to be notarized and certified by the city and state. All those large red-and-gold seals perversely made our paperwork look fake—like forgeries generated by the Marx Brothers’ Republic of Freedonia. For six months I waited in limbo for the FBI to clear my fingerprints. Usually the process takes a few weeks. Why the holdup? Every so often I’d call the FBI in Washington, and they’d always tell me that all fingerprints were examined in the central clearing bunker in Nebraska and that number was unavailable to the public. So I’d wait and worry some more. Was my pinko NPR connection to blame?

  Worst of all was dealing with the D.C. local government. “Kafkaesque” is an overused literary modifier, but in this case it’s the fitting one. One morning I took our D.C. “police clearances” down to a city office to have them notarized. The functionary there informed me that these were the wrong kind of clearances; we needed a different form for overseas scrutiny. “We’re only open till noon,” drawled the functionary (it was then 11:05), “so you’ll have to hurry over to Police Headquarters and come back.” I sprinted a couple of blocks over to Police Headquarters, got on line with a lot of mean-looking (recently released?) people awaiting their police clearances, and, when I finally reached the window, explained the error to the clerk. “Honey,” she said with a smirk. “These clearances aren’t any good anyway. They were done in March. Police clearances in D.C. are only valid for a few months.”

  I felt so beaten down by the city bureaucracy—and by the hoop-jumping effort to become a parent—that I tried to burn off my frustration that day by walking all the way home, about three miles. I had tears in my eyes for much of that walk. Just above Dupont Circle, I passed a townhouse that I’d never seen before. Next to its front door was a plaque that said something about the house being the home of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt when he was secretary of the navy. I had recently read the first volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s magnificent biography of Eleanor. “Think about Eleanor and all she went through,” I told myself. “Her tragic childhood, her homeliness, Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer, the ungrateful children (no, cancel that thought!), the nastiness of her political enemies.” Eleanor-channeling helped to a point, but thinking of her also reminded me of all those fiercely independent “odd women” I had known while teaching, years before, at Bryn Mawr College, and thinking of them made me frightened because, like them, I seemed destined to be childless.

  We left for China in early June 1999. One afternoon three months earlier I had picked up the phone and the adoption-agency social worker had said, “Maureen, I have news of your daughter.” My daughter. I don’t think any words anyone will ever speak to me will be so simultaneously unreal, frightening, and magical. Our trip was delayed a couple of weeks by the American military’s inadvertent bombing in May of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. We’d received Molly’s wallet-sized “placement” picture the day after that life-changing phone call. Immediately after the bombing, China suspended overseas adoptions—temporarily, it turned out, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was so scared we were going to lose her—not just a hypothetical baby anymore but her. Her name was Yangchun Chao, which translated as “spring morning,” according to our one Chinese American friend. She was eight and a half months old when the picture was taken, and she had beautiful dark eyes, a little frown line on her forehead, and a pouty, down-turned mouth. Someone had dressed her in red (the Chinese color of good luck, we later found out). She was the daughter we didn’t know we had been waiting for all those years, but we had.

  That’s when I felt as though the covers closed on my own female extreme-adventure story and another kind of adventure began, one that I didn’t recognize from any of the thousands of books I’d read. For ten days I was beyond the radar of books, beyond all known stories—at least those known to me.

  But that doesn’t mean we didn’t bring books along on this momentous journey. Before we left for Beijing, my friends in the English Department at Georgetown University threw us a shower. Books! Books! Lots of books! This would be a very well read and very underdressed baby. Then we took off, burdened by way too many suitcases and, what felt so very strange, a stroller. We also packed a duffle bag’s worth of books. Plenty of how-to picture books on diapering and feeding, because neither Rich nor I had ever cared for a baby before, as well as recreational reading. We didn’t know that you don’t read much when you’re sharing your hotel room with a ten-and-a-half-month-old baby.

  In Beijing, we hooked up with some other about-to-be parents and, for three days, did some sightseeing and shopping. It sounds frivolous and it was, but after all those years of infertility anxiety and on the eve of all the responsibilities of parenthood, it was fun to run around Beijing being tourists. On our last day there, we were even escorted by our very own “personal shopper,” a gorgeous Chinese American former student of mine named Jenny Fan, who took us to the best stalls to scoop up black-market Timberland sandals and Prada wallets.

  The giddy consumption came to an end that evening, when we boarded a plane for Guangzhou (formerly Canton) in the far south of China where the American consulate is located and where all adoptions by Americans are processed. Early the next morning we were taken with our group—four other adopting couples and one single mom-to-be and her sister—to the Bureau of Adoptions. There we were interviewed via our translator and completed the Chinese adoption forms. Rich held the line up for a good half hour by insisting on truthfully answering the bureaucratic question “What do you do for a living?” Apparently, there’s no phrase in Chinese for “labor-union researcher.” “Union! Workers banding together!” Rich kept repeating to our translator. “C’mon, this is a Communist country. I fight for workers’ rights—you people understand that!” Rich, well aware that China’s state-run unions were a sham, was clearly enjoying throwing China’s professed values back in the face of his interlocutors, something he enjoys doing with the American government, too. But his timing was lousy. Confusion ensued on the part of the Chinese, and irritation grew on the part of our fellow soon-to-be parents. “Just say you’re a teacher,” hissed one man from Maryland. Rich’s work identity eventually became blanded down to the innocuous “researcher,” and we finally boarded a van for what would turn out to be an eight-hour drive still further south to Yangchun, where Molly’s orphanage was located, a city close, relatively speaking, to China’s border with Vietnam. A few minutes out of Guangzhou, our van was hit by a car, necessitating a hurry-up-and-wait detour to a garage. Lots of downtime for reading, right? No. This was one of the few times in my life when I could have reached for a book and didn’t. I was too petrified.

  During part of that ride to Yangchun, we traveled on narrow dirt roads, through a tropical landscape filled with rice paddies and volcanic outcroppings and water buffaloes. People in bare feet and conical straw hats stopped and stared at our van as we drove by. Occasionally, the countryside was punctuated by small cities of new, uniformly dilapidated three-story concrete buildings faced in white bathroom tile where, as night fell, people in rooms open to the street gathered around the blue light of television sets. “The twelfth century meets Blade Runner,” I thought to myself, looking out at this strange landscape; the only real reference I had for what I was seeing was the nightly news footage of the Vietnam War when I was growing up and some of the descriptive
passages in Dr. Tom Dooley’s memoirs that I had been assigned in parochial school. Most of the other soon-to-be parents chatted with one another and sporadically aimed their video cameras out the window. Rich got into a political “debate” with one prospective father sitting in front of us who opined to our Chinese translator that “all Americans are against Clinton’s war in Yugoslavia.” That guy turned out later on not to be all that bad; maybe talking was just his way of coping with the fear of the impending unknown. Mine was to get quieter and quieter as an hours’-long out-of-body experience commenced. “What the hell are we doing?” I remember thinking to myself.

  We arrived at nighttime at the Yangchun hotel (a real full-service hotel, as one of our group later quipped, since it featured a bordello on the third floor—which I stumbled into—and also provided the “delivery room” for our babies on the fifth).

  I’ll never forget the first stunned moments with Molly, the joy at hearing her very first laugh that night when we tickled her belly with our noses, the anxious days that followed when she would not eat because she missed the orphanage, and the “tough love” of the amazing orphanage director, Mrs. Yu, who force-fed her, talked to her in the local dialect, and held her for hours, to make sure she would be strong enough to leave for her new life. I could tell you, in detail, about that time, but those memories are semi-private, as much Molly’s emotional property as mine, since they constitute her story. Suffice to say, we were thrilled and happy. Besides, isn’t this supposed to be a book about books?

  What about those books I said I packed for this trip—the most important trip of my life? Something uplifting and maternal, you’d think, the literary equivalent of a Mary Cassatt painting. Maybe Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, or Little Women, or that family classic, Cheaper by the Dozen? Or maybe, to exorcise some of my worst fears about how I would (or wouldn’t) shape up as a mother, I could have brought along Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, or even Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. (Though not hormonal in origin, post-adoption terrors have some similarities to postpartum depression.) Maybe, to gain some understanding of the unfamiliar situation I found myself in, I could have brought along a memoir about adoption in general or a book about recent Chinese history.36 Or, thinking in the most expansive terms, I might have at least packed a book that celebrates the happy possibilities of life: maybe one of Laurie Colwin’s novels or short-story collections, or Jeannette Haien’s wondrous novel Matters of Chance (which is partly about the thrill of adoption), or perhaps my favorite literary fairy tale, Pride and Prejudice. Nope, I didn’t take anything like those books with me as I set out on the trip that would change my life forever. Instead, on the fourteen-hour plane ride to China, during the jet-lagged downtime spent in hotel rooms in Beijing and Guangzhou, and even in the quiet moments when my lovely new baby daughter napped under mosquito netting in her crib at the Golden Roc Hotel in Yangchun, I had my nose buried in a true-crime paperback called The Unicorn’s Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius by Philadelphia Inquirer investigative reporter Steve Levy.

  The Unicorn’s Secret is about the notorious Ira Einhorn murder case, which I first learned about when I entered graduate school in 1977 at the University of Pennsylvania. Einhorn had been an undergraduate and graduate student at Penn during the 1960s, and as a prominent figure in Philadelphia’s New Left and burgeoning New Age circles, he remained a fixture on campus well into the seventies. By virtue of his gift for intellectual patter and self-promotion, Einhorn numbered politicians, corporate executives, clergy, academics, and fellow counterculture icons such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin among his friends. Overweight and not particularly cute, Einhorn also managed, by dint of his outsized personality, to be a highly successful roué; in 1972, his roving eye alighted on Holly Maddux, a pretty blond Bryn Mawr student from Texas. Soon the two were living together. Maddux disappeared late in the summer of 1977 (just as I was moving down to Philadelphia from New York), and although the police suspected that Einhorn was involved, they couldn’t put the pieces together. Then, in 1979, a Philadelphia police detective, working on a lead developed by a private investigator hired by Maddux’s distraught family, gained access to Einhorn’s West Philadelphia apartment and decided to open a trunk out on the enclosed sunporch. Maddux’s remains were inside.

  Einhorn protested his innocence (one of his claims was that the CIA planted the ghastly trunk in his apartment), and many of his influential friends supported him. Arlen Specter signed on as his defense attorney and managed to get him out on an unusually low bail. Einhorn promptly skipped the country, resurfacing in 1997 in France, where, still proclaiming his innocence, he was arrested. Einhorn had been convicted, in absentia, some years before of Maddux’s murder, and he was finally extradited to the United States in 2001 by French authorities. In October 2002 he was tried in person and convicted by a Philadelphia jury. By the way, Einhorn, who had been living the good life in a charming château, is married to a woman he met while on the run—a woman who was fully aware of the murder charges during their life together and still declares his innocence. Einhorn’s case proves, once again, that while lots of wonderful heterosexual women I know seem destined to live out their lives without romantic partners, a man—even one who chops up his girlfriend and hides her in a trunk in his apartment for eighteen months—inevitably seems to find an adoring mate.

  At this most extraordinary time in my life, what was I doing reading this well-researched tale about a sociopath whose crimes could have been scripted by that other notorious sometime Philadelphian Edgar Allan Poe? If the social worker who’d sincerely grilled Rich and me to determine our fitness as adoptive parents could have seen this paperback (with a photo of a mad-eyed Einhorn on the cover) perched on the hotel night table near the crib!, she surely would have pressed the alert button and had our exit visas and additional adoption paperwork frozen.

  I’ve thought sporadically about this incongruous choice of reading, and I think I understand some of the reasons why I packed The Unicorn’s Secret along with the diapers and stuffed animals. I think I was in self-protective denial after all those years of trying to have a baby and failing; I don’t think I really quite believed there would be a baby waiting for us at the end of this journey. My first sensation upon stepping into the hotel room and seeing Molly in the arms of her caregiver that night in Yangchun was that of her “thereness,” as Gertrude Stein might have said. Molly was a devout wish made flesh. Her physicality was overwhelming to me, and I had a first impression of her as being very big, even though she was, and still is, on the small side. Rich and I, along with most of our companions on this trip, had been burned by fate: we all had our stories of loss. I think that by choosing such an inappropriate book to take along, I was subconsciously steeling myself for an anticipated letdown.

  When situations are emotionally overwhelming, in order to get through them people like me who reflexively turn to books for comfort will sometimes choose a book that’s an escape from the crisis at hand. Looked at this way, The Unicorn’s Secret is the tonal double of the novels by Susan Isaacs and Maeve Binchy that I read during my father’s final hospital stay. I escaped into Binchy’s 1950s Ireland and Isaacs’s gutsy, funny wartime New York—places where the endings would be at least semi-happy. (I’m referring to Shining Through, Isaacs’s wonderful novel about a working-class, half-Jewish legal secretary from Queens named Linda Voss who eventually becomes an undercover OSS agent in Nazi Germany. Isaacs, whom I’ve referred to in a review as “Jane Austen with a schmear” is one of our great underappreciated contemporary writers. She consistently celebrates female spunk and heroism without any of the gynocentric mysticism that sometimes intrudes on, say, Toni Morrison’s novels. But because Isaacs works in the low-rent genres of mystery and suspense, she’s been relegated to the outer borough of “genre fiction.”) China, adoption, motherhood—it was all too much. I didn’t want to read books about any of these subjects; I needed a book as f
ar away from them as possible. The story of Ivy League maniac Ira Einhorn fit the bill.

  Perhaps there are some life experiences that are simply beyond books. By that I mean not that those experiences are quintessentially “unique” but that they’re so intensely personal, so crucial, that reading other people’s literary approximations of them is frustrating, even painful, rather than helpful. Rose Lewis’s children’s book I Love You Like Crazy Cakes is annoying to me because her experience of adopting from China isn’t mine. Lewis probably didn’t intend her book to be representative, but right now it is among the select children’s books about Chinese adoptions, so when I read it I become impatient. Other adoptive parents I know also have that complaint about it—it isn’t representative of their experience. For years I avoided reading Mary Gordon’s novels because I feared they would either approximate the Catholic-girl experience in a close-but-no-cigar kind of way or that they would mirror my own life so faithfully they would wipe out any need for me to write about it. When I did finally read Final Payments, I was relieved: Gordon nails the Catholic self-abnegation attitude, but the outer circumstances of her Catholic world in this and the other novels of hers that I’ve read make her experience sufficiently different for me to read in peace.

  Those first life-altering days spent with Molly in her native city of Yangchun will always be sui generis experience in my life. But with forays into the female extreme adventures of infertility and the adoption process so recently behind me, I couldn’t help but be aware that some aspects of the trip to China fit the traditional rough-and-rugged standards of the traditional male extreme adventure. Albeit, our group was cosseted in an up-to-date van that was stuffed to overflowing with Perego strollers, L.L. Bean diaper bags, and squirt bottles of waterless antibacterial soap, but state-of-the-art equipment doesn’t cancel out the extremity of the adventure. If it did, then the high-tech climbing gear that Krakauer’s crew lugged up Mount Everest in Into Thin Air and the sonar rig on the Andrea Gale described in A Perfect Storm would have disqualified those stories. Until the China trip, my high-risk adventures always had been emotional or intellectual, certainly not physical. When I was growing up, girls were not encouraged to be athletic. Of course, as a New York City kid, I played slap ball and hopscotch and jump rope on the streets every day after school. Phys ed at my Catholic high school was a stationary subject: I remember mornings spent sitting on the bleachers dressed in, I kid you not, yellow bloomers and taking written exams on the rules of basketball and golf. Title IX, guaranteeing girls equal access to athletic facilities, was passed during my last year of college at Fordham University in the Bronx, so no sports teams for me. I’ve always walked a lot, but apart from working, irregular enrollment in aerobics classes, and, these days, happily running around the playground, I’ve spent much of my adult life curled up on a piece of upholstered furniture, reading.