A Mother's Trial (10 page)

So Priscilla was hesitant to pursue the relationship. She had set her sights high and she just wasn’t certain that Steve could be a part of the life she saw for herself. She planned to find out at Berkeley.

Adjustment to the college did not prove difficult, because although Priscilla found herself in the midst of political upheaval on campus, she refused to be distracted. She wanted an education; she couldn’t be bothered with confrontation. Socially she was drawn to the more conservative students. In fact, she did not go out frequently, but she did date a couple of engineering students. One was from India. Priscilla was intrigued for a while, partly because he made no advances for a long time, but suddenly he made pass after pass and she dropped him. Then she began seeing another engineering student, but he demanded immediate sex. Although her sexual standards had changed to conform to the Berkeley students’ more relaxed attitudes, she was still a virgin. So that relationship was abandoned. She and Steve continued to correspond regularly, until he announced he was coming home on leave.

The occasion was not joyful: Steve had been notified that his mother had cancer and was probably dying. But Steve and Priscilla intended to spend a week together before he returned to South Carolina. She wondered how it would feel to be with him again. She had planned a lot of things for them to do.

“Pris!” He was flying across the grass to meet her, arms wide, an enormous grin splitting his wide face. They hugged and patted each other, both talking at once.

“I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” he said, his eyes moist.

 “Of course I’d be here, you big dummy!” she said. “Where do you think I’d be?”

“Out having a big ole time with one of your Indian friends,” he answered.

“Oh, that’s over. You know I wrote you that’s over.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t sure I believed you, Pris.”

Priscilla leaned against him and drew him down for a long kiss. “Now do you believe me?” She offered a coquettish smile.

 “Wow! You know it, lady!”

They spent the day touring San Francisco. Priscilla showed him Fisherman’s Wharf, and they snapped photographs of each other and laughed and kissed.

“It’s like we’ve never been apart,” Steve said. “I was so nervous about this, but it’s just beautiful.”

“I know,” said Priscilla. “I feel like that, too.”

That night, Priscilla brought Steve home to her new apartment on Sacramento Street she had recently rented with a Japanese-American friend from graduate school.

They had a spare couch in the living room, but Steve didn’t sleep there. Priscilla took him to her room and to her bed.

Sometime later, and before they were married the following June, they discussed their plans for children.

“Let’s have lots of kids,” Steve said.

“Well, maybe two of our own. And then we could adopt more. Okay?” Priscilla answered.

“Okay. Sounds pretty damn good to me.”

3

It was awfully late for Erik and Jason to be up, Steve thought for the tenth time. He wasn’t so sure that they should even have brought the boys to the airport, but Pris was set that the whole family should greet Tia when she landed.

They had left hours ago for the San Jose Airport—way too early. He and Priscilla had fought endlessly about what time to leave, what route to take. Would 101 be faster or 17? What should the boys wear? Would it be cold at nine-thirty on a November night? Would Tia even be on the flight from Los Angeles? Technically they should have flown to L.A. to meet the plane from Korea, but by chance a social worker on the Korean flight was continuing on to the Bay Area from Los Angeles and had agreed to bring Tia with her—if she could make the connecting flight.

It was a big if. They had no description of the social worker who would be carrying Tia except that she was blond. To make matters worse, the boys were falling apart from excitement and fatigue. Five-year-old Erik was streaking about the deserted airport, and Jason, just three, was clinging to Steve’s leg, weary-eyed and whiny.

Steve shifted in his chair and a big weight of anxiety resting heavily in his stomach moved along with him. Had they done the right thing with this adoption? he wondered. Would he love this child as much as he did his own? How would he really feel about a Korean child in their family? How would the boys react?

He got up and half-ran after Erik, who was just disappearing from sight at the far end of the terminal. That boy was a handful sometimes, Steve thought. They had nicknamed him Bam-Bam after the destructive little kid in
The Flintstones.
He’d been rambunctious from the beginning, deciding to sail into life on his own timetable almost a month early—February 6, 1970. They had taken Lamaze classes and were prepared for natural childbirth, but the delivery was hard, and they had to pull Erik out with forceps. He had the ugliest forceps marks Steve had ever seen, and his skin was yellow, but to Steve he was beautiful. The jaundice had worsened, though, and they had taken Erik back to the hospital after a few days at home for a complete blood transfusion.

Erik recovered but life around him was never easy; he found all kinds of trouble. He had his skull X-rayed twice already—once after he had been thrown to the floor in the truck—stitches a couple of times, both a sprained and a fractured foot and numerous treatments for his lazy eye. Jason had pulled down his share of problems, too, Steve realized. A year ago he had practically drowned at Crazy Horse campground and Steve had gone down on hands and knees to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

The seven and a half years since their marriage had not rolled smoothly. First Steve’s mother had died; then a year later they discovered his father had cancer, too, and in July 1969, he had followed his wife to the grave. It had torn Steve apart.

The next year had worn particularly hard. The problems resulted from a combination of factors, Steve knew. Priscilla was in early pregnancy with Erik and was experiencing severe morning sickness and back pain. After Steve took a job as a guard at San Quentin, everything slid solidly downhill. Steve had been casting around for a career. Correctional work appealed to him, as did the thought of an army career, but Priscilla was against the service. He tried part-time work as a commodities broker and attended school at a junior college while Priscilla finished her last year of graduate school, but he hadn’t hit on anything he wanted to do. Priscilla pressed him to return to school full time, but her pregnancy put an end to that possibility because the Marin County Department of Social Services mandated a leave seven months into pregnancy.

The pressures of San Quentin almost brought their marriage to a halt. Steve could look at that now with a measure of objectivity, but at that time he had lived daily with controlled fear. The inmates were as scared as he was; it didn’t take long to figure that out. In that place, fear was the governing factor. The Chicanos and the whites played off against each other, with the blacks holding the balance of power, and everybody looked sideways at everybody else. He had had to deal with them on their own level, and he had been good at defusing the situation when it threatened to get hot.

At home, though, he hadn’t been as successful. He and Priscilla spent the year screaming at each other. She wanted him to assume control of his life while he could hardly control what was happening at work. And he knew he relied on her for a lot; the army had made him peculiarly dependent, and with his parents both gone, he’d leaned hard on her.

They’d had some real high-level hassles, he remembered. One time Priscilla had been worried enough about the possible effects of all this emotional stress on the baby she was carrying that she’d even gone down to Kaiser to talk to a psychologist about it.

But one day he had been talking to a friend at work who had put it all in perspective for Steve.

“Do you love her?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then get your head out of your ass and do something about it!”

Steve had gone home, and he and Priscilla had sat on the couch and talked and cried, and from that point on they’d both known they were working toward building something instead of fighting each other every damn step of the way.

Things had picked up from that point, Steve thought as he grabbed at and caught Erik’s waving shirttail. He latched onto the boy’s hand and walked him firmly back down to the gate where Tia’s plane was due to land.

He had left San Quentin on schedule the summer of 1970, to attend school full time at Sonoma State. Priscilla had really encouraged him, insisting that he was smart, that he just had to learn how to study. He had started out on probation because of his poor record, but he had done well, and after a year and a half of intensive study he had earned a B.A. in Sociology. By then Priscilla was working full time in the Homefinders unit at Marin County’s Health and Human Services, and she was pregnant again.

The second pregnancy had been difficult from the beginning, and by the end Priscilla’s high blood pressure and signs of toxemia landed her in the hospital for several weeks of complete bed rest. The doctor finally induced delivery three weeks early. Steve began working for the state Department of Vocational Rehabilitation in Oakland doing disability evaluations. It wasn’t what he wanted—he hoped to work at Marin County juvenile hall, but jobs were tight and he took what he could. But his main satisfaction was his family. He wasn’t embarrassed at how important his boys were to him. He always cared for them as much as Priscilla. To him, childcare was a fifty-fifty proposition—he and Pris had no argument there. He couldn’t understand families where the women did all the work in the home and the father sat with his feet propped up and a beer in his hand. Steve even participated at Erik’s nursery school. His kids were an extension of himself, he felt, and he owed it to them to give them what they needed. And that came down to changing their diapers and fixing them meals—doing whatever was necessary.

Then in 1974, a job opened up in juvenile hall and Steve grabbed it. He had been there a year and a half now, and found it incredibly exciting. He was working in an open program for young boys—there were no locks on the doors—and he was really making some progress toward rehabilitating these kids.

He could see the effect. He was good at counseling. The kids trusted him and he felt he was particularly strong at evaluating whether he was dealing with retardation, or a learning disability, or delinquency, or a neurological problem, or a problem with diet.

Steve’s home life was stable, too. Later he would look back at this period as one of his happiest. They had started talking about adoption right after Priscilla’s hysterectomy in January of last year. She had never fully recovered from childbirth with Jason, never stopped bleeding; it had turned her into a wreck, so she had needed the surgery. There had been a few complications but she’d come out of there a new woman, Steve had bragged to everyone, smirking.

They decided to try for a Vietnamese baby. For one thing, there had been tremendous coverage on TV about the mixed-race children of American GIs whom nobody wanted, and also it was increasingly difficult to adopt white American infants. It turned out they had both been considering a Vietnamese child but neither one had said anything to the other. Priscilla thought he wouldn’t accept a racially mixed child, she told him—but he didn’t care at all. “A child is a child,” he said.

So Priscilla wrote letters to various agencies, and after she was released from the hospital, she attended a meeting of prospective parents at Catholic Social Service in San Francisco. Then they sent in an application asking for a girl any age up to Erik’s age. It was important not to get one older than Erik, Priscilla said, to avoid giving the oldest child’s place to a newcomer in the family. After the home study—including interviews and physicals—was completed, the social worker sent their application to Vietnam to be matched with a child. That was in the fall of 1974. Then they waited.

In January of 1975, Priscilla returned to work, and in April the Vietnamese babylift into Travis Air Force Base began. Priscilla volunteered to help process the children as they landed, ferrying a number of them into San Francisco in the middle of the night. She met the director of the New York agency there and asked whether all the children had been assigned to adoptive parents. Ninety-five percent of them had, it turned out, and soon they learned they weren’t going to get one of the others.

They had been terribly disappointed, but then their social worker asked them if they’d be interested in a Korean child, and of course they were. Just a couple of months later—in July 1975—they had received a preliminary report on a Korean child. Surprisingly it was an infant.

Pris was so goddamned excited; Steve would never forget her reaction. She had called him at work, screaming and crying that the social worker had a two-month-old baby girl for them and that they needed to drive to the city, see her picture and the report on her, and decide whether they wanted to keep her.

Priscilla couldn’t wait another minute. She took the afternoon off—Steve was just finishing for the day—so they could both go over there at once. They had wanted that little girl immediately. No question about that, Steve remembered. The social worker handed them some forms to fill out, immigration questionnaires, papers to be notarized, other forms for the bank to process. They completed all the paperwork the next day—Pris rushing them around like there was no tomorrow. They even had to be fingerprinted at the sheriff’s department at the Marin County Civic Center where Pris worked. She was talking a mile a minute about working out her schedule so she could get time off when the baby came.

The wait had been the hardest. Priscilla spent the time collecting new baby things and fixing up Tia’s room—right next to theirs. She bought a baby book especially for adopted children—she was religious about that sort of thing: Erik and Jason’s baby books were all filled in to the last detail. Then they were given an arrival date, but it was canceled and the waiting began again.