The People in the Trees (52 page)

There were other, less tidy puzzles as well. It became clear that he was obsessed with his feces; he would leave woody lengths of them on the carpets, in the yard, on the table. The strange thing was that he did not seem unfamiliar with the toilet itself; Mrs. Tomlinson reported to me that upon his introduction to it, he had pressed the lever with a manual dexterity and confidence that had yet to manifest itself in any other noticeable way and had watched the water swirl away. One night I watched him leave his bedroom and walk toward the bathroom, only to stop a few feet from it, almost lazily undo the strings of his pajama pants, and squat directly above the hallway carpet’s centerpiece, a large faded fuchsia rose. He had in the previous day or so acquired a facial expression that he interchanged (often, and for no discernible reason) with his usual automaton’s gaze: a ghastly facsimile of a smile, in which he spread his long mouth into a wide crescent and revealed his few dust-colored teeth. When I called out his name, he turned to me unhurriedly and gave me this smile. Even after I smacked him across his bottom and groin, he continued to smile, as if his facial muscles had seized themselves into a rictus from which they could not relax.

It seems foolish to admit this now, but at the time I allowed myself to be surprised by Victor’s behavior. He had been so quiet, so defeated when I discovered him that I mistook his wanness for a certain promise of tractability, a willingness to learn and be taught. The fact that he initially had little discernible personality of his own
only assured me that my job with him would be easy; I would instill in him the properties I had always wished to bestow on my children—he would be inquisitive, and polite, and obedient, and reasonable. But over his first month I came to see that he was more stubborn and altogether less pliable than I had assumed; indeed, his very impassivity began to seem a sort of spiky defiance. I began to think of him, with his masklike mien and terrible smile and graceless, stiff-limbed walk, as a golem, something I had unfairly and unreasonably awakened and let loose to totter through my household, wrecking it with its inhuman, robotic, indecipherable movements, its impulses ungovernable by man. Indeed, he was difficult not because the problems that he presented were so insurmountable but simply because I was unsure how to go about addressing them. I had had other children who were monstrous—Muti, during her first month in the house, had tried to kill the cat by gouging out its eyes with a pair of chopsticks; Terrence had torn the head off one of the older children’s gerbils with his pointy little teeth (
that
had caused quite an uproar)—but I had at least understood them. They had liked screaming and shrieking and throwing loud, sustained fits. Moreover, they were excited to be screamed back at, to have someone with whom to engage. Such episodes were, of course, wearisome, and frequently messy, but they were at least the beginnings of conversations, or at the very least of exchanges.

But such interactions seemed to have no effect on Victor. Over the months I tried approaching and then punishing him in every way I could. I praised him and cursed at him. I kissed him and hit him. I gave him extra portions of pasta (he seemed particularly fond of various carbohydrates, unlike the others, who had craved meat) and withheld food entirely. I sang to him and slapped his face, murmured nonsense into his ear and pulled his hair, but he remained spectacularly indifferent to my various attentions, only sat grinning like a skull.

After several months I grew to regret ever bringing him home with me. The various infections that had written themselves on his skin had vanished (and indeed, he was pronounced by Shapiro to be in excellent health), but the transformation from a sick child to a well one was not as dramatic as I had expected. Some of
the children, after making inauspicious first impressions, revealed themselves to be delightful creatures: their skin smoothed and their cheeks became fat and shiny, and their peculiar, rootlike hair grew in thick and faintly sweet-smelling, like mesquite wood. The restoration of good health (if, that is, he had ever been in good health to begin with) to Victor revealed no such pleasant surprises. He did not become a gleaming-eyed boy with an infectious laugh and a steady, focused gaze. Indeed, he was, once healthy, much what he had been before: neither a winning nor an attractive child, he remained stubbornly unlikely to inspire any feelings of affection or endearment, even from those in whom such emotions were expected.

Eventually it became clear to me that Victor was not the sort of child with whom a behavioral threshold could be reached and crossed. Rather, his socialization would be a long and tedious process, full of infinitesimal, unnoticeable bits of progress and lengthy, discouraging periods of regression. I spent an evening watching him, taking note of what he did and did not know, what he might be easily taught, what bad habits I might have to break first. He had, predictably, no language—although when forced or suitably inspired, he would let loose a series of terse, simian grunts—but he seemed to be able to understand timbres. A rebuke conveyed in a tone that cracked the air like a slap would still him, and a voice pitched to a high register, singy and false, seemed to comfort him. But in general he seemed to have learned not to react to things at all; hence the frightening, inappropriate smile, the weird, frozen blankness.

It was the smile that bothered me most. I offered twenty dollars to the first child who could teach Victor to successfully mimic acceptable facial reactions, and for several nights after they spent their evenings in the living room ringed around him. They tickled him, told him jokes (which he of course could not understand), danced about him, funneled cake bits into their mouths, making expressions of delight. Naturally, though, there was no response from him, and after a week or less the children lost interest and returned to their aforementioned after-dinner activities. Still, I did not think the week a waste, for I had seen him turning his veiny head from
one eagerly beaming child to another, his mouth slightly open, as if curious to learn the rules of some complex and bewildering game, one whose skillful mastery would determine his ultimate happiness. I’m not sure, then, that he understood this consciously or not—or that he would even have known how to begin to comprehend the idea of happiness—but he seemed, after a period of many weeks, to consciously devote himself to his studies. A few months later, I found him watching a talk show on television one morning. It took me some minutes to realize that he was looking at the newscasters’ faces, their bright, clownish smiles. After a while he stood and padded over to the hallway bathroom. I followed, silent as a specter, and stood for a very long time, watching him pull his mouth into odd and imperfect expressions of joy, gazing at himself in the mirror as if trying to memorize the exact angle at which his lips should curve upward, puzzling over the many muscles that such an apparently simple gesture seemed to require.

By the next year he had learned first how to approximate and then how to truly engage in appropriate human behavior. Although he never became a particularly captivating child, he managed to do well enough for himself: he grew, and ate, and acquired language and apparently genuine human emotions. On a more mundane level, he learned how to use the bathroom correctly, and how to eat with a fork and spoon, and how to tie his shoes. It was also revealed that he had certain easily indulged interests; he was very fond of simple mechanisms—anything that involved pulleys or levers fascinated him—and he could spend literally hours playing with the old dumbwaiter outside the kitchen, watching the box silently glide up on its twirled, shiny ropes and then lowering it back to the basement again, where it would come creaking into sight like some archaic spacecraft. Eventually he was sent to school, where he learned to read and write and even made a few friends.

After a few years he was, in every respect that mattered or was noticeable, a perfectly average boy, one who smiled and frowned and raged and laughed. His transformation had occurred so slowly, and over such a long period of time, that I was able to recognize it only long after it had ended. Indeed, I began to think of his initial years in the house as his sort of chrysalis phase—I could remember
(and would, often) the child he had been when I discovered him, but I soon found that it was very difficult to recall exactly how he had metamorphosed into what sat before me at the dinner table or behind me in the car, eating or chattering or merely watching the scenery slide by. The future I imagined for him, when I did so at all, was remarkable only for its haziness: he would, I suppose, go to high school, then perhaps college, would find a job (and I was unable to imagine what that might be, whether he would be a tradesman or perhaps work in an office in a white shirt, a tie wrapped around his throat, his diction perfect and deracinated), would marry and have a family. I would see him and worry over him less and less frequently until he became as pleasantly remote as a memory.

And really, that should have been the end of my story with Victor. Over the months his problems began to seem less exciting, less mysterious, less
vivid
, than they had at first. For one, there were new children, who would prove challenging in different, more understandable ways. A year after I adopted Victor, I added to my family another child, a boy, whom I named Whitney. He, like Victor, was underfed and undersocialized, but unlike Victor, he was wild—a screecher and a tantrumer. In other words, he was easy to discipline and swift to improve. Still, after Whitney, I decided to take a break from adopting children. (It is curious to me now that I thought of my decision in exactly those terms: I would, I resolved,
take a break
from children, but I was somehow unable or unwilling to admit the truth: that I had long ceased to derive that joy I so desired from a new child’s arrival, that I should simply stop adding them to my life.)

Consequently, those years, between, say, 1982 and 1985, were very pleasant ones for me. A batch of the children went away to college, and suddenly the house was empty (or at least emptier than it had been in a long time), and I was able to travel, often and for extended periods, both to places I’d long wanted to go and to places I hadn’t visited in years. One weekend I left the children at home under Mrs. Lansing (after more than fifteen years of tending to my children, Mrs. Tomlinson decided to retire, giving me the telephone number of her sister-in-law, a similarly capable woman named JoAnne Lansing, before she did) and went to see Owen at Bard, where he had just begun teaching. We spent a very nice few days together, Owen and
I, as well as a boy
⁷⁷
—one of his students, I believe—whom he was dating at the time.

But in 1986 I was seized by—what? A sort of boredom, I suppose, or else a madness (or was it simply my old yearning?), and traveled once more to U’ivu, where I spent a few listless days trekking over the island and charting its ongoing decline. And when I returned to Maryland, I found myself doing so with a set of twins, Jared and Drew, as well as a girl, Kerry. Suddenly my life once again seemed to elude my grasp, and three years later I was almost horrified to find myself with an entire new generation of children; it was almost as if they had multiplied one night when I was asleep. Indeed, it seemed a far more plausible explanation than the truth: that I had, for some inexplicable set of reasons I could not quite articulate to myself, repopulated my life with a dozen new existences, all of whom I would have to witness trundling through the multitudinous steps of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. I began to wonder seriously whether I had something of a tic. How was it, I thought, that I found myself now with
more
children, when only a few years before I had been anxiously waiting for the house to empty of them so that my life, alone, unburdened, might finally begin anew? Why was I incapable of stopping? What was I hoping each new one might provide me that the previous thirty-odd had not? What was it that I wanted?

II
.

In retrospect—when it is so easy to blame oneself for everything that has gone wrong—I realize that I should not have been so complacent about, so accepting of, Victor’s apparent maturation without first finding a way to properly control him, a way of exerting my authority that he would understand and respect. But something had changed. Once I would have wanted to discover why Victor behaved the way he did, but that was no longer true; by the time he had begun to behave appropriately, I was merely relieved that he had learned to be manageable and that he had left certain behavior behind. I began to realize that I was bored, or rather, that I had lost my taste for the whole occupation of child-raising. I was no longer interested
in solving the formerly intriguing puzzles of my children’s psyches. I no longer cared why one shrieked hysterically when confronted with coffeepots or why another cowered at the sight of the orange juice in its sweating, frosted bottle. Before, I would have spent many contented days mulling over the (usually unhappy) possible events and narratives that had resulted in such reactions; I often thought of them as bright, snappy little mindbenders, rubber bands to mentally stretch and tease when I was taking a break from the real work that filled my day. And such petty quandaries were in their own way immensely fulfilling, for they satisfied much of what I considered the romance of child-rearing: that it
should
at times be puzzling and elusive and problematic, that each child was a being who could be understood and, if need be, led in one direction or another. Indeed, when I had adopted Muiva, in 1968, the prospect of raising a child had seemed both tantalizing and rich with wonder: to have as one’s charge something both knowable and not, at once predictable and full of startling surprises, seemed to promise unimaginable adventure, dozens of daily revelations wrought in miniature.