CHAPTER

The Stork

the boys have always known they were adopted. They were three days old when they came into our lives, and we told them the very first day how ecstatic we were with the way events had played out. Even before they could acknowledge it, they were told how they came to be in our house and made it incandescent. It is nothing we ever hid from them. It is part of who they are.

Perhaps this explains why, when the boys were very young, one of their favorite stories was how the pets they shared the house with then, a rescued dog and two rescued cats, came to be in our family. I think that knowing how beloved these animals were, being able to love them on their own, and the story of how all of this came to be reassured them that kindness and caring are neither limited nor determined by the traditional biological parent-child relationship. What matters are the opportunities that are created and the extent to which the offered potential is fulfilled—the chance and ability to give love and support when they are most needed.

I would be flattering myself if I said that I’d been ambivalent about becoming a father. Nothing about parenting had generated any eagerness in me, no doubt as a result of the attenuated relationship I had had with my own parents and the experiences of my own childhood. However, because Jennifer badly wanted to be a mother, I agreed to pursue the choice. We endured multiple miscarriages, faced fertility issues, and ultimately gave up trying to get pregnant. We looked at several adoption agencies, but because I was over forty we did not satisfy their criteria. Ultimately, a friend told us about Golden Cradle, an adoption agency located in south New Jersey that did not consider age a determinative factor in one’s ability to be a good parent. We applied and were accepted into the program.

Arty Elgart had founded Golden Cradle, which is a nonprofit organization, after it took him five years to adopt his first child. Arty had concluded that adoption should not have to be such an arduous experience, and he sought to expedite the process of matching would-be parents with birth parents. After fifteen years on the Golden Cradle board of directors, I have come to the conclusion that what has made traditional Golden Cradle adoptions so successful—those in which the agency finds and assists the birth parent(s) and then arranges for the adoption by parents in the program, who have paid a fee—is that the agency makes certain that an adoption happens for the right reasons. There is no lingering regret by the birth mother or birth parents; they understand that it is in the best interests of the child to place him or her in the hands of another couple. There is no second-guessing; they know the child will be well loved and that they are sharing a gift of inestimable value.

In a traditional adoption, the birth parents pick the parents to whom the child is going to be introduced. When an expectant mother or couple who wanted to place their child for adoption through Golden Cradle contacted the agency, Golden Cradle would focus on what was important to the birth mother or birth parents. The agency would ask, What characteristics do you want to see in the couple who will adopt your child? And if the mother answered, Well, I’m Italian, and I am a potter, so I’d like the child’s parents to be Italian professionals interested in the arts, Golden Cradle would reply, Well, we have an Italian couple who are not professional and are not really interested in the arts, and we have a Jewish professional couple who are. What’s more important to you, religion or lifestyle? Depending upon the responses that Golden Cradle received to the questions posed, it provided prospective adoptive couples’ autobiographies for the birth parents or birth mother to choose from that reflected the birth parents’ interests.

For the first six months after placement had occurred, adoptive parents would prepare what were known as “Sharing Sheets,” letting the birth mother/parents know how the child was developing and the parent-child relationships were evolving. The Sharing Sheets, each of which included at least six photographs, were turned over to Golden Cradle and forwarded to the birth parent(s). Knowing that the child was doing well and was loved and appreciated served to confirm the correctness of the decision and helped the birth parent(s) to say good-bye.

When we joined Golden Cradle, forty couples at a time were accepted into the program, all of whom were waiting for children through traditional adoptions. Arty spoke at the first meeting of our class. And the first thing he said was: “I want you all to relax. You’re all going to be parents. One couple has to be first, and one couple has to be last, but you’re all going to get a baby.”

Early on, Golden Cradle staffers had learned that when they called adoptive parents for administrative reasons and told them, “This is Golden Cradle,” people would flip out, thinking that they had just been placed and were now parents. So at the first meeting everyone was informed that if someone called and said they were from Golden Cradle, it did not mean there was a baby waiting for them. When the phone rang and the voice on the other end said, “This is the stork calling,” the baby was there.

Jennifer and I ended up being the last in our class to be placed. It took almost two years. We had been waiting for the call so long, we had stopped thinking about it. Despite the assurances we had received, it seemed a distant possibility, not guaranteed or inevitable. Anticipation about becoming parents had long since faded into the grind of our daily lives. We stopped wondering about and planning for a future centered around kids. As it turned out, twice before we actually were placed, birth mothers had picked us before changing their minds about placing their children. Hence, no “stork call.” But we had no way of knowing that at the time. And as things turned out, it all was for the best.

I was forty-four years old when we got our stork call. In retrospect, I am glad this part of my life came as a complete surprise. If somebody had said to me ahead of time, “You’re going to be the forty-four-year-old father of twins,” I would have said, “There’s no way that’s going to happen.” I was riddled with doubts as to my ability to be an effective father. I felt wholly inadequate and unprepared to be the father of one child, let alone two at the same time.

One Saturday morning, Jenny and I were sitting on the couch having coffee, reading the paper, and getting ready to go into center city and put in a few hours at our respective law firms. I had come to believe that some people consume themselves with their jobs and careers so that they do not have the time to examine the emptiness or unhappiness in their lives. I think we were like that. We were both under enormous pressure to perform, and neither of us had the confidence to feel that we were good enough, which kept us working harder, pushing a burden up-slope to a destination we could never reach. We had substituted work for a life of substantive content and meaning. We were simply going through the motions.

And then the telephone rang.

Jennifer and I looked at each other. Neither of us had any idea who might be at the other end of the line. It wasn’t the time of day that the phone rang in our house. My first reaction to phone calls at unexpected hours was that they bore bad news. I stood up, put the section of the newspaper I had been reading on the couch, the coffee cup on the end table. I walked to the bookcase and picked up the receiver.

“Good morning,” I said, trying to sound as positive as I could. I would defy the intruder on the other end of the line.

“Hello, Larry. It’s Susan from Golden Cradle. Guess what? This is your stork call.”

Susan was the social worker we had worked with since enrolling with Golden Cradle. My thoughts immediately went to the night before. Every Friday night for years, a bunch of us from the office had gone out to a bar. I sensed in that moment that I would never again go out drinking with the folks I worked with. I never did.

I felt as if I had been hit in the back of the head with a two-by-four, except that it didn’t hurt. Everything had been knocked out of me. It was our social worker, Susan, telling me that we were parents. What did that mean?

Rather stunned, I said the first thing that came into my head: “Really? That’s amazing.” I was buying time, trying to internalize what Susan had just told me.

Susan said, “Congratulations. You and Jen are parents. Would you like to know what you have?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You’ve got a boy,” Susan said. “He’s three days old and he’s absolutely beautiful.”

“No kidding!” I exclaimed. I had the strangest feeling, as though I were speaking under water. “I guess this means,” I said, “that we don’t get to go to the movies tonight, right?”

By now, Jennifer had put down her newspaper and was looking at me, trying to figure out what was going on.

“Wait,” Susan said. “There’s more.”

“There’s more?” I asked. I was in a complete state of shock as it was. “What do you mean, there’s more?”

And Susan said, “Your son has a brother. You’ve got twins!”

“Here,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed by this news, and held out the receiver to Jennifer. I realized that everything in my life had abruptly been reprioritized. Concerns I could never have been able to imagine would from now on take precedence and control my days. I recalled, in some remote part of my brain, a conversation I had had with my oldest friend, who found out at forty that she was pregnant with twins. In typical fashion for her, she had researched the parenting experience. She had told me that the studies showed that if you were parenting correctly, you would not have time for many of the things that you thought were important before you became a parent, but you would feel more fulfilled as a result. I’d had no idea what she meant. At the time she told me this, my hobby was photography, and I was working in my darkroom twice a week until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I could not imagine giving that up. I have spent a total of two nights in the darkroom since the boys came home, printing up photos as a favor to a friend. I have never once missed it.

“Congratulations,” I informed Jennifer. “You’re a mom.” Then I added, “It’s twins.”

I hope that I was smiling as I said this, but I really can’t remember. Jennifer shrieked, “What?!” and jumped off the couch as though she had received an electric shock. She grabbed the receiver and started talking to Susan. I mentally drifted away, trying to absorb the information and figure out the next step. At some point Jennifer began to cry. If I recall correctly, she did not stop crying for at least two days.

Finally, Jennifer hung up the phone. Mascara colored her face beneath her eyes like an athlete’s eye black. “They said we can show up anytime after twelve,” she told me, sniffling. “The birth mother is still there. She needs some time to say good-bye.”

I nodded, pursing my lips. “That’s understandable,” I said.

We realized that we needed to get dressed and go to a baby store. We had absolutely nothing in the house for a baby, because in Jewish tradition the keinahora says that it is bad luck if you plan for a baby before it arrives. All we had was a room on the second floor painted dark yellow, which was where the baby (one!) was to go, and which held only a tan couch, a set of curtains and a window shade for each of the two windows, and three bare white bookshelves anchored into the wall. We had no baby clothing, no formula, no bedding; we had no books, no toys. There were no bottles, no cribs, and no dressers. We did not have a name for one baby, let alone for two. We had nothing. We were completely unprepared for this. We hugged each other and went upstairs to get dressed.

I put on my tuxedo. How often would I get to be a father and bring two boys home? I wore bright red socks and my black sneakers so people would know that on some level, at least, I wasn’t taking myself too seriously. In later years, the boys admitted that they were very impressed to learn that I treated the event with such significance that I went to the trouble of wearing a tuxedo (even paired with red socks) in order to go meet them for the first time. The tux was a hand-me-down from my dad, whom it no longer fit. Somewhere in there, a circle was being completed, but I didn’t have time to think about this. We called Jennifer’s parents in Bethesda to tell them the news; they said they would pack and arrive later in the afternoon. My own parents were out, so we were not able to tell them yet that they had finally become grandparents. We called our siblings, scattered around the country. We called some friends. We asked people to spread the word that the next day we would have everyone over for an open house. Jennifer called a caterer to arrange for food to be delivered. The real estate agent who had sold us our house, and who had become a friend, ordered two stork signs for us to plant on the lawn to announce the boys’ arrival.

We drove to the closest available baby store. Jennifer went to look at furniture. I explained to the saleswoman who approached me that we had two newborn boys coming into our house and had absolutely nothing for them but an empty room.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You’re on the way to pick them up now?”

I nodded. “In an hour,” I told her.

“Well, to start with, you’ll need car seats,” she pointed out.

She walked me over to a little room off the main part of the store, took a gray plastic car seat off a shelf, and set it on the floor. The inside of the shell contained a padded cushion; a belt and two straps were joined at the center buckle.

“Can you show me how to use that?” I asked.

“Of course.” She knelt next to the car seat. She turned it over and showed me where the car’s seat belt slid through the bottom of the carrier assembly to hold it in place on the seat. Next, she demonstrated how the carrier locked into place on its base when the lever was pushed down and how it disengaged when the handle was flipped back. The handle that locked the seat into place in the car was used to carry the child when the seat was disengaged. She cautioned me that the carriers were to be placed on the rear seat facing toward the back of the car. Then she turned the carrier around and started explaining to me how to place the child in and restrain him. But nothing she said seemed to take.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I’m having a hard time following how this works. Can you show me?” I reached around her and picked up a stuffed animal, a little gray-and-white elephant. I handed the elephant to her to use as a visual demonstration. I needed to see what I needed to do.

“Okay,” she said. “First you open the harness like this.” She pressed the center button on the buckle, which released the shoulder straps. The buckle itself was on a strap located on the bottom of the seat. “Then you place your baby in the seat like this.” She looked up at me to see if I was watching her, then turned her face downward again to concentrate on what she was doing. She put the elephant in the car seat and pulled the buckle up to its chest from between its legs. “You move his little trunk out of the way like so, then slide the clasp back into place.” She lifted the elephant’s short trunk and pushed the clasp for the shoulder straps into the buckle until it clicked into place. She looked up again with a smile.

“Voilà,” she said, raising both hands in a gesture of triumph.

I bought the elephant, too. It was the boys’ first toy. They still have it. I hope that they always will.

We also bought two cribs with mattresses, four sets of sheets, four blankets, and four pillowcases. We purchased several boxes of formula, bottles and bottle liners, clothes, and some more toys. Jennifer ordered a dresser that would be delivered in a couple of days. We bought wipes, diapers, and talcum powder, just enough of what we needed to get started and until we could figure out where it was cheapest to get more. We managed to fit all of this into the trunk of the car. Then we made the twenty-minute drive to Cherry Hill.

We entered the building where the Golden Cradle offices were located and took the elevator to the agency’s suite. Because this was the first set of twins at Golden Cradle in five years, the entire staff had gathered in celebration. Everyone accompanied us into the conference room, offered their heartfelt congratulations, and then left us there, closing the door. Alone together, Jennifer and I clasped hands. We were about to experience one of those moments in life for which there can be no dress rehearsal. We stood staring at the door that had just been closed behind us. What was behind door number one?

There was a soft knock and the door opened. Shelly, a social worker who assisted with birth parents and who had flown out to meet and return with the boys and their mother, came in with the babies, one cradled in each arm. The boys were wrapped in white blankets festooned with yellow stars. Shelly was grinning from ear to ear; just about five feet tall, with red hair, she reminded me of a leprechaun.

“Here,” she said. She handed one of the boys to Jennifer. “One for you,” she said, and turned, handed me the other boy, and said, “and one for you.”

Then she left, closing the door softly behind her, and the staff left the four of us alone for twenty minutes.

I had never before held a newborn child. He was sleeping. It felt as if I were holding a pillow.

The first thing I said to Jennifer was, “Oh, my goodness.”

The boy I was holding had a tiny, wrinkled red face that was so pushed in it looked as if it had been hit by a shovel. His hands appeared shriveled, like little monkey hands. I looked at the boy Jennifer was holding, and he looked exactly the same way. I said, “They’re really funny-looking. I think they look like ET.”

“Trust me,” Jennifer said. Her mascara was streaming down her face again. “They’re beautiful.”

I had no idea how she could tell that, but she proved to be right.

I was not sure what we should do next. They were asleep, so there was no sense in rocking them.

“Okay,” I said to the one I was holding. “Who are you?”

There was not a lot of talking to be done. We were simply awestruck at the sudden sequence of events. We sat on the couch and placed the boys between us and stared at them. Then we switched boys. After that, we each experienced holding both of them. We must have used the word amazing eight times. They did not open their eyes, so we had no idea what color they were. They did not wake up. It was inconceivable to imagine the power they now held over us. And there had been a subtle but critically important change within me, although I was not to realize it for years to come. I was no longer afraid of being a father—now I was afraid of not being a good one.

Then Susan and the agency’s director returned to fill us in on the boys’ family history. A brother of theirs, who was three years older than our boys, had been adopted when he was several weeks old and was living in New England.

This time, the birth parents had contacted Golden Cradle three days before the due date to arrange for adoption. At the time they contacted Golden Cradle, however, they did not know that they were about to become the parents of twins. In the sonograms, one of the boys was in front of or on top of the other, and no one appeared to have paid much attention to what was really going on in there. After the first boy was born, we were told, their mother said, “I don’t think I’m done yet.” She was rushed into surgery, and the second boy was delivered by C-section twenty minutes after she had delivered the first.

We also learned that the birth parents initially asked for the twins to be placed with their brother in New England, but the couple who had adopted the boys’ brother responded that they were not in a position to adopt twins. Shelly discussed other adoption possibilities with the birth parents, then flew to their home state a day before the births occurred with the files of several prospective adoptive couples in whom the birth parents had expressed interest. Then, after we were selected, and after the twins had been delivered, Shelly had to scramble to call Golden Cradle to see if Jennifer and I had preapproved twins. The agency would not place twins separately and would place them only with a couple who had agreed ahead of time that they would accept multiple siblings in the event that occurred.

We had been fascinated with the notion of twins for years, ever since an old friend of mine had visited with his three-month-old twin sons. Watching their similarities and the way they interacted with one another even at so young an age revealed a special bond that seemed to add another dimension to their relationship with each other as well as with the overall family dynamic. As a result, we had preapproved twins, but we had never expected that the adoption process would yield such a result.

On the way out of Golden Cradle that morning, Susan gave us a black-and-white copy of a photograph of the boys’ older brother at six months.

“Here,” she said. “This will give you some idea of what your sons are going to look like.”

As it turned out, it really didn’t. Their brother has dark hair and dark skin. Noah and Dan are strawberry blonds. Both are taller than their brother. The three do share gray green eyes, however, and similar builds, lean and muscular.

The boys’ birth mother had flown with them to Golden Cradle and was still there the day we went to pick them up so that she could nurse them until the surrender occurred. She wanted to make sure that she would give them the best possible start in life. We were told that when she was leaving, she looked at them for the last time and said, “These boys are Levins.”

Our visit to Golden Cradle lasted about an hour and a half, and at some point someone took a picture of me sitting on the couch with both boys on my lap. I look stunned. My eyes appear murky, unfocused, as though I had not slept in days. Perhaps I was beginning to crash from the adrenaline rush of the preceding several hours. I had never been jacked that high before, and I could not have had any idea what all of this would come to mean.

On the way over to Golden Cradle that morning, Jennifer and I, for the first time, had begun tossing around possible names. It was kind of like buying a house, involving lots of trial and error until we both could agree on something. We knew we both had to agree, because the results of the decision would be permanent. Very quickly we happily settled on Noah as the name of the firstborn. This was an easy choice because the boys had come two by two. Then, once we had agreed on Noah as the name for boy number one, we agreed that the second boy should also have a biblical first name. That second name proved more difficult to decide upon. Over the next several days, we tried out different names one after the other—Aaron, Adam, Ari, Benjamin, Caleb, David, Eli, Ezekiel, Gabriel, Gideon, Isaiah, Jonah—but we were unable to agree on a name for our second son. None of them seemed to fit with Levin. Until we agreed on a second name, the boys were “Baby One” and “Baby Two” by order of birth. Finally, we settled on Daniel for the younger boy. We could not recall a single Dan we had ever known who was not a stand-up guy. Dan’s middle name, Garrett (which for several of his early years he thought was “Carrot”), was for his maternal grandfather, Gershon. In Jewish tradition, one uses the initial of a deceased person and not the name. Noah was initially Noah Alexander, for no other reason than it sounded nice.

One of the ironies in all this is that the day we received the stork call from Golden Cradle, my dad had gone to the emergency room with severe stomach pains, which is why my parents had not been at home when we called to tell them that they were finally grandparents. These stomach pains proved to be the precursor of the cancer that killed him four months later. He did not get to enjoy our boys for long, but at least when he died he knew he was a grandfather. As the boys’ adoptions had not been finalized at the time of my father’s death, we changed Noah’s middle name to Harte, for Herbert, my dad’s first name.

In their infancy, we color-coded everything in order to distinguish what belonged to whom. All of Noah’s bottles had red dots appended to them. Dan’s bottles had blue dots. Noah had the red blanket and the red socks, Dan the blue. We never dressed them alike. We always made it a point to stress their individuality.

During the first six months, there might have been an hour out of every twenty-four, if we were lucky, in which both boys were asleep at the same time. As a result, Jennifer and I were constantly and completely exhausted. In fact, we were barely functioning. I would sleep from just after dinner until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., when Jennifer would awaken me and I would take over while she went to sleep until 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., when I would shower and dress and stumble to work. When I came home, I would fall asleep on the floor or wherever I happened to be when I could no longer stay awake, while whoever was in the house took no notice and walked around me as if I were simply another piece of furniture. The boys’ ability to sleep for extended periods gradually increased, but it was not until they were almost three years old that both of them slept through the night on a regular basis. Until then, whichever one of us could manage to get up and respond to whichever one of them was awake did so.

Jennifer’s parents came up from Maryland to help as often as they could, usually every other week. Before my dad died, he and my mom visited on three or four occasions, but under the circumstances, there was no assumption of responsibility for the lives of the boys as there was with Jennifer’s parents. Other relatives of mine would also drop by periodically, my closest aunt and uncle, Esther and Bernie, the most often, and they were also the most help next to Jennifer’s parents. After my father died, my mom would come by for very short visits—she would stay longer if other family members were there, for dinner, say—sometimes only for ten minutes, “to see how the boys were doing.” She could not stay away, but she also made it clear that she did not feel comfortable in our home, as though it were an imposition.

We went through enough diapers to warrant our own landfill. There were regular sorties for diapers, formula, and, when they had outgrown the need for formula, juice. We spent many Friday and Saturday nights over the next two years shopping. In fact, shopping pretty much came to define the way we spent our weekends. One evening at the market when I was buying juice and diapers, as I stood in front of the cashier, I started laughing out loud. The checkout girl looked at me, puzzled. “In one end and out the other,” I explained. She did not see the humor in this.

Seeing newborn twins, total strangers wondered regularly about the birthing experience; time and time again, their temerity in asking personal questions amazed us. It was never easy explaining to people we did not know and would never see again what it was like to be the parents of twins when they would not have had any reason to suspect that we were not the birth parents. For example, because Jennifer is so petite, it was not unusual for another mother to comment, “But you’re so small! Was it hard having twins?” “No,” Jennifer would answer. “It wasn’t.” People we had never met before asked Jennifer how she had lost the weight so quickly. “It wasn’t really a problem for me,” she would respond serenely. We decided very early on that it was no business of strangers that the boys were adopted; that was something they could tell people if they wanted to. Initially, I had felt some urge to tell people, which I now think represented some attempt to distance myself from fatherhood. But as time passed, and the overwhelming experience proved to be one of joy and marvel at the bounty with which we had been blessed, my reluctance, born of the fear of failure, faded. The very labor of nurturing paid immeasurable dividends, and after several months, after my head had stopped whirling at what had happened and I had accepted it as part of my life, I became their father, and all our lives were joined. There was nothing to distinguish me from them.

Watching their personalities emerge was a constantly rewarding experience. They were home for only a few weeks before they earned nicknames. Noah became “the Professor” because he was so contemplative. He seemed constantly to look at things as though he were trying to figure out what they were, what they were supposed to do, and how they went about doing exactly whatever it was they were supposed to accomplish. Dan was nicknamed “Jarhead” because of his bald, round dome and absolute determination, his commanding sense of bravado.

The first time I heard the boys giggling uncontrollably, I sensed that it was a sound I had never heard before or made. As it turned out, everything about the way the boys grew up would be different from my own childhood experiences.

When I was three years old, my sister, Susie, died of leukemia. She was two years older than me, three years younger than my brother. I have only two memories of her.

One is of our father holding her in his arms in the alley behind our house, on a block of semidetached houses in West Philadelphia. It is a hot summer day, and our dad is using a handkerchief to shoo away a yellow jacket that has been buzzing around Susie and frightening her. She is crying, and he is speaking soothingly to her. Since in reality he proved to be powerless to protect her, I guess that it is understandable why I hold on to this.

Susie is not present in the only other memory I have of her. She is in the hospital, dying. She may already have died. It is a Sunday morning. My parents and I, accompanied by my aunt Esther, have driven to the hospital from our house. Another aunt is home with my brother. The car is suffused with an aura of grim resignation; there is only one inevitable conclusion to the events of the morning. I am too young to be admitted to the hospital, so I sit outside in the car alone. I do not to this day understand why my parents even brought me. I remember a black steel fence and a massive yellow brick building visible from where the car was parked on the street. I remember Aunt Esther coming to the car, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, to say that Susie had died.

In the house I grew up in, there was only one picture of Susie to be found—just one picture for as long as we owned the house, which was another twenty-three years. It sat on the piano along with a number of other photos of different family members, events, gatherings, and occasions. This one photograph showed a beaming little face with dimples and two long, golden braids. I would look at the picture for minutes at a time, trying to get to know the girl in it, but it never felt like anything more than a picture. The little girl had been my sister, but the photograph could have been of anyone. There was no connection.

My parents seem to have assumed that my brother, being older, could deal with Susie’s death, and I guess it was also thought that, as young as I was, the event wouldn’t have an impact on my life. Each of these assumptions demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about the capability of young children to understand events that are happening around them. At my mother’s insistence, no one talked or reminisced about Susie, so why things had happened and were happening was never clarified. Nobody was ever asked how he or she felt about Susie’s death. We were never asked if we wanted to talk about it. My mother’s way of coping seemed to have been to pretend that Susie had never lived. If she had never lived, she could not have died.

My father must have been a brash young man. At sixteen, he was the youngest-ever graduate of the most academically elite of the city’s public high schools and finished Wharton by the time he was nineteen. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, played semipro basketball, and was heavily involved in local politics at the street level (which takes a particular kind of toughness)—first as a committeeman, then as a ward leader, getting out the votes for the Democratic machine. He rose through the ranks and eventually became the lawyer for the city’s Democratic Party. This suggests a confidence and focus that no doubt enabled him also to successfully woo my mother, a noted local beauty. Ultimately, the party awarded my dad the judgeship he had coveted his entire professional life.

My father had a keen intellect; his interests were diverse. As a lawyer in private practice, he argued and won the first case in Pennsylvania to hold that a man who had committed murder was not guilty by reason of insanity, and every year until that man passed, he sent our family a Christmas card. My dad loved history and language, was an avid golfer, gardener, and fisherman, and was an ardent Zionist. He played the piano regularly until, in old age, he couldn’t read sheet music anymore. In my favorite photograph of him, he is sitting at the piano, glasses pushed all the way up on his forehead, squinting at the notes swimming before him. As both a judge and a lawyer, he was recognized for his honesty, humanity, and candor, and he was much beloved by many, a mentor to countless up-and-coming attorneys.

I would not describe his relationship with me in the same way. Perhaps he embraced the opportunity to nurture those who were not his children because he was unable to understand his own. After Susie died, my father’s need to be in control seemed to have, understandably, increased. He judged me, and I did not satisfy his standards. From my perspective, he was aloof and often seemed angry and unapproachable. Afraid of incurring his wrath and his disappointment, I kept secrets from him, and keeping secrets created walls. Did I remind my father of his ultimate powerlessness to control what mattered? Did I remind him every day of Susie?

After my dad was diagnosed with cancer, he used the time he had left to take everyone who mattered to him out to lunch or to dinner. The last thing he did before he died was his taxes. The morning he died, I went into the bedroom where he lay and sat next to him. I looked at him. I had no real sense of the man who lay in front of me. I had no sense of personal loss, that I had somehow been diminished. The body in front of me might as well have been that of a stranger. There was no connection; it was like the experience I had had when I examined the picture of my sister.

The lives of the dead set examples for us. It makes sense that having a sister die when I was only three left me afraid of a lot of things. It explains why the unexpected phone call is always bad news. It accounts for why, until I became a father, I was many times filled with an emotion I could articulate only as “the nameless dread.”

An incident that is emblematic of my outlook at the time I became a father arose late one Wednesday morning. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the scariest day in Jewish theology, when God writes down what will happen to you in the next year based on your piety and observance of Jewish law. Jennifer and I had gone to services at a local university, and when they ended, we walked to our car only to find that we had received a parking ticket. That seemed a disastrous omen for what awaited us. I was shaken and angry.

Three days later, we got our stork call.

As one of my cousins described it, the boys literally, and on many levels, brought new life into the family.

When I became a father, I felt about as ready for the responsibility as would someone with a degree from a culinary school who has just been hauled on deck and told to steer a ship. As it turns out, the only way to learn how to be a father is to become one. I am grateful that my father inculcated certain core values that have proved to be beneficial guides, but I recall no open, candid conversations with him about serious personal issues. However, I can remember several moments when I learned how not to act—such as how damaging and counterproductive it is when a father loses his temper. My most disappointing moments as a father have been when I felt that I had acted too authoritarian and interjected anger into the moment. I would feel keen disappointment that I had become my father. His anger had driven me away; it had created a wedge between us. I desperately did not want my children to be afraid of me.

And certainly nothing that I have learned over the past thirty years of being a lawyer is of any use in being a father. One of the things drilled into new lawyers is never to ask a question to which you do not know the answer, because it could potentially damage your case. Of course, as a father you don’t always have that luxury. Sometimes you have to ask questions you don’t know the answer to, even if the answer might well be something you really would prefer not to hear.

When Noah and Dan were born, they were named by their birth parents, respectively, Thaddeus and Basil. (One of our friends suggested that they were given these names so that when they were adopted and given “normal” names, they would be eternally grateful.) One day in fifth grade, it was Noah’s turn to be Star of the Week. Sooner or later, every kid in his class was given the opportunity to tell the others about his or her life: siblings, pets, what Mom and Dad were like, what their parents did for a living. So, Noah being Noah, I figured his birth story would be a part of what he told people. When I picked them up at school that day, after they had climbed into the backseat and gotten buckled in, I asked, “So how was your day, boys?”

“Great,” Dan said immediately.

“Fine,” said Noah curtly, almost dismissively, looking out the window. So I knew, or at least had a sense, that he was going through something. And then came the moment—the first time I had to ask a question when I had no idea what the answer or its ramifications would be. But I wasn’t looking to prove a point or buttress an argument.

I asked, “Do you guys feel differently from your friends because you’re adopted?”

“Not at all,” said Dan.

“Yeah, sometimes I do,” Noah said.

“Really?” I asked, looking at him in the rearview mirror. “How do you feel differently?”

“Well, sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if we hadn’t been adopted.”

Dan immediately reached across the backseat and punched Noah in his left shoulder. “Well, for one thing,” Dan said, “you’d have been Thaddeus and I’d have been Basil.”

This cracked the ice as the moodiness dissolved in laughter.

Before I became a father, I relished my solitude. At the start of Labor Day weekend of the boys’ senior year of high school, our plans to go to the Jersey shore to relax and shut down the house there were interrupted when an unexpected preschool project came up that required Noah to stay home. As Dan did not want to go without Noah, and Jennifer felt uncomfortable leaving them both alone, I went by myself.

My folks had bought the place back in the mid-1960s. It is a three-bedroom cottage, the smallest house on our end of the island and one of only two houses on the block that remain from the day they moved in. Since they had sold the house I grew up in thirty-five years ago, the shore house had become the repository of a lot of memories. I started spending time there as a junior in high school, and the summer freedom it represented had always been an integral part of my life.

Now I was uncomfortable being there alone.

Closing down the shore house always causes me to wonder about what will have happened in my life before we reopen it for the next summer. Seeing one of Oogy’s chew toys in the living room made palpable the tenuous hold we have on what is dear to us. This was the start of the boys’ final year at home, and image after image of them kaleidoscoped before me: running, laughing, standing on the rock jetty as the surf exploded around them, digging holes in the sand, making sand castles, cavorting in the surf with Jennifer. I remembered putting them in the car when they were toddlers and driving around so they would fall asleep. I saw them on the jetty as a storm rolled in, each wearing one of my hooded sweatshirts that reached to their ankles. I could see and hear them playing outside as they showered off the sand before coming into the house. I recalled my mom making us dinner, remembered putting them to sleep on the sofa bed, relived the smell of the clean sheets and the scent of their skin. I could see their sun blond hair, feel the heat of their bodies. They appeared before me, utterly exhausted, suspended in the sleep of the pure.

I had been part of an instrument of joy for them, and it made me feel complete. Laughter resounded within these walls, like distant thunder. It was still so odd for me to contemplate, after all that had happened in my life: How lucky was I?