Maya gave up and returned to the vegetables. Alex returned to the garage. Eugene unloaded the grocery bags around Maya, whistling an old tune. Raisa admonished him — it was bad luck to whistle inside.
7 2004
Adopting a child, it turned out, was nearly as difficult as conceiving one. Mishkin, the new adoption supervisor, had laughed when the aspiring parents had gently inquired whether a Jewish child might be available. “A Jewish child?” he’d said. “A unicorn comes online more often than Jewish.” Even though the Rubins were participating in the last American pastime that allowed for open discrimination — they could ask for Jewish; the birth parents could ask for non-Jewish — realistically, their choice was between a Catholic, familiarly dark-haired but unfamiliarly Hispanic, and a Protestant, familiarly Caucasian but unfamiliarly blond. Asian Americans seemed to fall into the same category as Jews, though there were plenty of Asian children from Asia. There were African American children, of course, and these were — no way around it — less expensive, but the Rubins could perform only one radical departure from the familiar at a time.
Periodically Mishkin called to haggle: raise the acceptable age; expand the list of eligible birth countries; change the adoption from “closed” to “open”—no one did “closed” anymore. Several times Maya came close to buckling, but then Alex spoke to the supervisor in such a way that Mishkin never needled again. Maya was at once grateful and angry. Grateful to be looked after, angry that Alex had disciplined the man who, Maya felt, held the keys to the kingdom. And, in fact, Mishkin, who was on speakerphone, had signed off with: “You want the impossible. You want an American newborn in five minutes or less, without a relationship with the birth parents.”
“What, Mr. Mishkin, you work on commission?” Alex had replied. The line went dead.
Three generations before, Mishkin’s own ancestors had made the passage from Old World to new, and the soft spot — not to say unreasonable patience — that Mishkin confessed to feeling for the Rubins he explained on account of this heritage. In fact, the Rubins had stirred in him such a fury of curiosity and nostalgia that he decided to embark on a self-discovery tour in the archives of both the Mishkin family and Ellis Island. It was because Mishkin had overheard the Rubins whispering in what he thought was Russian at IAS that he had inquired, and volunteered to take over the file from Slab-Face.
This was a strange custom of American Jews: They assaulted recent émigrés from the former Pale with biographical thumbnails meant to produce. . what exactly? Maya would listen politely before finally, timidly, asking if the Rubins’ profile had had any bites. It had not, Mishkin conceded, which filled Maya with a brutal sense of rejection, as if not only genetics but even other humanity had deemed the Rubins unworthy of parenthood.
“Ask him if he knows Mishkin is the name of Dostoevsky’s idiot,” Eugene remarked after yet another Mishkin monologue about patrimony, casting a meaningful look at his wife, the former teacher of literature. Eugene, like his son, considered Mishkin tainted by the whole idea of adoption and refused to deal with him, leaving it to Maya, though the adoption supervisor’s cavalier style and self-absorbed prologues enabled Eugene to pretend that he disliked Mishkin on Maya’s behalf.
“Dostoevsky’s idiot is an idealistic figure,” Raisa reminded her husband.
And then, with no ceremony—“it only takes one,” Mishkin had warned them, “like love”—the wait was suddenly over. A young couple in Montana had chosen them to receive their newborn. Maya felt rewarded, or placated. Like an addict slipping back under the spell, she had cooked prodigious amounts of food during their months of waiting for news, pressing it on the senior Rubins, Moira and the others at the hospital, the trashman, the electric-meter man, the lawn guys, the lifeguard at the Sylvan Gate pool. Periodically, Alex would wander into the kitchen, purse his lips at the bedlam, extract the cognac from the cupboard, and tiptoe out carefully. “The maternal instinct is kicking in,” Eugene observed sourly. She had pressed her kitchen, the only blandishment in her arsenal, so fervidly on the universe that God had broken down, relented, agreed to send her a child if only she’d quit. However: Montana?
“The child must be sick in some way,” Maya had said to Mishkin when he’d told her, late one afternoon. She was just back from the hospital.
“No!” Mishkin yelled. “Not at all. You must not think in that old-world way, Mrs. Rubin.”
“So what is the reason?” she said, trying to ignore Mishkin’s insult. She tried to sound skeptical. How odd that a child could be announced like the win in a contest. But wasn’t that the way with normal mothers? One day they woke up and, eureka: pregnant. It was in what followed that the pathways diverged. A normal mother had nine months to get used to the result; Maya could have her child right away. She stopped herself: She was missing crucial information being transmitted by Mishkin. In the chaos of her mind, he appeared to her as a spoonbill, the huge mouth moving endlessly.
“We don’t know the reason, Mrs. Rubin,” he was saying. “We don’t ask. But the child is healthy. Which isn’t always the case, you are right. But it is here. Full medical checkup, full family history, verified and reverified.”
“He is just born?” she said.
“Just about.”
“So why don’t they want him?” Maya said.
“Do you want him, Mrs. Rubin? Let’s not lose our eyes on the prize here. They chose you, Mrs. Rubin. They want you.”
Maya tried to ignore the warming flush of the affirmation. “Why us?” she insisted. She tried to keep up the skepticism that Alex would have channeled were he home. (Had the adoption supervisor purposefully called when he knew he would get the gullible Rubin?)
“I don’t know. Because you’re far. They want the baby to go far.”
“Far from where?”
“Montana, like I told you.”
“What’s wrong with Montana?” Maya said. “Where is it?”
“Again, I don’t know. I mean, I know where Montana is. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s beautiful.”
“It can’t be more beautiful than New Jersey,” Maya said savagely, and, defeated by the mysteriousness of her ill will, sank into a chair.
“I don’t have a dog in this fight except you getting a kid, Mrs. Rubin,” Mishkin said. “Can I ask you a question because this, actually, we didn’t discuss. Did you hope for a boy or a girl?”
“I don’t know,” Maya said. “A boy?”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. It’s a boy.”
In the kitchen that evening, Maya and Alex sat and stared at each other. Montana? Well, they had demanded an American child; this, too, was part of America. They had imagined Chicago, Florida, even Texas. But Montana? Maya had almost asked Mishkin if English was spoken there, then lamented her idiocy.
On the phone, she had declared that she would refuse the adoption until she spoke to the parents. With satisfaction, the adoption supervisor reminded her that she and her husband had insisted on closed. Photos would come via the agency, the medical work-over, too. But no information about the parents. At a certain point, the Rubins would have to fly to Montana and take up residence in a hotel room while the state verified their identity and dotted the i’s with New Jersey. Then the child was theirs.
The pictures arrived with an equally perturbing lack of significance; she was looking at a newborn with sleepy eyes and a wary expression. He looked like a big cake. Why was this her child? Desperately, she studied the margins of the photographs instead of the child at their center. Who were the parents? How did they live? Were there baby wipes in Montana? How did they hold the feet when they wiped him? Did he get diarrhea? How much diarrhea was okay before getting concerned? It was the parents she wished to possess. By being denied to her, they became what she most wanted to know. She and Alex signed the papers.