Two babies—that was twice as complicated. Still, Dan and Alice shared an ecstasy that, punctuated by upsets, astonished them with its potent, strange embrace. When Eddie started walking, Dan said, mimicking Jimmy Durante, “That’s my boy!,” and took Polaroids while Alice recorded the event in a baby journal. In fact, everything Eddie and Simey did, all their firsts and triumphs, were noted with like exultations and recordings, and with clamorous approval and long-distance phone calls. California was notified when a boy placed a square peg in a square hole, beat a relatively rhythmical tattoo on a drum, peed in a toilet for the first time, took off his shirt and flexed his biceps, or did a somersault. When Eddie posed for a high-chair photograph slathered in spaghetti sauce, that amusing snap got sent to California, along with snaps of Eddie and Simey at the park, at the pool, in the back yard enjoying a sprinkler’s spray, in the front yard clutching red plastic baseball bats, in Dan’s arms, in Alice’s arms, in snowsuits, on the ferry to Victoria, at the Space Needle. Dan would call home from his clinic and say, “How’s Simey and Eddie?” or “How are my kings?,” and if there was something to report, Alice would: “Eddie actually ran today.” “Simey’s teeth look beautiful.” “Eddie is clearly ambidextrous.” “Simey ate two bananas this morning.” “Not a peep when Eddie got his diphtheria shot—not a sound.”
Dan liked to stuff his sons on weekends: oatmeal with brown sugar, melba toast, scrambled eggs from his own plate, graham crackers spread with jelly, macaroni or Rice-A-Roni, chocolate pudding after dinner. He liked to jostle Eddie and Simey in his lap while watching Saturday Night at the Movies. He liked to drag them around the pool while making speedboat noises. He liked to tickle their plump, dappled thighs above the knees. But then he noticed something that, as a doctor, he was concerned about—Eddie, it seemed to Dan, had excessively turned-in feet, which was affecting his gait as he toddled and scrummed and might one day affect his hips, knees, and ankles if nothing was done about it.
Alice took Eddie to a pediatric orthopedist. Yes, the boy was pigeon-toed, but that was normal, the orthopedist said, because of how the fetus sits in the uterus, and in most cases it corrected spontaneously within a year of independent walking. Three weeks passed, though, and Eddie seemed, to Dan, more pigeon-toed. To him, the boy had the excessively turned-in gait of a child with an actual orthopedic problem. Again to the specialist, who this time, under pressure from Dan, took measurements and found severe in-toeing. Eddie had lower-body X-rays showing neither a rotated hip nor a rotated calf bone, but revealing an emphatic metatarsus adductus, otherwise called curved feet.
Curved feet! That sounded to Dan like a congenital anomaly, and the idea that Eddie’s birth parents had passed to Eddie a congenital anomaly like metatarsus adductus left him upset—unfairly, he knew—with those invisible people. Chagrined, he had his adopted son fitted for night splints, which meant his feet were joined, while he slept, by a bar fastened at each end to special shoes. So stoic was Eddie, asleep on his back, that he seemed at first not to notice this circumstance, but then his right shoe began to chafe at the ankle, and since his room was too hot, as a matter of course, his ankle got damp and stayed that way, and the tender, pink spot there became infected. Dan tried gauze, iodine, moleskin, and an antibiotic, but it was too late, Eddie had staph, his foot ballooned, and he had to go to Children’s Orthopedic, where the treatment included the draining of pus from his ankle, warm dressings, intravenous feedings, stronger antibiotics, and infant doses of codeine. After twenty-two days of this, Eddie went home, but his right foot now looked a little disfigured, and when the treatment with splints was tried again, it was implemented with footplates instead of shoes.
A silver lining: the fastest runners in the world were pigeon-toed, like Eddie. So, when the Kings got together with other young families and someone made a comment about Eddie’s gait, Dan would respond with world-record holder Bob Hayes, the hundred-meter winner at the ’64 Olympics. If that didn’t ring a bell with people, he would suggest next the image of Jackie Robinson stretching a single into a double. Alice, at the swim club, holding Eddie in the water, or watching him splash in the kiddie pool, referred to his disfigured foot, when someone asked about it, as “his little Achilles’ heel.” Often, at bedtime, she rubbed his foot with baby oil, and his persistently swollen ankle made her sad.
But really there was little to be sad about. Both Simey and Eddie started reading at an early age, each sounding out the words in a Dick and Jane primer while sitting on Alice’s lap. Both were mathematically precocious, good with puzzles, gentle with the cat, and problem solvers on a playground. Eddie was well coordinated and could throw a tennis ball over the net from the midline, whereas Simey was prone to earaches on the plane to California, and to car sickness when they drove. At four, Eddie dove off the low board into deep water. His baby fat was gone, and, flying through the air with eager courage, suntanned, arms spread, muscles wet and gleaming, he left Dan and Alice giddy with pride. This fearless, charming, intelligent, and enormously nice-to-look-at child was a spring of good feeling that never stopped flowing, an answered prayer, a gift from God—just like Simey, their birth child.
Eddie and Simey, Simey and Eddie—they had their portrait taken by a professional photographer, Eddie in a bow tie and sweater vest with Simey in his lap, then Eddie and Simey under the cherry tree in the back yard, then Eddie and Simey with Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys. The best one was Eddie and Simey on the living-room floor, cheek to cheek, giggling. “Such a nice big brother,” Alice said as the photographer snapped away with a camera on a tripod. “That’s my big, good boy, my darling Eddie.”
“Ick,” Eddie answered. “Simey smells bad.”
They sent the photograph to San Jose and Pasadena, framed and ready for hanging. Pop called long-distance on a Sunday night, because Sunday night was cheaper than other nights; already the picture was on his wall, he announced, adding that he’d gone to the hardware store for hooks, which came “in a package of total five hooks, the other four are now in the drawer where I keep the screwdriver and pliers, but that’s not the main thing, the main thing is, a very nice picture, but different, those two.”
“Kids don’t have to look alike,” said Alice.
“What’s the big deal?” added Dan.
“Maybe one day they ask,” said Pop. “ ‘How come he’s tall, I’m not so tall, he’s got his nose, I got my nose, his hair, the other hair’—what you gonna say to your boychiks then? Huh, Dr. Dan? I’m waiting for you! This one, he’s hitting home runs from the left side of the plate; the other, he’s making like Einstein in science class; one allergic maybe to nothing, one don’t leave home without having asthma; one is this, one that, one up, one down, one yes, one no—so what do you say, Mr. Know-It-All?”
“We stick with the mystery of genetics,” answered Dan. “It couldn’t be simpler, Pop.”
“Simple?” Pop said. “How is it simple? One day, Edeleh finds out.”
“We stick with the mystery of genetics,” Dan repeated. “If no one slips up or spills the beans, he isn’t adopted. Let’s all remember that.”
Pop sneezed into the phone. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s lying, this business. The tooth fairy’s lying, the golem is lying, Santa Claus is lying, all of it lying, but this, Mr. Eddie, not adopted, that’s lying lying, that’s Number Nine of the Ten Commandments lying. Listen, Daniel, I’m telling you from my heart, you want more tsuris than you already got? Go ahead—tell this lie!”
Dan looked at Alice, pointed at the phone, then made the loony-bird sign at his ear—a rotating index finger.
“Pop,” said Alice, seizing the receiver, which until now Dan had held at an angle while both of them tipped an ear toward it, “you’re having a heart attack over nothing. All of the specialists say the same thing, better that the child doesn’t know about adoption. This is like a white lie or a lie of omission, this is for the good of our Eddie.”
“Okay, forget it, I don’t know nothing,” Pop answered. ?
??Since when is it up to me yes or no, Alice and Dr. Dan should lie or not lie? Go ahead, it isn’t my business, not the alter kocker’s business. Only, a glick ahf dir, see what comes of it!”
Alice and Dan did what many American Jews did when, after fleeing their parents, they themselves became parents: join a Reform synagogue and celebrate a few holidays. At Temple Beth David, where Nate Weisfeld was now rabbi-in-chief, Sukkoth came with fruit pies and ice cream eaten in a sukkah constructed by sixth-graders, Purim brought a carnival for kids and a costumed musical extravaganza, and Hanukkah was funded to compete with Christmas. Dan and Alice approved of the ambience. They paid for access to it. Neither believed in the God of the burning bush, or even in his modern, more nebulous iteration, but both believed there was vaguely more than met the eye, generally speaking, in the universe. Belief, however, was beside the point—what mattered was that Eddie and Simey should have an identity and not just wander through their lives like lost sheep; Eddie and Simey should know whence they came (even though Eddie came from who knows where, technically); Eddie and Simey should have a cultural experience and be nurtured in the embrace of a community. When push came to shove—when it came to their kids—the community the Kings wanted was a community of Jews, not bearded Jews who made no sense but rational Jews who didn’t believe in the God of the Torah or, for that matter, in the Torah itself. The earth was made 5,728 years ago? Come off it, no one in their right mind could believe such crap. Adam and Eve? A curse on the sons of Ham? Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt? Please. Spare us. Ancient tribal myths. Fortunately, Rabbi Weisfeld could spin Torah dross into contemporary gold, and do it at a level kids could understand, complete with life lessons, liberalism, and a seasoning of eternal mystery. Things at Beth David were at the right pitch, not too irrational, laughable, or boring, not too embarrassing, ancient, or foreign. Secular as it was, though, watered down to nearly nothing, Beth David remained strong on the Chosen People motif. God liked Jews a notch more than anyone else. God had made a special pact with the Jews, which explained their smarts, Israel, and pastrami. At Beth David, the King boys learned that Jews were special—the smartest, the most sensitive and moral, the greatest artists and writers, the greatest scientists and scholars, the best at making money and at giving it away. Einstein, Marx, and Freud were Jews, so were a lot of the the Bomb inventors, and so was nearly everyone in show biz. Yes, there’d been a Holocaust recently, during which Jews had been marched into gas chambers, but since then they’d risen from the ashes, won the Six-Day War, garnered Nobels, and beat polio. Still on top!
Alice and Dan liked the Chosen People concept so much that they put Eddie in Beth David’s half-day kindergarten. On his first afternoon, he didn’t want to go, and cried, and clung to the car-door handle. Alice bribed him by saying that after school he’d get a toy and ice cream, and he calmed down and went to Beth David.
As it turned out, kindergarten wasn’t bad. Finger painting, building blocks, story time, and kickball were good; playing house, nap time, and singing weren’t. Clay was so-so, the matching game was good because he knew the answers, and what happened on a kibbutz was okay because they saw a movie about it. Eddie felt impatient saying his bracha before he could guzzle grape juice and wolf down his challah, but he liked to give tzedakah, because the sound of a coin clanking against the wall of the can was satisfying. The money was going to plant trees in the Promised Land, as shown on a poster labeled “Miracle in the Desert” taped to the classroom door. Eddie liked the idea of those trees, but he didn’t like it when Miss Cohen got out her guitar and, sitting on the floor, made them sing, in Hebrew, “Hatikvah,” the national anthem of Israel. Even worse, they had to make hats out of construction paper and wear them, along with sheets, for little plays about Abraham and Moses. Worst of all was Israeli dancing with Rabbi Weisfeld, who turned pink doing the hora.
“Not enough academics,” said Dan, after an open house in Miss Cohen’s room. “Whatever happened to the ABCs? Since when does Ed need Joan Baez Junior if he’s already reading like a fourth-grader? They’re charging us tuition like he’s going to Harvard and this is what we get?”
“I agree,” said Alice. “She’s too young.”
They moved him, briefly, to a Montessori school, and when that turned out not to be a good fit, they found a school for the academically gifted whose motto was “Great oaks from little acorns grow.” Acorn Academy’s teachers were specially trained to help exceptional children become more exceptional. Eddie was finally where he was supposed to be—with twelve other kids like him.
Acorn Academy encouraged extracurricular activity, so Alice and Dan added Tuesday piano lessons, Wednesday modern Hebrew, and Sunday mornings—for both Simey and Eddie—at the Jewish Community Center, which offered tumbling and basketball. Within three months, Eddie was playing “The Pirate’s Hornpipe” at a recital and mopping up the other boys—including Simey—when it came to layups on a six-foot hoop (“Havlicek Junior,” his coach called him). Simey showed little interest in sports, but it was apparent early that he was extremely intelligent. Simey, in fact, was a veritable whiz kid, prodigious in his ability to multiply long numbers without pencil and paper. Given his unusual brilliance, Dan and Alice paid for testing to determine if he should start school early. A specialist at the University of Washington thought Simey had “exceptional blood flow in his cerebellum” as well as a trait often found in prodigies known as “the rage to master.” In other words, the answer to the early schooling question was, as Dan put it, “an unqualified definitely”—Simey should join Ed at Acorn Academy, despite being seventeen months younger. So he did.
The next year, Ed and Simey went to Gladys Glen, with its special program for gifted children and its ten-acre wooded campus. Monday through Friday, Alice drove them to Bellevue at eight and picked them up at four-thirty. This meant no more Wednesday modern Hebrew, so Dan and Alice shelled out for Saturday school at Beth David. A tradition developed for after Saturday school: the Kings ate corned beef on rye with potato salad for lunch, followed by macaroons and halvah from Israel.
Simey and Eddie each got a weekly allowance of twenty-five cents, which Dan parceled out on Saturday mornings in the form of two dimes and a nickel. The nickels were meant for tzedakah at temple, but the dimes were theirs to spend as they wanted, and what Eddie wanted, each week, was a package of Sugar Babies and a comic book. Always on Saturday he was impatient for these purchases, and begged Dan, on the way home from Beth David, to stop at a mom-and-pop store where, before long, he and Simey were expected. Simey took forever choosing candy, but that was perfectly fine with Eddie, because it gave him time to read parts of comic books while standing in front of a display rack. Back in the car, the boys tore into their candy and stuffed it down greedily. Eddie usually had his comic book read, or partially read, before Dan pulled into the driveway. If he hadn’t finished his intense examination of the latest Adventure, Action, or Green Lantern, he sat there deaf to Dan’s entreaties—“I want you inside right now, little man”—and read and finished his candy. Simey went in to watch cartoons, and Dan and Alice prepared the Saturday delicatessen lunch, so that a sandwich and potato salad, on a paper plate, would be waiting for Eddie when he came inside to reread his comic book while eating.
Sometimes Eddie tossed out snippets about the Legion of Super-Heroes. From the back seat he would let Dan know that he didn’t like Triplicate Girl, or that Colossal Boy was in love with Shrinking Violet. At school, Eddie wrote illustrated stories about Cosmic Boy, who creates magnetic fields, and Lightning Lad, who’s killed but resurrected. In her end-of-the-year report, his teacher wrote, “Eddie has a terrific imagination and a real talent for drawing with crayons. I would venture to guess that for him the Legion of Super-Heroes is something like the panoply of Greek or Norse gods, and I have not discouraged his interest in this direction. His absorption in these figures has been a gateway for him to art, narrative, and much creativity. The resurrection of ‘Lightning Lad’ in particu
lar, I thought, was truly wonderful, and indicative of a mind that is stretching itself. For Eddie to be playing so powerfully with myth and story at such a young age is, I think, an excellent sign. I’ve enjoyed listening to him as he explains the meanings behind his pictures.”
That summer, the Kings spent three days in Pasadena and a fourth, much anticipated, at Disneyland. As soon as they entered, here came the Dapper Dans, strolling along Main Street in their candy-stripe vests singing “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” Eddie, though, kept looking for Legion of Super-Heroes figures, even after Alice had explained, twice, that there were none of those at Disneyland. “A different company,” Dan added, exasperated. “The Super-Heroes aren’t Disney, they’re DC Comics, which is owned by Warner Brothers, which is a Disney competitor. Now, look at those animatronic bears there, boys—they’re wearing what look to be actual bear hides.”
“Where can we see the Super-Heroes?” answered Eddie.
In the first grade, Eddie decided that, though comic books remained glorious, baseball cards reigned supreme. Baseball players, like superheroes, wore colorful uniforms, but they also wore five o’clock shadows. Eddie filed his cards in shoe boxes. Dan encouraged him to create a special category for Jewish ballplayers, but what Eddie really liked were MVP cards. There was a “Classic” series of MVP cards that a collector could compile with luck, cash, and determination, and Eddie, by Hanukkah, was dead-set on filling his few remaining gaps—’34’s Mickey Cochrane, ’43’s Spud Chandler, ’58’s Jackie Jensen, and a frustrating three in a row, ’63–’65, Elston Howard, Brooks Robinson, and Zoilo Versalles. On the first night of Hanukkah, after fidgeting through Dan’s recitation of the three blessings in Hebrew and English and Alice’s candle lighting, Eddie tore into the fifty packs of Topps his mother had wrapped in festive paper. Cochrane, Robinson, and Versalles, yes; Chandler, Jensen, and Howard, no. “Don’t give up,” advised Dan. “You hit five hundred on opening night of an eight-game home stand.”