Introduction--Some thoughts on adoption

Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound is crucial to understanding the effects of separation upon mother and most especially upon baby that occur when Nature’s essential dyad is sundered.  We have long known that the experiences of earliest childhood, even though not remembered in later life, do in fact profoundly affect the human adult.  We humans are tangled in our social arrangements and messy in our attempts at order, and throughout history we have failed to listen to what our biological nature tells us.  An essential fact of life is that a mother and her baby are one unit--until birth.  It takes several months for the baby to realize he is a separate being, and he relinquishes his connection to his mother reluctantly.  His wellbeing, his very survival, depends on staying as close to her as possible.  It is as natural for a new mother to suckle her baby immediately at birth as it is for a cat to lick her newly born kittens.  This, then, provides a strong argument from nature for preserving the maternal-infant bond, even in the face of difficult circumstances, such as the youth or poverty of the mother.  

What happens when the bond is broken, whether by adoption, death or illness of the mother, or medical interventions necessary for the baby to survive?  I am not a social scientist nor a statistician, and while a quantitative analysis of the effects of adoption is useful, it is the human angle that is ultimately most persuasive.  The story is all.  I have only my own story to tell, and I’ve revised it many times over the course of my life.  Whether this will be the final version remains to be seen, but, based on my own life experience, this is how I see things.

Americans are great believers in the second--and third and fourth--chance, despite Fitzgerald’s claim that there are no second acts in American life.  We are a people of possibilities, futurities, not fatalistic acceptance, which is perhaps why it is so difficult for many people to accept and admit the damage caused by adoption.  After all, the mother, who may be young and poor, gets a second chance at getting an education or a stable marriage and her own independence.  The adoptive parents, who are most likely infertile, get a second chance at having a family.  Broaden it out, and you could say that a Chinese baby girl gets a second chance for a successful life when she is adopted by financially comfortable Americans parents.  I adopted my own son from Vietnam with the conviction that I was  saving his life and giving him a future free from destitution and social ostracism.  There can be no counter-factual narrative.  All we can know is what in fact happened, and I think I have a better understanding now of what transpired between Dabbs and rest of our family.  

When you have a baby, your body and mind prepare with the release of chemicals and hormones that facilitate bonding between mother and baby.  A father who spends time with the pregnant mother of his child also experiences hormonal changes.  Men become less aggressive, more nurturing,  less interested in sex and more interested in other kinds of touch.  When a baby is adopted, these physical triggers are lacking.  The adopted infant experiences the loss of his whole world and is confused by the strangeness he encounters.  The smells, the sounds, and the heartbeat of his mother vanish, to be replaced by an alien being.  The current thinking among many pro-adoption advocates is that the earlier the baby is placed with the adoptive mother, the better for both the baby and the adoptive parent.  This is a bait and switch that cuts no ice with the infant, because mother and baby are already bonded AT BIRTH.  Every adoption, no matter how young the infant, is a traumatic loss for the baby, as well as for the natural mother, who at least, unlike her baby, knows what is happening.

David was three weeks old when he was moved from a foster home to his adoptive parents.  Dabbs was apparently abandoned (details are lacking), then taken to an orphanage at two months of age.  He was severely malnourished and had to spend weeks in a hospital getting stabilized.  From there he went to a foster home, then at nine months, he came to us.  At the very least, he suffered four major disruptions before he was a year old.  Did that have an effect?  You bet it did.

Picture a Fourth of July, with the whole neighborhood outdoors, kids playing, dads grilling hamburgers, everyone waiting for nightfall and the fireworks that would be visible from the hill where David’s house was located.  Then imagine David, sent to his room for God knows what reason, forbidden even to open the curtains on his window to look out.  He sat alone in that room, listening to the shouts of his brothers and the other kids  and finally the whistle and thunder of the fireworks that bloomed and fell in his imagination.  Such utter loneliness for a child.  I don’t want to tell David’s story.  He can and should tell it himself, but I can offer my response, my own version of what I believe happened to him, based on what he’s told me.  My judgments may be predicated on untruths or semi-truths or the skewed memories of a miserable boy, but the pain I have witnessed  David go through is true enough, real enough, reason enough to search out its roots, causes, and effects.  Since finding David and learning more about the aftermath of adoption, I think I understand my adopted son Dabbs better, why my efforts to be a good mother to him so often fell short, and why he was an angry child.  We are each responsible for who we are and what we become, but we are also shaped by our genes and our experiences.  When I look at David, Tanner and Saskia, I see a genetic mirror.  Dabbs has that with his children, but he can never have it with me.

 

Beginnings

Where does the story begin?  Perhaps it starts with my happy childhood with loving, attentive parents.  Dad was a coach at a small Christian college in western Pennsylvania; Mother stayed home and took care of my older brother and me, sewed clothes for me and my dolls, and  baked the best pies I've ever eaten .  Tolstoy famously said, Happy families are all alike.  I certainly agree with the second part of his observation—every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way—but I'm not sure I agree that happiness is as bland and uniform as his comment suggests.  Even as a child, I recognized that my happiness was not universal, that there were many people all over the world who suffered.  We used to go on shopping trips to the big department stores in Youngstown, Ohio, where we would pass through black neighborhoods.  From the cocoon of my father's car I would peer out the window at people who seemed to inhabit a different world from mine and my heart would lurch with sympathy.  

Yes, I was happy, but there were constraints.  Sunday was the bleakest day of the week because I was made to stay in my church clothes and not allowed to play with my friends because of something called “Blue Laws” that closed the movie theaters and the swimming pool in the park on Sundays.  It was decades before I was able to enjoy a Sunday and not feel the gloom of repression and guilt.  There was no anger in our home; it was simply not permitted.  My dad, the football and basketball coach, was a gentle man, so  I was astonished when I'd see him pacing the sidelines at  games, shouting at the referees or scowling at

 his players.    

 “Why do you get so mad?” I asked him once.  “It gets the players fired up,” was his answer.  

Anger, then, was not something natural or inevitable, it was a tool to be applied for a purpose when nothing else was working.  I learned from my parents that expressing anger was a  failure, a regrettable lapse, almost always inappropriate.  I knew this because my mother never got angry.  Never in my entire life did I ever hear her raise her voice, not even to call the dog.  If I misbehaved, she went coldly silent.  Her look of disappointment was more potent than any spanking.   

I loved my parents and when they went out for the evening I couldn't fall asleep until they were safely home.  I adored my big brother and craved his attention.  I must have been about five when Jim once told me he was going out and would be back in an hour to play with me.  I sat on a kitchen chair and stared at the clock on the wall for a solid hour, watching the minutes tick by, waiting.  As much as I loved my parents, I perhaps loved my brother even more.  He was eleven years older than I, so he always seemed to me to belong to a different generation, not quite my parents' but not mine either.  His age, even when he was still a teenager, seemed to confer wisdom and worldliness,

so when he teased me I took his attentions as compliments.  The day his draft card arrived in the mail—this was in those long-ago days of a military draft—I was sure it meant he was about to go off to war and be killed , and I was too frightened to mention it to anyone.  Later, when we were both older, he became my confidant, the person I'd turn to first if I had a

problem.  By the time I found myself pregnant with David, I had a long history of looking to my brother as a kind of hero, as someone who would help me without judging.

I'm baaaaack.

A lot has happened to me since I last posted on this blog, but I have not been idle.  In fact, I have been writing about the dramatic turn in my life that occurred on January 26, 2012, and the events that followed.  I want to share my story because for 46 years I have needed to tell it and because I hope it will shed light on a very serious subject: adoption.

“Secrecy is the wellspring of fear.”  Laurie White

“...the present rearranges the past.  We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”  Rebecca Solnit, quoted in Harper's Magazine Feb, 2014

When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, studying for an MFA in creative writing,  I wrote a story with the line, "It's possible to live with half your heart and no one will ever know."    For years I had  lived with a hidden vein of grief and loss and at that point had told only one other person about the most important event in my emotional history.   The first person I told about losing my son was Cherry, another young mother whom  I had  met at a neighborhood park near our homes in Guelph, Ontario.  Her daughter was about the same age as my adopted son Dabbs, and as young mothers will do, we began chatting.  Cherry asked me about my baby, and when I told her about having adopted him from Vietnam, she wanted to know more.  We began getting together a couple of times a week for tea, either at her house or at mine.  One afternoon we were   at my house, and she began nursing her baby.  I was so envious, because I had tried and failed to breastfeed my older son, and I shared my disappointment.  

Intimate details of one's life are the currency of female friendship, and Cherry and I were on our way to becoming best friends.  Both our husbands taught at Guelph University, we both loved to read, and she introduced me to Canadian fiction, which became a life-long interest.  She told me about her struggles with mental illness and the four years she had spent in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager.  That she was now a trained nurse, married with a child, seemed nothing short of miraculous.  She seemed, in fact, incredibly grounded and was a wonderful mother.

  

I thought if anyone would understand my story she would, so I told her about giving up my infant son for adoption six years earlier.  I felt as if I had handed her a chunk of my heart, and  for   a moment my burden seemed just a bit lighter.

                                                       ****



When I retired from teaching to care for my youngest grandson, I left a fulfilling career at a university I had come to love.  I was finally in a happy marriage, my third, and after many years of struggle, it seemed like smooth sailing ahead, but something was missing, something that had been missing for virtually my entire adult life.   I've thought of my life as a series of chapters, and I felt there was another chapter waiting.  I just didn't know what it would be.

"The Marriage Plot" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides is part of a triumvirate of writers that includes, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.  Wallace is the fair-haired boy of the literary world at the moment, whose writing is dazzling, hilarious, and profound.  Sadly, he committed suicide not long ago.  Eugenides was working on "The Marriage Plot" when Wallace died.  Franzen won notoriety when he declined to be Oprah's book of the month after she dubbed "The Corrections" a good read, as indeed it is.  He later thought better of his petulance, but he wanted to make it clear that his novel was "literary," not "popular."  Eugnides' "Middlesex" won the Pulitzer Prize, but he hadn't published a novel in about ten years.  "The Marriage Plot" is his new novel, and it is wonderful.

I'm sorry to be so vague, but I neglected to note the author of an article in the NYRB or the TLS or wherever I read it, so I will have to paraphrase what I remember.  The basic argument was that these "new realists" do not produce serious literature because they eschew the theoretical "advances" (my word) of contemporary literary criticism, ie., deconstruction, queer theory, post-modernism, gender theory, Marxism, and so on.  That these young(ish) writers still take seriously such 19th c. elements as plot, realistic description and character development, and the historical context of the action is seen to be a failure of imagination as well as style.

Another British writer from an older generation, A.S. Byatt, is also condemned for the same "crimes."  Too much realism, too much history, too many "real" characters, too much plot.  For the record, I believe Byatt's "The Children's Book" to be perhaps the best novel in English since "Middlemarch."  I couldn't believe my eyes when I read in the aforementioned article that Byatt's writing is execrable.  Byatt is nothing less than brilliant, and "The Children's Book" is the product of a lifetime of learning and deep reflection.  I don't see how she could follow it with anything near the same level of accomplishment.  We shall see.

I bring Byatt into the discussion because of the comparison drawn between her and these young American writers, whose work may have different historical and social roots but whose approach to writing is similar.  Of course, I am expressing my own preference for realism, but I believe realism in fiction to be more than a personal quirk.  I believe a defense of realism can be made that recognizes its philosophical and moral seriousness, its humanity, and its repudiation of faddish literary trends that are smug in their difficulty, exclusive in their audience, and dissociated from ordinary life.

"The Marriage Plot" tells the story of three friends, students at Brown in the 1980s.  Madeleine is the daughter of an upper-middle-class family, with intellectual parents and a sophisticated lifestyle.  Leonard is essentially David Foster Wallace.  He is brilliant but troubled, a scientist not in control of his own mind, who cannot love without doing damage.  Mitchell is Eugenides, the "good boyfriend" that Madeleine's parents wish she would marry.  He majors in Religious Studies and searches the world for enlightenment, just as Eugenides did.  Madeleine eventually marries Leonard, with disastrous consequences, just like a willful but loveable Trollopian heroine.  These are broad strokes; none of these characters is as simple as I have described them.

Is marriage still a viable plot device in the 21st century?  Now that divorce is easy and acceptable, do decisions about whom to marry not matter enough to warrant a whole novel?  Eugenides suggests that, yes, they do matter--profoundly.  He also recognizes that love is not rational nor even necessarily in one's best interests.  His plot may echo those of the great 19th c. novels, whose plots were almost always about marriage and money, but he brings it up to date with his very recognizable 20th c. characters.  They are definitely of their time; they are also emblematic of an elemental aspect of human life: relationship.  Whether it's marriage or a love affair or a friendship, the way people relate to each other is important and often problematic.  It is the stuff of life, and Eugenides makes no apologies for that.

He also explicitly rejects the whole post-modernist, deconstructionist, New Critical approach to literature.  His satire of Madeleine's and Leonard's English professor is a treat.

"Zipperstein was in a lively mood.  He'd just returned from a conference in New York, dressed differently than usual.  Listening to him talk about the paper he'd given at the New School, Madeleine suddenly understood.  Semiotics was the form Zipperstein's midlife crisis had taken.  Becoming a semiotician allowed Zipperstein to wear a leather jacket, to fly off to Douglas Sirk retrospectives in Vancouver, and to get all the sexy waifs in his classes.  Instead of leaving his wife, Zipperstein had left the English department.  Instead of buying a sports car, he'd bought deconstruction." (48)

Here is Mitchell's description of Madeleine: "In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before.  It was the stupidity of all normal people.  It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable." (77)  But Mitchell is wrong about Madeleine, at least at this point in the novel.  He is in love with her, but he underrates her.  She is an English major because she loves to read.  The list of books she has devoured and relished is impressive for one so young, and her ambition is to go to Yale graduate school.  She ends up at Princeton.  She sees things for what they are (mostly) and believes a book should be harder for the author to write than for the reader to read.  "They [the Zippersteins of the world] wanted to demote the author.  They wanted a *book*, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a *text*, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions.  They wanted the reader to be the main thing.  Because *they* were readers." (42)  Whoever it was who wrote the article I'm responding to (if I were a better person, I'd make an effort to find it) will have none of this.  He fumes and sputters and attempts to appear a wise judge, but his criticisms ring shrill to my ear.

I believe that literature is a source of wisdom and comfort; it provides, at its best, a guide to life.  Good writing and good thinking go together, and being deliberately obscure is not only insulting to the ordinary intelligent reader, it is the expression of introverted, solipsistic thought.  The academy is not the natural home of the writer--or the reader.  The imposition of a scientistic framework upon an art is truckling to the economics of institutions.  Physics is difficult, so, by gum, literature has to be difficult too.  Chaucer's, Shakespeare's, Tolstoy's, George Eliot's works were not written to befuddle but to shed light, to show the deepest truths of life to actual people who want to live it fully.  Madeleine knows this, even as she is led astray by romantic idealism a la Dorothea Brooke.  She may be at times misguided, just as Dorothea is--the reader wants to shout out to them, "Don't do it!"--but like Dorothea she is intelligent, well-intentioned, and capable of deep feeling and self-sacrifice.  She is "ordinary," but she is fully human and mentally healthy--not such a bad thing to be.

"The Marriage Plot" is a good read; I found it a real page-turner.  But if that makes it sound superficial, you misunderstand me.  Great literature--to me--is what pulls you in and holds you rapt, while delivering more than you expected and expanding your mind and heart.

Every day brings its discomforts, until it all gets to be too much and I boil over.  I know I am not alone in my thinking, but I am dismayed that sensible voices are being silenced or ignored.  My current list of grievances:

The uproar over mandated health insurance.  If everyone participates in the system, care is more affordable for everyone.  We require car insurance and mortgage insurance (sometimes); what's so different about health insurance?  Let people contribute on a sliding scale, but bring everyone into the system.

The outrageous things said by Republican candidates in their debates and elsewhere: denial of climate change, denial of basic civil rights to the LGBT community, resurrection of the gold standard, total obduracy vis a vis anything proposed by Obama, insistence that America is a "Christian" country, absurd defense of the wealthy alongside scorn for those in need.  I could go on.

 Is it just me, or does the WHOLE country seem to be tilting farther and farther right?  Why are so few willing to admit to being a "liberal?"  Why are so many silent?  That may be what bothers me most of all--the silence.  Wall Street is occupied by protesters for days, yet the mainstream media doesn't mention it.  It took Michael Moore to get the media's attention.  I'm sorry to say, I don't believe Michael Moore's voice is the best one to speak for the good and the true these days.  He gets attention with his baseball cap and sneakers, but his clownlike presentation of himself only alienates the more sober folk who should be his comrades-in-arms.  Al Gore is more serious, but he lacks flash.  Where are those who can speak for liberals, be taken seriously, and receive the public attention they deserve?  The silent majority, I assume, is moderate, temperate, responsible, compassionate--qualities that don't attract attention or headlines.  The Tea Party with its fulminators, its cranks, its ignorance, is front and center; it is, I fear, becoming respectable.

I can't help thinking of Germany in the 'thirties.  A paranoid megalomaniac was able to transform a tiny cohort of followers into a vicious society, wherein regular folks were turned into monsters, and the crowds cheered.  I worry that some of the same forces are astir in our land.  We assassinate our enemies, and we cheer.  We don't turn a hair when the uninsured suffer and the unemployed seek sustenance.  It's every man for himself, and Ayn Rand is considered a hero.  "Freedom" and "liberty" are code words for "I've got mine, Jack, so f--- off."  A political movement fueled by anger is unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable.  The Right today feels nothing else, from Wayne LaPierre and his paranoid fantasies about the second amendment to Sarah Palin and her hatred of just about everything, from Rush Limbaugh to the whole tribe at Fox News.  Anger is energizing, but it is also frightening. 

Place these alongside each other and ask yourself which you would choose:

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
The Great Society, one of whose aims was to end hunger in America.
FDR standing up to the big banks and averting a revolution.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit.
The GI Bill.
Headstart.
Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
The Civil Rights Act

Requiring photo ID in order to vote, thus disenfranchising thousands of people.
Building a "Berlin Wall" along our borders.
An enchantment with guns that goes beyond reasonable limits.
Government-sanctioned torture.
Ignoring habeus corpus.
Debilitating wars with so many unintended consequences it's hard to count them.
Prejudice against anyone who is "different."  The denial of rights and protections to those so defined.
Laws based on the beliefs of one religion.

What scares me is that a sizable portion of Americans would choose the second list.  Once a tipping point is reached, it may be impossible to impede a rush to destruction.  Public office is for sale.  Religious disputes are settled with horrifying violence.  Enemies of the state are held incommunicado in secret locations.  Illegal wiretaps and covert surveillance of innocent people are commonplace.  Foreigners are treated like criminals; alternative lifestyles are considered deviant.  Sexual exploitation is rampant in the sexualization of children, advertising, and entertainment.  Privacy is invaded, and difference of opinion is branded treasonous.  Rome once thought itself the "eternal city," until the sale of public office, the corruption of the legislature, debauchery, cruelty, and the repudiation of republican values led to disaster and eclipse.  America is no more eternal than Rome, but we have history to learn from.  We will need more than monasteries to keep culture alive if we don't learn how to choose between the better and the worse.

"Portobello" by Ruth Rendell

I have been a fan of Ruth Rendell, the British mystery writer, for years, but her latest novel, "Portobello", is something of a departure for her.  For one thing, there isn't really any character you could call crazy, and for another, the only murder is accidental.  What Rendell has done in this novel is present a slice of London life, circa 2010, not the London of tea rooms and green parks and intimate theaters, rather the gritty goings-on of what we might call the underclass, some of whom work, sort of, and some of whom live on what the government metes out.  Juxtaposed to the ramshackle lives of those who get by are Ella and Eugene, a long-engaged, middle-aged couple.  Ella is a doctor; Eugene runs an art gallery.  When their paths cross with Lance, Gemma, and Fize, there is trouble with a capital T.

As always, Rendell's characters are vividly drawn and quirky, if not eccentric.  Gemma is a pretty young mother who uses men for all manner of purposes, often playing one against the other.  Lance is in love with her, but she kicks him out when he hits her and knocks out a tooth.  She has better things in mind for herself than being kicked around by an unemployed lout.  Lance's friend Fize (Fizal), a Muslim who drinks and loves his mother, moves in with Gemma, mainly as a babysitter so Gemma can go out.  Fize's friend Ian is the closest thing to a psychopath in the novel.  There is no doubt he is capable of murder and worse, but when a Romanian immigrant is burned to death in a fire that Ian sets, it is an accident.  Ian and Fize, his reluctant accomplice, don't realize the house they're burning is occupied. 

With this unholy trinity, Rendell presents the sordid lives of many of Britain's young.  A young man with nothing to do and nowhere special to go, a basically decent Muslim who loses his cultural bearings and gets swept along by the current, a teenage mother with ambition and limited opportunity.  Of the three, I put my money on Gemma, but time will tell.  What is wonderful about this novel is the way Rendell takes us right into the thick of the noise, the crowds, the shops, and the hustle of Portobello Road.  A crossroads of sorts, it attracts all kinds and classes of people, who in rubbing elbows sometimes throw off sparks.

Eugene is a pip.  He's likable enough, I suppose, but he's a bit unformed for a forty-something art dealer.  His track record with women is abysmal, yet he has a loyal companion in Ella, a physician who treats all sorts, including Gemma and Joel, who, yes, I guess would qualify as the crazy and menacing, but ultimately harmless, character Rendell is known for.  Ella is on the cusp of forty and would like to marry, perhaps have children, but Eugene is evasive.  He is reluctant even to live with Ella because he harbors a deep, dark secret.  He is an addict.  He is addicted to chocorange, a sugarless sweet that he absolutely can't get enough of.  He hoards these candies all over his house and in his pockets the way an alcoholic keeps bottles of vodka in his underwear drawer or behind the commode.  He his ashamed; he tries to quit; he succumbs to temptation and feels wretched.  Yet, despite his obvious suffering, there is something ludicrous about a grown man who can't get married because he cares more about chocorange than a loving woman.

I'm tempted to say that Rendell dissects the corrupting influence of materialism, but that would be too simple.  Portobello Road is a place where practically anything can be bought, from trash to treasure.  Eugene's art gallery is cheek by jowl with kabab stands and cheap jewelry boutiques.  His home is comfortable and well-furnished, a perfect setting for an educated, professional couple, while Lance lives with his Uncle Gib, a reformed thief who now cares absolutely nothing about things of any kind.  His house is worth a lot, but it's falling apart, and he couldn't care less.  Rendell doesn't so much indicate that wealth, even relative prosperity, is a bad thing as show what living like Tantalus with the world's goodies just out of reach can do to unformed or chaotic minds.  Joel, Ella's patient, is obesessed with her and lives alone in the dark in a flat his wealthy father pays for.  His family is broken, and his father's response is to throw money at the problem in order not to have to deal with Joel or confront his own demons.  Joel's difficulty isn't material temptation; he lives like an ascetic, but his attachment to "stuff" is as pathological as Uncle Gib's or Ian's.  What should our relation be to the objects around us? Rendell seems to ask. 

In "Portobello" we have a whole range of socio-economic classes crashing into each other like calving icebergs.  We see death, theft, lies, family breakdown, loneliness, obsession, addiction, weakness, and grief, and what kind of an ending does Rendell provide?  Not the one you might expect.  Rendell's vision is generally dark, and even though the guilty may be brought to light in true English-mystery tradition, you wouldn't necessarily call her endings happy.  In this novel, however, there is a twist.  In a brief few chapters, everything sorts itself out.  Ian goes to prison, which he deserves even though he didn't mean to kill the Romanian; Gemma and Lance reunite, and she will be the making of him; Ella and Eugene marry; Uncle Gib ends up with his prophet's widow; and everyone lives happily ever after.  As a great American writer once wrote, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so."

Recent Travels: Third Stop

I was born in Newport, RI, right at the end of WW II.  Nine months after it concluded, actually.  My parents must have been feeling a new optimism.  I never spent any time there and until fairly recently I had only been back once, when I was a teenager.  Still, I have always felt attached to our smallest state and proud to call it my birthplace.

After leaving Boston, we made our way to East Greenwich, RI, where a dear friend of mine lives.  Our visit with her was restorative and relaxing, as well as intellectually stimulating.  I don't want to dwell on her story, but thinking of her makes me ponder once again the value of friendship.  I have almost always had a "best" friend.  My first was a little girl who lived up the street from me in the small town in Pennsylvania where I lived my first nine years.  I don't remember a time when I didn't know her.  I had other friends too; our neighborhood was teeming with kids.  But she was my closest friend, and when we moved to Indiana I missed her terribly.  My little grandson's best friend just moved to New York city, and I sympathize with the boys.  Parting from your childhood best friend is the first loss most of us encounter, and it hurts.

Here's what I find intriguing: how is it that so few of the people we know actually make it to that inner circle of "best friendness?"  Just now I have what I consider a large number of best friends, and I can count them on one hand.  We don't fall in love with every man we know or want to parent our friends' children, so perhaps it's only natural that our intimates are few.  I consider a best friend to be someone I can call on the phone at any time for no particular reason, just to talk.  In order to be completely happy, I need at least one such friend at all times.  There have been times when all my friends were "social" or "couple" friends, and they're fun too.  But I need a friend I can be totally open with and totally myself.  My visit to Rhode Island reminded me just how true this is.

Shifting gears, I'd like to talk now a bit about our day in Newport, where we visited the Elms and the Breakers, two of the many mansions built along the sea by wealthy nineteenth century industrialists, such as the Vanderbilts.  These amazing dwellings were built mainly as summer homes, yet they were as opulent as a king's small palace.  America may not have a certified aristocracy, but we did have our own version of "Upstairs, Downstairs."  The Breakers had a staff of over forty to cook, clean, tend the gardens, and serve the master's family.  That's a lot of people to manage one family's home.  But what really impressed me (if that is the right word) was the house itself.  (Somehow "house" doesn't do it justice.)  It was like a giant jewel box, with intricate designs on every wall, some gilded with platinum, as well as gold.  There were acres of imported marble and chandeliers whose crystals must have reflected candle light in a most romantic way.  The Breakers, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II (I think it was, the brother of the one who built Biltmore House in NC), was designed to impress.  It was the site of many a ball and dinner party, and I have to admit to being a bit overwhelmed by the whole enterprise.  I could imagine being a young woman whose sole purpose in life was to please her family and friends by marrying a wealthy or a titled man.  Those balls and dinner parties were not just fun, they were a high stakes engagement with a larger world where social connections meant everything.

I don't know if the Vanderbilts' several daughters felt their position to be a burden or an entitlement.  At least one of them went on to be a success in her own right.  She married a Whitney (I love how these people refer to themselves as a this or a that, as though a family were a category) and went on to found the Whitney Museum of Art in New York.  I fear I might have felt the whole rich girl role to be too much, but I am sure I would have twirled around the dance floor with abandon anyway.  What else was a woman to do?

I am left with mixed feelings.  On the one hand, the whole Newport scene, with its mansions overlooking the Atlantic and its amazing gardens, is beautiful, a wonder to behold.  On the other, it is an egregious display of wealth from a day when there were no income taxes and a rich man's fortune didn't have to be shared with anyone.  I can't help thinking about the poor marble cutters in Italy or the sweating workers in dangerous factories or the frazzled kitchen help who made this whole edifice possible.  There is something unseemly, something gauche, about such flamboyance, yet without these millions there would be no art, no great architecture, no beauty to inspire and awe.  This is something that has always bothered me: is a great disparity of wealth necessary to the creation of monumental art?  I fear the answer is yes.  What would St. Petersburg be without the wealth of the czars?