Of course, I also knew, without knowing for certain, without any real evidence, that something had gone very wrong for him at some point. That first time you were all up in Truro, I came down to the kitchen late one night and found JB sitting at the table, drawing. I always thought JB was a different person when he was alone, when he was certain he didn’t have to perform, and I sat and looked at what he was sketching—pictures of all of you—and asked him about what he was studying in grad school, and he told me about people whose work he admired, three-fourths of whom were unknown to me.
As I was leaving to go upstairs, JB called my name, and I came back. “Listen,” he said. He sounded embarrassed. “I don’t want to be rude or anything, but you should lay off asking him so many questions.”
I sat down again. “Why?”
He was uncomfortable, but determined. “He doesn’t have any parents,” he said. “I don’t know the circumstances, but he won’t even discuss it with us. Not with me, anyway.” He stopped. “I think something terrible happened to him when he was a kid.”
“What kind of terrible?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We’re not really certain, but we think it must be really bad physical abuse. Haven’t you noticed he never takes off his clothes, or how he never lets anyone touch him? I think someone must have beat him, or—” He stopped. He was loved, he was protected; he didn’t have the courage to conjure what might have followed that or, and neither did I. But I had noticed, of course—I hadn’t been asking to make him uncomfortable, but even when I saw that it did make him uncomfortable, I hadn’t been able to stop.
“Harold,” Julia would say after he left at night, “you’re making him uneasy.”
“I know, I know,” I’d say. I knew nothing good lay behind his silence, and as much as I didn’t want to hear what the story was, I wanted to hear it as well.
About a month before the adoption went through, he turned up at the house one weekend, very unexpectedly: I came in from my tennis game, and there he was on the couch, asleep. He had come to talk to me, he had come to try to confess something to me. But in the end, he couldn’t.
That night Andy called me in a panic looking for him, and when I asked Andy why he was calling him at midnight anyway, he quickly turned vague. “He’s been having a really hard time,” he said.
“Because of the adoption?” I asked.
“I can’t really say,” he said, primly—as you know, doctor-patient confidentiality was something Andy adhered to irregularly but with great dedication when he did. And then you called, and made up your own vague stories.
The next day, I asked Laurence if he could find out if he had any juvenile records in his name. I knew it was unlikely that he’d discover anything, and even if he did, the records would be sealed.
I had meant what I told him that weekend: whatever he had done didn’t matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who mattered to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to me. But of course, this was na?ve: I adopted the person he was, but along with that came the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person was. Later, I would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that person, whoever he was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would wonder, incessantly, what it would have been like for him if I had found him twenty years before I did, when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then ten, or even five. Who would he have been, and who would I have been?
Laurence’s search turned up nothing, and I was relieved and disappointed. The adoption happened; it was a wonderful day, one of the best. I never regretted it. But being his parent was never easy. He had all sorts of rules he’d constructed for himself over the decades, based on lessons someone must have taught him—what he wasn’t entitled to; what he mustn’t enjoy; what he mustn’t hope or wish for; what he mustn’t covet—and it took some years to figure out what these rules were, and longer still to figure out how to try to convince him of their falsehood. But this was very difficult: they were rules by which he had survived his life, they were rules that made the world explicable to him. He was terrifically disciplined—he was in everything—and discipline, like vigilance, is a near-impossible quality to get someone to abandon.