Peter

Nearly a decade before you were born, your uncle, my brother, Peter died on the very same night as his wife, but of different causes and in a different town. This seemed typical for Peter, somehow. He was only thirty-six and, by any storytelling standard, his was not a remarkable life, but it had never been an ordinary one, either. Short as his life was, and unaccomplished, he lived it far from normal, from one end to the other.
 
His parents had been unwed, underaged teenagers. As my mother told it, his birth mother was an adolescent white girl from a Roman Catholic Italian family who got pregnant by a black boy in her New Jersey middle school. This was 1966. Her parents gave the girl no choice but to carry, deliver, and surrender. Things were made no better when Peter (his original name was Mark) was born with hydrocephaly and spina bifida. Instead of being put up for adoption, he was kept first by the hospital and then raised “in an institution,” as the grim euphemism went, for the next eight years of his life.
 
I’ll never know what that “institution” did to him. I was never even told its name. I have my suspicions it might have been the infamous Greystone, a hulking monstrosity the primary mission of which was to house the insane. Peter had to have suffered from the lack of any secure attachment, even if whatever rotating staff working there had been mostly kind, which I very much doubt. Surgeons had placed a shunt in his neck to drain the excess water from his brain, but my parents were told that there had been some damage anyway and that damage was to blame for his learning difficulties. Knowing him for decades as I did, I suspect the shunt was quite successful, and more of his tardy learning was down to those eight lost early years than to direct damage to his brain. But who can make such distinctions after death?
 
When my parents were first introduced to Peter, he was still in diapers because his spina bifida prevented control of his urine and he’d never been given a stoma. As a result, he hadn’t been toilet trained at all. He could talk. He could walk with a shuffling gait, the bifida causing him a permanent crook in the knees that he would later labor to recreate as a casual, bent-kneed hipster’s stroll. He couldn’t count or read.
 
My parents had been called in to consider him because by then they had already adopted four children, added to the two kids born to them, myself and my sister, your Aunt Alleene. Moreover, the last three of those adoptees had all qualified as what were then still casually labeled “unadoptables”—a Eurasian boy born without legs, a twelve-year old Korean boy with polio who’d already been rejected by his first adoptive family, and an abandoned African-American baby girl. Would my parents possibly be interested in another such case, a disabled black boy, eight years old?
 
My father, who told us the story often, found himself terrified out of his wits by the “institution” when he rolled his wheelchair in. He would tell us about the overwhelming feeling of dread he felt as soon as they had pulled up to the gates. When he first described the visit to my grandparents, my grandmother was aghast. She told him she had been advised by her family doctor to deposit him in that very same institution because of his severely brittle bones when he was only two, back in 1934. She and my grandfather had gone so far as to leave him there, only to turn back before halfway home and return to fetch him. Once he heard that, my father swore that he must have recognized the place somehow and felt such dread because of deja vu. That was his narrative, but I expect the place was simply dreadful. You needn’t have had a close call with it as a toddler, I suspect, to have found it disturbing. But I wasn’t there.
 
In any case, my parents adopted Mark and changed his name to Peter so that it wouldn’t inconveniently echo my name, which left me feeling vaguely guilty for years. Then my nearly indefatigable mother set to work on catching him up with his peers. He had surgery for a stoma. He slowly learned to use an external bladder and control his bowels. Within a year or two he was only a grade behind in school.
 
Into his adolescence, Peter was a mostly quiet, gentle kid. He endured teasing and occasional bullying at school and in the neighborhood because his struggles to master his urine bag and his bowels meant he often smelled foul, and he was never quick of wit. Within our family, he nestled into a trio and then a quartet of adoptees nearly the same age, separated by roughly five years from us older kids. Then I went away to boarding school when he was ten, and on to university, and for the next six years, I didn’t see that much of him.
 
By the time I had crashed and burned out of college a couple of times and was forced to come home again, Peter was a teen and Peter had changed.
 
He was being administered shots of testosterone. His own testes never descended, another aspect of his spina bifida, and the doctors were attempting to trigger a normal adolescence, which is somewhat like trying to trigger a normal war.
 
Peter was more aggressive now, with a faint mustache haunting his upper lip. He tried his best to make his crooked steps a swagger. He looked eerily like a very young Lionel Richie. He sassed my mother and father. He sassed everyone. He had zits. He was something of a problem, but on the other hand, he seemed like a more or less normally unhappy teenage kid.
 
When he was fifteen he entered a public high school after having spent his grade school years in a small church school. The high school social scene was divided along racial lines, and Peter began to claim his Blackness. He hid his disability as best he could and mimicked the cool and tough mannerisms of the dominant boys. At home, he remained close to our Korean sister Kim but had an uneasy relationship now with his also mixed-race, also disabled brothers John and Jim. For the rest of the family, including his white adoptive parents, his familiar quietness shaded into deliberate silence, punctuated by occasional storms of defiance. “Watch your attitude!” Mom would tell him, a warning that served to incite him.
 
I had my own problems to work through about then, and I have to admit, as far as Peter’s high school years were concerned, I didn’t much care. In a crowded, chaotic house, we were good at staying out of each other’s way. After a couple of years at home, taking night classes, working for a donut shop, for a theater company, and eventually for a giant insurance firm, I left to go to graduate school in Montana. Two years of that were followed by two years of more graduate school in Georgia. Peter was someone I saw during my rare visits home, and he was hardly around the house then. My memory of him in those years, consequently, is vague.
 
In 1989, I had a dissertation fellowship to study the T.S. Eliot archives in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the famed Manhattan branch with the great stone lions out front. I was twenty-seven and single, and the most cost-effective thing to do was to live at my parents’ house in New Jersey, pay them a modest rent, and take the bus into the city each morning. Half of the kids had cleared off by then. Two of my sisters were married young mothers, one in another state. Two or three brothers had their own places.
 
Peter was a different story. At twenty-two, he’d been kicked out of the house for stealing to support a drug habit. When I first settled into my rental space in the house’s back rooms that summer, no one knew where he’d gone. Jim and Kim, with whom I was close, were worried about him, but Jim was caught up in his studies and social life at William Paterson University down the road, and Kim had her baby to take care of. “Besides,” Jim shrugged, “Peter’s crazy.”
 
I don’t know how Peter survived those days. He didn’t have a driver’s license. He couldn’t walk very far. He had squeaked through the vocational trades track of a crappy public high school, but unlike our father or our brother John, he had no evident skills at carpentry, mechanics, or electronics. He was certified and licensed in nothing. Did he live with friends? Did he live on the street? Did he deal on the side? I don’t know.
 
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. One week toward autumn, Peter gave us all a scare by moving into the scrub woods and bushes around the house and moving about so stealthily that we had no idea it was him. We would hear a rustling outside the windows at night or see a shadow in the trees during the day. The house was surrounded by several acres of thick undergrowth, swampy ground, and second-growth forest. Neighborhood dogs haunted it, as did seemingly innumerable deer. And as close as we were to Newark and New York, there was nonetheless always someone rumor-mongering about the sighting of a bear. For a few days, my younger siblings still at home, especially Alice, who was just fifteen herself that year, thought of all the monstrous possibilities that could be out there and propped shelves against their windows in fear.
 
One sunny afternoon, home early from Manhattan, I spotted Peter standing under a window where a trio of pines sheltered the side of the house, trying to climb in. I called to him, startled, and he scrabbled away, down across the back garden into the trees. Any able-bodied man could have run and grabbed him by the collar, but I have my father’s brittle bones and could not have caught him if I cared. And I did not care to catch him, even if I could have. What would have I done with him, if I did?
 
My parents put out a restraining order, barring Peter from the property, which was probably pointless and only hurtful if he ever knew of it. He didn’t return. By midwinter, I had finished drafting my dissertation and returned to my adult life in Atlanta. Jim told me the next spring that Peter had been picked up and deposited in Greystone, of all places, to get clean. It seemed like a terrible, fateful closure to me.
 
The next time I saw Peter, things again were different. It was a year later, and I’d come home for the holidays prior to traveling to an academic convention. Peter had been released from Greystone after six months, back into my parents’ care. He’d found steady work as a dishwasher in a local diner, where they appreciated his tendency to silence, and he’d found a girlfriend named Pam who served tables there. He lurked around the house doing nothing when he wasn’t working, but he seemed clean. Things didn’t go missing. His eyes were clear. He looked almost content.
 
Over the next few years, as I taught in the Deep South and pursued my career, Kim and Jim provided me with updates. Pam had gotten pregnant. She said Peter was the father, and my parents said he should marry her. He did. Jim and I raised eyebrows, knowing how biologically unlikely it was for Peter to become a father with undescended testes, but our parents insisted, thinking it was good for him. Pam moved in.
 
Their baby girl was born with straight dark hair and pale skin. Pam was white, pale, freckled, and Peter’s birth mother had been Italian, but Jim and I raised our eyebrows again. Their family continued to live at our parents’ house. There were reports of trouble, some fighting between the couple, a minor arrest for Pam. Then there was another baby, a curly-haired boy with light mocha skin. Who knows, said Jim to me, maybe? More reports of the same sorts of troubles, then another baby, a girl who looked nothing much like either older sibling, with wavy dishwater blonde hair as well as pallid skin. Peter and Pam claimed they were all Peter’s, but when I visited they didn’t look much like kin to each other much less to him.
 
Pam was treated for drug addiction. My father died of diseased lungs. My mother worked another year, now in her seventies, suffered a stroke, retired, and sold the home. When she moved out to rural Pennsylvania to be close to Alleene and her six kids, Peter and Pam came along with her.
 
In his thirties now, Peter was aging rapidly, visibly, and looking gaunt in the last picture I saw of him. My mother and Alleene had hoped being in the country would curb Pam’s appetites, but within a few months she was out of the house most of the time, leaving the parenting to Peter, apparently scoring heroin.
 
One night in 2002, one of his kidneys failing, Peter went in for emergency surgery. The children stayed with Alleene. Pam was missing and no one knew where. Peter died on the operating table, and in the morning police arrived with the news that in a nearby town where she’d been sharing needles with a boyfriend, Pam had overdosed and died the previous evening at about the same time. Alleene and her husband Charlie adopted the three instantly orphaned kids, bringing their own family to nine overnight, nearly literally.
 
And that’s the story of Peter's life, so far as I know it. I warned you, although it was anything but ordinary, it was anything but a storyteller’s dream. At my mother’s wake, nine years later, I sat at a table with Peter’s children. The oldest was a smiling, plump young woman with thick glasses and bobbed brown hair. The middle child was a small, quiet teenager with light brown skin. The youngest was just entering adolescence, a sallow-skinned blonde girl with clear cognitive difficulties. Who knows? Maybe. They asked me eagerly if I had any good stories to tell them about their father, who only the oldest remembered clearly. I didn’t know what to say.
 
Twenty-two years earlier, the day after my grandfather died, I composed a tribute to him, one of the worst poems I’ve ever written. Alleene printed and framed it, propping it up among photos of him on a table at his funeral service. God, that poem was an awful thing. The gist of it, the gist I tried to create for it, was that an unremarkable, unremarked life, if decently lived, was exactly the life worth living. But although I admired my grandfather, I didn’t believe it when I wrote it, and the poem itself was proof I didn’t believe it and was awful because I didn’t believe it, of course.
 
If lives can’t be saved, and they can’t, even though they can sometimes be enlarged and a little extended, then everyone lost deserves remarking, everyone, the unremarkable included, so that our story deaths like our animal flesh can at least restore and nourish those who must continue living behind us. Peter’s life deserves remarking; otherwise, what was the value of all that aimless shuffling and suffering that shaped him?
 
I just wish I could have thought of one true and happy anecdote to tell his children, your cousins, after all, something extra for them to cherish about him.