Journey into Darkness (30 page)

For whatever combination of reasons, personal confidence or divine plan, Jack and Trudy Collins each knew what they wanted. They were engaged that August and married in December of 1956. Ironically, Trudy’s parents had constantly warned her as a child: “Always do your very best, or you’ll end up marrying a garbage man.”

After a semester at Columbia, Jack decided a Ph.D. in English might not be the fastest route to providing the kind of life he wanted Trudy to enjoy. She had a very good job as a legal secretary for Caltex—the California-Texas Oil Company—and it was an insult to his sense of 1950s manhood to think of a woman having to support him. So he quit grad school and got a job in the purchasing department of M.W. Kellogg, a major international engineering and construction company. After a year, he had been promoted to buyer and had enrolled in night law school at NYU.

As he got to know his son-in-law, Tom Martinus’s continuing concern was that since Jack was Catholic, he’d keep Trudy pregnant all the time, spending her life tending an army of kids. Yet after seven years of marriage, Jack and Trudy were still childless. By this time Jack had graduated from law school, and had decided his career ambitions lay more in diplomacy than in either business or law. He sat for and passed the notoriously challenging U.S. Foreign Service examination, and with Trudy at his side, was sworn in as a foreign service officer on January 2, 1962, in the State Department’s Diplomatic Reception Room.

Now living just outside of Washington, D.C., they contacted Catholic Charities of Northern Virginia to try to adopt a child. But since Jack was Catholic and Trudy was Episcopalian, they were considered a “mixed marriage” and told theirs would not be considered a suitable situation for
adoption. The Episcopal Church agency told them the same thing. But their passion to be parents had not diminished.

In August 1963, Jack was serving as vice consul at the U.S. consulate general in Aleppo, Syria, responsible for consular and commercial affairs. He had heard of an orphanage called the Crèche in Beirut, the capital of neighboring Lebanon, from which it might be easier to adopt a child.

As it turned out, because Jack’s professional responsibilities kept him in Aleppo, Trudy was able to travel there first. The Crèche was run by the Sisters of Charity, a French religious order. She was escorted into a room of about thirty cribs containing children ranging in age from birth to about six months. Just at this time, however, there was an attempted coup in Syria, and the borders closed and telephone lines were down. Being a resourceful diplomatic wife, Trudy waited until the crisis passed, then as soon as she could get a telephone line, she called Jack in Syria and said, “I think we’ve found a child.”

But she didn’t want to tell Jack anything about her selection. So as soon as the borders reopened, Jack eagerly undertook the three-hundred-mile journey, driving south to Homs, west to the Mediterranean coast, and then south again to Beirut. He met up with Trudy there, and together they went to the orphanage. Trudy and the orphanage director took Jack into the same room and let him go from crib to crib, getting acquainted with each child. When he had finished the procedure, he told Trudy which child he had selected.

“I think it was the eyes,” says Jack.

It was the same choice as hers—a beautiful little darkhaired, dark-eyed six-month-old boy. The director told them they could take the child with them for the next few days while the nuns completed the paperwork. By August 25, the little boy was theirs. The nuns had called him Robert Raja Rabeh. Jack and Trudy wanted to name him Thomas after Trudy’s father, but soberly decided that he would inevitably be called Tom Collins, a nickname no child should be saddled with, so they agreed on Stephen Thomas Collins.

They returned to the States when Stephen was a year and a half old, and had him naturalized on November 9, 1964, at the Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan, amidst a
crowd of new American citizens from all over the world. When the time came for him to swear his allegiance to his new country, Trudy raised the baby’s right hand for him. A month later the three of them flew to Sweden for Jack’s next assignment, with the U.S. embassy in Stockholm, and this time little Stephen traveled on an American diplomatic passport.

In Stockholm, Jack served as deputy scientific attachá. Once they were settled in Sweden, he and Trudy started thinking about another child. They contacted the orphanage in Beirut and asked if they could adopt a little girl this time. But for a combination of reasons, no female children in the age range they were looking for were available, so they kept in touch, hoping the situation would change.

When they returned to the United States in late 1966 and settled in an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, they still hadn’t been able to adopt another child. Around March of 1967, Jack was attending mass one Sunday at Blessed Sacrament parish when he noticed in the church bulletin an item announcing that Catholic Charities had changed its policy on adoption and now only required that one parent be Catholic. When he got home, he excitedly told Trudy the news and the next day they put in their application. An elaborate round of interviews and home visits followed, during which the Collinses sensed their raising of Stephen, now a toddler, was being scrutinized in exhaustive detail.

Finally, by summer, they got a call from the agency saying they had a female child who might be right for them.

She was a year old. Her christening name was Regina Celeste, which the adoption officials told them meant heavenly queen, but everyone called her Gina. When Jack and Trudy saw her for the first time, they thought she was, in Trudy’s words, “just as sweet as she could be.” But, they also had to admit, it was not really her best day. She had a bad cold, her nose was running constantly, and she wouldn’t stop crying. Also, her right foot had been turned in since she was born and she had to sleep each night with a spreader bar that looked like a medieval prison device attached to each ankle to keep her lower legs apart. In spite of that, she was absolutely adorable, with beautiful blond hair and luminous, almost opaque skin. Within another six or eight
months they were able to dispense with the leg brace, though she had to wear corrective shoes until she was five. The foot problem must have made a deep impression, though, because as she grew up, she constantly pushed herself at athletics and sports, particularly the sports that involved running.

Her beauty belied her personal history, which was a woeful one. In the year she’d been alive, she’d already been through at least three foster homes. Her birth mother had been young and unwed and had given her up in the hopes of finding a better life for her. She was initially settled with a military family, but when they’d gotten orders to relocate, that foster-home placement fell through. The agency became unhappy with the next family she went with, having some concern that she was being mistreated, so they took her back. She had just returned from a third foster home when Jack and Trudy saw her and fell in love with her. They decided to call her Suzanne Marie, the middle name in honor of Trudy’s mother, Mamie. To make sure Stephen didn’t feel slighted, they reaffirmed to him that they’d also specifically picked him out to be theirs and how special he was to them, and that now he would have a sister who would be special, too.

They took Stephen with them when they went to pick up Suzanne and bring her home. “We went in hoping for the ideal situation,” Jack recalls, “where we’d see our little girl again and she’d run right up to me or Trudy. Instead, we both walked over and she backed away and started crying. We took another step and she backed up another step and cried harder. And then Stephen started walking toward her and she hobbled over and put her arms around him. I think they bonded that minute.”

Trudy adds, “With what she’d been through, she was so afraid of big people, I think she was glad to see someone her own size.”

As they walked out to the car with Suzanne, she was still sniffling and sobbing, about to be taken away by yet another family. But then Stephen put his arms around her and said, “It’s all right, Suzanne. Don’t cry. You’re our family and we’re your family.” She stopped crying.

In the car, they heard more sniffling. Then they heard
Stephen whisper to her, and she stopped. This happened several times on the way home, and each time Stephen would whisper to her and she stopped. They never knew what he said, but at that point Trudy turned to Jack and said, “Stephen’s in charge.”

And when they got home, he was the one who showed her her room and her bed. He was the one who told her what to do. Suzanne looked up to Stephen as her leader and worshipped him from then on.

For about a month after they got her home, Suzanne did anything they asked her to, with no argument and no balking. It was delightful for a while, then Trudy became concerned.

“I thought, ’There’s something wrong with this child. She’s not normal. She’s too obedient.’ It suddenly dawned on us that with her background, she wasn’t sure if she was going to stay. Stephen talked to her a lot, and once she became convinced in her own mind, ’Okay, this is forever,’ she became a normal child.”

What Trudy began seeing in her daughter were attributes that would really never change all through Suzanne’s growing-up years. She was a blond-haired, blue-green-eyed beauty, utterly charming and always going off in many directions at once. “A true Gemini,” says Trudy.

She showed her spunk and adaptability in various ways. Since she’d been a baby, she was hardly ever without her security pacifier. Jack thinks the habit was probably started in one of her foster homes. When she was a little less than two, the Collinses were driving to Bethany Beach, Delaware, for a brief vacation. She must have managed to roll down the rear window and then suddenly they heard Stephen call out, “Mommy! Daddy! Suzanne’s lost her plug!”

We’ve got to get it back, Trudy thought, but Jack said, “I can’t stop here.”

Suzanne said she thought she could get along without it. Impressed, Trudy said, “Suzanne, you’ve just grown up. Now you’re a big girl and you don’t need that.”

Jack adds, “And she didn’t. She never needed the pacifier again.”

For Suzanne, everything in life was so exciting, she wanted to do it all at once. And whatever it was she had her sights
fixed on, no amount of advice or threat of punishment could deter her. Every day of her life since she was a very little girl, Suzanne Marie Collins had her own agenda. That remained constant.

Another constant was her unwavering love of her big brother. Even when the four-year-old Stephen started to rethink the benefits of sharing Mom and Dad with a baby sister and sometimes balked at sharing his toys and playing with her, she continued adoring him.

The two children were very different—the intense and darkly handsome little boy with the penetrating eyes and his blond and cuddly, doll-like sister. Stephen was hyperactive, always fussing, wanting to control something or have his own way. Suzanne was more laid-back, sweet, and alluring, just happy to be alive and in a stable, loving environment. Suzanne wanted her way, too, but she seemed to know instinctively how to go around corners to get it rather than taking a direct approach. Or, as Stephen recently put it, he was much more frenetic and intense like his mother, and she was much calmer and more laid-back like her father.

And her father was absolutely smitten with her. Early on, it became clear that Suzanne’s favorite color was blue. Jack started calling her Blue Bell after he noticed this. In certain light, he thought, her eyes were the same color as the sky. Sometimes, he shortened it simply to Belle. Trudy called her Sue Blue. Suzanne loved all of the nicknames. The serious-minded Stephen continued calling her Suzanne.

Right from the beginning she showed her curious, independent streak. She had learned how to rock her crib to get it to move and managed to move it over to the bookcase where Jack kept his legal books, and, on more than one occasion, climbed onto it. During a family trip to Chicago when she was three, she wandered off because she saw a set of swings in the distance and thought she could master them. When the terrified Trudy caught up with her, she was playing with about five other children.

“She just never looked back,” said Trudy. “She was fearless. I’m not sure Stephen was any better behaved than she was; he just had more reasonable fears which kept him from getting into trouble.”

When Stephen was in elementary school and Suzanne was
a five-year-old in preschool, the family moved to Salonika, in northern Greece. It was a big adventure for both kids. Stephen had some residual memory of Sweden, but this was something completely new and exciting for Suzanne.

Before Jack assumed his posting as political officer at the American consulate general in Salonika, there was a week of briefings at the embassy in Athens, during which the family was put up at the elegant King’s Palace Hotel. After an initial nap to try to overcome the effects of the nine-hour plane ride, it was time for what Jack and Trudy always referred to as “TFH”—the teeth, face, and hands ritual.

Suzanne was sent into the bathroom first. After what seemed like quite a while, Trudy called in, “Suzanne, are you okay?”

“Oh yes, Mommy,” the child declared.

“I hear the water running. Aren’t you finished yet?”

“Oh yes,” she replied. “I finished my teeth.”

“Then would you open the door, please?”

Suzanne had discovered that the cap from an American toothpaste tube fit just perfectly in the Greek sink drain. And once she had the basin filled, she could watch the water cascade over the edge and onto the floor—a rather spectacular show.

They then went to dinner at the hotel’s rooftop terrace restaurant, which offered a beautiful view of the floodlit Acropolis. Jack surveyed the menu and translated it into English for the kids, who both responded with disbelief, “What! They don’t have hamburgers?”

A short while later, the lights on the terrace suddenly go off. Waiters with trays start crashing into each other. Fearing the worst, Trudy says, “Suzanne, do you have something in your hand?”