Blue Genes (10 page)

MISSY BROUGHT WITH HER ANNA FUCHS
, the refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Conversant in several languages, this tall, thin woman with a craggy Slavic face served to guide and protect Tony and myself; we were both desperately in need of a friendly and understanding person to watch over us. Baba was there, too, but more and more it was Anna and Missy who were our guardians.

That next summer Dad sent us off to camp while he wrestled with financial matters. Then, coughing violently and feeling weak, he went for a chest X-ray. Tuberculosis was diagnosed. While we were still away at camp, he underwent a pneumothorax operation. One of his lungs had become so infected the physicians needed to deflate it—to allow it to recover. The operation left Dad weak.

What hurt the most for Dad was not the pain or the disease but that he had just started work at the Society for the Prevention of Crime. The Society was formed in the mid-nineteenth century to shut down porno shops and houses of prostitution. By the time Dad got there, however, it had a formidable board of advisers, including the director of federal prisons, professors, judges, and important public figures in New York City. By the 1940s, the Society had changed its goals from trying to prevent crime to trying to prevent
criminals
, a vastly different and equally difficult—if not impossible—enterprise.

Dad signed on with great enthusiasm.

Now, however, just as this exciting work was beginning, he was forced to leave the Society for a “cure” in a TB sanitarium.

He had lost his wife and his health, and he would soon have to sell his home. He had some hard decisions to make, including what to do with us while he was away. He knew one thing: he wanted us to be anywhere
but
with Missy, who had offered to take us with her to New York City and send us to public school there. Dad would have none of that. He and Missy had been violently in disagreement on what treatment to give Mother. They each felt that her suicide was the result of leaning too heavily on the
wrong
therapy. This sad conclusion on their part caused rifts between them that disrupted all our lives for years. When Dad had to go away for treatment, it was impossible for him to ignore the consequences he foresaw if he “gave us over” to Missy.

He decided to sell the house and send us to Vermont, to the Putney School, a boarding school that Mother had learned about years earlier. Missy was appalled. In a series of letters, Dad tried to explain to Ira, who was now in a public service job in New Orleans, why he was sending us away to school despite Missy’s “kind offer” to harbor us.

These letters have always struck me as remarkably obfuscatory; he clearly wanted to keep his feelings from his brother-in-law. The letters are also remarkable for the formality of style, so very different from Mother’s free flow of thought.

The other side of the coin: Missy writes to Dad.

Both of these letters are extraordinarily disingenuous. Dad never felt that Missy’s generosity was authentic, and I often heard him rail against her motives. There is a story that she offered to adopt me at one point, which left Dad apoplectic. As for Missy, she always felt that Dad was an unfeeling man and that only she could take proper care of us.

Yet what strikes me most, every time I read these letters, is a recurrent fear of mine that Dad did indeed feel differently toward Tony than toward me. In fact, I never believed that he loved me, or thought me as smart or as diligent or as “important” as Tony. When he shouted at me or reprimanded me (“Don’t run so fast!” “Can’t you sit still?” “How many times do I have to tell you?”), I was sure he was doing it with more passion or with a greater degree of anger than with Tony.

Perhaps he would have been shocked to hear that I felt singled out. Perhaps it was simply my own miserable self-doubt and insecurity that painted this portrait. Perhaps Dad loved us both equally, or came to love us both equally.

Or none of the above. Children’s feelings about parents are complex, and I do not pretend to be so “analyzed” that I can ever totally sort mine out. For years, I had very angry feelings toward Dad. I believed that he had taken Mother away from me—on purpose.

Missy did favor some of her grandchildren over others and was not able—or willing—to hide it. When cousins and grandchildren assembled for the holidays, she sometimes gave gifts to one or another of us that were radically different in value. She saw no harm in this. She showered affection on me openly. And I responded with delight. Tony, who could never bring himself to offer Missy the unfettered “I love you” that she required, was treated to a different level of affection: reasonable, but not unconditional. Of course, her love for me was not really unconditional. As I grew and (at a late age) finally pulled myself from the relationship, I realized that my grandmother needed my complete and undivided attention. She did not want to let me go. Ever.

Was Tony wise to cut himself off from her right at the beginning? Or was he unable to control how he behaved? Until I began to reflect on our past, I did not think deeply about how my brother might have felt being the odd man out. I had assumed that he was glad not to be at Missy’s beck and call, pleased to be free to remain shut up in our room, reading a good book, while I went into the living room to listen to the piano or into her bedroom to chat with her and answer whatever probing questions she had. When Missy said, “A penny for your thoughts,” it wasn’t a casual statement. She was perfectly willing to pay—in candy, money, a movie, a new coat or sled—as long as I was willing to tell her what I was thinking about.

But did Tony feel slighted? Was his withdrawal actually not a welcome release but the reaction of a hurt little boy? What, in short, if he was showing not insensitivity to Missy but a great deal of sensitivity?

Back in 1942, there were no such questions, no such thoughts. What I know now is that, despite Missy’s firm grasp on me—and the battles it caused with Dad—I came through my childhood as well as I did because Missy cared and took care of me.

In 1942, however, Tony and I mourned the loss of our White Plains home. Someday, we knew, when we were grown, we would buy the house at 250 Rosedale Avenue—and live there happily ever after.

IF TUBERCULOSIS WAS DAD’S WORST NEWS
, the most severe blow to Tony and me was that, for the second year in a row, a parent was ill and would leave us. And we would leave him. Who knew what might follow?

Anna told us not to show our grief: “Your father needs all the sympathy he can get.” It was the only bad advice she ever gave me. In retrospect, it seems to me that
we
needed all the sympathy
we
could get. At the ages of seven and nine, we had already lost our mother to a mysterious death, our father was ill and going away, our home was being sold, and we were being sent two hundred miles away to a place we’d never heard of, to be taken care of by people who were total strangers.

As if I didn’t have enough anxiety and distress, when the appointed time to go came Tony had a cold and couldn’t go with me. He had to stay in bed for at least a week, the doctor said. A cold! How sick does that make a young boy? Why couldn’t he still go with me? Why couldn’t I wait until he was well? No one ever answered those questions. Again, I felt betrayed.

In 1935 the progressive educator Carmelita Hinton bought Elm Lea—a four-hundred-acre cattle and hay farm on the top of East Hill—to establish the Putney School. Based on ideas she had gleaned from John Dewey, the regimen included eighty-minute academic classes, work on the farm, heavy emphasis on the arts, attention to politics. Putney started with a few dozen students and became nationally known as the benchmark of a well-rounded, “progressive” co-ed education, in which graduates were urged to solve the problems of the world as humanitarians, not just as scholars. Mrs. Hinton was the widow of the man who had invented the jungle gym, thereby providing enough money when he died to start the school. Sebastian Hinton had killed himself, but none of us learned that until many years later. Mrs. Hinton’s younger brother, Phil, started a school for the elementary grades a few miles away, and it was actually to that branch of Putney—called Hickory Ridge—that we were going.

Missy took me up to Putney and waited with me until Tony was well. For the first of nearly a hundred times over the next ten years, I climbed aboard a train at Grand Central and headed up the Connecticut valley to Vermont. As we went into the train, carrying just a small suitcase (the trunk would follow by Railway Express), I was comforted by the fact that my grandmother was with me, but I was terrified at what lay ahead. I did not really understand what a boarding school was, except that there would be all sorts of strangers, including boys older than I who might want to hurt me or tease me, and that my brother would not be there to protect me. And that my mother and father were—for all practical purposes—gone, vanished.

Still, it must have been somewhat exciting to look out at the passing scenery as city gave way to town and town gave way to countryside. I found the world outside those windows vastly fascinating. Fields that stretched wide across flatlands and long sheds with tin roofs and slatted sides. These held tobacco, drying in the sun and fresh air.

On future trips on the Cigar Valley Express, when we traveled alone, comic books became our solace. They reminded us that crime didn’t pay, that crooks and Nazis could be caught, that right always wins—
and that lost little boys are always reclaimed
. Comic books showed us that it was possible—if only in fantasy—to turn oneself from a weakling into a powerful force for good, a force that could twist its way into nooks and crannies, fly to distant spots, pierce solid substances, and always—
always
—triumph. For two little boys caught in the spiderweb of a world gone mad, they were an essential part of our survival kit.

When Missy and I arrived at the Putney station in mid-September 1942, we found the village’s sole taxi waiting. It was a short drive up from the river to the town, which had been founded in 1753, long before Vermont became a state.

The population in the town of Putney those days was small, but it was a wonderful place to learn about America. There were three churches—one Catholic, and two of Protestant denominations. There was a village hall, where the town selectmen met monthly and where, in true democratic fashion, a town meeting was held on the second Tuesday of every March. All laws had to pass before every voting adult. In the evening on Town Meeting day, a square dance was held, and to the delight of the children hot maple syrup, fresh from the local, wood-fired sugarhouses, would be poured over pure snow. The instantly crystallized sweet was as good a treat as any I have ever had. Black coffee, pickles, and plain donuts were offered to soften the potential shock to our systems of so much sugar.

After our five-hour train ride, the coal dust was too clotted in our nostrils, and Missy too agitated, to go right up to the school. It is hard sometimes to realize that, despite her regal and controlled manner, Missy had only recently lost a daughter and that now—as she saw it—she was losing her favorite grandson. She had dared; she had asked to have us with her in New York and, having been refused that, must have felt both angry and bereft. Having a child die by suicide is both an accusation and an irretrievable loss. But since Tony and I had suffered our own losses, we didn’t think about her.

Knowing there would not be accommodations befitting her at Hickory Ridge (outdoor plumbing was still in use that first fall), Missy had booked a bed-and-breakfast halfway up the hill above the village, just next to the co-op food store. The pleasant owner of that B and B was a longtime resident who welcomed us with a cup of tea for Missy, a cookie for me, and a comfortable cot in Missy’s room for me to rest on. I lay there for a while, in fitful day-dreams of what awaited me, but soon fell asleep.

When I woke, it was dark, and I could see that Missy’s bed was empty. In fact, it had not been slept in. Thus began a recurrent shudder of fear that I was being abandoned again. In later years, that terror would send me to the bathroom with an instant case of stomach cramps. That night it simply propelled me into action: out the door, down the stairs, looking for my grandmother. She was nowhere in sight. I opened the front door, and a voice called to me from the kitchen. It was our landlady.

“Have you seen my grandmother?” I sniffled.

“She went out for a walk, darling,” the woman said.

“Oh . . .”

“She’ll be back soon. Do you want to sit here with me until she comes back.” I debated. Was the cold kitchen chair a place I wanted to wait, or the comfortable cot upstairs? I chose the cot, but I didn’t go to sleep until my grandmother came back and went to bed.

The next morning we took a taxi to Hickory Ridge. It was the middle of September and the leaves were that dark summer green that comes with ample sun and water. Up toward the top of the hills, a few had begun to turn into the rust and gold that, within a month, would flood the landscape with unparalleled beauty. But even if they were already brilliant, I doubt that I would have seen them. Though the streams were full of sparkling water and the hills full of verdant growth, my heart was beating wildly. I feared what lay ahead.

The road was made of packed dirt. We climbed for twenty minutes, and then came out on a clearing where a large yellow farmhouse had been modified to accommodate thirty student rooms. Carpenters were working on a dining-room/kitchen addition. A large red barn was nearby, and I could hear horses neighing in the paddock. We were directed to a small machine shed where Helen Chase, the headmaster’s wife, was preparing lunch in a makeshift kitchen. Missy showed her how to mix peanut butter and honey in a big bowl and spread the premixed mess on bread, rather than doing each slice individually. Mrs. Chase was grateful. Missy had asked the taxi to wait, and now set back off for town, saying she’d come by tomorrow. Who knows what was in her heart? I can only guess that she was dismayed to be leaving me behind, distraught that Dad had chosen to send a seven-year-old boy into this wilderness rather than leave him with her in the safety of her New York apartment. Later, I could understand why he had done what he had done. But at the moment I felt far from protected.

I cried. Mrs. Chase chastised me. “I don’t like little boys who cry,” she said. I stopped crying, but I never learned to like her, not in the six years that I spent at Hickory Ridge.

When Tony finally caught up with me, a week later, we were bedded down in the same room. The theory was that he could comfort me when I got too frightened or sad. And indeed, years later, Tony told me that he listened to my crying after lights-out as I revisited the pain that had been set upon us. I desperately wanted him to tell me everything was going to be okay, but I don’t remember that happening, ever.

I would not let my brother out of my sight for long. As far as I knew, he was the only family member I still had. I did more than keep an eye on him: I strove to protect him from every possible ill. On cookouts, which were frequent, I made sure he had his food first. When classes were over for the day, I rushed to find him, to make sure he was okay. This proved to be an annoyance to Tony. It was bad enough having a younger brother tagging after him, but a seven-year-old who turned the tables and tried to take care of a nine-year-old was infuriating. The pattern was set for years to come: I was concerned about him; he did not seem to be concerned about me.

America had entered World War II. Big-time. Outside, in the “real world,” ration cards were issued; travel by car or train was limited; censorship was established. And millions of young men enlisted in the various branches of the armed forces, determined to throw Hitler and T
j
from their thrones of power. Because we were isolated in this little Vermont town, we were spared some of the frightening aspects of wartime America: the brownouts, when all lights had to be hidden from view at night; air-raid siren testing; the establishment of air-raid shelters; talk of invasions or shelling from offshore submarines.

And so, despite the fears that came at night, there were times at the school when we forgot that we had been sent into the wilderness. Exiled from parents, from comfort, from everything that “home” had meant to us—the excitement and freedom of boarding school life finally took over our spirits.