Blue Genes (11 page)

In the winter, we all went skiing—a mandatory sport. Those early skis were long and cumbersome, with spring bindings that didn’t come loose when we fell. The poles, made of bamboo, came up to our armpits. Tony and I took to the slopes with gusto, but not with great skill. Later, I worked my way up to become a ski instructor and once won a downhill race against another school. But in general, I was not a speedster on the slopes, nor did I try ski jumping. I might have been graceful, but I was not courageous.

Tony was never graceful; he was, in fact, ungainly. His arms and hands were carried forward of his body, not smoothly, but in jerks, rising and falling as his body twisted in an attempt to perform acts of physical skill. His body was out of rhythm, his legs pumping almost spasmodically. When he skied, he
threw
himself down the slope, his upper body trying to wrest his lower body into turns rather than melting into the slope as the best skiers do. At soccer he churned down the field, his lips taut, his brow furrowed, trying to reach, to kick the twirling ball, often as not sending it far afield from his desired target. Only when he played second base or shortstop did his longtime love of the game of baseball enable him to fire a hardball straight to first, angling for a double play. The rest of the time—at other sports—he was lucky if he just got the job done.

However, in his face you could see the effort, the intensity, the will to succeed. With his eyes bulging, his lips tightly compressed, you couldn’t tell if he was angry or just concentrating on the job.

I often thought he would fall onto the playing field or the slope out of sheer exertion or desperation to get it right, but he entered into sports and theater and even square dancing with a gusto reminiscent of the way in which he had bitten into an onion sandwich as a child, or the way in which he tackled his homework. For him, it was all or nothing.

His lack of grace extended to his personal appearance. Tony did not wear clothes well. Even when, after his marriage, he bought the finest shirts and double-breasted jackets, there was something sloppy about the way he stood—hands crammed in his pants pockets, one hip lower than the other, his tie ever so slightly askew. Perhaps it was an image from that play about journalism in the old days,
The Front Page
, a jacket-off, shirtsleeves-rolled-up look, that attracted him. Or maybe he was just clumsy of body, the way he was elegant of intellect.

Life at Hickory Ridge was harsh at first. The walls were full of leaks and took the full brunt of winter snows and autumn rains. In the middle of the night, wind screeched past the faulty caulking around our windows. It entered into our beds—the radiators having long since ceased their whistling warmth—and we wriggled in our deep sleep, feeling the chill. In the morning, we slipped on long johns, ran down the hall to the newly installed bathroom, and hastily washed our faces before descending to a stomach-warming breakfast of Cream of Wheat.

Tony was no more fit to the north country than I, but the fact that he was two years older gave him a leg up on adaptation to cold and wind. While we both would learn to deal with winter chills and rough lodging, in those first two years I didn’t adapt to the emotional cold.

Lying in bed, I tried to convince myself that I had concocted all this squalor. It was merely a movie of my life, over which I had control as some future film director, or, at the worst, a phantasm of loneliness and discomfort, not real life. But I remember distinctly that this did not, in the end, comfort me. The “movie” didn’t end; no fairy godmother came floating out of the sky. Only the headmaster, Phil, his crinkled, leathery Vermont face bending over the bed, coaxing me back to sleep, but promising a life of unease for years to come.

Nonetheless, I formulated one firm idea: if I behaved like the good little boy everyone said I was (and that I knew I wasn’t; otherwise, why would my mother and father have abandoned me and sent me off into the freezing hell of Vermont?),
eventually
my mother would return.

If not my mother, then surely my father would come here, make amends for his inept handling of my childhood, compensate us for the pain and sorrow. He would take us into his home, into his bosom, and pay us back for what had been stolen from us.

AT HICKORY RIDGE
, Tony began the intellectual and physical growth spurt that would take him to Harvard and the
New York Times
. Even his first report card makes the point. He is nine years old. Elizabeth Hamill, his English teacher, writes: “Tony is a very conscientious worker. His script is beautiful. His creative writing shows both thinking and originality and a happy feeling for the poetry in language.” And his history teacher, Ida Belle Hegemann, pens: “Tony is attentive and rather quiet in history class. His questions are always pertinent, which shows that he is interested in the subject. His comprehension is good and he gave a well thought-out talk in a history assembly. His papers are written with care and thought, and with attention to sentence structure.”

They did not think the same about me. For ten years, I followed in his footsteps, academically, with the same courses, the same teachers; my footprint was never as big as his. “If only Kit would work harder,” they said. “You never quite live up to your potential,” one teacher wrote me directly. I was “scattered” in my organization.

Of course, as I look back on it, we both had our strengths. I was easy to get along with. I had a spontaneous, almost instinctive sense of music, an inborn ear. Though I never became the professional conductor I aspired to be, I have always been able to enjoy all kinds of music and performing arts. And, unlike Mother, who complained of her “over-quick mind,” I found it enjoyable to make quick decisions, to get on with things, whether they were profound or not. Some things, after all, do not demand perfection or a lifetime to decide.

One of those things was acting. At Hickory Ridge, I quickly entered the world of drama, performing plays like
Toad of Toad Hall
: efforts to encourage elementary school children to express themselves. I needed no encouragement. Mother’s plays on the window seat had prepared me. I loved the exposure to an audience. I loved approbation. Though I always wanted to be the hero, the serious one, it was with comedy that I began to win not only applause but laughter—and I loved it.

WE WAITED FOR DAD
to let us know when—if ever—he would be coming home. At Thanksgiving, that first year, we rode the sooty train to New York and stayed with Missy. The same occurred at Christmas. We conversed with Dad over the long-distance phone. He was in Phoenix, Arizona, at a tuberculosis sanitarium. He was getting better, he said.

Our
X-rays—taken before we left for school—were fine; only
he
had the disease. He hoped to be back within a year.

A year! That seemed like an eternity to me. How would I survive? What would happen to me—and to Tony? I was on terra incognita.

Children are resilient, or at least they
appear
to be. Looking back, I cannot be sure which was true of me, or of Tony. At the time, we appeared to go on with normal children’s lives—if “normal” can include seven- and nine-year-olds being sent two hundred miles away to a raw country life to live with strangers. But we did play and learn, and enjoy the benefits of a Vermont lifestyle.

Underneath, however, I was coming to terms, in a very strange way, with the notion that my mother was dead and my father had gone away.

In the spring of 1943, Dad showed up at school. He had returned only recently from Arizona and was eager to get to work again at the Society for the Prevention of Crime, pursuing his holy grail: preventing delinquents from growing up into adult criminals.

When he came up to Hickory Ridge, Dad was thirty pounds heavier than the last time we’d seen him; he didn’t look like himself. Clearly, the bed rest, fattening foods, and other treatment at the sanitarium had improved his health. But when he left, I confided to Tony that I did not believe this man was our father. This was a trick that was being played on us. Our
real
father was still in Arizona, with Mother. We would never see either of them again. Tony looked askance at me, but did not tell anyone what I had said.

My head was filled with nightmares. Just after Mother’s death, I dreamed of being buried alive. I would wake in a terror. Later, in adolescence and early adulthood, evildoers were after me, chasing me with spears. Luckily, I could fly, and I would hover just above their raised weapons, fleeing, just out of reach. In adulthood, the most intense dreams have been ones in which some beautiful girl or woman abandons me or is simply out of reach: she remains silent, never contacting me or letting me contact her. It was a video replay I could not turn off. The machine was on automatic.

Clearly, I was not happy, and I was not particularly stable. Shortly after the visit from Dad, I started setting fires in wastebaskets in teachers’ rooms. I always put them out, but soon Phil Chase, the head of the school, and others noticed and started trying to figure out who was doing this dangerous trick. One evening, Phil sat me down in his tiny office and asked me to tell him whether I was in fact the arsonist. I admitted it. To my surprise, he was not angry. He sympathized with my fears and my grief. He knew I wasn’t happy. He asked for my cooperation in helping him keep the place safe. I had to say yes, and in fact I was pleased to do so. At last, I had received real comfort, real understanding.

Eight times a year, Tony and I took that train between Putney and New York. We grew physically and intellectually. On vacations, Tony and I did things together, but seldom at school, where I continued to inquire if he had had enough to eat, gotten enough sleep, wanted to go to the soccer game. I was still trying to reassure myself that he, too, wouldn’t get sick and abandon me, that I knew where he was at all times. He, however, found the attention anything but gratifying and sought out boys his own age for company. In my eighth-grade year, he was no longer there, having moved up from Hickory Ridge to Putney, three miles away. I had to find friends to supplant him.

I gravitated to Tom Russell, whom we called Rusty, with his golden hair falling constantly across his freckled face, stocky legged, running across the soccer field, or taking off—soaring—into the air from the ski jump. His parents had moved the family to India when he was very young, and he and his sister grew up attended by amahs and watching cobras drink milk from straw bowls. It was the era of the Raj, and when the Rockefellers came visiting their Standard Oil domain, Tom’s father (who was their manager for India, Burma, China, and Ceylon) showed them around. The war came; Tom, his sister, and their mother were sent home. Somewhere in Ceylon, Tom’s father got killed by the Japanese.

Tom would sit, cross-legged, his calves bulging under the strain, clutching a dog-eared paperback close to his chest so we couldn’t see the pages, and read to us, the hungry looks on our faces telling him how much we wanted him to go on.

The book snapped shut. Rusty heaved himself up out of his cramped position and went to play soccer or sun himself in back of our dormitory. The book was put away in a Chinese puzzle box that my other roommate and I could never open. I don’t know why we allowed ourselves to be toyed with like that, but then, we were only twelve years old, and it’s not hard for one preteen with lots of worldly experience to fool another.

It wasn’t until the end of the year that I finally got a glimpse at that book. It was a Penguin edition of
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, and the closest there was to a seduction scene was in the name of the book. But there was something about Tom, about his seductive voice, his unbearable masculinity, that made the story believable, and every time he “read” us excerpts, our mouths watered, our tiny penises rose beneath our sheltering hands, and we begged him for more. I suppose it was natural, then, that I should have fallen in love with Tom, natural for me, that is, a boy whose brother didn’t pay him much attention, who made him feel small.

Not that I ever let on, of course. We were chaste and platonic as could be, much as my mother apparently had been with Frances Berwanger. And soon, when Tom and I both went up to Putney, I began to focus on girls. Soon, too, because he was a superb baseball player, Tom would be taken up by the boys one or two classes ahead of us. He became very close to Tony, and the three of us would occasionally vacation in New York or go to a ball game.

______

IN THE SPRING OF
1945, as the war wound down (I was ten, Tony twelve), we got word at Hickory Ridge that Dad had remarried. The new wife was a tall, stunning redhead named Ruth West who worked in advertising at J. Walter Thompson. She had a daughter, Piri, from her first marriage.

I was elated. This would mean we had a new mother, someone to look after us and give us what we’d been missing for four years. Tony was more cautious. This was our father’s new wife, not necessarily a new mother for us. I don’t think he was actually eager to have a new mother. His experience of the old one had been less than stellar.
I
was eager for a reincarnation.

In some ways, this characterized a major difference between us. I was hopeful (though not always optimistic) that life could take a wonderful turn for the better, almost magically. Tony was confident that nothing could create good outcomes except hard work, diligence, and attention to detail. If mine was a fantastical way of looking at the world—one that was bound to have many disappointments—his would leave him disenchanted before the battle even began.

For that summer’s vacation in 1945 we all settled into a house in Larchmont, a suburb of New York City. It was the first summer we had not gone to camp or stayed with Missy, and I thought it might prove to be the beginning of a permanent structure for our disjointed lives. But the only permanence was the house itself, one of those fake-English, half-timbered buildings on a quiet side street.