Blue Genes (3 page)

“We’ll have to carry her,” said my father.

And carry Ella they did, up many, many flights of stairs, stopping every so often to curse themselves for being smart alecks and cheap. Arriving, at last, at the lab’s doors, they encountered another problem. They were locked. It was late. By now, tempers flaring and ingenuity at a low, they had only one choice. They broke a basement window, slid the body in, clambered in themselves, and carted Ms. Ella Morgan to an empty dissecting table.

As Dad put it: “In the morning, we could barely face one another, much less Ella.”

Dad lasted that one year and then quit.

At the same time, Samuel and his family moved back to New York City, and Dad returned with them, joined by Lou Berko, a cousin with whom he had struck up an enthusiastic friendship in Pittsburgh. Together, they decided to go to a night course at Brooklyn Law School. It would take longer than going during the day, but they could have jobs during the day if they went at night. That would help them pay the tuition. Luckily, at that time, one didn’t need a college degree to go to law school, so they both got in.

Lou and Dad pursued the law with intelligence and energy. To help support himself, Dad got a clerkship in the law office of one Fiorello La Guardia, a man who understood something about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. He had done much the same as Samuel Lukacs, finding work at Ellis Island translating from Italian and the Slavic languages.

Dad liked clerking for La Guardia. The Little Flower (as he was called by the press) believed in justice for the poor and in many of the qualities of democracy about which my father was now becoming passionate. Among Dad’s duties for La Guardia was getting the famous stogies the mayor smoked. Dad tried one on a boring afternoon and was violently ill. La Guardia took no apparent notice, but on Dad’s graduation from law school gave him a cigar box filled with those stogies. Dad was twenty-one years old.

This was not Dad’s only escapade. On graduating from law school, and after taking the bar exam, he and his close Pittsburgh friend Lou decided to “see the country.” Because neither had the money to travel in a comfortable manner, they decided to ride freight trains like hoboes. According to my aunt Judy, Dad took along a mandolin for entertainment. All went well for the first half of the journey. They traveled in empty freight cars, avoided the railroad police (the infamous “bulls”), and also managed to stay away from hobo encampments, where, according to legend, one could get killed for a few pennies.

It was the golden era of flappers, before the Depression sent America into a spiral of debt and despair. Jazz was played on the street corners and in the bars; pretty women danced in shimmering costumes. Lou and Dad could walk the streets unmolested, enjoying the exterior scenes and listening to the frantic music floating out from fancy joints. All that ended one night in July when they rode an empty car into the rail yards of Abilene, Texas. As they stretched their legs down to make the short jump to the ground, wondering where their next meal would come from—and their next shower—a couple of “bulls” materialized from behind a building.

“Gotcha!”

True to the town’s frontier origins, the Abilene cops who captured Lou and Dad won a cash prize for every person they caught riding the rails, turning that person over to the local justice of the peace, who also was in charge of the jail. Scowling down from the bench, the judge sentenced them to ten days.

“You can’t do that, Judge,” said my father. “We’re due back in New York for our appearances before the bar committee.”

“Lawyers, huh!” said the justice of the peace. “Thirty days, then.”

If some of this story is my aunt’s hyperbole (Dad’s short version was less exciting), so be it; enough is true to have cemented it in my memory all these years. As we heard it, the next thing that happened was that the judge’s wife—who cooked meals for the few prisoners—took pity on the two young men and asked her husband to reduce the sentence. Calling them before him once again, he freed them, on one condition: they be out of town by nightfall.

Dad and Lou, sleeping gear and mandolin in hand, went down to the tracks. There was no freight train in sight, and a local hobo told them none was due through until after midnight. They had but one choice—to hide themselves behind the coal car in the flaps that stick out from the baggage car at the head of the line (“the blinds,” they’re called). So they rode the blinds to Denver, only to discover upon alighting—frightened and frigid—that coal dust had blackened them beyond recognition.

Neither Dad nor Aunt Judy relates how they got back to New York. Perhaps they had to call on their parents to rescue them. What
is
known is that they appeared in front of the bar ethics committee. Having passed their exams, they now simply had to tell the assembled men that there were no moral reasons why they should not be accepted into the New York bar. Dad told them about Abilene and jail and riding the rails. Looking down their rum-scarred noses at him, the committee members scolded him for his actions, asked him to think about what he had done, and let him leave the room thinking that they had serious doubts about his character.

As the doors closed behind him, raucous laughter spilled out from the committee room, and Dad knew that those peccadilloes were behind him. He would be admitted to the bar.

What always startled me about this story was not the minor infraction of the law but the independence of spirit shown by my father. To us—to Tony and me—he preached adherence not only to the law but to the
spirit
of the law. More than that: anytime that Tony or I broke away from the crowd, striking out with our own ideas or dreaming of great exploits, Dad would put us down. It was a clear case of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Or was it a change in personality—something that happened to Dad as he got older: the fear that his adventuresome spirit might endanger his children, that we might prove to be
too
bold,
too
spirited,
too
independent, and he would lose us?

IF MY FATHER’S FAMILY
—with its Hungarian bravura—proved to be too erratic, my mother’s family, while appearing to be calm, cautious, mainstream, was a time bomb waiting to explode.

Our maternal grandmother, May Bamberger, was born in Brooklyn in 1884, fourteen years before that city became just another borough of Greater New York. Her parents were wealthy by any standard, but by German-Jewish standards well-off indeed, and May was treated royally. She went to a private school—the Packer Collegiate Institute—but not to college, having fallen, at nineteen, under the spell of a Philadelphia physician fifteen years her elder.

I have a photograph of her on her wedding day. Sweet and beautiful, she wears a diaphanous gown that stretches to the floor and beyond, not with a train, but with frilly tassels and lace. A full bosom, full sleeves, hair coiffed up and away from her neck. Her nose is slightly upturned.

The doctor, Jay Frank Schamberg, had seven brothers and sisters; one of those siblings had ten children. I grow dizzy looking at the family tree. But May and Jay had only two children.

Early in her marriage to Dr. Schamberg, when the smallpox vaccination was introduced, May helped him spread the word that it was safe and effective. Later, when women she knew needed abortions, my grandmother often arranged for them, though her husband forbade her using the home to do so, since it would reflect on his professional respectability. And who can blame him? It would be another fifty years before abortions were legal in the United States. What amazed me is that my rule-bound, staid, puritanical grandmother was at one time at the center of a series of illegal operations.

She took other chances. At the beginning of World War II, May arranged for two English children to come over to the United States and gave their mother money to get started in a new land. She did the same for Anna, Ernst, and Marguerite Fuchs, Czech refugees who had fled to Paris when the Germans entered Prague, only to have to flee again when France was taken. Ernst Fuchs was immediately given important work in the war industry, and Marguerite Fuchs (his sister) took over the sewing department at the elite Elizabeth Arden shops. Only Anna—a college-educated woman—came down a step or two, rewarding our grandmother for the family’s freedom by becoming her cook, and a caretaker for Tony and me. She would become much more than a caretaker: a guardian angel.

Some people said that May B. Schamberg (Missy, as we came to call her) looked just like Ethel Barrymore, the famous movie star, but prettier. She wore floor-length dressing gowns around her apartment and always paid for the best—whether in butter or beef or dry cleaning. I know about her early life only through a piece of barely disguised autobiographical writing of my mother’s, a kind of “memoir à clef,” which she wrote for a class in educational psychology she took in the 1930s. In that long essay, in which Mother used pseudonyms, she idealized Missy for her selflessness but felt there was something missing in her sense of self-worth. In fact, Missy was often depressed, rising in the middle of the night to cook or to play the piano, which she did with some degree of accuracy and no feeling whatsoever.

Because that psychology paper is so clearly an account of my mother’s early life—as well as of her brother, Ira, her achievements and debacles, and the early years of my brother, Tony—I think of it as a long and powerful piece of correspondence: a letter, as it were, read by me after I ceased to be able to converse with her.

I first came upon it in 1971 after Missy’s death. I was overjoyed to get some insight into the hidden facts of my mother’s life, but in retrospect it has turned out to be more like a Trojan horse, replete with booby traps. Looking back, I wonder if it doesn’t tell me
too
much about my mother’s life and her relationships with those around her.

Mildred Elizabeth Schamberg was born on April 17, 1908. She came squawking into the world like many another child, although of course she was born at home, as were most children in those days. Dr. Jay had been cautious, however, and had a “specialist” present, rather than the usual family doctor. That obstetrician used forceps to bring Mother out. The umbilical cord was wrapped twice around her neck, but there was, the doctor asserted, no damage to the infant. Missy tried to nurse Mother, but the little girl didn’t thrive, so a bottle was brought into play, and little Mildred Elizabeth grew fast. Her baby book—a compendium of factoids about the newborn and her first six months—contained a section for gifts from relatives. I see listed there all those strange nineteenth-century names that clearly echo from my own childhood—names of the various great-aunts and great-uncles who peopled my grandmother’s world. The gifts included one of those hollow metal dishes that allow oatmeal to stay warm by virtue of hot water poured into the interior. There was also a silver spoon from Tiffany, the date and time of birth inscribed upon it. I have them both, almost a hundred years later.

My mother had a very romantic notion about her parents. In the autobiography she describes them as a “Tennysonian husband and a Byronic lover.” From other reports, ones I can trust, Dr. Schamberg was actually quite a distant husband and father. I have pictures of him, wearing a pince-nez and a vest. Many years later, my aunt Frances said he had been “a pill.” She would tell the story of how, when asked if he was hungry, Jay would pull out his pocket watch. If the two hands met at noon, then he was hungry. Otherwise, not. Punctilious. Rigid. Victorian through and through.

As is the case with many German-Jewish families, there is little evidence that the Schambergs actually practiced any form of Judaism, except for the obligatory yearly Yom Kippur attendance. Still, Mother and her younger brother, Ira (born fourteen months after her), were often called “dirty Jews” at elementary school in Philadelphia. Ira had been born “weak and sickly, a little premature,” but Mother reports that he stood up valorously for her if she was jeered at, and when they weren’t fighting for attention from Missy and Dr. Schamberg, Mother and Ira were tight allies.

Apparently, the grown-up Schambergs were also disturbed by the cries of “dirty Jew” in the schoolyard because, shortly after Mother’s tenth birthday, they surprised her by announcing that Dr. Schamberg had helped to organize a grammar and high school in the nearby suburb of Jenkintown. Soon, they moved there, and Elizabeth (her favorite name for herself, though some called her Betty and her brother occasionally called her Liza) spent an increasingly happy number of years at Oak Lane Country Day School.

Like many another rich family—and my mother’s parents had plenty of money—the Schambergs often spent summers in Maine or other New England haunts. Often, Missy and Mother would go to Kennebunkport without Dr. Schamberg, who had to sweat it out in his office in Philadelphia.

When Mother was twelve, she went away to Camp Miramichi, one of those fake Indian hideaways where urban girls break up into different “tribes” and learn how to get along with one another. In her letters, which were often ten pages long, Mother was unlike the other camp kids I have known. She wrote with fine grammar and an even finer sense of purpose. To her father, in July 1920, she says that she hopes she hasn’t made him angry for not writing sooner. Two weeks later she is begging her parents’ pardon for having lied to a head counselor about taking some brown sugar from the kitchen back to her tent.

When Mother was thirteen, Francis Froelicher, who was in his late twenties, arrived on the scene as the new headmaster at Oak Lane. He took an immediate liking to her—to her quick sense of humor and to her appearance. Mother reciprocated. Over the next seven years what had started out as a childish crush became a dangerous liaison. In her mid-teens, Mother began to spend weekends as well as weekdays at the school. Froelicher was tutoring her in German and English and welcomed the teenager’s avid study habits.

If this sounds like a budding Lolita–Humbert Humbert relationship, I fear it was far more prosaic, and far more dangerous. Froelicher was married—with three children—and knew better. Mother was beautiful, smart, and precocious. She knew what she wanted and, before long, how to get it. I don’t suggest that Mother was at fault here. There are too many stories of April–November affiliations in the newspapers and the psychology journals to blame an unstable teen for her desire to break out of a Victorian morality into an Edwardian one. Froelicher should have held his sexual desires at bay. He didn’t; nor did he act ethically with regard to his job as Mother’s headmaster. It was a terribly messy situation. I cannot take a higher moral plane than that: we all have made errors of judgment in our day. But I can say that what happened next was to have horrendous repercussions for decades to come.