Blue Genes Page 12

  Maxwell was the father I thought I wanted to have: the outgoing, swearing, gregarious, daring, generous man, the one who never criticized us, but instead offered us views of an adult world into which our own father had never led us. He taught us how to fire a .38 revolver, talked about condoms and farts and sex, and kidded us when we laughed at dirty jokes we didn’t really understand. Jessica, at that time in her thirties, was beautiful and slim and daringly risqué. I fell instantly in love with her. The pair did not have children and would split up over that fact within ten years. For now, however, they were an exciting contrast to our own father, who was also enchanted with them—as Nick was with Gatsby—but who could not hold a candle to them when it came to giving adolescent boys a glimpse of a dizzy, glittering world.

  Though they were men of different means and mores, Bob loved Dad, too. My father was a determinedly ethical lawyer whose view of the universe was that juvenile delinquency could be halted by kindness and psychological insight. Bob was a rambunctious radio producer, whose signal radio show, Superman, had captured the imagination of boys all over the world and who broke rules for his own aggrandizement, when necessary. They had both grown up in modest circumstances, without a college education, vowing to make something of themselves.

  I think that Bob saw in Dad a passport to higher ideals—but he never attained them. Dad saw in Bob a chance to get his ideas known, and to make more money.

  I might have taken more after Bob, but I didn’t have an entrepreneurial spirit. Tony was a different matter: he was always going to follow in Dad’s footsteps. He was a serious boy who was going to lead an ethically and professionally serious life. I remember once, for instance, in the middle of August in Cutchogue, a hurricane blew across the island, threatening boats, houses, and people. Tony and I went down to the causeway as the winds blew themselves out and discovered a man in his thirties trying to capture his small powerboat, which had broken loose from its mooring some miles away and was threatening to crash onto the shore. We waded out into the waist-high, choppy waters and helped bring it safely to rest on the sand. The man dug into his water-sodden pockets and gave each of us $5. Or at least I thought each of us received it. When I got home and was changing clothes, I pulled my bill from my pocket. Tony was aghast.

  “You didn’t take that, did you?”

  I asked why not.

  “You don’t take money for helping people in a crisis,” he said.

  It was a firm and memorable reprimand from my big brother, and I was ashamed and embarrassed. This was not the first—or the last—time that he chose to be my ethics teacher. Underneath my shame, I was intensely angry.

  Dad drove out to Cutchogue on Friday nights and was always a little sour when he arrived. Had we behaved ourselves? What did we eat when he wasn’t around? Were we meeting any interesting kids? Did we thank Bob and Jessica for the bicycles, access to their rowboat, their Deepfreeze, their love and kindness?

  These were not idle questions; Dad had strong ideas about what two young teenagers should be doing with their vacation. They should be learning social skills, dating girls, reading good books, and behaving themselves.

  Whatever we did, it was not in line with Dad’s hopes. We did not try to meet and make new friends. We did not read edifying literature. We did not tidy our beds. Those months were luxurious, because never again would Tony and I have so much time to ourselves with no obligations. They were also painful, because these were supposed to be the summers when Dad took the time to really be with us, but this didn’t happen. The old arguments cropped up, and Dad’s two days at the beach were always shadowed by what he thought he owed us and what he knew he couldn’t give us.

  What had we done in any particular week? We had probably arisen late, eaten a leisurely breakfast, packed a lunch of Kool-Aid, peanut butter sandwiches, and cookies, ridden our bikes a mile to that causeway, and sunned ourselves on the very fine stretch of sand. When the sun got too hot, we waded out into the bay, which, at low tide, provided a magnificent bed of huge hard-shell clams for the picking.

  We were shy teenagers, ill matched in intellect and interests: Tony was still a baseball fanatic, I liked to sail; he read history books, I chose fantasies; Tony got As at school, I was still “not living up” to my potential. But almost nothing could defeat the joy we shared when we waded out into the warm waters of the bay and pulled those clams—fully three inches across—from the sand just under our feet, filling floating plastic buckets with enough of the mollusks to make a feast for ourselves.

  Unlike modern-day adolescents, Tony and I were sufficiently repressed that we avoided discussing dating or girls or sex. I learned what I knew (and it wasn’t much) from dormitory discussions; what Tony knew or where he learned it, I don’t know. Once he asked Dad what masturbation was (the answer from our father: “Manipulation of the penis until it gives you a pleasant feeling. It ruins things for later on”), but that was the extent of our joint sessions with Dad on sex. In fact, I didn’t even think that Tony had anything like carnal desire. His intellectual conflagrations burned so brightly that I assumed they extinguished anything else. Later, when I realized how eagerly Tony sought out women for companionship and sex, I found out that he was just like other boys in that regard.

  One crucial day in 1949 was the demarcation for me between a fearful childhood and a fearful adolescence. I had always hidden my deep fears of Dad from Dad: my belief that he was powerful enough to deprive me of Mother; that he had a choice as to whether to make our childhood safe or not; that he might wreak physical havoc on me if I told him how angry I was about losing my mother and my home.

  That particular Saturday in July, my mask would come off.

  It started quite simply enough with Dad asking us what we had done, and why we hadn’t swept the sand out of the cottage, and why the dishes were dirty, and why this and why that. I was silent. Tony started to argue with our father. I begged him to stop, and then began to cry. My father stared in amazement. What was wrong with me?

  “He’s afraid of you,” said my brother, revealing the dirty little secret for the first time.

  Dad appeared astonished. “Afraid? Why?”

  I realized that he actually had no understanding of the emotions I had been experiencing since Mother’s death. He didn’t know that I loved him and hated him, or that I feared him for what he had done to us. He didn’t know that I felt guilty for having been angry at Mother when she didn’t show up to say good-bye. He didn’t know that part of me believed that he had spirited her away. And I myself didn’t know that my longing for my mother had caused me such great anger and self-loathing.

  The magical thinking of childhood had perverted my reasoning into two choices: either I had been responsible for my mother’s death or he had. Either way, it caused anxiety, anger, and guilt.

  If he was responsible for Mother’s death, I was furious at him, but afraid of his power. If I was responsible for her death, he was going to kill me for that.

  He sat there, stunned, at my tears.

  “You don’t ever have to be afraid of me,” he said. “There’s nothing I would ever do to hurt you.” I didn’t answer.

  “Don’t you know that no matter what you did, I would always love you?”

  He had said this many times, and all it did was reinforce my childish belief that I had done something wrong.

  He shrugged his shoulders in helpless confusion. The conversation ended, but the effects lingered on and on.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1951, Dad paid for Tony to go to England, as a high school graduation gift. I went off to be a counselor at a summer camp for underprivileged kids.

  The camp was the wrong place for me. I had no experience dealing with young children, much less those who couldn’t hear or had been through hard knocks. Despite my eagerness to do what was asked of me, despite comments about what a competent young man I was, I became frightened by what I saw as my incompetence.

  I wrote to Dad:

  I’m being driven
literally to a mental frustration which it will be difficult for me to come out of. I know that sounds dramatic, but I am rather young to be a counselor of such 11 year olds.

  But the real event of the summer occurred when I found myself in a railroad station with Dad at the end of the summer, waiting to take a train to Marblehead for a mini-vacation with Missy, where I could swim and sail and be sybaritic.

  While we waited, I told him about a letter I had received from a girlfriend. In it she let me know that she was not interested in seeing me anymore. I told Dad I was very upset.

  “She looks like your mother, you know,” Dad said.

  “Nah,” I said.

  “Sure,” he replied, pulling out his wallet and showing me a tiny color photo of Mother, a picture I had not known even existed. I wondered how many times he had extracted that photograph from its hiding place and looked at it—longingly or angrily or with despair. I had never known what feelings he had about her, because he never talked about them. In the ten years since Mother’s death, he had never volunteered a word about the woman he had married, the woman who had given birth to me. I always assumed he had been hopelessly in love, and equally hopelessly in pain when she died, but he never said. Dad never volunteered to expand on the story.

  In a minute, he was about to.

  I looked at the picture of my mother without having feelings about her as my mother. I was simply comparing her with my girlfriend, looking at resemblances, not thinking of Mother as a person, not even a dead person. At that moment I felt a greater pang at my girlfriend’s negative message than at Mother’s absence.

  “You know that she killed herself, don’t you?” Dad said, and all thoughts of my girlfriend disappeared. Had he really said that? Was I being tested for some reason? Was it a horrible joke? No, he was serious, as he’d been ten years earlier, at another railroad station, when Tony and I returned from camp.

  I managed a strangled “Why?”

  “She was sick,” Dad said.

  “Of what?”

  “Mentally.”

  In the years since then, I’ve asked myself many times why I didn’t take a later train, why I didn’t stay and pepper him with questions. How—after all these years of unanswered and strangled doubts—could I just sit there, in shock? Perhaps it was because Dad himself was apparently unmoved, tearless. Why was he cruelly telling me the most important fact of my life at this time, when there was no room for discussion and with people milling about? No room to digest the news. Shock and awe silenced me.

  Barely able to get the question out, I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I thought you already knew.”

  I should have done more than shake my head. I should have shouted at him in anger. Or broken into sobs. How dare he think I knew and still never talk to me about Mother’s death!

  Now I understand. Now I know that he was in a permanent shock, one from which he never recovered. His own anger, guilt, sadness, and longing were never worked out—not in therapy, not in grief, not in personal conversations. He buried all of those too deep in himself to be able to communicate with his sons. Gin and bourbon became his only therapists.

  I asked one more question before I left.

  “Was Mother there when I was a child?”

  “Physically, yes,” Dad said.

  I stumbled on board the train and sat in thought for the three hours it took me to get to Marblehead.

  Stunned is what I felt—stunned and startled and hurt. I was furious at Mother. She had taken her own life and abandoned me in the process. I was furious at all the adults who had done nothing to protect me, to prevent her death, all those who had not told me the truth.

  What was I to do with this news? I knew nothing about suicide. I had never known anyone or heard of anyone who killed himself. I felt guilty that I was angry, but equally furious that I was not permitted to shout and storm and tear my clothes.

  My next impulse was that there was more to the story than the little I now knew. Dad had done something to make her kill herself. He had sent her away to Tripp Lake, rejected her. He had mistreated her. Because I didn’t understand that Mother had a disease, a mental disorder, I concluded that Dad had been culpable. That’s why he was secretive. He was more dangerous than I had thought!

  Exhausted, I fell asleep. I couldn’t think about this now. Later. Tomorrow.

  I did not throw myself at Missy and ask her about Mother’s death. That would have been too difficult, too soon after the ugly news. The next day, however, after four hours of cruising in a brisk wind by myself in a 110 sailboat, I felt ready to broach the subject with my grandmother. She immediately broke into tears.

  “I wanted to tell you, darling. All these years. But your father . . .”

  Had she really wanted to tell me? In the ten years since 1941, she had never brought the subject up, except in the most general terms. She never came close to hinting how Mother had died. If she talked about her at all, it was with tears and sobs, but she never got beyond them—to the truth.

  I spoke with Dad about Mother’s suicide only once more. It was the summer after I graduated from college. “You’re better off,” he assured me, talking about a passionate love affair (my first real sex) that had ended a few weeks earlier, “if your girlfriend was as nutty as you say.”

  “Would you have been better off not marrying Mother?” I asked, more as a retort than expecting a real answer. Without a moment’s hesitation, he nodded his head.

  “Yes. I would have been better off.”

  I was shocked, and hurt. Not to have had my mother at all—that was unthinkable.

  In the time since I had first learned about Mother’s suicide, I had given some thought to what it was like for Dad to live with her. I had talked with Uncle Ira about it, and he had given me some hint of the wild swings that governed Mother’s life, of the terrible nights she must have put Dad through. That was when Ira told me that he, too, was bipolar, and I learned that he used medication to control his mood swings, medication that hadn’t been available to Mother in the early 1940s. We even briefly day-dreamed together what might have been had Mother had lithium and other modern drugs instead of having to rely on shock therapy and psychoanalysis.

  When Tony came back from England, I immediately told him about the suicide. He sat for a moment, but asked me no questions except “Are you sure?”

  In fact, for the rest of his life, Tony showed no journalistic curiosity about his past, none of the fire and passion that he exhibited about other people’s problems, their day-to-day lives. We both continued in psychological and intellectual denial.

  MORE AND MORE, Tony and I ventured out into the city without Dad or Missy in tow. Our independence from them resulted in a special brand of camaraderie, one in which Tony’s greater pluck overcame my more timid nature. We explored precincts in which Dad and Missy wouldn’t be caught dead—places like the seedy and precarious Hubert’s Flea Circus. This inelegant emporium lay in the middle of Forty-second Street, between theaters showing endless Marx Brothers’ films and flashy burlesque shows. We went there with some fear for our safety: Forty-second Street was then an area known by all to be the province of perverts, prostitutes, and pickpockets. As we walked carefully off Broadway, where brilliant billboards lit up the city, we scanned the streets for danger.

  It was worth it. At Hubert’s, for a few cents, we would gape at the bearded lady, the midget twins, and other oddities of the era. We would revel in frivolity. At the end, for a few extra pennies, we could peek into the flea circus itself, where we were persuaded that the little insects actually wore costumes and did acrobatics. We were gullible and easily entertained and thrilled with having witnessed the forbidden together.

  Then there was magic. We had both decided that we wanted to be magicians. We had to be magicians. Under the old elevated tracks that still ran along Sixth Avenue, Tony and I visited cranky little shops that catered to amateurs and professionals alike. Above our heads, we could
hear and feel the wobbly trains of the IND line as they cast shadows down onto the seamy shops below.

  We entered stores filled with mystery, wishing to become midget Houdinis. We learned to do a few card tricks, to make silk handkerchiefs appear and disappear, and to watch other customers create much greater illusions. At the time, I dearly wished I could learn enough to make Mother reappear. But even Houdini couldn’t do that.

  SOME EXPERIENCES weren’t quite so exhilarating. One December—we were no more than eleven and nine—Tony and I sauntered into a store to buy soap or sachets or some such holiday gift for Missy. Dressed up in three-quarter-length winter coats with fake fur collars, we must have looked the quintessence of little rich boys. As we walked through a quiet part of the store on an upper floor, four boys, a little older than we, approached. One asked if we knew the time. When Tony pulled back his sleeve to look at his wristwatch, the kids knew they had a good target. “Give us what you’ve got,” the toughest said. I remember literally shivering in fright. Tony tried to face them down, while I begged him to give them something. Seeing how frightened I was, he relented. They got away with no more than $1.60, but Tony was furious with me for being such a coward. Still, I was relieved to get away without a beating, and felt secure in the knowledge that I had a big brother who would protect me.

  The truest shared passion—our own little piece of heaven on earth—was theater. This was mostly an outgrowth of our early experience with Mother in White Plains, playing out our feelings on the window seat in our dining room. Being rewarded with her smile and applause.

  Dad, too, found the lure of theater irresistible. I remember sitting in the living room of his small apartment on Seventy-ninth Street as he recited a peroration from Henry V, his hand and index finger stabbing the air, one eyebrow raised in an expression of melodramatic exhortation. It was a stirring if over-the-top rendition. Tony and I found it thrilling to hear our father perform something in a realm that we ourselves found fascinating. There were a few other recitations: something from Blake. But Henry V was the topper.