Blue Genes Page 16

  The boys were worried—for about ten seconds. Then they took off for parts unknown. Suddenly the place was quiet and dark. I looked at my watch: it was 5:15. Would we miss the boat? Tony was now sitting on a stool at the refreshment stand, nursing his badly bruised elbow. How was I going to get him back to the motel? Where would we find a doctor?

  Behind the counter—on which stood sweating bottles of orange Fanta—was an old man, one of tens of thousands of such Mexicans, face lined from too many hard days in the sun. Reaching to a shelf below him, he pulled up a jar of something viscous, green, and evil smelling. Motioning Tony to move closer, the Indian slopped this gummy substance on my brother’s elbow and massaged it gently. Within seconds, Tony reported that a warm, healing electricity had entered his arm, swiftly reducing the pain. Within minutes, we were able to walk to the ferry—which had not left—and made it back to our room. By this time, Tony was perfectly comfortable.

  For the rest of the trip we referred to this as “The Magic of La Roqueta.”

  But the real magic of the trip was in the relationship with Tony. Traveling with him had created a brotherhood that had not existed before. We were more equals, more comrades, more family than ever before.

  This golden time would never happen again. From then on a divide would exist between us.

  In the years to come, I would think back to this trip often. I would refer to the food, the weather, and the experiences I had shared with my brother. These were roseate memories, lovingly preserved.

  I RETURNED FROM MEXICO to find that my “girlfriend” was taking off for Europe for a postgraduation tour of architectural sites.

  It is not an exaggeration to say that this threw me into a panic. What would she do while she was away? Forage for a new man? Explore the depths of his romantic soul? My fantasies ran the gamut.

  And what would I do? How would I get by without her?

  This abandonment (for that was how I experienced it) was the worst I had ever felt. I was in a fit of coruscating grief. Why was she doing this to me? Why did everyone always abandon me? It was a neurotic despair unlike anything I had gone through.

  Then, as letters from abroad came one by one, I began to consider the possibility that she had not forgotten me—only gone on a lovely vacation. We wrote back and forth, and in one letter I asked her to marry me. She didn’t reply.

  In fact, two months later, when she returned, she said nothing about marriage. I waited, afraid to ask, becoming more and more unsure of myself, more and more panicked.

  She never did say no, but I took her silence for a turndown. She was abandoning me, and I went into a period of intense anxiety. For two weeks, I was afraid to go to work, or indeed to go anywhere. I shut down.

  Little by little with my psychoanalyst’s help, I worked on what had encouraged me to get tied up with this woman in the first place. Had I perhaps sensed that she would never commit to me? Had I sabotaged myself from the beginning? Was I—in the words of the psychology profession—in an endless cycle of the repetition compulsion: the need to live through what had traumatized me in the first place, hoping over and over again that I might reverse history?

  The relationship was over, and I needed to find a way to move on, to find the “right girl.” In July of 1961, the mother of a high school roommate suggested that I meet the daughter of one of her friends. Susan Ries was twenty years old, an English and philosophy major at UCLA. I phoned the number I had been given.

  “Bob’s Big Boy” was how the young woman on the other end answered. Now, Bob’s Big Boy was a fast-food restaurant in Los Angeles. I quickly hung up. Clearly, I had dialed incorrectly. I tried again.

  The same young female voice answered, but this time she said, “Hello?”

  “Hi,” I said, relieved, not even taking the time to realize that I’d experienced a practical joke. “My name is Kit Lukas . . .”

  There was a slight laugh on the other end of the phone. “Kit!” she said. “That’s the hokiest name I’ve ever heard.”

  Susan’s sense of humor might be just what I needed to pop my bubble of despair. Certainly she felt that I spent too much of my time being oh-so-serious about love, life, sex. At times, true to form, I couldn’t believe that she was the right woman for me. After all, if she loved me, how could she be good enough? After she began to reciprocate my affection, I began to find reasons to have a fight, to pull away. If she loved me, then this couldn’t be what I wanted, because the person whom I had most loved had deserted me. If she didn’t love me, then I wanted her passionately, because I had to conquer the loss of childhood.

  I recognized this behavior in Tony (who dated ferociously but for years couldn’t find the “right woman”). But it took months for me to see it clearly in my relationship with Susan.

  Six months, to be precise. In January, I proposed. On July 1, 1962, we were to be married. Tony would be best man.

  Susan and Tony took to each other immediately. She was not put off by his dark moods, simply sought—as with me—to lighten them with her irrepressible joshing. On Dad’s arrival for the wedding, he, too, could not believe how beautiful and charming Susan was. The only naysayer was Missy, who, like a Wicked Witch of the East, arrived with a cane, a scowl, and demands for attention.

  On the day before the wedding, rather than adhere to Susan’s mother’s schedule for yet one more hair appointment, she, Tony, and I went to the racetrack, where we bet on numerous losing horses but enjoyed ourselves tremendously. After the wedding, just before we drove off to San Diego for our brief honeymoon, Tony confided to me, “If you hadn’t married Susan, I would have.”

  The big news at the wedding was that Tony had been hired by the New York Times. He would start on the general assignment desk but would then be prepped for foreign duty either in Asia or in Africa; if he was lucky—and skillful—he would be sent to one of those plum European positions that foreign correspondents aspire to.

  I don’t think the family could have been prouder. Tony had shown us all that he had the right stuff. I knew it was the culmination of one dream, and the beginning of another. The culmination, because just getting a job on the Times had been his goal for over a decade. The beginning, because I knew that Tony would now shift his sights upward: to a higher rung of the ladder. If past predicted present, he would begin to berate himself for not climbing faster, harder, still higher.

  After four months at the Times, Tony wrote me that the news-paper was sending him to the Congo on December 1. They clearly knew what they had in hand. But, true to form, Tony wrote a peculiar if not quixotic note:

  I’m of course very happy about the idea in the abstract. But in more concrete terms, I have no great desire to spend two years in Léopoldville. I was just beginning to enjoy New York.

  For years, he had been striving to achieve this status. The mother of all journalism—the Times—was sending him abroad. Now that he had this prized possession, he was dispirited, discounting the rewards of his expertise and hard labor. It was a sign of things to come: forever doubting that what he aspired to was what he really wanted.

  He was right. What he really wanted, and what I really wanted, was proof that we had not been abandoned and rejected, that we could regain our previous, childhood state of grace.

  Nevertheless, Tony’s first foreign assignment was to Léopoldville. His fragile command of French now bolstered by an intensive course at Berlitz, he set off with great excitement to learn about Kasavubu, Adoula, Mobutu, Moise Tshombe, Patrice Lumumba, the Pygmies, and how King Leopold II and the Belgians had destroyed a nation. Endless civil wars, which continue to this day, would show him that the king’s legacy was . . . more blood-shed.

  I knew what it meant for Tony to be abroad. I wouldn’t have liked it: it would have been neither exciting nor a “romantic” enterprise, nor one I would dream of taking on. But he wanted the job, and despite leaving safety and family behind, he would conquer the work and, on some level, feel gratified by it.

  Once Tony got t
o the Congo, he stopped writing home almost entirely. Dad complained bitterly that he didn’t hear from his elder son. To me, Tony sent only two letters during his two-year stay in the Congo, but each gave insight into the beginning career—as well as the inner emotions—of this foreign correspondent.

  He did thank Susan and me for sending him paperbacks. He remarked that he particularly enjoyed Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and Mark Harris’s Southpaw. Conrad, Malamud, and Waugh were also on his list.

  And he reported on the dangers of following the civil war to its heart of darkness. Tony and fellow journalists Arnaud de Borchgrave and Jon Randal came under attack at one point. All the men in the town were herded into a small building by local government officials and a CIA operative, given a weird assortment of guns, and told to protect themselves if the rebels came close. Tony’s army training may or may not have come in handy. He didn’t say. He did say that even in the midst of battle, he remembered to take his antimalaria pills.

  There was also a revealing story about how Tony’s ever-present anger could boil over at any point.

  Mobutu Sese Seko had taken over the country in a coup. He called a press conference. When Tony arrived at governmental headquarters, he found that soldiers were checking identification of all journalists. The ID package had been changed recently, but Tony had neglected to collect his new papers. The soldiers refused to admit him to the news conference. He struggled with them in his serviceable French, but to no avail. Furious that someone reporting for another newspaper might get hold of this important story, depleted from long service in a strife-torn country, bogged down in humidity, Tony reverted to curses. “Je m’en fou de vous,” he said, “de vous et de Mobutu.” The translation runs something like: “Fuck you and the president you rode in on.” Tony was marched off to jail, to await a Times lawyer to get him out. In retrospect, the story was told with a sense of humor and bravado. But what, as the narrator in Peter and the Wolf says, what if the soldier had used his rifle?

  In Tony’s next assignment, India—a step up in the journey to top foreign posts—life was a good deal better, and the letters flowed more often.

  India provided him with high living: a house with three servants, plenty of room for entertaining, a patio with tropical birds, a car and driver. He traveled widely and came to respect the country and its people.

  More important, his reporting made it to the front page during perilous times in that country. The Pakistan-India wars were heating up over Kashmir. There were threats of building nuclear deterrents on both sides. And Russia was making noises from the north. Tony had long ago earned his stars, and the Times brass thought highly of him.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  I. E. N. S. BUILDING, RAFI MARG, NEW DELHI

  J. ANTHONY LUKAS, CHIEF OF BUREAU

  August 25th, 1965—

  This is an ideal country for the kind of writing I like to do—the sort of slightly offbeat, bizarre feature story which nevertheless has plenty of political, social, economic, linguistic, philosophical, and psychiatric overtones (look for them next time you read one). The bottom drawer of my desk is just filled with lovely ideas for such stories and more go in every day. I’ve decided that I like India as a field for journalistic endeavor.

  I don’t like it at all as a field for just about anything else. Like women. Like, there aren’t any. After my two and a half months of philandering in New York [on leave], the past four months of celibacy have been hard to take. I’ve been working hard, but I’m one of those guys who can’t forget the other things life has to offer.

  He did play tennis, go to the movies, go on dates, but it was clear that none of this was enough to satisfy his need for companionship.

  He gave over more and more of his thinking to his status as a single man and why he couldn’t find the “right woman.” Still, while he might worry about his personal life, it was always the professional one that he came back to—on paper and in practice. He wondered if he wouldn’t be better off quitting the Times and going freelance. He’d lose money and prestige, perhaps, but get to do “a really solid piece of work.” What was insubstantial about the work he’d done for the Times was unclear.

  Perhaps it was not solidity of work that was the problem so much as the old depressive devil. While he had now found a female companion, who moved in with him, he spoke more often of his pain when she went away than he did of the pleasure of having her there. He once wrote that his “gazelle” had gone to Bombay to look after her ill mother. “I’m melancholy.”

  To Dad he found it necessary to be more upbeat about life and about his companion in particular. “She’s a real delight—one of the most vivacious and lively people I’ve ever known. Delhi seems the grimmer for her absence. I may even take a jaunt down there myself in the next few days so if you start seeing bylines from Bombay you’ll know what I’m up to.”

  Indeed, some Bombay bylines did show up, but Tony soon returned to home base in Delhi: plowing on, writing a huge piece on right-wing Hindu groups for the New York Times Magazine, traveling up and down the country, and proving his worth. In September 1966, he visited with Dad on the island of Menorca, off Spain. It was such an uncharacteristic place for either of them to have gone that the vacation was surreal. I think it was the first time that Tony came face-to-face with Dad’s alcoholism.

  The days in sunny Menorca were a little strained. Dad and I sat around the lobby and the bar of the Agamemnon drinking dry martinis and making rather desultory conversation. Nothing very significant was said by either party, but I think Dad got a lift out of it. I thought he looked a little better and more relaxed than when I saw him last, but he did some damn heavy drinking a couple of the days—you know the drill, nipping away at the bourbon bottle all afternoon and then starting on the martinis at night.

  His words left me puzzled and a little dizzy. I didn’t know Dad had traveled outside the country, not since a few months he’d spent in Germany in the 1950s. I thought he was sedentary and U.S.-bound. It made me wonder where else he had secreted himself off to, without telling me. The idea of Tony and Dad going to tiny Menorca in the Mediterranean, a place known in those days mostly for stoned expatriates, was bewildering. I can imagine the scene—in a bar on some backstreet—and it isn’t pretty.

  In those days of blissful ignorance I didn’t put Dad’s drinking together with his moods. For me, and for everyone I knew, liquor was a treat, something you occasionally took to make you feel good. The idea that people were dependent on it—in those halcyon days before marijuana, crack, and other drugs of support hit the schoolyard markets—had not occurred to me. So the idea that Dad was an alcoholic and needed his drug never crossed my mind. He was someone who liked to drink, and he wanted to drink. The negative effects—his anger, his own depression—never hit home.

  The worst instances of Dad’s behavior due to drinking, the times I was most aware, were when Susan and I would be walking down the street with him and he would say, in a very loud voice, “Susan, you’re a woman: explain that to me.” “That” was a young woman nearby who had dyed hair or a low-cut blouse or some other fashion statement. Or “that” was an older woman with a fat belly. Or “that” was a young man with a hippy-dippy attitude or attire. Then the scorn that came over Dad was a far cry from the liberal father I had come to know.

  At times like these—and they increased in number and amplitude over the last years of his life—I would look the other way, or cringe in embarrassment, or wish I could be somewhere, anywhere, but here. Later, Susan and I would laugh or cry over these episodes. But at the time, we said little. Alcoholism was not talked about among the general population. A man was either a drunk or a stone-cold-sober and upright person. Middle-class Jewish people didn’t accept that their fathers could be drunks, so they must be upright citizens who occasionally took too much.

  Like thousands of others, I deceived myself. I was an enabler, but I could not break free from my fears and anger, not nearly enough to help my father.
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br />   I wrote to Tony that Dad and Betty’s marriage was now officially ended. Dad had waited until he could make sure that Betty got what was coming to her from her late husband’s estate, while he eked out a living in a hotel room on Fifty-seventh Street. He had left behind all the belongings that he and my mother had acquired—antiques from France and Italy, and wedding gifts. He just wanted to get out of the apartment, he said, but I told Tony that I thought Dad had feelings of guilt over leaving and gave Betty all those beautiful belongings as atonement.

  To Tony the divorce was inevitable, but something of a relief now that the angry marriage was over. He was also sad: “What kind of life is it for a man of sixty-five, living in a room and a half apartment in New York? Christ, I hope I don’t end that way.”

  That was not a casual thought.

  By the end of the year, Tony had decided not to extend his tour of duty for a third year, which the Times had offered him, and not to take a Belgrade post, which was an alternative. As for China? Learning the language was too much of a challenge for him. Barring appointment to the plums of Paris or Rome, he’d prefer to return to a place he could call home: New York City. He was in his early thirties.

  I owe it to myself to give my Personal Life some attention after many years in which I have thought only about my career. It’s high time I get married. Sooo—I’ve told the Times that I’d like to come home to New York for a year and work on the metropolitan staff. It will be just one year . . . but if I can’t find a wife in one year’s hunting in New York then something is radically wrong. Naturally, I expect you and Susan to keep your eyes open for lissome young things these next seven months so that when I get back you can start parading them into my office for inspection.