Blue Genes Read online

  At one of the dinners that Dad, Tony, and I shared with Paul and Daisy (Paul’s alcoholic Hungarian wife), Dad asked him if he preferred movies or plays. Holding out his huge hands on either side of him in a dramatic pose, Paul said, “If a movie is here” (he clutched the putative film in one fist) “and a play comes along” (he opened the film hand to let the movie go, and grasped the “play” tightly in the other), “then I’d take the play.” Even then, at the age of twelve, I remember thinking, he’s putting on an act. I bet he’d take a film if it were more money.

  Shortly after he turned twenty-two, Lukacs Samu met a young woman with whom he had a brief romance that broke off when the girl’s parents discovered the dalliance. Which was why he precipitously left for the United States. Entering during the waning decades of the nineteenth century, he encountered Ellis Island but passed through successfully because he had some distant relatives here who could vouch for him. He remembered the experience, however, for later he took a job interpreting for some of the immigrants who aspired to live in the United States. He used the many languages he had picked up in that muddled part of Europe into which he had been born: Serbian, German, Romanian, Czech, French, and Yiddish, among them.

  My Hungarian grandmother, Anna Jacobs, born in 1872, spoke German at home because that was the common language in her part of Hungary.

  She had come to the States when she was three and learned how to be a seamstress from her mother, who was an expert at it and supported the family. Granny, as we called her, was diminutive and beautiful—so beautiful that in her late teens she took to modeling. She and her three sisters and brother lived with my great-grandmother in an apartment that opened onto the back of a Hungarian café. I think it was the one that Samuel Lukacs ran for a brief time. At any rate, Anna met him there when she was twenty, and they married in 1892.

  I do know that my father thought Granny was too full of quiet resignation, too passive. He talked about that passivity often, saying he couldn’t stand such “martyrdom.” But he never told me what she was a martyr about. Was it Samuel’s tantrums? Samuel’s drinking? He didn’t say.

  But my grandfather did stand by her financially, even when times were tough for him.

  By 1902, Samuel had moved with Granny to Jersey City, where my father was born, followed in four years by Aunt Judy. Samuel practiced the craft of watch repair (learned in his adolescence in Nagyvarad) but couldn’t abide New Jersey.

  Over the next fifteen years, the family moved many times: from New Jersey to Philadelphia; from Philly back to New York; then to Pittsburgh. Samuel’s profession changed just as often. He gave up watchmaking for a hardware store, then traded that in to sell early models of the phonograph to the miners in the hills above the Allegheny River. My aunt remembers him striding around his study in Pittsburgh, comparing recordings of various arias—Caruso versus “unknown” tenors like Lazaro—and asking everyone in the family whom they preferred, so he could let the phonograph company know what it should support. Samuel thought Caruso was not the best; he didn’t last long at that job, either.

  “Every day started with excitement,” wrote Aunt Judy. “He was an early riser. I heard him sing and whistle in the bathroom. I loved that. Then I had to be prepared for what would follow. My door would open and there would be some surprise. A funny face, a hand making signals, the growl of a monster. Before the day was over I would witness an endless variety of moods and antics. When he pounded the table at dinner, I didn’t always know whether he was angry or having fun.”

  Some of this behavior can undoubtedly be chalked up to the “Magyar personality,” the explosive temperament coming out of the tempestuous battles for survival in the old empire. But much was probably due to a particular set of character traits that I could sometimes find in my own father. He, too, whistled pretty tunes. He, too, broke into fiery anger at strange times. He, too, could be sarcastic—making jokes that were, or were not, funny.

  My grandfather seemed totally unaware of the effects his erratic behavior had on Granny—or anyone else, for that matter. He was one of those theatrical human beings who was a whole world unto himself.

  In Pittsburgh, Samuel continued to make enough money to support the family with basics. Anna gave them luxuries with her sewing, including a piano for Aunt Judy, who couldn’t play then and never did learn. Aunt Judy’s first marriage, at nineteen, the one that took her away from the lovelorn column, was a disaster. “I married a Hungarian firecracker” is the way she put it. “And that’s all I’m going to say about that!” I later found out he was twenty years her elder, an abusive man. When she married again in the 1970s, Dad helped get her divorce papers from Mexico.

  Aunt Judy told me that Dad was popular with both girls and boys, who loved the way he had taught himself to play the mandolin and the accordion. Dad never mentioned his popularity. He spoke of the ugly, belching steel mills, and made it sound as if his family were poor. Aunt Judy swears they were not. Perhaps what colors how he remembered it were the vivid arguments he had with his father, especially about the outbreak of hostilities during World War I. Samuel believed the family should support the Hungarians, who were, of course, on the side of the Austrians, and therefore foes of the Americans. Dad was furious about this and argued in America’s defense. When the “wrong side” won, Samuel pretended he’d been America’s supporter all along. But they both shared dismay that the Allies had taken Nagyvarad from Hungary and given it to Romania. In some ways, it took the steam out of Samuel for the rest of his life.

  Dad was also disappointed that his father wanted him to study dentistry (“to support the family”), a notion that Dad detested. He had his heart set on law and politics. However, to please—or at least pacify—his father, Dad entered the medical school of the University of Pittsburgh.

  Dental studies were not as long or as arduous as those required for physicians, but the first semester was the same for both, mainly involving dissection. Dad told two stories about his dental school attendance, both of them quite amusing. Unfortunately, he told the same two stories over and over, until Tony and I knew them by heart, by which time they ceased to be interesting. One sticks most in my mind. It shows something about ingenuity, life in the 1920s in Pittsburgh, and my father’s mind-set.

  Dissection of the human body was done by teams of three students. My father picked two young men to do the work with him. Unfortunately, none of the three had the few bucks it took to purchase a dead body from the university, so Dad and his cohorts decided they could do what the dental school did: go to the coroner’s office and get a body that was going to be buried in potter’s field—the burying place for unclaimed bodies—and transport it to the lab themselves.

  They looked in the paper and found the ideal body: a woman who had been dead only a few days and who, according to the paper, would be interred in a simple grave within twenty-four hours if no one claimed her. The three stooges approached the morgue and “claimed” Ella Morgan (the name found on the woman’s identification, according to the paper). “A cousin,” my father said. The official at the morgue laughed long and hard. “You’re med students, huh?”

  “How did you know?” they asked, chagrined.

  “Come on, fellas, I’ll show you.”

  Ella Morgan was black. None of the three applicants was. While Dad and his friends felt foolish, the pudgy official was delighted to have Ms. Morgan taken off his hands. He gave her to the students.

  Ella weighed 250 pounds, which caused a number of problems. Outside waited the Model A Ford they had borrowed for the job. Piling Ella into the rumble seat was not easy, but they managed it. All three of them crowded into the front seat; no one wanted to sit with Ella. It began to snow, and the slippery, steep road up the hill to the university was too much for the Model A—especially with a dead body in the backseat. The vaunted ability of Mr. Ford’s automobile to go up hills better in reverse didn’t pay off, and the car skidded to the side of the road.

  “We’ll have to carr
y 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.