Blue Genes Read online

  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.

  Despite Froelicher’s tutoring, and despite Mother’s intellectual interests and achievements, she seems to have reached a little too high scholastically. On graduation from high school, she did not get into her first-choice college—Bryn Mawr—and went into a self-described funk. It was Froelicher who pulled her out of it and helped her get into then-second-ranked Goucher College, which she entered in 1924. Mother says she chose Goucher because Froelicher’s father taught there. But it is more likely she went there because Froelicher himself recommended it. It was he, not Dr. Schamberg, who wrote her a long letter, telling her she was accepted. She was sixteen, Froelicher was thirty-two.

  Goucher was good for Mother; she flourished there. I contacted the college—which is now coeducational and highly ranked—and managed to reach the secretary for the graduating class of 1928, who was still alive at ninety-seven. I asked whether she remembered my mother, and was astonished to find out that she did. “She was beautiful, and liked by all the upperclasswomen,” the secretary said.

  Goucher’s alumni office sent me the class yearbook.

  I thought I had become accustomed to seeing new photographs of my mother, but the bright-eyed, beaming, stunningly beautiful young woman of twenty who looks out from these pages was a startling revelation. In one photo, she is standing with six other students. They are dressed in the style of the day: fur coats, bobbed hair, bowl-shaped cloche hats. Mother, the tallest, has her coat thrown back to show her tight-fitting dress. A scarf circles her neck, and her head is not covered.

  Compared with the other students, she was spectacular.

  At Goucher, Mother’s best friend, Frances Berwanger, became a companion with whom she could express loving feelings. They exchanged poetry, visited each other’s homes, and spent summers together. There were rumors that Frances and my mother had a sexual relationship—rumors I heard from my aunt and uncle—but in her autobiographical essay, Mother says no.

  At the age of twenty, she was about to graduate, looking forward to “real life.” While she had corresponded with Francis Froelicher during her four years away and, when at home, had often run to tell him of her activities, their relationship had remained somewhat distant. Now, she thought, things would change. But as she contemplated acting upon what had only been a dream before, Mother realized that what she wanted was impossible. I don’t say “wrong.” There is no hint in her writing that Mother felt a moral reluctance. But she knew full well that Froelicher had a wife and that Dr. Jay would find the relationship between his young daughter and this man anathema.

  So, before her last semester of college, she broke off with Froelicher, vowing that she would not see him again. It was of necessity a hard decision.

  To her mother:

  Of course yesterday was ghastly for me in every way: it means the breaking of a contact which I suppose no one can understand, but which has been practically my chief source of inspiration for the past six years. If I behaved badly I hope you’ll attribute it to the emotional strain of the whole business. Must go to bed—I hope really to get some sleep tonight.

  Reading this letter for the first time—and digging into what the autobiography revealed about this period of my mother’s young life—I
was shaken. The rumors of this illicit relationship, over-heard in bits and pieces at my aunt and uncle’s house, paled in comparison to the actuality. My own love life at a comparable age had been rocky. I knew what it was like to give up a precious relationship. But nothing really prepared me for what Froelicher and Mother had undergone. Shaped not only by the mores of the 1920s but by my own late fifties sense of right and wrong, I could both identify with my mother and feel trepidation at what it meant for her future—and for mine. Hindsight, in this case, gave me little clarity, little comfort, little optimism.

  AFTER GRADUATION, Mother wanted to get away. From Francis, from her parents, from the whole mess. Picking up on a parental promise, she planned to go abroad for a year, taking Frances Berwanger with her. But that was not to be. Her friend was only a sophomore, and Frances’s mother didn’t think the trip was a good idea, perhaps afraid of the lesbianism that had been rumored.

  With the idea of a trip with Frances stillborn, Mother nevertheless made a brilliant year out of it. Off she went to London, where she enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the only American allowed into that hallowed institution that year. It was 1928, she was twenty years old. Stars of the British stage had been trained at RADA for decades. It was a difficult leap for an American to make, and yet, from all reports, my mother did remarkably well. Perhaps her warmth and sense of adventure out-weighed self-doubts that any emotionally precocious person might have—and my mother had them in spades. Or perhaps being away from her family gave her freedom to be outgoing.

  I have read the reports from her instructors at RADA. They praise her elocution and diction and her sense of stage presence. “The teacher told someone that I have one of the most beautiful Shakespearean voices she has ever heard,” Mother wrote to Missy. “Imaginative and sensitive,” wrote another teacher. They cannot promise that she will succeed as an actress, but perhaps . . .

  Outside of class, self-doubts do assert themselves. Her inability to concentrate on any one thing at a time alternates with anxiety, which in turn alternates with depression. What will become a diagnosable illness in a few years is more than an annoyance, though less than debilitating. Still, midyear, she writes Missy that she is “sick at heart,” a euphemism for depressed. Then she beats a hasty retreat in a follow-up letter:

  I had allowed myself to give way to what was a very temporary mood, and by doing so caused you real concern. The problems of which I spoke are really minor.

  We can’t know whether Mother believed this or whether she was so used to hiding the truth from others that this was yet one more chicanery.

  Missy had a brother, Morton Bamberger, who had gone to fight on the side of the British in World War I by enlisting in the Canadian Air Force. Enchanted by the English way of life, Morton turned Anglophile and anti-Semitic in one fell swoop: he changed his name to Morgan Blair and settled down in Sussex to raise race-horses. The great flu epidemic of the 1920s killed him, but not before Elizabeth had met him and he had introduced her to a sixty-seven-year-old polymath, Edward Heron-Allen—who had, among other achievements, translated The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám into English from the original Arabic. He tried to seduce Mother. Failing in that, he gave her an autographed copy of the book, which I have on my shelves. To Froelicher she wrote an inquiry: Did he think she should have acquiesced? Was it better to be loved by an older or a younger man? This disingenuous query was answered at once by Froelicher. Perhaps she should wait, he suggests.

  It doesn’t take any reading between the lines to know what Francis wanted her to wait for.

  In retrospect, I am startled by how little reaction I had when I first got all this information of sexual and emotional transactions. This, for me, was more like opening a lost history book and discovering facts and aspirations, desires and denials that were unknown to mankind and are now revealed.

  Mother’s letters reflect not only on her life and emotions but on her mother’s. Missy was not happy. She, too, showed signs of depression and anxiety. Approaching the age of forty-four, she decided to embark on psychoanalysis, and at one point Elizabeth wrote from England: “No news from you in several days leads me to believe that you are plunged into the very depths of psychoanalytic gloom.”

  There is no reply from Missy.

  After studies, Mother toured France and England, returning to the United States in 1929. Clearly, she had learned a great deal, because she was asked to join the repertory troupe of the director and actress Eva Le Gallienne, whose company was making artistic headlines. What roles she played, and where she toured, are not recorded, but at one point she must have found herself near Francis Froelicher, because they picked up where they had left off a year earlier.

  The news of the relationship finally reached Dr. Schamberg. Perhaps it had been rumored for years, and now, finally, someone actually told my grandfather. One did not need to be a rigid Victorian to object to one’s twenty-one-year-old daughter getting involved with a married man with three children.

  In the few remaining years before his death, this liaison—now out in the open—was a subject Dr. Schamberg never spoke about to his wife or anyone else in the family. My mother says that he couldn’t bear the fact that his daughter had been “so lacking in standards” and that his friend and protégé, Francis Froelicher, could behave in such a disloyal fashion. It was “an unbearable disillusionment.”

  Dismayed by the agony she had caused her father, Elizabeth once again promised to stop seeing Froelicher. And Francis promised not to write her. As a teenager, Mother had been a camper in far-off Maine. That summer she decided to go to the Tripp Lake Camp, as far away from Francis as possible, to be drama counselor. Tripp Lake was the kind of place where wealthy Jewish thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-olds spent four or five weeks in canvas tents and wore middy blouses with lanyards and baggy blue shorts. Rising early in the chilly mornings, they stood around the flagpole singing songs. Then they peeled off to shoot arrows at straw targets, paddle canoes on the big lake, and compete for parts in weekly dramatic productions. Mother adored the camp’s owner, Caroline Lavenson—a friend of the family—who reciprocated the feelings.

  Despite promises made on all sides, Francis and Elizabeth kept up their correspondence:

  There was a letter waiting for me here, and an eight page one yesterday. His resolve not to write evidently proved impossible to keep. I’ve answered both letters. Of course, I miss him, but there is much compensation here. I’m finding pleasure in this work.

  As the year wore on, the pair broke promises right and left. Exactly what transpired between them has been lost to burned letters and unspoken confidences, as well as whatever actions could not—or would not—be spoken about. My mother confided some things to Missy—who, it turns out, was not only undergoing psychoanalysis but having an affair of her own—and they supported each other in these secrets.

  Then there was silence: nothing in my file of letters for the next year, not between Missy and my mother, nor between Francis and my mother. I suspect that my grandmother dispensed with those letters that bore dangerous secrets; or Mother did. It was a “thrilling, but painful” year is all my mother would say in her memoir.

  On his side, Froelicher was clearly fighting his own moral and practical battles. He made what must have been a hard decision. He told Elizabeth that he would look for a better, higher-paying job and, when he had money put aside, he would leave his wife and marry her.

  But as the country entered its Depression, Mother entered into her own increasingly intense periods of pressure and desperation. She knew that Missy would “stand by her no matter what she did,” but she was equally sure “that she might just as well kill her father as to do this thing.”

  “This thing,” of course, was to run off with Francis. And other factors weighed in. There was a large sum of money waiting for her in her grandmother’s trust fund; if she married Francis, she knew she would be disinherited.

  ENTER EDWIN JAY LUKAS. After graduating,
Dad had begun the practice of criminal and civil law. In a few years he would join the firm of Sapinsley and Santangelo. Later, when Santangelo became a judge, it was Sapinsley and Lukas.

  Alvin Sapinsley handled the civil cases that brought in money. Dad took care of the less remunerative civil cases and—increasingly—the criminal ones. In later years, he spoke only of the latter. And more and more he took on cases that brought in little money—cases of indigents and the underclasses.

  Somewhere in the bottom of the pile of letters through which I have been rummaging I came across this snippet, from a woman whose name was unfamiliar to me. It was written to Missy in 1932:

  A short time ago, I read of a lawyer, Edwin Lukas, offering his services free of fee as a defense counsel for a Negro couple whose case interested him (as it did me) and who, through utter ignorance had gotten themselves into a lot of trouble. What a splendid act of true charity and proof that ethics have not yet gone entirely out of the world.

  One of my father’s friends was an actress named Anna Kostant (later, after she married a real estate magnate, she was Anna Bing). Anna knew my mother through Le Gallienne and thought she would be a good match with my father.

  Dad and Mother met and immediately saw something within each other that struck a strong chord. They were both energetic, both endowed with good looks, but there was more. For my mother, my father was a way of keeping her from being tempted by Froelicher—at least for now. For Dad, there was something endlessly enticing about this sparkling actress from an upper-class family. Mother had a clear sense of Dad and approved of his goals and activities.