Blue Genes Read online

  When I went away to school, it wasn’t Groton or Exeter, it was coeducational and “progressive”: more chinos and blue jeans than flannel slacks; more outdoor activities and chores than perks. We were forbidden to have expensive items in our bare-bones rooms. Egalitarian in the extreme, it was a place where we were meant to ignore differences. No, it was more than that: we weren’t supposed to know that money was a factor in people’s lives.

  I grew up believing that a happy life did not require having a lot of money, that work was beneficial for one’s soul as well as for society, and that equality between the sexes was a given—and constructive to boot.

  Nevertheless, for much of my young life, I was coddled, protected by Missy’s largesse.

  ______

  IN HADES, there is a river called Lethe. For those who drink from those waters, the past becomes obliterated. It’s not clear to me who in the big white house at 250 Rosedale Avenue actually drank, but they all appeared to be oblivious to the immediate past: nothing bad had happened.

  It was a grand illusion.

  All continued to think they were living a golden life. On weekends, visitors sat with the family in capacious Adirondack chairs on the side lawn, sipping iced tea. A formal dining room was the scene of parties—not just for the grown-ups but for the children as well. I remember my fifth birthday. A number of neighborhood children were invited to an Italian feast. We had fake noses (Pinocchio had recently been in my reading material) and ate spaghetti.

  Willows grew quickly in the moist soil at the edge of the lake. Even the algae that persisted in the lake were of a quality such as to make friends, relatives, and even ourselves shimmer with delight at the sheer beauty.

  Fall was the most devastatingly beautiful there ever was. Spring, the most pleasurable.

  Our nanny was warm and generous and devoted to us. She was married to a man who lived elsewhere. Where he was or when she found time to see him was unclear, for she took care of us and did housework and cooked a good deal of the time. Tony had named her Baba, an infant’s attempt to merge “Mama” with “Mary.” She was kind, attentive, and aware of everything that went on in the house. I have a photograph of her in our garden in White Plains. She sits, primly dressed, quite small, quite young, in a large rocking chair. On one side, his arm leaning on the chair, stands Tony in a striped T-shirt. He is three years old. I, clutching the chair to steady myself, stand on the other side. Both of us wear shorts. My curly hair needs cutting. An impish grin is on my face, and Baba looks with great love upon the scene. In her lap—a book and a ball, some of the paraphernalia of her work.

  When I was four—still, by all reports, a sunshiny, precocious child—photos show me smiling all the time, but a little too chubby kneed and precious for my taste. My famous actor cousin, Paul, offered to take me to Hollywood, where I would become—he said—the male Shirley Temple. My father, bless his soul, demurred.

  All the photos and accounts tell the same story: I was fair and curly haired and ran everywhere after Mother. Tony was deep and dark and troubled, his sallow coloration and furrowed brows signaling troubled inner thoughts. When he was six or seven, my parents sent him to a psychiatrist. Perhaps they saw Mother’s earlier abandonment of him as the cause of his sadness; perhaps he had bad dreams. Perhaps there were more pressing problems. No one ever informed me.

  Later, as adolescents, when we saw Joe Btfsplk in Li’l Abner cartoons, we felt that Tony, like Joe, was always under a cloud.

  Was he the wearer of blue genes, inherited from Mother and her ancestors; or was he reacting to her suicide attempt just after his birth? Or both? Or was he simply unlucky? Whichever, Tony always exhibited a sense of sadness.

  There was another person in attendance at the Rosedale Avenue home: Proctor. This tall, sturdy African-American served as occasional chauffeur, as well as man of all trades, fixing the lawn mower, the sump pump, the kitchen sink. He lived above the garage and became, by default, an educator to Tony. By default, because in many ways Dad was not able to act as a paterfamilias. His concerns about Mother, his concerns about his career, created a father present in body but not necessarily in mind.

  So it was Proctor who taught Tony to ride a bicycle, how to bat a ball, how to garden, weed, harvest. In later writings, it was Proctor whom Tony credited for his devout interest in professional baseball.

  There must have been times when the entire family—all four of us—was together during these early years, but I have only one strong recollection of such an occasion. It overshadows all the others.

  At the age of five, Tony had already learned the rudiments of swimming. Since I was two years younger, I was tentative about even wading into the lake. The bottom was muddy, and I feared snakes or snapping turtles, so I stayed on the small sandy ledge about six feet from shore, calf deep at most.

  One Saturday, however, as Mother in her bathing suit watched from the bank, I was encouraged to wade out farther—where the water was deep enough to swim. I went slowly into the unknown—afraid to dog-paddle but also afraid to take my feet off the muddy bottom, worried I might sink. I was on tiptoe when I felt a little wavelet and suddenly thought I was going to go over the top of my toes and drown.

  Panicked, I cried for help.

  From a few yards away, Tony struck out for me, as did Mother, diving in from the bank. Then I saw that my father, dressed in a fine summer suit, was stripping his jacket off. He, too, dove into the water.

  I quickly realized I wasn’t drowning. Still afloat, I shouted, “I’m fine!” and started dog-paddling toward shore.

  Everyone was relieved that I was safe. But Dad was furious that I had ruined his suit. “Don’t cry wolf unless you mean it,” he shouted. “Look what you’ve done!”

  I still try not to cry wolf, and I try to believe that Dad loved me. I am not totally successful at either.

  ______

  ROSEDALE AVENUE WAS WHERE OCCASIONAL LAPSES foretold distant events.

  I remember sitting one spring with my mother, in the rock garden, listening to the birds and watching the shadows of a great elm tree play against the front of the house. Mother was quiet, too quiet. I glimpsed in her beautiful face some distant thoughts that were not for me or for repetition.

  I remember Dad coming home at night, tired and cranky, usually too late to come up and say good night, though I strove to stay awake long enough for him to do so.

  Missy used to visit several times a month, taking the slow train up from New York City and remaining several days.

  There are some photographs of her when she was in her twenties. Tall, regal, with prematurely silver hair. There is a picture of her grandmother that I’ve seen, too. It was at the New-York Historical Society some years back. Titled “Mrs. Bamberger Comes to America,” it portrays a well-dressed woman, floating, fully clothed, in the ocean while clinging to a piece of flotsam. Behind her a vessel appears to be swiftly sinking, its four masts barely protruding above the murky water. The painting was done in the nineteenth century. It’s based on a true incident that involved my great-great-grandmother. On Mrs. Bamberger’s face there is no sign of panic, no sense that she is in danger. She will make it to shore and will go on with her life.

  I hold this image in my mind, knowing that some people come face-to-face with disaster, then, letting go of the debris, turn their backs on the past and survive. Most of us are treading water, even though we don’t know it. What we do next is the crucial thing.

  I remember Missy walking across the grass at 250 Rosedale Avenue. It was six in the morning, and she was in her nightgown; I can almost feel the dew on the lawn as it softly rinses her bare feet. The sun crept up over the woods that bordered our property. Birch, oak, and maple trees, shining in that lustrous morning light which I remember well, beckoned to those of us who were awake. As soon as I was able to walk, I became an early riser, and I liked to put my elbows on the windowsill in my room and watch the sunrise, the squirrels on the trees, the change of seasons in the rose garden th
at bordered the house. But this memory of Missy has always been confused with a photograph of another white-haired woman, also in a nightgown, also barefoot, walking across the grounds of an old-age home in the Midwest. This shot appeared in Collier’s magazine as part of a story on forgotten people. In remembering the picture, I always think of the place as an insane asylum, not an old-age home. And I always think that it is Missy walking there, not some anonymous old lady, lost in her crazy thoughts. I know I really did watch her in those early mornings, rounding the corner of the rose garden, her head down, her long prematurely white hair falling over her shoulders, dreamily experiencing the coming of day. I always feel the event not as Missy says she felt it—a lovely oneness with nature—but with a premonition of terrible things to come.

  In the late 1930s Dad made a decision to get out of courtrooms. He didn’t actually do it until late 1940, and there are several versions about how this happened. His friend Robert Lindner—the psychoanalyst who made a stir as the author of Rebel Without a Cause and The Fifty-Minute Hour—told me that Dad had been asked by a big importer-exporter client to go to Veracruz, Mexico, in the fall of 1940. Apparently Mexican authorities were holding up permission for a freighter to leave port for Japan.

  Dad found out why and phoned the owners.

  “Your father was drunk when he called from Veracruz,” Lindner told me in 1955. “He had discovered that the owners of the ship had a cargo of scrap metal they were sending to Japan. By this time, such shipments were embargoed. The United States knew the Japanese were going to use scrap to make planes to fight China, or ourselves. Your father hated being used that way. So he told the owners to shove it.”

  “He was drunk?”

  “Yes,” Lindner said. “He’d had half a bottle of tequila.”

  This was the first I’d heard of any such behavior on Dad’s part. It was very dramatic. The resulting unemployment and attendant anxiety would haunt the family for years to come.

  MEANWHILE, TONY AND I BECAME CLOSE COMPANIONS, not just brothers. Much of the time, we enjoyed each other’s company. Other times, it was a sibling relationship, like any other: testing and torn.

  There were two bedrooms for us. I had the interior one, and Tony slept on a large porch with storm windows that sat on top of a screened-in porch below it. Tony’s room was big enough to serve as our playroom, and there are photographs of us, playing with blocks, then toy soldiers, and finally a bunch of marionettes. One of my favorite photographs, a large 8×10 that has been laminated to a wood block, shows the two of us dressed in kneesocks, matching long-sleeved argyle sweaters, Blue Boy shirt collars, and ties, playing with our soldiers on top of a huge set of blocks in Tony’s sleeping porch. We seem to be having a good time of it.

  In my room, a bed was pushed up against one wall, and a toy chest against the other. I could look out over the rose or rock garden, but the room was dark enough so I could take naps in the afternoon. My favorite stuffed animal, a penguin, nestled next to me on the bed, and I remember the texture of the tan blanket that lay underneath my bedspread: it felt soft and furry and was probably very much akin to the “blankie” that most young children cling to for security.

  Tony and I went to bed at the same time—a practical matter. It was easier to treat us as having the same needs than to feed or read to us at different times, with different stories. I know this annoyed Tony and occasioned many a “Go away” when I tried to catch up with him or accompany him as he broke away from set routines or explored the woods with his pals. But at meals, we were together.

  And at bedtime as well. While we both lay awaiting sleep, we would have a conversation between the two rooms. Sometimes this was plans for playing cops and robbers the next day, or finger painting, or exploring the ferns around the back side of the lake. At one birthday we acquired some toy bows and arrows. When a gaggle of older boys passed our driveway one afternoon, we fired the suction-tipped arrows at them. Naturally, the light pieces of wood fell harmlessly to the road, far short of their target. The boys went away; when they returned, they came with hunting bows and steel-tipped arrows and scared the shit out of us.

  We played well together in the earliest days, though occasionally our jocund recreation became antagonistic. Tony might hound me about a particular piece of verbal stupidity, some word that I could not get my mouth around, such as “spaghetti” or “radiator” (which came out “pisketti” and “elevator”). Once or twice he jumped out at me from a dark closet, scaring me into tears. He also locked me in the same closet a couple of times, even though he knew that I was terrified of closed-in places, so much so that I had nightmares for years of being buried alive. In those dreams, I had somehow become entombed in a coffin; dirt was being piled on top of me. I could shout, but I couldn’t be heard. I would wake in a panic.

  As far as I can tell, none of Tony’s pranks were pathological or truly hostile. They were the normal give-and-take of siblings. Had they persisted into adolescence, that would have been a different matter.

  One fall, a fire broke out of control when Proctor and Dad were burning leaves. Tony ran to them with a garden hose, but the picket fence was beginning to be lapped by the flames. I sat on the front steps, my arm in a giant cast, a broken arm from a fall off a skittish Arabian mare. I asked Mother why no one had called the fire department. A lightbulb went on in her head, and the local crew arrived quickly. I was rewarded with a little metal medallion for my inspiration. Tony was jealous.

  Tony had another use for the garden hose under less frightening circumstances. The water was cold, summer days were hot, I was younger than he. So, as a joke, or as punishment for some of my “misdeeds,” he would wait for me to come around the corner of the house, and then spray me with the hose. I was not amused, but later I learned to turn the tables on him.

  There was another summer activity that was a lot more fun. A half mile down Rosedale, where it meets Mamaroneck Avenue, was a tiny grocery store. No one in our family shopped there, but once we reached a certain age, Tony and I were allowed to walk there in the summer for ice cream cones. I favored chocolate; Tony, vanilla. The cones, costing five cents each, were fully packed, so we had enough for the walk home. The game we played was how long each could make the ice cream last, who could say, as the other finished his dripping cone, “I’ve still got mine.”

  I loved sitting in the front seat of our station wagon when Dad or Proctor or Mother drove to the station or the farmers’ market or to pick up Tony from his violin lessons. I played with the window handle, turning it this way and that as if I were steering. It was an elegant vehicle, a Ford, with wooden frame and slats (what the Brits call an estate wagon), polished until it gleamed.

  When we weren’t using the car, it often sat right in front of the house, as if it might be needed at a moment’s notice, left in first gear to keep it from sliding.

  One day, when I was about five, I got into the driver’s seat. I knew how it went: you get in, you close the door, you push the little button on the dashboard, and the car goes. So I got in, I closed the door, and I pushed the little button. And it went. Apparently the brake wasn’t on.

  My feet didn’t have a chance in hell of reaching the floor, and I doubt I would have known what to do if they did. At first I was delighted—no panic. Then lots of panic. Then screaming, as the car chugged up the little incline and—luckily—stalled. There was a moment of fear that it might go backward, but the gear held. I slid from the seat to the driveway: guilty, frightened, relieved. I remember no consequences for my naughty act, except having one more guilty escapade to add to my list—a list that would keep growing as I got older.

  Dad and Mother went to Mexico one spring for a brief vacation. We were left to our own devices—under Baba’s and Proctor’s guidance, of course. When our parents returned, carrying chairs from Guadalajara and other memorabilia, we were aware that there was more and more tension between them. One night, waking from a frightening dream, I tramped down the long hallway to knock on the
ir door. Then I opened it. I started toward Mother, but Dad intervened. He was furious.

  “Get back to bed!”

  He chased me down the hall, and as I scooted into my room, crying with fear and shock, I hollered for Mother.

  “Get into bed,” he screamed again. I wanted to stop to take off my slippers, which I had carefully put on as I prepared to go for comfort to my mother’s arms. Dad would have none of it. Into bed I went, slippers and all. The door slammed on my room, and then on their room.

  I was terrified of my father. And I hated him.

  Crying, hurt, uncertain about my safety, I pulled the covers up over me, pretending that I was in a boat on the ocean, safe, water-tight, far from harm. Tony, in the next room, never awoke.

  In some of the psychotherapy I underwent in later years, it was suggested to me that Dad’s fury had to do with my intervention in a sexual event—the “primal scene” about which Freud writes. I dutifully listened to this interpretation, but I reject it. I think that my motivation may have been Oedipal (What is going on behind that closed door?), but the scene I saw in my parents’ bedroom was not a happy one, much less sexual. Mother sat in her bed, a scowl on her face, Dad in his. I remember how much Dad liked his sleep and hated to be interrupted. But what I recognize now is the tension between them, and Dad’s fear that Mother might be getting manic or depressed again, that she might be in touch with Francis. And Mother must have had her own terrors: What would happen to her? What would happen to all of them?

  THE MOST IMPORTANT PART of our early life in White Plains was undoubtedly the little dramas Tony and I staged on the window seat in the dining room. This even had a curtain that could be pulled to close off the entire window seat from the rest of the house. There, at the ages of six and four, respectively, my brother and I began to play out our feelings, making up plays to express ourselves through mime or rudimentary dialogue. This was at the urging of Mother, the actress and budding educational psychologist.