Finding Magic

by Sally Quinn

  Mother had it. She had polio—lumbar polio, she was told, the worst kind. Incurable. They took her to the army hospital at Fort Belvoir. Children under twelve weren’t allowed to visit their parents. The irony and the pain of this after having been in the hospital in Tokyo without my mother being allowed to see me was almost more than I could bear. Happily, because the old wooden pre–World War II hospital was only one story, my father would wheel my mother’s bed to the window and we would stand outside and talk to her. At night Daddy would come home and try to be upbeat. Nana usually did the cooking, but sometimes he would take everything in the icebox, put it in a pot, and call it the “Mystery Dish,” usually something unrecognizable and awful. We were always sad at dinner, but Daddy tried to make things seem lighter, at least joking about that night’s dish. The problem was he never had any good news.

  Mother was still very sick. I thought I would never see her well again. I believed she might die or be paralyzed for the rest of her life. I knew I couldn’t live without her. I cried all the time but stubbornly refused to pray. What was the point? There was no God. How could that good and loving God that others talked about do this to my mother, the most wonderful person on Earth? I wanted to shriek and stomp on the floor and show my rage. I found that the most helpless feeling in the world was to be angry and not have anyone or anything to be angry at, no object for my anger. It would not be the first time I would know that kind of frustration and anguish. Finally I decided to take the situation upon myself, as I had in the hospital in Tokyo. I willed her to get better.

  Mother recovered and, contrary to the doctors’ predictions, walked out of the hospital. It was a miracle, they said. They had never seen this kind of recovery in a case this bad. Some people said that God had answered our prayers. I didn’t say anything. Mother told us she had to get better because she loved us so much and she had to be there to take care of us. I believed then that she willed herself to get better. God had nothing to do with it. When we got home from picking her up at the hospital, at our insistence Daddy made her the Mystery Dish for dinner. She said it was a good thing she got better because if she hadn’t, we would all have died from eating Daddy’s cooking.

  * * *

  In these early preadolescent years I was obsessed with Alice in Wonderland. I wanted to be Alice in part because I often felt I was in my own version of Wonderland. I had practically memorized the books. My time in the hospital in Tokyo had been a through-the-looking-glass experience. It was surreal. Life was surreal. Somehow Alice in Wonderland didn’t seem all that far-fetched to me. Everything was jabberwocky. I learned someone was making a movie of Alice in Wonderland and was feverish with excitement. So were all my friends, though no one was as ecstatic as I was. It was coming soon to a theater near me, on a Sunday afternoon. My friends and I were all going to go together. I was beside myself. I could barely sleep, the level of anticipation was so high. It was certain to be the highlight of my life. Finally the big day arrived.

  Daddy woke me up, saying it was time to go to Sunday school. Daydreaming as I was, I certainly didn’t want to go to Sunday school. I hated Sunday school and fell back on my usual thinking that it was all a big lie, anyway. It just seemed so stupid, the teachers sitting there telling us these treacly stories about Jesus and having to sing songs with lyrics I didn’t believe—“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong, they are weak but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me, Yes, Jesus loves me. . . .” Who were they kidding? Had Jesus loved all the little Jewish children? All those young men on the hospital plane coming back from war? Did Jesus love them, too?

  I quickly lied to Daddy, telling him I had a terrible stomachache and couldn’t possibly go to church. He absolutely hated lying and knew right away that I wasn’t telling the truth. I curled up, rubbed my stomach, and moaned, not looking him in the eye. He stood there in silence for a bit. “Are you really sick?” he asked. “Yes,” I groaned. “I’m sorry about that,” he said, “but you ought to think about it because if you’re really too sick to go to Sunday school, then you’re too sick to go to Alice in Wonderland this afternoon.”

  What did he just say? I didn’t believe I had heard correctly. Not go to see Alice in Wonderland?! He knew how I felt about it being the most important day of my life. How could he even suggest such a thing? “I mean it,” he boomed, “either you get out of bed and get dressed now or you’re not going to see the movie this afternoon.”

  What could I do? I couldn’t suddenly have a miraculous recovery on the spot—the proof that I had been lying would be evident and he might punish me by not letting me go anyway. Besides, he wasn’t a cruel person. He couldn’t possibly not let me go. It was unthinkable. I decided to call his bluff. I rolled over and moaned again, curled up even more, and whispered that I felt horrible. He turned and left.

  What riled me even more was knowing that Daddy was not himself a churchgoer. He would drop us kids off at Sunday school and then come home for another couple of hours’ sleep and return to pick us up. He and Mother never went to church. What kind of a lesson was that? I was so mad that I almost did get sick. I had to figure out a clever way to get unsick. I stayed in bed for a few hours, then went to my mother and asked for some Pepto-Bismol, which she gave me. I suddenly had a miraculous recovery. I asked her if she would tell Daddy that I was better and feeling well enough to go to the movie. She said she would. She knew I had lied, but she didn’t feel that strongly about it. I could hear them having a heated discussion in the kitchen. After a while, she came back upstairs. She shook her head sadly. He would not relent. She had done her best, but he would not tolerate dishonesty.

  It was the first and last tantrum I ever threw. It was a pretty good one too. I may even have threatened suicide. I certainly threatened to run away from home. Of course my mother knew that that would never happen since I was a double Cancer and Cancerians were such homebodies that they would never run away. It was all to no avail. I missed the movie and spent the afternoon in my room sobbing in dismay and rage, even hating my father for the moment. I literally made myself sick. I now realize that what I never got over was the moral issue at stake. Yes, I lied. That was wrong. I never should have. On the other hand, he was trying to force me to believe something that was so personally offensive to me that I couldn’t do it in good conscience. My lie was a little lie compared to the big lie he was insisting I live. I never forgot it.

  * * *

  Enterprise, Alabama, is the peanut capital of the world. In the center of the town square is a kind of modified Statue of Liberty, holding a pedestal with a boll weevil on top. When the boll weevil hit Alabama and destroyed the cotton crops, the farmers planted peanuts instead and made fortunes by diversifying.

  My father got his first star when we were in Enterprise. We didn’t live at Fort Rucker where Daddy was stationed after his Washington assignment, because there were no quarters for dependents. Enterprise was a tiny town then. We lived in a new housing development, surrounded by red dirt. Across the street, the less affluent white neighbors lived in shacks or trailers. My friend’s house had no separated rooms unto themselves, just ropes or clotheslines with sheets hung over them to define spaces for privacy. I had never seen that kind of poverty. It was shocking to me.

  I was in sixth grade. The first day of school was in September and it was still swelteringly hot. I was the only child wearing shoes. Everyone else was barefoot. Lunch was a bag of salted peanuts poured inside the green neck of a glass Coke bottle. It was almost as dramatic a culture shock as the move to Japan.

  Children were regularly beaten by the teachers for the mildest infractions. They would be marched up to the front of the room, made to lie across the teacher’s desk on their stomachs, and hit with paddles. Nobody seemed to have a problem with this. I was horrified and so were my parents. They’d never heard of anything like it. The humiliation was more than I could imagine. I lived in terror that I would do something wrong and be hauled to the front
of the class. I felt sure that I would not let that happen. I would run out of the school and never return again. Happily, that never came to pass. My teacher, who was probably in her early twenties and didn’t really have her heart in the paddlings, was married to a lieutenant at Fort Rucker. I didn’t think I was going to have a problem. Nevertheless, what really got to me was that the kids were all Southern Christians. We had to pray in school in the morning. What kind of Christians would publicly humiliate and beat their children in front of others for such little things? Just another reminder that there was no God.

  My parents always found good friends and managed to have fun anywhere, but Enterprise was no garden spot, and the surroundings and culture began to wear on all of us, especially Mother and Daddy. There was a lot of tension between them. Daddy was away a lot on maneuvers and Mother was left alone with us, with nothing much but her bridge club to keep her occupied. One night, after he had been away for a while, he came home to dinner. Unfortunately there was no dinner. My mother still was not home from bridge. Fuming, he went into the kitchen, made something for dinner, and called us to the table. Just as he did, my mother drove up and flounced into the house, not really greeting my father or apologizing for being late.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded in a controlled but stern voice. He looked especially commanding in his uniform. “I came home to an empty kitchen and I had to cook dinner myself.” I had never once in my life heard my parents argue, and I had certainly never heard my father use this tone of voice to my mother. Before she could answer, I piped up in a singsong, teasing voice, and exclaimed, “Poor little housewife!” I’ll never know what possessed me to say that.

  With that, my father threw his napkin on the table, his face drawn with rage, stood up from the table and said, “Goddamnit, Bette, that’s it. I’m leaving.” He charged out the door and drove off. I’d never heard him swear either, except his occasional “God Almightys.” I was thunderstruck. What had I done? What had I said? My father had left us because of me. How could I ever forgive myself? I ran upstairs to my room and flung myself on the bed, quickly becoming completely hysterical. My mother came up to console me. She kept rubbing my back and kissing me and telling me it would be okay, but I knew it wasn’t okay. Eventually I got the dry heaves. Mother became frantic. Sometime around dawn I heard my father’s voice. He came up to my bedroom and put his arms around me. He held me for a long time until my tears subsided. He said he was sorry. He didn’t mean he was actually leaving but he had to go back out on maneuvers for a few months. He loved me and he would be back. He knew—and my mother did too—how sensitive I was. It had only been a little over a year since I had gotten out of the hospital in San Antonio. I could tell they were worried I might have a relapse. He managed to convince me that everything would be okay and then he left.

  He didn’t come back for months, a time period that seemed even longer than it actually was. I overheard my mother talking to my grandmother about how Daddy was living at the BOQ (Bachelor Officer Quarters) at Fort Rucker. He wasn’t really on maneuvers at all. I just knew they were splitting up. It took everything I had not to get sick again, but the combination of knowing I had to stay strong for my mother and that I couldn’t go back to a hospital again kept me resolute about not getting some unknown malady once more. We were all miserable, stuck in Enterprise, with Daddy gone and no idea what to do.

  I took up praying again. I actually knelt by my bed. Maybe I was praying to Daddy to come back. Maybe it wasn’t to God. I don’t know who was the recipient of my prayers and hopes and best wishes, but I knew I had to do something and this was one of the few things I knew how to do, although I certainly had been out of practice.

  In May, Daddy got his new orders. He was going to be stationed in Athens, Greece. We were going to go with him. Paradise. I’d rarely been so ecstatic. He came home, finally, to tell us the news. He would leave almost immediately and we would follow on a ship from New York. My mother—alone—would have to pack up everything, and all of us as well, and get us there. She was so thrilled, she didn’t care. We were going to be a family again. Did my prayers help? I’ll never know.

  * * *

  As a family we were the happiest we had ever been in Athens. We loved everything about it—the weather, the blue skies, the whole Mediterranean ambience. We loved the sea, the mountains, the beaches, the whitewashed islands, the olive trees. We loved the culture, the music, the language and history, much of which was redolent in the ruins and monuments. We loved the Greek food—the salads, feta cheese, calamari, moussaka. We loved the Greek people, their personalities and temperaments. We loved the den peirazei—the insouciance, the lightheartedness—of it all, essentially an attitude of “whatever, don’t worry.” The whole place lent itself to some calm and peace that came over our family. We were unstressed and delighted by each day. Yet again I was in sync with the genius loci of the place. I was Greek and felt completely at home there. This would be a repeated experience throughout my life.

  It was 1953 and Daddy was a major general by now. He was the number two in the JUSMAG (Joint United States Military Aid Group). My parents made huge numbers of friends in the military and the diplomatic corps, the CIA as well as the Greek shipowners, the Greek government, and even became friends with King Paul and Queen Frederika. It was a tight social community and they saw each other all the time. (At the time I began to suspect that Daddy was working for intelligence.)

  The Hotel Grande Bretagne, across the plaza from the palace, was headquarters for all the action, and my parents often took us to lunch there on Sundays. The hotel restaurant had the most extraordinary homemade potato chips I had ever eaten. We also drove on weekends into the mountains near Athens, where we had lunches in small tavernas, always including dessert with freshly grown almonds and honey from wild beehives.

  In the summer we would drive to Vouliagmeni Beach, south of Athens, where there was one tiny taverna on a cove. We watched the fishermen catch the octopuses in the cove, beat them on the rocks to tenderize them, and deliver them to the restaurant. When we finished swimming, we would take a table and order freshly grilled octopus as we sat in the shade and sipped our Fanta limonadas.

  Some weekends in the summer our parents’ friends would take us on their yachts to the islands. Often we would stay with their friends who had houses on Hydra or Spetses. We went to the Anglo American School in Kifissia, a suburb of Athens. It was tiny, international, and laid-back. Our friends were from every country imaginable. In Greece, children were folded into the grown-ups’ activities. We stayed up half the night and slept half the day. Greece was heaven.

  I turned thirteen in Greece. It was there that I began to become a fully formed person. It was in Greece where I began to be a woman. It was in Greece where I learned the word atheist.

  Here was a word for what I was—or at least felt myself to be. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t weird. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t evil. I just didn’t believe in God. It’s not that the existence of God had not been questioned before. I felt an enormous sense of freedom, emotional and intellectual (confirmation that my thinking was not wrong). In some odd way, that sense of freedom allowed me to be more spiritual, a feeling I hadn’t recognized before.

  I was so proud of my newfound word, my newfound identity, that I announced to my father that I was an atheist. Naturally, he went ballistic. (A decade later, the atheist community in the United States was led by a shrill woman with a mustache named Madalyn Murray O’Hair, not the compelling sympathetic leader one would want for a new movement.)

  As they had my entire childhood, my father and mother continued to try to send my younger siblings to Sunday school and me to church while they slept in on Sunday mornings after their late-night “bacchanals.” From this point on—and after the personal catastrophe of missing the Alice in Wonderland movie—I simply refused to go.

  Right around this time my father went to Paris for a meeting. When he returned, he brought me a present. He had little tr
inkets for Donna and Butchie. He saved mine for last. It was a shoebox, inside of which was a gorgeous pair of sophisticated, sexy black suede pointed-toe French heels with a sweetheart cut. I could hardly contain myself, they were so beautiful. My first pair of heels. I slipped them on. A perfect fit. I threw my arms around my father, practically weeping with gratitude.

  “You can have them on one condition,” he said. I suddenly had a wrenching feeling in my stomach.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You can have them if you go to church.”

  I was faced with an enormous moral crisis. What should I do? Take the coveted shoes and go against everything I then believed by going to church services or refuse the shoes, not go to church, and live with a clear conscience.

  “Okay,” I said.

  The next Sunday, our chauffeur Yiorgos drove my brother, sister, and me to Sunday school and church, respectively. I deliberately ran late so the church would be filled when we got there. I sashayed up the middle aisle all the way to the front where I proudly took my seat before the altar. I wanted to make absolutely sure that everyone saw me in my new high-heeled French suede shoes.

  They knew what was on my body. It was none of their business what was in my soul. After that there was no way my father could keep me out of church. That was the only place I had to wear the shoes. I often wondered how he felt about bribing me like that. He must have realized a pair of French heels couldn’t change someone’s mind about believing in God. Although I have to admit, they came close.