All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  Jackson Family Bake

  Serves 18 (adjust amounts as necessary pending final head count)

  16 quarts soft-shell steam clams

  water to cover

  3 tablespoons vinegar

  18 potatoes in their jackets

  18 ears of sweet corn on the cob

  18 flounder filets

  36 link sausages

  melted butter

  18 lobsters

  1 bushel rockweed from clean salt water

  1 large potato

  1 quart water

  About 4 hours before baking time, cover the clams with water, and the vinegar, and stir well. This makes the clams throw off sand and does not alter the taste. Scrub the potatoes, leaving the skins on. Husk and desilk the corn, removing all but the innermost layer. Roll each filet around 2 sausages, then wrap the filets in Patapar paper. Divide the steamers in thirds and put each portion in a gauze bag for ease in removing from the bake.

  For the cooking, use a large, heavy-duty metal refuse can, with its cover, over an open grate or an improvised fireplace made of cinder blocks. Devise a rack about 4 inches high that will raise the bake above the juices. Pack in this order (which makes it come in almost the right order for serving, see note): layer of rockweed, fish-and-sausage packages, rockweed, sweet corn, rockweed, potatoes, layer of rockweed, bags of clams, rockweed, live lobsters, rockweed. This fills the can. In the top layer of rockweed, bury the large potato as a timer. Put the quart of water in the can, cover it, and set it over the fireplace. Make a brisk fire underneath, and keep the fire going until the bake is done. Note when steam begins to come out around the cover. Approximately one hour and ten minutes from this time the bake should be done. If the potato on the top is not well-done, cook a while longer until it is. Remove the can from the fire.

  Each course should be served hot to be best.

  First course: clams with melted butter

  Second course: potatoes, sweet corn, and the fish-and-sausage rolls

  Third course: lobsters with melted butter. Each lobster should be split open and the claws given a breaking crack to make it easier to get the meat out.

  Dessert course: fruit pies, use following recipe for crusts

  NOTE: Experience has taught that the lobster gets overcooked if put at the bottom of the bake. Put the lobster on top. When unpacking the bake, put the lobsters between two layers of hot rockweed to keep them warm for serving last.

  Skidmore College Piecrust

  (adjust amounts per number of pies)

  2 cups flour

  1 teaspoon salt

  2/3 cup Crisco

  1/3 cup cold water

  Mix the flour and salt in a large mixing bowl. Cut in 1/3 cup Crisco well until it looks like coarse meal. Cut in another 1/3 cup Crisco until the mixture forms large chunks. With a fork, mix in 1/3 cup cold water.

  Roll this. It makes a double large pie.

  NOTE: patch as much as you need; it doesn’t hurt.

  IV

  The Spy Who Loved Me

  My father had a favorite story he used to tell. He told it for guests, rising to his feet at the head of the family dinner table, his wineglass up in a toast. The story is about two mice who one day find themselves cornered by a vicious cat. As the first mouse cowers, certain the jig is up, the second mouse looks the cat straight in the eye and bellows: “Bow wow wow!” The cat, terrified, runs away. Astonished, the first mouse asks the second, “My good fellow, how ever did you manage that?” to which the second replies: “Simple. It always pays to have a second language.”

  Hyperpolyglot: one who speaks many languages.

  My father collected words. He spoke as many as fourteen languages, and when he wasn’t at home studying them, he was traveling abroad to use them in their native context. Many he had fluently, including French, Italian, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish, and Polish. Others he categorized as “I can get by in conversation and if need be argue my point.” Some were relegated to “taxi and restaurant” languages, meaning he only had enough to get where he needed to go and order food. Some he had “book fluency” in—he could not converse but could translate from that language to English on paper. Some he didn’t speak at all but knew how to write, such as classical Arabic and Mandarin.

  My father had grown up in the Midwest of the early twentieth century. He was a quiet, patient boy from St. Louis, Missouri, whose grandfather John I. Beggs had been a business associate of Thomas Edison, and thus in the right place at the right time to become a multimillionaire utilities magnate in the early twentieth century. His daughter, my grandmother Mary Grace Beggs, married Richard McCulloch of United Railways, a pioneer of electric train transportation. Thus, electricity and railroads formed a major merger, and my father was the offspring. This was all lore by the time it was handed down to us, but for my father and his two siblings, it meant that the life they led was formal and free of financial worry. One dressed for dinner, children were to be seen and not heard, parents were called Mother and Father and one appeared before them at the proper instances, all this regulated by a team of governesses who did the actual nuts-and-bolts parenting—tending to baths and skinned knees and meals and toothaches and bad dreams. To one’s parents one spoke formally and only when spoken to. Summers were spent on a lake in Wisconsin called Oconomowoc, where the family owned their own island, known as Beggs Isle, and all supplies were brought by boat to a grand house where three generations of the Beggs family resided. In photos, my father and his sister and brother are dressed in starched outfits, my aunt Sally with a big bow in her hair, my father and my uncle Robert in ties and short pants. They pose with vacant stares under a vast weeping willow.

  Many times, I’ve wished I could locate that young child and see, as he grew, how the quest to master new languages fired his imagination and grew along with him. How he developed his gift of communication when he was not allowed to speak unless spoken to. He was by all accounts a shy boy, growing up in impersonal and joyless luxury, and I wonder where the love of foreign languages took root. Was the gift of communication a dodge, a way to deflect his own feeling? Was it easier to speak in foreign languages than to speak from the heart? Or a code he adopted to speak truth to power—power being the distant and affectless adults—in ways they could not understand? Was communication in foreign languages to foreigners a way to reach out past his upbringing, to learn to express in code that which he did not feel license to express in his native tongue?

  These secrets of the past that can only be pieced together through a few stories handed down through the generations, through boxes of photographs, books left on shelves, a suitcase of old letters.

  My father entered Yale at sixteen and tucked a number of graduate degrees under his belt by the time, in his late twenties, he departed with his young first wife on a three-year honeymoon exploring the Balkans. It was 1936, and the region, only recently opened at that time to the West, became the subject of the only book he ever wrote, Drums in the Balkan Night.

  The author’s bio on the back reads:

  In June 1930, when John I. B. McCulloch was graduated from Yale, he left the same night for a trip around the world. The following winter he spent in India where he studied Hindustani in Delhi, met Gandhi in Allahabad and Rabindranath Tagore at his school north of Calcutta. The next spring found him in China. The school year of 1931–32 he studied at New College, Oxford, and learned Arabic and Persian, among other things. For two months in the autumn of 1932 he was in Moscow and saw the celebration for the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution. In 1932–33 he was in Paris studying at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. In September 1934, he married Elizabeth Ten Broeck Jones of Milwaukee and since then, most of their time has been spent in Eastern Europe.

  In the photo on the frontispiece, he is in shirtsleeves, his hair blowing in the wind, his young wife, Betty, in white shorts, a halter top, and white pumps. He would have been twenty-eight. He is lanky, his face thi
n, a radiant smile exposing a row of straight white teeth. They appear to be on the deck of a cruising vessel; behind them is a rail, and beyond that the Aegean Sea. He quotes a line of Aubrey Herbert in his book, a line that, he writes, always thrilled him: “I went to the East by accident, as a young man might go to a party, and find his fate there.”

  I’ve thought of that line often over the years. The whimsicality, the spirit of adventure, the openness to fate wherever it might lead. “As a young man might go to a party”—the party being in my father’s case the world unfolding in the wake of World War II, where fate defined an entire generation.

  After their return from the Balkans, Betty gave birth to their four children in quick succession and America joined the war. Recruited to the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, my father served as an intelligence officer during the war, and in the immediate aftermath as a kind of multilingual peacekeeping force of one.

  He always spoke modestly of “summoning up” a language, as if he had but to call on one and it appeared on the tip of his tongue. Language primers, the language of each written on the spine, lined the rows of our family bookshelves, and I pictured this shelf whenever he spoke of summoning a language to the fore—Arabic, Hebrew, Modern Persian, Old English, Finnish, Welsh, Icelandic, Urdu, Romanian, Chinese. Jifunze Kiingereza was a primer on teaching English to native Swahili speakers. Yoruba was the mother tongue of certain regions of Western Nigeria.

  “Summoning up my best Yoruba” would not be an unusual thing to hear my father say at the start of a story.

  Even when at times they didn’t share anything else—dreams, secrets, opinions, or a bed—my parents shared the couch in the library of our apartment. On the bookshelf that spanned the wall behind the couch, my father’s language books lined the rows on his side much as the Social Register lined the rows on hers. These volumes lived side by side for as long as my parents did—the regimented black spines of New York social hierarchy and his textbooks, all different sizes, some leather-bound and some paperbacks, some tall, some short and thick, quite a few first edition hardbacks, their covers chipped from use.

  The details of my father’s life in the OSS came out only in small increments. Some nights when they had dinner guests he’d rise to his feet and sing the German ballad “Lili Marlene” in the original German, explaining he’d learned it from a double agent in Berlin at the end of the war—a female double agent, he’d add, and wink to imply wartime romance. For me as a child, this seemed both thrilling, right out of James Bond, and deeply distressing, my father in love with a random woman while he was supposed to be defeating Nazis and missing his wife and small children at home. My mother saw it as performance, at least on the surface, and presumably so did their guests. She would sit at the other end of our long dining table, look at her husband across the candle glow as a maid cleared the dessert plates and poured one last round of wine, and say, “Oh god, there you go again,” and roll her eyes. Yet I noticed the look that came over him as he sang those nights. His eyes got moist; he looked toward the window and his voice seemed almost to crack, as if for that instant it all fell away—the guests, the candlelight, the city noise below—and he was back in a world of international conflict, romance, and espionage, a world where by just “summoning up” a language, his words could cast magical spells.

  One evening I found a great commotion in the square. A number of trucks had suddenly appeared with Italian partisans and they were about to batter down the doors of the German officer’s building. A man who appeared to be in charge gave me to understand that they intended to lynch a certain German lieutenant who, they assured me, had been guilty of various war crimes. Summoning up my best Italian, I told the partisan leader that, although the Germans were still technically in charge of the town, authority had passed to the British and Americans and that we couldn’t permit a bloodbath.

  This is my father recounting his activities in the OSS at the close of the war in Europe. I heard him give the interview to a man named Russell Miller for his book Behind the Lines about the OSS. I was about ten, curled on the couch beside him as he spoke. I had arrived home after school, kicked off my shoes, and in my uniform wandered in to see my father in his best suit speaking to a man taking notes. He waved me in as he spoke, put a finger to his lips to ensure I stayed quiet, and as I curled up on the couch beside him he went on. It took me years to find the book in which the interview appeared. He speaks of controlling German and Italian and Allied troops like a nanny in a room of overtired children.

  I sent one of our GIs, who happened to be in the neighborhood, back to our headquarters to summon help, moral, if not physical, and arranged that an American tank, also there by chance, should circle the square with the Stars and Stripes prominently displayed. Within a few minutes an American officer arrived who was of Italian descent and who had worked closely with the partisans. He was able to persuade them that no good would come of an Italian–German confrontation and that justice would, in the end, be served.

  After that VE day itself was something of an anti-climax. We celebrated it with Champagne, which we had taken from the Germans, who had taken it from the French. In the midst of our party, a German major arrived, sat down casually at the piano and started playing Strauss waltzes. This was interrupted when an upper-class British officer gruffly declared that this was a “bad show” and “not at all the thing to do.” It was left to me to explain to the German major that while we liked his music, this was neither the time nor the place for it.

  His first wife waited years for his return, and finally found love elsewhere, something they all appeared to accept without acrimony, and when he returned home from the war to Washington, DC, they divorced. He then moved to New York and to projects as varied as editing a Latin American journal and working as a freelance journalist.

  This is their story of how my parents met:

  “We were at a cocktail party”—my father.

  “We were at Sally Stamm’s cocktail party, in her garden”—my mother.

  “Somewhere uptown”—my father.

  “On East 92nd Street, between Park and Lex”—my mother.

  “We were immediately drawn to each other”—my father.

  “Daddy had a ‘tootsie’ on his arm”—my mother.

  Laughter from my father, hand goes to forehead in amused exasperation.

  “Very tacky woman”—my mother.

  “Honey, come on”—my father.

  “Someone should have taken that monkey and put her back in her cage”—my mother.

  “Honey, please. Anyhow. We were pleasantly conversing, and suddenly an ashtray came flying across the garden, narrowly missing us both”—my father.

  “The tootsie was throwing it at me”—my mother.

  “We never knew which of us she was throwing it at”—my father.

  “I could tell, it was me”—my mother.

  “So when it was time to leave, I asked Sally, ‘Sally,’ said I, ‘who is that divine creature with whom I was just speaking?’”—my father.

  “He took a year to call me”—my mother.

  “That’s right, I took a year”—my father.

  “A full year”—my mother.

  “You didn’t want me to call while I was still seeing someone else, did you?”—my father.

  “That tootsie. What you ever saw in that cheap girl I’ll never know”—my mother.

  “I was thinking about you every day in that year, Pat”—my father.

  “He took a year to call me, he’s lucky I hadn’t run off with someone else”—my mother.

  “I was very lucky indeed”—my father.

  “A full year, girls, your father took a year to call me, a year almost to the day after his cheap tootsie threw an ashtray at my head”—my mother.

  “I was trying to be a gentleman”—my father.

  “I had a lot of other suitors”—my mother.

  “It was the longest year I ever waited for anything, and that includes wa
iting for the war to end”—my father.

  “Jean-Jean”—my mother, pronouncing it in the French manner.

  “My darling dear”—my father.

  In a black leather suitcase my father kept all the cards my mother had ever sent him. Each card is addressed to “Jean-Jean” and signed “Patsy Poo.” In the suitcase, there are also envelopes with all our school report cards and our baby teeth. Teeth dating from my half siblings in the 1940s, all the way up to my sister Catherine’s teeth in the mid-’60s. He put the teeth in plain white envelopes and marked the date, with the age of each child. There were far fewer from the half siblings, as he saw them so infrequently a tooth loss was no doubt rare on those visits. Still they are all stored there in his suitcase. Twenty years’ worth of baby teeth shed by his children. In large manila envelopes, there were love letters from women all over Europe in various languages, professing undying passion in the time of wartime pandemonium. These were mixed in among the teeth and report cards. “I know you are probably back Stateside by now,” one woman named Susan wrote, “with your wife and children, and I hope your life will go on happily. As for me, I will never again be as happy as when we were together . . .” There were war journals written in his almost illegible scrawl. “I dreamed I was on a train going through high mountains,” one entry said, written in 1942. “I couldn’t get off and the train wouldn’t stop.”

  For my father, when he met my mother, there was no apparent shame in not making a salary. And despite her concerns voiced at the ladies’ lunch at Gino’s, she seemed to take to the life he could afford, and together they moved to an apartment high above Park Avenue shortly before I was born. My father’s day-to-day reality was to sit in our living room all morning in his bathrobe, with a book in his hand and stacks of index cards in piles by his feet, filling the cards with words in whatever language he was studying that year. Verb declensions scattered all over my mother’s soft dove-gray rug. At noon, he’d take a shower and put on a suit. He always wore a dark suit, with a white shirt and a blue tie. “It brings out the blue in his eyes,” my mother would say of his collection of blue silk ties. He never left our apartment building in anything but a jacket and tie—he was proud of mentioning that the doorman had never seen him any other way. This included during the elevator strike when he did his shift taking residents up and down the building in his suit. Once dressed for lunch, he would walk the short distance to Café Geiger on East 86th Street, or down to Lüchow’s on Union Square, so he could keep up his German over assorted wurst or corned pork knuckle with sauerkraut. His trajectory midday in the city was so predictable that when years later I got my acceptance to college, I knew to call Café Geiger and have the maître d’, a dear friend of my father’s by this point, put him on the phone.