My mother, who at twenty had already witnessed the bombing of Jena, the Red Army’s arrival, her mother being doused with the contents of a neighbor’s chamber pot, a dog eating a child’s corpse, pianos hacked apart for firewood, and the rise of the socialist workers’ state, liked to say to me that she had never in her life seen anything more amazing than the American man’s warmth toward the two creeps in their sedan. His kind of trust and openness was, for a Prussian, inconceivable.
“What’s your name?” my father asked her when they had the street to themselves.
“Clelia.”
“Oh my, what a beautiful name,” my father said. “That’s a great name.”
My mother happily smiled and then, certain that she looked like a mouthsome Tyrannosaur, tried to stretch her lips down over her hundred teeth; but concealment was a lost cause. “Do you really think?” she said, smiling all the more widely.
My father hadn’t said two kind words, it was more like ten. It still wasn’t very many. In the back pocket of his khakis was a map of Berlin, the kind with the patented folding system (my father loved innovations, loved to see inventors rewarded for improving the human condition), and he was able to lead my mother to Zoo Station and buy her some wurst at the all-night food kiosk there. In a mix of English and German, followable only spottily by my mother, he explained that this was his first day in Berlin and he was so excited to be here that he could have walked all night. He was a delegate to the Fourth World Congress of the Association for International Understanding (which wouldn’t survive to hold a fifth congress, owing to its exposure, the following autumn, as basically a Communist front). He’d left his two little girls, from his first marriage, in the care of his sister, and had flown to Berlin on his own nickel. He’d had some disappointments in life, he’d hoped to contribute more to the world than teaching high-school biology, but the wonderful thing about teaching was that it gave him whole summers to get out, out into the world, out into nature. He delighted in meeting foreigners and uncovering common ground; at one point, he’d studied Esperanto. His girls, only four and six, were already great little campers, and when they were older he intended to take them to Thailand, to Zambia, to Peru. Life was too short for sleeping. He didn’t want to waste one minute of his week in Berlin.
When my mother told him she’d run away from Jena, my father’s first impulse was to think of his own daughters and insist that she go home again in the morning. But when he learned that her mother had beaten her and that she’d never go to college, he reconsidered. “Golly, that’s rough,” he said. “Something wrong with a system that makes a bright, vital girl like you work behind the counter in a bakery. I’m an old-fashioned camper—a blanket and a piece of level ground’s enough for me. My hotel’s not much, but it does have beds. Why don’t you sleep in mine, and we’ll see how things look to you tomorrow. I can get a little shut-eye on the floor.”
His motives were almost certainly benign. My father was a good man: a tireless teacher and loyal husband, a seeder of independence in my sisters, a sucker for stories of injustice, a reflexive giver of the benefit of the doubt, a vigorous raiser of his hand when there was unpleasant work to be volunteered for. And yet I’m haunted by the fact that, all his life, he did exactly what he pleased. If he wanted to take his students to Honduras to dig sewage lines, or to a Navajo reservation to paint houses and brand cattle, even if it meant leaving my mother alone for weeks with the kids, he did it. If he wanted to stop the family car and chase a butterfly, he did it. And if he felt like marrying a pretty woman young enough to be his daughter, he did it—twice.
He was originally from Indiana. Hoping to make a contribution to agriculture, he’d pursued entomology, but the road to a PhD in entomology is long. Certain stages in the life cycle of the caddis flies he was studying could be collected only for a week or two each year, and to support himself while the years went by he took a job with the Colorado Department of Agriculture. He was living in Denver when he finished his dissertation and sent his collection to his committee in Indiana, which couldn’t grant a degree without seeing specimens. The package, which represented eight years of work, disappeared in the U.S. mail without a trace. His dream had been to teach at a university and do pure research, but instead he ended up as an ABD in the Denver public school district.
Sometime in the late thirties, he took under his protection a bright but vulnerable girl whose stepfather was an alcoholic brute. He had conferences with her mother, he arranged for the girl to live with a different family, and he encouraged her to apply for college. But the girl turned out to be amenable to rescue only temporarily, because her boyfriend was in prison. As soon as he got out, they ran away to California. My father served four years in the Army Signal Corps, the last of them in Bavaria, and when he returned to his job in Denver he learned that the young woman was living at home again; her boyfriend was now in military prison for nearly killing someone in a bar fight. My father, who I suspect had been in love with her from the beginning, invited her on long hikes in the mountains and by and by proposed to her. Trying to turn her life around, and under pressure from her mother, the young woman may have felt that she had no choice but to accept. (She looked like an angel in the one picture I ever saw of her, but there was something empty in her eyes, a deadness, the despair of the disparity between what she looked like and what she felt herself to be.) The daughters she’d had with my father were one and three when her boyfriend finished his sentence and resurfaced in Denver. My father never told even my mother, let alone me, what happened then. All I know is that he ended up with sole custody of my half sisters.
He was more than twice my mother’s age, but she was a couple of inches taller, and maybe this helped equalize and normalize things. In Berlin, he blew off the plenary sessions of the Fourth Congress, which even by the standards of international do-goodery must have set new records for tediousness and pointlessness, and together he and my mother walked the city. They took the boat rides that must be taken in Berlin, they ate at restaurants that seemed first-class to her. On their fifth evening, he sat her down and made a little speech.
“Here’s what I want to do,” he said. “I want to marry you, and, no, don’t worry, I’m not trying to pull anything dishonorable. I just have a feeling that if you stay here you’re going to get in trouble and find yourself back in Jena in no time, and there goes your whole life. So, and then we’ll see about getting you a passport and so forth. I’ll fly back here next week with my little girls, and you can see if you want to come back to the States with me. If you don’t want to, no hard feelings, we’ll annul the marriage. I just think you’re a swell girl, with a good head on your shoulders, and I have a feeling I’d be happy to stay married to you. I think you’re pretty darned wonderful, Clelia.”
“My mother was right,” my mother said to me much later, when my father was long dead. “I was a stupid-innocent goose. I was so thirsty for kindness, but I’d still never imagined a man could be as kind as your father. I thought I’d run into the kindest man in the world. On a dark street in Moabit! Some kind of miracle! And you know how thick his wallet always was—all those things he never took out of it, business cards from important people, clippings from important publications, all those tips for self-improvement, all those recipes for a better world. And money. Well, it was more than I’d ever seen—more than we had at the bakery at the end of the day. A price-subsidized Communist bakery with one cash register: that was my idea of a lot of money! I didn’t even know the hotel we were in was terrible, he had to tell me it was terrible, and even then I blamed it on the congress, not him. What did I know about strong dollars, weak currencies? And I couldn’t follow everything he said, so I thought the entire city of Denver had elected him to be its representative at an important world congress. I thought he was rich! I’d never seen a thicker wallet. I didn’t know the Association for International Understanding had exactly four dues-paying members in the state of Colorado. I didn’t know anything. He had
my heart in his hand in five minutes. I would have crawled on my knees to America to be with him.”
It took some years for my mother’s passion to wane and the marriage to fully polarize. In the early years, she was engulfed by child care and by night school, where she eventually earned a degree in pharmacology. But by the time of the first presidential election I remember, she was voting for Barry Goldwater. She’d seen enough of socialism to foresee its ultimate failure, she knew the Soviets to be thieves, rapists, and murderers, and she never got over the shock of discovering that my father was rich only in comparison to Jena, only the way most Americans were rich. In her disappointment with him, she idealized the truly wealthy, attributing improbable virtues to them. She’d cashed in her youth and her looks for life in a cramped three-bedroom house with a tin-pot progressive too good and kind to be divorced, and in her rage against her stupid-innocence she found better men to admire: Goldwater, Senator Charles Percy, later Ronald Reagan. Their conservatism appealed to her German belief that nature was perfect and that all the troubles in the world were caused by man. During my school hours, she worked at the Atkinson’s Drugs on Federal Boulevard, and what she saw there was diseased human beings parading to the counter where she took their scripts and gave them drugs. Human beings busily poisoning themselves with cigarettes and alcohol and junk food. They weren’t to be trusted, the Soviets weren’t to be trusted, and she arranged her politics accordingly.
My father knew that nature wasn’t perfect. During his years with the Ag Department, he’d stood in parched fields amid plants that were dying of thirst because they lost too much water through their stomata, because their use of carbon dioxide was grossly inefficient, because the chlorophyll molecule’s left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing—its left hand took in oxygen and emitted CO2 while its right hand did the opposite. He foresaw the day when deserts would bloom because of smarter plants, plants perfected by human beings, plants implanted with better, more modern chlorophyll. And he knew that Clelia knew her chemistry, he defied her to refute his proof of nature’s imperfection, and so they would argue about chemistry, with rising voices, at the dinner table.
Sadly, she wasn’t a very good stepmom to my sisters. She herself was like a plant in a parched field, craving the rain of my father’s attention, which my sisters soaked up so much of. But it was worse than that: she criticized my sisters the way her own mother had criticized her; she found particular fault with their clothes. This had to do partly with the rebellious sixties, hard years for a conservative, and partly with the rebellion of one of her own organs, her colon. I’m told I was a colicky baby, and no sooner was she past the stress of this than she suffered an ectopic pregnancy. Physical stress, life disappointment, money worries, genetic predisposition, bad luck: her bowel became inflamed and gave her trouble for the rest of her life. It pulled the strings in her face that her mother’s stomach had pulled in hers, and she became, with everyone but me, the voice of its unhappiness.
When I think about Anabel and the warning signs I ignored on the road to marrying her, I keep coming back to my polarized family: my sisters out doing world-bettering things with my dad, me at home with my mom. She spared me the shameful details of her suffering (she would have preferred, I’m sure, to have had her mother’s stomach, which ejected nothing worse than blood, not foul-smelling filth, not the very foundation of German expletive, humor, and taboo), but of course I could sense that she wasn’t happy, and my father always seemed to be out at some meeting or away on an adventure. I spent a thousand evenings alone with her. She was mostly very strict with me, but we had a strange little game that we played with the tony magazines she subscribed to. After we’d paged through an entire Town & Country or Harper’s Bazaar, she had me pick out the one house and one woman I most wanted. I soon learned to choose the most expensive house, the greatest beauty, and I grew up feeling as if I could redeem her unhappiness by getting them. What was striking about our game, though, was what a gushing, hopeful, big-sisterly girl she seemed like, leafing through the pages. When I was older and she told and retold me the story of her flight from Jena, the person I imagined was that girl.
* * *
I betrayed Anabel before I even met her. At the end of my third year at Penn, I’d run for the top job at The Daily Pennsylvanian on a platform of paying more attention to the “real” world, and once I was installed as executive editor, after a summer in Denver with my mother (my father had died two years earlier), I created the position of city editor and assigned articles about ticket scalping at the Spectrum, mercury and cadmium in the Delaware, a triple murder in West Philly. I thought my reporters were breaking the hermetic campus bubble of seventies self-indulgence, but I suspect that, to the people they pestered for interviews, they seemed more like kids whose overpriced candy bars you had to buy so they could go to summer camp.
In October, my friend Lucy Hill alerted me to an interesting story. Across the river, in Elkins Park, the dean of the Tyler School of Art had come to his office one morning and found a body wrapped in brown butcher paper. Scrawled on the paper in red crayon were the words YOUR MEAT. The body was warm and breathing but nonresponsive. The dean summoned security, which tore away enough paper to reveal the face of a second-year grad student, Anabel Laird. Her eyes were open, her mouth taped shut. Laird was already known to the dean for a series of letters denouncing the underrepresentation of women on the faculty and the disproportionate number of fellowships awarded to male MFA students. Further judicious tearing seemed to indicate that Laird was wearing nothing but the butcher paper. After some collective hand-wringing, security carried away the package and put it in a room with a female secretary who unwrapped the student, untaped her mouth, and covered her with a blanket. Laird refused to speak or move until late afternoon, when a second female student arrived with some clothes in a plastic bag.
Since Laird was an old friend of Lucy’s, I should have edited the story myself, but I’d fallen behind with my class work and left the DP in the hands of the managing editor, Oswald Hackett, who was also my roommate and best friend. The Laird story, written by a notably amoral sophomore, was by turns salacious and snarky, with an assortment of tasty blind quotes from Laird’s fellow students (“nobody likes her,” “poor little trust-fund girl,” “a sad cry for the attention she’s not getting with her films”), but the reporter had checked the requisite boxes, getting lengthy quotes from Laird and a bland statement from the dean, and Oswald ran it in full on our front page. When I read it the following afternoon, I had only a fleeting sense of guilt. Not until I stopped by at the DP and found phone messages from both Laird and Lucy did I realize—all at once, with a lurch in my heart—that the piece had been really cruel.
A fact of my life was that I had a morbid fear of reproach, especially from women. Somehow I persuaded myself that I could get away with not returning either of the women’s messages. Nor did I bring the matter up with Oswald; being so afraid of reproach myself, I hated to inflict it on a friend. It seemed possible that Lucy, who lived off campus, might have cooled down by the next time I saw her, and it didn’t occur to me that a woman militant enough to wrap herself in butcher paper might show up at the DP in person.
As the executive editor, I had an actual office I could use as a study room. If Anabel had come to it in bib overalls, the Penn uniform of feminist militancy, I might have guessed who she was, but the woman who knocked on my door, late on a Friday afternoon, was dressed expensively, in a white silk blouse and a snug below-the-knee skirt that struck me as Parisian. Her mouth was a slash of crimson lipstick, her hair a dark cascade.
“I’m looking for Tom Aberrant.”
“Aberant,” I corrected.
The woman registered her surprise with the bulging eyes of a hanged person. “Are you a freshman?”
“Senior, actually.”
“Good Lord. Did you come here when you were thirteen? I’d pictured somebody bearded.”
My baby face was a sore
subject. My freshman roommate had suggested that I age myself by manufacturing a dueling scar in the nineteenth-century manner, by cutting myself with a saber and laying a hair in the cut to keep it from healing cleanly. I believed my face to be the main reason why, although I was good at befriending women, I wasn’t having sex with any of them. I got physical attention exclusively from very short girls and queer guys. One of the latter had walked up to me at a party and, without a word, put his tongue in my ear.
“I’m Anabel,” the woman said. “The person whose message you didn’t return.”
My chest constricted. Anabel shut the door behind her with a chicly booted foot and sat down with her arms crossed tightly, as if to conceal what her blouse wanted to reveal. Her eyes were large and brown, like a deer’s, and her face rather long and narrow, also like a deer’s; she shouldn’t have quite been pretty but somehow was. She was at least two years older than me.
“I’m sorry,” I said wretchedly. “I’m sorry I didn’t return your message.”
“Lucy told me that you were a good person. She said I could trust you.”
“I’m sorry about the article, too. The fact is, I didn’t even read it until after it was out.”
“Are you not the editor?”
“Authority is delegated in various ways.”
I was avoiding her eyes, but I could feel them blazing at me. “Was it necessary for your reporter to mention that my father is the president and chairman of McCaskill? And that I’m not a well-liked person?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “As soon as I saw the story, I realized it was cruel. Sometimes, when you’re in the thick of putting a story together, you forget that someone’s going to read it.”
She tossed her dark mane. “So, if I hadn’t read it, you wouldn’t be sorry? What does that mean? You’re sorry you were caught? That’s not sorry. That’s cowardly.”
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