Blue Genes (13 page)

We also learned that she borrowed money from Dad and Missy, and never returned it. Dad described her as “artsy-fartsy.” She found him uptight. Theirs was not a good role model for a sibling relationship. We also later learned that she, too, had made suicide attempts.

But despite Judy’s bizarre behavior patterns, her total lack of criticism of us, her funny wardrobes, and the fact that she lived with—and took care of—her ailing mother (Anna Lukacs) all served to endear her to us.

And
Judy took us to restaurants that whetted our appetites for exotica for decades. Turkish, Armenian, Japanese—all were part of Judy’s wish for a broad education for us, and without her we would undoubtedly have missed out on cuisines and cultures that gave us endless pleasure in years to come.

STILL, THIS ENTIRE PERIOD IN OUR LIVES WAS
, for me, dominated by Missy. Tony, however, could not give himself totally over to her will. In consequence, Missy lavished far more attention and love on me, sinking me further and further into the symbiotic relationship that would, in the end, both save me and render me far too dependent. Tony remained aloof. Perhaps he had been too damaged by having trusted one female figure—and having lost. Perhaps it was simply the personality he was born with. Whichever—or whatever—Tony did not say “I love you” nearly enough for Missy’s pleasure. He did not put away his reading matter when she decreed lights-out. He did not lavish attention on her. But then, Tony did not lavish attention on anyone. He was a true loner, deep in whatever emotional or intellectual dialogues he was having with himself.

For now, however, we were at Missy’s beck and call, and we became allies in a holding pattern against her potentially destructive cloying arms and heart. We played together in that large back bedroom and, only two blocks from her apartment, spent many afternoons in Central Park.

In the park, our spirits soared. We rode endlessly on its famous carousel, trying to pluck the brass ring from a stanchion; it would bring us luck, we believed. We were friends, not just brothers, fleeing to the sun. It was wonderful to be free to read and loaf and play without supervision. Until nightfall, that is, when Missy would run steaming hot water into our huge white bathtub, and we would scrape and scrub the park’s dirt off our young bodies while she watched.

We made up our own rules for life. We ran to the large windows of the twelfth-floor apartment to look down on Seventh Avenue as the fire trucks from the nearby station rumbled noisily onto the block on their way to a fire. We read the same books (
Gone With the Wind
, the Hardy Boys mysteries) and listened to radio programs together, pushing the buttons that were labeled WEAF and WJZ, station names now long gone.

These were passionate hours as we huddled over the little Admiral radio next to our beds. These rapt moments listening to
Terry and the Pirates
,
Duffy’s Tavern
, and
Inner Sanctum
bonded my brother and me as partners in a rare world of imagination. It’s not that we were in love with these shows as shows but that we were in love with radio, with the magic it created. And the experience of listening
together
.

In the mornings, I woke early. I would turn to see if Tony was still asleep. Then, needing company, I would cough, whisper, or make other noises to awaken him. It was a practice that everyone complained about, but I never gave it up. I was too lonely when no one else was up, and it was too much fun watching Tony slowly come out of his dream state.

ON THE CUSP BETWEEN PRETEEN AND ADOLESCENT
, Tony and I yearned to be free from Missy, but Dad—still eking out a living with the Society—said he could not afford to have us live with him. But could Dad not have lived a more frugal life, or gotten a higher-paying job, and had us move in with him? The question has been painful for me; for many years I have seen him as putting his own comfort and living style ahead of our needs. Clearly, he was uncomfortable with his parenting skills, but he did not need to abandon us. Tony felt otherwise. He thought that Dad had done his best.

Since we lived apart from Dad, our most intense relationship with him became, by default, the meals we took together.

The beginning of every meal for our father was a dry martini or two. He held his liquor well in those days, but the alcohol lubricated his emotions so that even the most enjoyable dinner ended in some criticism of our behavior, as he complained about our grades or our manner or the dry-cleaning bill. Sad to say, we rose to the bait in predictable fashion: Tony with carefully crafted counterarguments, I with sullen, down-turned face.

Dad would turn to me with one consistently uttered complaint: he said I had a
catastrophic outlook
, that I always perceived the world as a dangerous and threatening place. It meant that when someone got a cold, I might describe it as pneumonia. If someone said the sky was falling, I might believe it.

For me, that was not so bizarre. I had seen what the world could do to me, and I tried to predict the truth, even if it was a sour truth. I extrapolated from the past. To Dad, however, it was a constant reminder that I was not a happy child and that he had participated in that unhappiness. He would have preferred to see me as an optimist.

I once figured out that by the time I was fifteen, Tony and I had eaten meals at the same table twelve thousand times, many—unlike “normal” families—at restaurants, where we listened to Dad’s criticisms, the rest with Missy, with whom we dined well but felt cramped. Despite—or rather because of—the fights with Dad, the meals we had together combined to form an even greater alliance between Tony and me. It wasn’t just that we stood together against Dad’s criticisms. Our sense of fulfillment from the food was a further connection between us. What we ate, and how much we ate, served as a sign of love—perhaps a
substitute
for the love that others had, in families that actually lived together.

We both reveled in the experience of eating, and whatever bad hands might have been dealt us in other regards, food—and the pleasures of cooking, eating, and sharing in its consumption—almost always brought joy to our souls. It was a critical source of the attachment we had for each other, and would be so for years and years to come.

IN AUGUST 1945
, at the end of the Larchmont summer, the war ended. So did the marriage. It had lasted a mere six months. I was very upset, but I seem to have been the only one. Dad and Ruth and Piri went on with their lives. Missy and Judy never spoke about the marriage. And Tony? Not a word. “Hey, these things happen,” his body language seemed to indicate. I wanted a mother again.

In the summer of 1946, we hoped that Dad would spend time with us and that we wouldn’t be sent away to camp or have to spend time with Missy. But with the Society taking up a lot of his time, Dad felt he couldn’t get away for more than a couple of weeks. He arranged for Tony and me to spend the summer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the first four weeks on a dude ranch. He would join us for the first two. This had the added benefit of taking him back to the dry desert air that physicians thought was the cure for TB.

The trip did not result in the bonding between all of us that he wished for, but it did give Tony and me something to share, and something to talk about for years to come.

Our destination was Rancho La Merced, run by a retired opera singer who had lost a lot of money in the 1929 crash. What he had left he had plowed into this little burned-out patch of sand south of Santa Fe, with a windmill to bring up water, five horses, four little rooms for guests, and a large adobe main house, the exterior hung with bleached cow horns. Dressed in cowboy boots and jeans, with broad-brimmed hats on our heads, we were soon riding down into dry arroyos and up onto the parched flatlands in search of rattlesnakes and working ranches.

Despite our discomfort at being with Dad every day, as he was always criticizing us for one thing or another, Tony and I had a lively time. Riding and sunshine appealed to us. There’s a photo of the two “cowboys” grinning into the camera in one of the endless boxes of pictures in our garage, and one of Dad, looking quite trim and at ease on a slim horse. Is that an English saddle I see beneath him?

The rest of the summer, after Dad went back to New York, we spent at a camp in nearby Tesuque, north of Santa Fe. In the 1920s, Aunt Judy had gone out west to escape a debt she owed. She stayed with the German-American family that ran the camp and found respite with them from her financial and psychological troubles. She never forgot them, and it was she who urged Dad to take us to the little town. We had chores, and there were other campers with whom we had to interact. Dad’s criticism on one point was well-taken: Tony and I didn’t know how to meet and greet. We were shy, introverted, and unsure of ourselves. Upon learning that there were two teenage boys in the family, I even felt frightened that they might try to beat us up. Such was the continuing legacy of trauma at an early age.

One exciting moment occurred when the boys—who, it turned out, were friendly and enthusiastic—and Tony and I crept to the top of a hillock to observe as the five girls at the camp swam in the nude. It was my first time seeing a girl’s naked body, and I was suitably impressed (though also suitably embarrassed).

BY 1947
, gas rationing had been abolished. The country could breathe again. Live again. Buy cars again. And travel again. Bothered by the continued lack of contact with us, Dad decided to take a four-week drive across the country. He bought a secondhand 1940 Cadillac convertible from a man he didn’t know, paid too much for it, and didn’t have it looked over for defects. Then he asked a board member of the Society to help drive. Everything was a huge mistake. Irving, the board member, had no license, the car needed a lot of work, and bonding doesn’t take place from the backseat of a car, to which we were relegated because Irving got carsick.

For most of the five-thousand-mile trek, it was a bizarre image: two unhappy boys, an alcoholic father, and a miserable sidekick. There was no bonding between Dad and us, but Tony and I pulled together tighter than ever. There were constant arguments between my brother and my father about how often we could stop; arguments between Dad and Irving about whether the convertible’s top should be up or down; complaints about car sickness and our lack of “gratitude” for the experience we were having at our age. I remember feeling ill, lonely, sad, and frightened. I also remember the great stretches of Arizona highway, with nothing to see. Tony and I urged Dad to let the Cadillac out to its full speed, but he slavishly stayed under the speed limit.

Two very unpleasant events stand out: One was our arrival at the hotel on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Dad was elated. He had planned that day’s drive so that we would come upon the great ditch just at sunset, and he had managed to do so.

Dad parked the car as close to the rim as he could, then he and Irving and I piled out and rushed to the edge. It was only when we got there that Dad noticed Tony was missing. Turning back to the car, he discovered my brother curled up in the backseat, reading.

The book was
The Amboy Dukes
or
The Grapes of Wrath
or
Gone With the Wind
, depending on whose memory is to be believed. It doesn’t really matter, since the point was the same: Tony did not want to participate in Dad’s game plan, he enjoyed reading more than sightseeing, and he had had enough of nature. Dad was furious. I don’t remember him being as angry. He excoriated my brother, told him off in no uncertain terms, and stormed off to watch the sunset. Tony dragged himself out of the car and ambled into the hotel.

That night, for the first time, I became aware of Dad’s serious drinking. At dinner he had more than a couple of bourbons and went to bed with a slight shine to his complexion. In the morning, he used a phrase I hadn’t heard before—“hair of the dog that bit me”—as he pulled a flask from his suitcase and had a swallow. “Accch,” he said, grimacing, as the undiluted liquor opened up his gullet.

On the way back, our passenger got off in Chicago. We went on to Pittsburgh. At first, Tony and I felt some pleasant anticipation at this idea. After all, there were few things we knew about Dad’s early childhood, but Schenley High in Pittsburgh was one of them. We knew that Pittsburgh was important to him; maybe this would be fun.

The city was hot, filthy, ugly. Dad drank his way from one nostalgic spot to another. One morning in the hotel restaurant, we became totally fed up. He had shouted at us for coming down late for breakfast. He had scolded Tony for drinking milk too fast. We left him sitting at the table and went to our room. We didn’t know that it was drink that often made him angry; whatever the cause, we didn’t like it.

Not that Dad always expressed his displeasure by shouting. Sometimes it was the mere raising of an eyebrow, a quizzical look that set off just the tremor of alarm that something we had said or done was not to his liking. Then there was the glare—the “I don’t believe what I just heard” stare—a prelude to angry words.

In addition to mere anger, there were certain phrases that carried particular weight. “How many times do I have to tell you?” was one of them. “Well, I suppose you might as well learn to make your own mistakes” was another. And the one I swore I would never use on any other human being was what he said after asking us to do something that we were not immediately prepared to do. Raising his voice, he would say, “All right.
Don’t
do it. Since you always do the opposite of what I ask, then do the opposite of this:
Don’t do it!
” It was sarcasm, employed to demean us, and it worked.

It was also frightening.

In the hotel room in Pittsburgh, Tony and I turned to each other for comfort.

“I can’t stand it,” Tony said as we packed to leave the hotel that afternoon.

“I can’t, either,” I admitted, throwing socks at the distant suitcase without any skill or luck. “Why doesn’t he ever say anything nice?”

“I’m not going to take it much longer, I can tell you that.” Tony’s voice rose in ire.

We went on in that vein for some little time, and then—I suppose it was predictable—the door burst open and Dad appeared. On the way back to his room, he had passed our door, heard the imprecations;
he
, too, couldn’t take it any longer.

“What the hell is wrong with you two ungrateful kids? I have taken you on a trip that thousands of boys your age would sell their souls for. And what do I get? Complaints, whining, back talk!”

He slammed the door. I burst into tears.

Not long after, Dad wrote the following letter to another guest at the dude ranch.

I guess he saw things differently than we did.

There
were
occasions when Dad demonstrated the comforting and sheltering due two young boys from their remaining parent. He took us to plays and taught us about good theater. He recited poetry and incited us to use the right words when we both spoke and wrote. He taught us how to fold a jacket when we were packing, informed us about civil rights and civil liberties. He showed me how to carry a martini glass without spilling a drop. He trained us to match ties and shirts to socks, how to polish shoes. He tried to set us straight on what we owed the world and what, if anything, the world owed us. He had a moral sense in him that was very important, and he wanted it to be important to us. And though he lectured us on not being too individualistic or straying from received wisdom, by example he taught us to think for ourselves and search for our own truths.

These are no small matters.

IN THE SUMMERS OF 1948 AND 1949
, Dad rented a small cottage on sandy soil near Peconic Bay on the then-unfashionable North Shore of Long Island. For a month and a half, Tony and I spent weeks there alone; Dad came out on the weekends. I was the chief cook and bottle washer. I liked feeding people, but I resented doing the household work—being
expected
to do it. That first summer we were fifteen and thirteen.

Dad chose this particular part of Long Island because a man named Robert Joffe and his wife, Jessica, had a house nearby. Joffe—a radio producer who used the professional name Robert Maxwell to avoid telegraphing the fact that he was Jewish—had taken a great liking to my father and was preparing a program with him called
Criminal Casebook
in which Dad interviewed exconvicts and got them to tell about their childhood.

Maxwell lived in Cutchogue on weekends, on an island reached by a long causeway. To the left was Peconic Bay, an offshoot of Long Island Sound. The beach here was lapped very gently by the bay’s waves, and we could walk far out without losing our footing. It was sparsely populated; except for the occasional jellyfish, it was also safe. To the right of the causeway was a saltwater inlet. Here, when Joffe-Maxwell loaned us his rowboat and Evinrude outboard motor, we would go crabbing, pulling gently on a string baited with chicken to lure the unsuspecting crab up from the mud so we could net him. Patience was needed. We caught very few crabs.

Maxwell was the father I thought I wanted to have: the outgoing, swearing, gregarious, daring, generous man, the one who never criticized us, but instead offered us views of an adult world into which our own father had never led us. He taught us how to fire a .38 revolver, talked about condoms and farts and sex, and kidded us when we laughed at dirty jokes we didn’t really understand. Jessica, at that time in her thirties, was beautiful and slim and daringly risqué. I fell instantly in love with her. The pair did not have children and would split up over that fact within ten years. For now, however, they were an exciting contrast to our own father, who was also enchanted with them—as Nick was with Gatsby—but who could not hold a candle to them when it came to giving adolescent boys a glimpse of a dizzy, glittering world.

Though they were men of different means and mores, Bob loved Dad, too. My father was a determinedly ethical lawyer whose view of the universe was that juvenile delinquency could be halted by kindness and psychological insight. Bob was a rambunctious radio producer, whose signal radio show,
Superman
, had captured the imagination of boys all over the world and who broke rules for his own aggrandizement, when necessary. They had both grown up in modest circumstances, without a college education, vowing to make something of themselves.