Blue Genes (4 page)

Despite Froelicher’s tutoring, and despite Mother’s intellectual interests and achievements, she seems to have reached a little
too
high scholastically. On graduation from high school, she did not get into her first-choice college—Bryn Mawr—and went into a self-described funk. It was Froelicher who pulled her out of it and helped her get into then-second-ranked Goucher College, which she entered in 1924. Mother says she chose Goucher because Froelicher’s father taught there. But it is more likely she went there because Froelicher himself recommended it. It was he, not Dr. Schamberg, who wrote her a long letter, telling her she was accepted. She was sixteen, Froelicher was thirty-two.

Goucher was good for Mother; she flourished there. I contacted the college—which is now coeducational and highly ranked—and managed to reach the secretary for the graduating class of 1928, who was still alive at ninety-seven. I asked whether she remembered my mother, and was astonished to find out that she did. “She was beautiful, and liked by all the upperclasswomen,” the secretary said.

Goucher’s alumni office sent me the class yearbook.

I thought I had become accustomed to seeing new photographs of my mother, but the bright-eyed, beaming, stunningly beautiful young woman of twenty who looks out from these pages was a startling revelation. In one photo, she is standing with six other students. They are dressed in the style of the day: fur coats, bobbed hair, bowl-shaped cloche hats. Mother, the tallest, has her coat thrown back to show her tight-fitting dress. A scarf circles her neck, and her head is not covered.

Compared with the other students, she was spectacular.

At Goucher, Mother’s best friend, Frances Berwanger, became a companion with whom she could express loving feelings. They exchanged poetry, visited each other’s homes, and spent summers together. There were rumors that Frances and my mother had a sexual relationship—rumors I heard from my aunt and uncle—but in her autobiographical essay, Mother says no.

At the age of twenty, she was about to graduate, looking forward to “real life.” While she had corresponded with Francis Froelicher during her four years away and, when at home, had often run to tell him of her activities, their relationship had remained somewhat distant. Now, she thought, things would change. But as she contemplated acting upon what had only been a dream before, Mother realized that what she wanted was impossible. I don’t say “wrong.” There is no hint in her writing that Mother felt a moral reluctance. But she knew full well that Froelicher had a wife and that Dr. Jay would find the relationship between his young daughter and this man anathema.

So, before her last semester of college, she broke off with Froelicher, vowing that she would not see him again. It was of necessity a hard decision.

To her mother:

Reading this letter for the first time—and digging into what the autobiography revealed about this period of my mother’s young life—I was shaken. The rumors of this illicit relationship, over-heard in bits and pieces at my aunt and uncle’s house, paled in comparison to the actuality. My own love life at a comparable age had been rocky. I knew what it was like to give up a precious relationship. But nothing really prepared me for what Froelicher and Mother had undergone. Shaped not only by the mores of the 1920s but by my own late fifties sense of right and wrong, I could both identify with my mother and feel trepidation at what it meant for her future—and for mine. Hindsight, in this case, gave me little clarity, little comfort, little optimism.

AFTER GRADUATION
, Mother wanted to get away. From Francis, from her parents, from the whole mess. Picking up on a parental promise, she planned to go abroad for a year, taking Frances Berwanger with her. But that was not to be. Her friend was only a sophomore, and Frances’s mother didn’t think the trip was a good idea, perhaps afraid of the lesbianism that had been rumored.

With the idea of a trip with Frances stillborn, Mother nevertheless made a brilliant year out of it. Off she went to London, where she enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the only American allowed into that hallowed institution that year. It was 1928, she was twenty years old. Stars of the British stage had been trained at RADA for decades. It was a difficult leap for an American to make, and yet, from all reports, my mother did remarkably well. Perhaps her warmth and sense of adventure out-weighed self-doubts that any emotionally precocious person might have—and my mother had them in spades. Or perhaps being away from her family gave her freedom to be outgoing.

I have read the reports from her instructors at RADA. They praise her elocution and diction and her sense of stage presence. “The teacher told someone that I have one of the most beautiful Shakespearean voices she has ever heard,” Mother wrote to Missy. “Imaginative and sensitive,” wrote another teacher. They cannot promise that she will succeed as an actress, but perhaps . . .

Outside of class, self-doubts
do
assert themselves. Her inability to concentrate on any one thing at a time alternates with anxiety, which in turn alternates with depression. What will become a diagnosable illness in a few years is more than an annoyance, though less than debilitating. Still, midyear, she writes Missy that she is “sick at heart,” a euphemism for depressed. Then she beats a hasty retreat in a follow-up letter:

We can’t know whether Mother believed this or whether she was so used to hiding the truth from others that this was yet one more chicanery.

Missy had a brother, Morton Bamberger, who had gone to fight on the side of the British in World War I by enlisting in the Canadian Air Force. Enchanted by the English way of life, Morton turned Anglophile and anti-Semitic in one fell swoop: he changed his name to Morgan Blair and settled down in Sussex to raise race-horses. The great flu epidemic of the 1920s killed him, but not before Elizabeth had met him and he had introduced her to a sixty-seven-year-old polymath, Edward Heron-Allen—who had, among other achievements, translated
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám
into English from the original Arabic. He tried to seduce Mother. Failing in that, he gave her an autographed copy of the book, which I have on my shelves. To Froelicher she wrote an inquiry: Did he think she should have acquiesced? Was it better to be loved by an older or a younger man? This disingenuous query was answered at once by Froelicher. Perhaps she should wait, he suggests.

It doesn’t take any reading between the lines to know what Francis wanted her to wait
for
.

In retrospect, I am startled by how little reaction I had when I first got all this information of sexual and emotional transactions. This, for me, was more like opening a lost history book and discovering facts and aspirations, desires and denials that were unknown to mankind and are now revealed.

Mother’s letters reflect not only on
her
life and emotions but on her mother’s. Missy was not happy. She, too, showed signs of depression and anxiety. Approaching the age of forty-four, she decided to embark on psychoanalysis, and at one point Elizabeth wrote from England: “No news from you in several days leads me to believe that you are plunged into the very depths of psychoanalytic gloom.”

There is no reply from Missy.

After studies, Mother toured France and England, returning to the United States in 1929. Clearly, she had learned a great deal, because she was asked to join the repertory troupe of the director and actress Eva Le Gallienne, whose company was making artistic headlines. What roles she played, and where she toured, are not recorded, but at one point she must have found herself near Francis Froelicher, because they picked up where they had left off a year earlier.

The news of the relationship finally reached Dr. Schamberg. Perhaps it had been rumored for years, and now, finally, someone actually told my grandfather. One did not need to be a rigid Victorian to object to one’s twenty-one-year-old daughter getting involved with a married man with three children.

In the few remaining years before his death, this liaison—now out in the open—was a subject Dr. Schamberg never spoke about to his wife or anyone else in the family. My mother says that he couldn’t bear the fact that his daughter had been “so lacking in standards” and that his friend and protégé, Francis Froelicher, could behave in such a disloyal fashion. It was “an unbearable disillusionment.”

Dismayed by the agony she had caused her father, Elizabeth once again promised to stop seeing Froelicher. And Francis promised not to write her. As a teenager, Mother had been a camper in far-off Maine. That summer she decided to go to the Tripp Lake Camp, as far away from Francis as possible, to be drama counselor. Tripp Lake was the kind of place where wealthy Jewish thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-olds spent four or five weeks in canvas tents and wore middy blouses with lanyards and baggy blue shorts. Rising early in the chilly mornings, they stood around the flagpole singing songs. Then they peeled off to shoot arrows at straw targets, paddle canoes on the big lake, and compete for parts in weekly dramatic productions. Mother adored the camp’s owner, Caroline Lavenson—a friend of the family—who reciprocated the feelings.

Despite promises made on all sides, Francis and Elizabeth kept up their correspondence:

As the year wore on, the pair broke promises right and left. Exactly what transpired between them has been lost to burned letters and unspoken confidences, as well as whatever actions could not—or would not—be spoken about. My mother confided some things to Missy—who, it turns out, was not only undergoing psychoanalysis but having an affair of her own—and they supported each other in these secrets.

Then there was silence: nothing in my file of letters for the next year, not between Missy and my mother, nor between Francis and my mother. I suspect that my grandmother dispensed with those letters that bore dangerous secrets; or Mother did. It was a “thrilling, but painful” year is all my mother would say in her memoir.

On his side, Froelicher was clearly fighting his own moral and practical battles. He made what must have been a hard decision. He told Elizabeth that he would look for a better, higher-paying job and, when he had money put aside, he would leave his wife and marry her.

But as the country entered
its
Depression, Mother entered into her own increasingly intense periods of pressure and desperation. She knew that Missy would “stand by her no matter what she did,” but she was equally sure “that she might just as well kill her father as to do this thing.”

“This thing,” of course, was to run off with Francis. And other factors weighed in. There was a large sum of money waiting for her in her grandmother’s trust fund; if she married Francis, she knew she would be disinherited.

ENTER EDWIN JAY LUKAS
. After graduating, Dad had begun the practice of criminal and civil law. In a few years he would join the firm of Sapinsley and Santangelo. Later, when Santangelo became a judge, it was Sapinsley and Lukas.

Alvin Sapinsley handled the civil cases that brought in money. Dad took care of the less remunerative civil cases and—increasingly—the criminal ones. In later years, he spoke only of the latter. And more and more he took on cases that brought in little money—cases of indigents and the underclasses.

Somewhere in the bottom of the pile of letters through which I have been rummaging I came across
this
snippet, from a woman whose name was unfamiliar to me. It was written to Missy in 1932:

One of my father’s friends was an actress named Anna Kostant (later, after she married a real estate magnate, she was Anna Bing). Anna knew my mother through Le Gallienne and thought she would be a good match with my father.

Dad and Mother met and immediately saw something within each other that struck a strong chord. They were both energetic, both endowed with good looks, but there was more. For my mother, my father was a way of keeping her from being tempted by Froelicher—at least for now. For Dad, there was something endlessly enticing about this sparkling actress from an upper-class family. Mother had a clear sense of Dad and approved of his goals and activities.

There are a couple of misalignments in this assessment. For one thing, though far from “cultured” in the sense that Mother meant, Dad was an extremely well-read man. It might be that he thought orchestra conductors were show-offs, and, to be sure, his idea of classical music was pretty much limited to Tchaikovsky’s
Romeo and Juliet
overture; his opinion of abstract art was that “a monkey could do that just as well.” But if you wanted to talk Samuel Butler or Dostoyevsky, he was your equal. And if you ventured further, into the realms of social philosophy, ethics, government, and certain arenas of psychology, Dad could beat you at your game as fast as Uncle Ira would whip me at chess.

He was of his period and time. His politics were to the left of center, though nowhere as far left as those of some of his neighbors who formed a Communist cell. He believed in civil liberties and civil rights—in other words, what the Constitution said. When he was in his fifties, he led a strong organizational push for civil rights, even filing an amicus brief for his employer, the American Jewish Committee, in
Brown v. Board of Education
at the Supreme Court.

He
was
elegant. My wife says his hands were two of the most beautiful she has ever seen. I am pleased to resemble him somewhat. There is a photo of Dad at his desk in the Fred F. French Building on Fifth Avenue when he is in his mid-thirties. Compare it with me at the same age and you can hardly tell us apart: thin, balding, severe.

Dad was also an elegant speaker and writer. Mainly self-taught, he had learned how to create phrases for papers and speeches that went beyond mere rhetoric. His journal articles and speeches are models of engagement and clarity. He was an extemporaneous speaker of note. Whether at a graduation ceremony or an assemblage of colleagues, Dad could rouse, persuade, encourage, and damn the audience with what appeared to be minimum effort. Suddenly, before they knew it, people were with him in whatever cause he was espousing.

SOON AFTER DAD AND MY MOTHER MET
, Missy’s mother, Reba Bamberger, was introduced to my father and was charmed. Shortly afterward—much too shortly, to my mind—Edwin asked Elizabeth to marry him. She told him about Francis, and he asked her again. For three months he asked her, and one day she said yes. My mother wrote that “it seemed the only possible solution for everybody.” (Froelicher was clearly still in her heart and mind.)

On February 4, 1931, at the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine, respectively, Elizabeth Schamberg and Edwin J. Lukas became engaged. They went riding together in the Philadelphia and New York parks, each sitting erect on a good-looking horse. They went dancing and on cruises.

IT WAS NOT A GOOD ERA
for the country. President Hoover had failed to rescue the banks and the population from desperate times. Unemployment was at 25 percent. Hoovervilles, encampments for the dispossessed, had sprung up all over the United States. Average salaries plummeted. Food prices sank. Milk was fourteen cents a quart; bread, nine cents a loaf; steak, forty-two cents a pound. And even then, at those low prices, millions of people couldn’t afford basic commodities. Hoover nonetheless steadfastly insisted that while people must not suffer from hunger and cold, caring for them must be primarily a local and voluntary responsibility. But there were no safety nets, and the country sank deeper and deeper into the Depression. Despite such nationwide desperation, Mrs. Bamberger had done well. A cousin had urged her to sell stocks while they were still high, and she had kept her money in safety during the terrible crisis of October 1929. Now she moved into the Langdon Hotel just off fashionable Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street in New York City, gave her legal affairs to my father to handle, and started dispensing sufficient sums of cash to Missy and to the engaged couple to allow them to forget that Hoover and the country were failing. Soon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would ride in on his white horse to rescue the rest of the population.

Like Mrs. Bamberger, Dr. Jay and Missy took to Dad immediately. What was not to like? He had begun his legal career smartly and was already being talked about in New York circles (Dr. Schamberg did his due diligence with friends in the city).

My mother, in turn, fell for Dad’s mother, Anna, and my aunt Judy, both of whom reciprocated. She described them as “impecunious,” and her attitude was always a little condescending, but that was in part the attitude of all the Schambergs. Still, there was no doubting the couple’s rightness for each other, no “class” distinctions to be made. Dad, whatever his roots, was clearly a man for all seasons.

The marriage might have gone ahead without a hitch except that Elizabeth began at once to have second thoughts. She was not
really
sure that she could ever love Dad as much as she had Froelicher.

For his part, Francis tried to do the right thing. He knew now that my father-to-be existed and was engaged to his darling Elizabeth. He wrote the following letter to Missy:

Missy was an endless romantic. That she was also a meddler did not come home to me until I read the following from my mother. Missy had apparently not only been in touch with Francis Froelicher but told my mother about his letter.

Calm and determined as her note to Missy sounds and feels, in the same envelope is a smaller letter in which she told her mother that “according to your instructions, I have gone to see Bernard Glueck,” my grandmother’s analyst.

It has never been a good idea for family members to share the same therapist. Since Glueck and his wife were personal friends of the Schambergs, it was an even worse idea. The good doctor saw my mother for fifteen minutes, squeezing her in between other appointments. According to her, he felt that “the marriage was okay” and that it should “take place as planned.” Mother says she had asked whether it wasn’t too soon “as I’ve so barely recovered from the other thing.” But Glueck says he thought a delay would “gain nothing.”

In what can only be considered a second bad judgment, the psychiatrist urged my mother to turn down a part in a play that Le Gallienne had offered because it would go on the road in the spring. Mother says she is “divided” in her feelings. Is it the tug between Francis and my father that divides her? Or between the play and staying with Dad? She doesn’t say.

For my part, “living” these events many years after they occurred, I feel as if there’s a bad genie at work. Someone is pulling strings from outside the frame. Given Mother’s oncoming mental disorder, the Froelicher affair could only have ended badly for all concerned. Nevertheless, Mother’s creative outlet in acting was a strong life force for her. What would have happened if Glueck had practiced in today’s world? Would he have still thought that a marriage and children were the most appropriate “escape” from a romantic tie to Francis, and would marriage to my father—so soon after breaking up with Froelicher—have been a remedy for depression? I doubt it, and it makes me angry that he interfered so strongly and so wrongly.

The wedding was small, took place at the Langdon Hotel, and resulted in a $10,000 bearer’s bond passing from Reba Bamberger to the Lukases. It would be well used on a house five years later. For the next year, there were no letters between the newlyweds. I consider this a good sign. It means they were
with
each other, staying close to each other in their apartment in New York and planning their future together. But Mother said that all was not well.

The next thing that went terribly wrong was that Dad was told Francis and Mother continued to be in touch.

The person who did this was Caroline Lavenson, the woman who ran Tripp Lake Camp. Looking back, I cannot imagine why Caroline felt she needed to warn Dad about Froelicher. At this point, there is
no
evidence that Elizabeth and Francis were continuing the romance. Mother was emotionally beaten down, but she seems to have given herself over to Dad in every way that I can discern.

I don’t know whether Dr. Schamberg and my grandmother found out about this indiscretion on Caroline Lavenson’s part, but I do know it would have profound repercussions on my parents’ relationship until the very end.

And certainly it did not help the young couple’s relationship that, a few weeks later, Missy gave a huge box of letters and other material to my mother—labeled “The Private Papers of Elizabeth”—and told her to go through them to sort which she wanted to keep and which to get rid of. The letters from the clandestine year may have been thrown out at this time. Mother wrote to Dad, “I have spent the evening with ghosts, and though there is no fear in me there is much thought and speculation.”