Chapter 5
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
William Shakespeare, King Lear
During the school week when I was growing up, the family dinner table was the battleground. My parents occupied either end, and my younger brother and I the flanks, pinned in the crossfire. When their arguments flared into open warfare, I found myself ducking as they hurled words back and forth across the table. The food turned to paste in my mouth, and I held on to my knife and fork in an effort to keep myself from shaking. Even though my parents seldom argued, the possibility left me feeling that it happened every night. Because every night the atmosphere was dense as my mother held herself tense and alert, monitoring my father’s studied effort to act as if there were nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all.
Before dinner there was the cocktail hour. “Bourbon, dear?” My father asked this question at six o’clock, and every evening at six my mother said, “Lovely. I’ll be right there.” She was in the kitchen fixing dinner.
My father carried their drinks into the living room, setting his on the end table beside his armchair. He sat down to wait for her and removed a Chesterfield from the silver cigarette case with an engraved inscription that read:
To Thomas H. Johnson
with respect and affection
from his colleagues
And when he’d finished, he would stub his cigarette out in a silver ashtray, also engraved:
To Dad on his Birthday
with love
Laura and Tommy
My father wore a tweed jacket and silk tie and sat with his right leg crossed over his left. When my mother arrived she occupied the sofa, one arm resting on the back, a leg folded under her. Her drink was there waiting beside her ashtray.
I was doing my homework upstairs, with an ear cocked to what was going on downstairs. My brother was playing in his room down the hall, and I knew he wasn’t paying any attention. If they fell into an easy back-and-forth flow, with a lilt of a laugh from my mother, I settled into my math and lowered my antennae. But if my mother offered conversation in a tight voice and there was an interminable pause before my father gave forth with a monosyllabic reply, my pencil froze. I couldn’t distinguish their words, but I only needed to catch my mother’s tone, jammed with all the words she wasn’t saying, to dread dinner. I heard her get up and stride into the kitchen with a footfall that rattled my pencils in their mug, and when she announced that dinner was ready, I was filled with fear, because in her voice I heard that she was close to giving up on the whole situation.
I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty. We ate every night at six-thirty. I started downstairs. My brother bounded out of his room, slid around me, and landed in the dining room.“I win,” he hooted.
I didn’t pay much attention. I wasn’t interested in racing.
“Slow down, Tommy,” my father said in his warning voice. He stood behind my mother’s chair, leaning on it. My mother walked back and forth from the kitchen, putting food on the table. Finally she emerged with her apron off. My brother and I had already sat down. My mother walked toward her chair, and my father pulled it out. “Kiss the cook,” he said and leaned toward her.And she returned his kiss. Then he walked to his end and sat down. My mother laid her hands on the table palms up, as if she wanted to hold hands. She put on a bright smile, looking first at my brother, then at me, and finally gazing straight ahead at my father. I was flooded with hope: maybe tonight everything would be all right.
Then my father pushed back his chair and stood up. He hung over the meat with the carving knife in his hand and started sawing. The roast slid around, emitting a strong smell of the gravy. His knuckles clipped his glass, and the water slopped out in big drops. I reached to move his glass to a safer position. “Thank you, Laura,” my mother said. She sat very straight in her chair.
“What?” My father lifted his head and flung a look across the candlesticks. His eyes were pale, innocent and blue, his cheeks puffy, and the carving knife wobbled in his grip. She didn’t say anything further but put her fingers to her throat, and I heard her inhale. It seemed she was holding her breath. There was a tiny smudge of lipstick at the corner of her mouth.
He went back to the meat and levered a ragged slab onto the top plate from the stack of four in front of him. Gravy slopped onto the table, catching the edge of his mat, but he wasn’t aware of the brown stain that was spreading into the threads of the lace. My mother drew herself a notch tighter.
He handed me the plate, and I passed it to my mother, who received it and splatted out the mashed potatoes with a silver serving spoon. I braced myself in case she hurled, “You’re drunk.” She’d only said this once. He’d flung back,“You’re drunk,” which resulted in an argument. Normally she held herself in check, her eyes on him not giving an inch, and the silence that flowed toward my father like a current was packed with anger and all her unspoken words.
Finally we were all served and sat before our heaping plates. “Sit straight, Tommy,” my mother said. Across from me my brother sat sideways in his chair, as if ready to bolt from the room. He squirmed a quarter-turn toward center. I sat in my chair like an insect pinned to the mounting board, studying first my father’s face, then returning to my mother’s. She picked up her fork. I did too, even though my appetite had vanished. Everyone was silent. My father sat round-shouldered, staring at his food. He fumbled with his fork, which rattled against his plate. My mother sat so straight that her back arched like a bow six inches from the chair. She turned to me and said in her party-bright voice, “What did you do in school today, Laura?”
My father, Thomas H. Johnson, was a brilliant man, a scholar and a gifted teacher. I was told he had the kind of clarity of mind that could illuminate textual analysis with the concentrated focus of a magnifying glass. He was known for his infinite capacity for taking pains, and colleagues who sought his advice found their academic papers subjected to a razor-edge scrutiny that lifted up their work at the same time as it left them feeling like schoolboys. His contribution to American letters as Emily Dickinson’s editor was, some have said, the most important piece of scholarship in the twentieth century.Among the things I learned from him was discipline. He rose at 4:00 a.m. every day of his adult life and wrote at his desk until my mother called the family for breakfast at 7:15.
Though I cannot recall my father expressing his emotions in words, he was an emotional man. He loved opera and played his recordings of the great voices of his youth at full volume—Caruso, Melba, Rosa Ponselle, Galli-Curci, John McCormick—in the evening after I was in bed. He made no allowances for a young child trying to fall asleep.
On Sunday afternoons my father often listened to his records with Mr. Marsh, a heavy-set bachelor who wore musty-smelling three-piece suits and taught music at the Lawrenceville School, where my father also taught and around which our lives revolved.
“Mr. Marsh is coming this afternoon,” my mother would announce with a smiling voice at breakfast, and I knew I’d be included in this adult occasion at which my father served sherry, treating the event as a command performance for the whole family. He did not feel it necessary to explain the opera’s story, or even sketch for us what we were hearing, but nonetheless I knew my father wanted me to be there as I took my place beside my mother on the couch, my brother under her arm on the other side.
My father’s record player was a Victrola the size of a chest of drawers, with a metal arm to wind it up. The whole household spoke of “Dad’s records” in hushed tones: they were breakable disks, one song per side, with plenty of background crackle.
On those Sunday afternoons my father was in charge of operations and ritual. He began with the “Jewel Song” from Faust. As the great Geraldine Farrar gained momentum his face drew together, his eyes lost focus, and the music took him over.As the singer’s voice ceased he sat immobile for several long seconds, his head bowed. The record on the phonograph whirred louder. “God damn!” my father ejaculated in a voice that sounded like a sob and hit the arm of his chair with his fist.This propelled him to his feet, and lifting the needle off the record, he turned to Mr. Marsh and began a discussion about the voice they had just heard.
I listened, but mostly I watched my father. His reaction was so strong. It wasn’t that unnamed terror I felt at the dinner table, but he was scary, and my mother’s grip tightened across my shoulders when he pounded his chair. Mr. Marsh sat large and unmoving as a walrus, however, as if my father’s reaction to the music was the most natural thing in the world.
“The human voice is the greatest instrument,” my father said to Mr. Marsh. I didn’t understand this, though he said it often. But I saw how the human voice affected him.And this was his greatest gift on those Sunday afternoons, the one he gave without knowing he was giving it: letting me see what moved him.
Ambiguity was my father’s favorite word. Others were paradox, innuendo, conundrum, and profound. The word others used to describe him was opaque. “Tom, that was a thoroughly opaque remark” became an oft-told story because the headmaster who called my father on one of his philosophical profundities did what no one else would have dared to do.After my brother and I were grown, we concluded that it wasn’t what Dad said that caused friends to regard him with awe, but his delivery. First came a preamble of throat clearing that could silence a room, then an elongated pause that drew all eyes to him. Meanwhile, his eyes became steely or watery, depending on the tenor of the oracular statement he was about to impart.
There were stories about my father in the classroom, his brilliance in leading his students to the brink of understanding, then encouraging them to make the leap. I remember a discussion of free will at a midday Sunday dinner, the meal for which I was most grateful because my father was at his brightest and best, since it took place when he was still sober. He asked me to consider what I would do when I took the train back to school—I was home on vacation and was to leave the next day—and arrived at my station. Would I get off the train? Or would I stay on and keep going? I tried to imagine myself remaining in my seat while everyone else got off, the train pulling away to parts unknown, me still on it. Classes starting at eight the next morning and my place vacant. In this way he led me to see that I wasn’t as “free” as I thought.
It was a well-known secret, at least in the English Department, which he chaired, that Thomas H. Johnson was an alcoholic. But in those days everyone at the Lawrenceville School drank. It was the way these adults socialized. Alcoholic or not, words like “great man” and “genius” attached themselves to him in trails of glory.
What no one beyond the family saw was that “the great man” was slurry to the point of incoherence four nights out of seven. The clarity he was revered for was muddied, as though a heavy stone had dropped in the wellspring of his mind. But which four nights would it be? There was no predictable pattern to his drunkenness, so I dwelt in a perpetual state of watchfulness, gauging by a repeated footfall, by the click of a closet door, by the splash of liquid into a glass, what he was going to be like by dinner.
I never gave up hoping that my father would stop drinking. But I hoped with the powerlessness of a child. I clung to wishful thinking and the off chance of a miracle.
In 1952 we spent the year in Copenhagen, where my father had been invited to set up a program in American studies at the university. When he returned to his teaching at Lawrenceville the next fall he began his work on Emily Dickinson. It was that fall also, when I was in seventh grade and my brother Tommy was in fourth, that my father’s normally opaque pronouncements at the dinner table crossed the line into a kind of gibberish. So, as I later came to see, at the moment my father was at the height of his powers, poised to make his most important contribution to American letters, he had also begun the unchecked downhill slide. Perhaps there was good reason that paradox was one of his favorite words.
“What did you say, Dad?” I found myself asking nearly every night at dinner. I was missing something important. If I asked him to repeat enough times, perhaps I could make come clear what I couldn’t understand.
After supper I asked my mother, “What’s the matter with Dad?”
“He’s tired,” she said.
That made sense. He got up so early. Often at dinner his pale eyes were more watery than ever, and he went to bed before my mother and I had finished the dishes. I just needed to be patient when his talk made no sense and he moved his knife through his meat as though it were a piece of leather, then let it sit on his plate. His face was growing jowly. My mother kept the conversation going, and I did my best to help her out.
One night after dinner was finally over and my brother had escaped back upstairs, I heard my mother in the kitchen call him back to help with the dishes. I was in the dining room watching my father as he headed for the door. His shoulders were stooped. His legs seemed about to buckle as he pushed a hand along the wall, then reached for the door jamb. He was only fifty-two, but he seemed old, and it made me sad.
In the kitchen dishes clattered in the sink. “What’s wrong with Dad?” I said. This time I had to find out.
“Don’t you know?”
“No,” I said in a small voice. There was something I should know, but I didn’t.
“He’s drunk.” She didn’t shout, but her words exploded out of the kitchen.
I stood alone in the empty dining room. Now she was telling me the truth. I felt guilt for not knowing this thing that the rage in my mother’s voice told me she had known for a long time. I walked into the kitchen.
She tossed me a dish towel. We worked in silence, and I was full of questions I didn’t know how to ask.
When my father’s study door was open I could walk in, even if he was at his desk. The room smelled of his tobacco, his books, and the mustiness of a man who dwelt with books. Sometimes he showed me what he was working on. Or he might say, “Here’s a poem you might like to memorize, Laura.” In this way I learned by heart “How happy is the little stone” and “I like to see it lap the miles”—Dickinson’s verses that children like. He had tacked Emily’s (as the family called her) poems to the pine paneling. These “photostats” showed her wispy handwriting in chalk white on a jet background, and he moved them around as he discovered new ways of dating her poems. We met over books, my father and I, but I knew from what went on at our dinner table that he couldn’t be counted on for emotional or even practical support.
That meant I had to count on myself.
But I could also count on my mother. When I was in high school I believe she wrestled with leaving him. Then something changed, because I no longer felt the threat that our family might come apart. It seemed she had made a commitment to herself—to her family—to stick this out. She must have paid a high price.
Perhaps the turning point came the year my brother was in seventh grade and entered the Lawrenceville School. I was, by then, a sophomore at Princeton High School. My mother wanted to work at a real job, for pay. My father didn’t want her to work. He was “adamant” about this, he said. Her going to work would “belittle” him. It implied he couldn’t support the family on his teacher’s income.
“You’re a tyrant.” I caught my mother’s sentence as I sat upstairs in my bedroom over my hated math.
“If you’re bored, go back to indexing for that Princeton professor.”
“ I’m not going to do that, Tom,” my mother said. She wanted to be out of the house. She wanted a career. She stuck to this, and she won.
She studied for her broker’s license and then sold real estate in Princeton for many years, though it often must have seemed a Pyrrhic victory. My father “stipulated” that she be home to fix his lunch and that she not take clients out on weekends. I see my mother—an intelligent and surprisingly resilient woman—as the unsung hero of our family.
When I was growing up our house was alive with talk and friends, many of whom were contributing to American literary scholarship. When a colleague arrived with his briefcase he’d be greeted by my mother, who, with a wave toward the study, would say,“He’s in there with Emily.”
When they came with their wives everyone glided into the living room on a spin of laughter and my father fixed the drinks. Their cigarettes overflowed the ashtrays. I sat on the stairs taking in this adult talk about their work that left me feeling there was nothing so exciting in the world. If the gathering included Perry Miller, a white-haired, florid-faced, whale-sized man and a prodigious consumer of my father’s drinks, the talk hinged on Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and other Puritan “divines” my father and Perry had written books about. I sat listening with my chin in my hands to their well-turned sentences intended to dazzle, their knee slapping, the gusto of their laughter as they unleashed those Puritans, three centuries dead, right into the room.
I took in as well the sad failures. Dick Martin was, for a time, my father’s closest friend and colleague at Lawrenceville. When Dick burst into our house without knocking I’d run downstairs to hug his legs and we’d waltz around the hall, me standing on his shoes. Then he’d disappear into my father’s study. The story, years later, was that Dick was “always going to” get down to a big work on Melville. As Dick sank deeper into alcohol my father lightened his teaching load, but nothing worked, and by Christmas another Lawrenceville family, the Pecks, had taken in Dick’s wife Ruthie and the three young children. Word spread that Dick was holed up at home with a shotgun. That jagged, boisterous Christmas Day at the Pecks, we children ran around upstairs, jumping on the beds, while the adults circulated with martinis downstairs. Whenever I came down to see if dinner was ready, there was Ruthie with a box of tissues in a corner of the couch, hovered over by the wives. Dick hung on for another two years, only to slide out with a whimper at his own kitchen table. Poor Dick Martin, my father’s friend and mine, had certainly never lived up to his promise.
Had my father? If one were to judge by his published works, the ledger was dense with checks in the credit column.After The Puritans came The Literary History of the United States, which had involved a team of scholars; my father was responsible for volume 3, the bibliography. On the heels of his success with Emily Dickinson he was asked by Oxford University Press to write The Oxford Companion to American History. This came out in 1966, the year he retired from teaching. He made it to the end of both of these efforts with forbearance on the part of the Lawrenceville School, which let him reach retirement age before cleaning out his classroom, and an assist from Oxford, which called in a “consultant” to help him wind up this monumental work for which he would have needed no assistance a decade before. He lived for nearly another twenty years, going out of the house less and less. In his reclusive habits he was increasingly compared with the Amherst poet whom he had spent so many years studying and in whom he had found not just a kindred spirit but a version of himself. When I came home on infrequent visits I saw with a stab that he appeared always a little smaller, more florid about the nose, more jowly, and more sunk in his customary chair. But he was still wearing his jacket and tie, still sitting with his right leg crossed over his left, and still filling the silver ashtray, given to him by my brother and me so long ago, with his unfiltered Chesterfields. I took in as well that the tabletop and the Oriental rug at his feet were a little more scarred with cigarette burns. I sat across from him on the couch, unable to concentrate on my own reading as I watched how he held his well-thumbed copy of The Oxford Companion to American History open on his lap. Was he reading or dozing? I couldn’t tell. The winter sun slanting through the picture window behind him cast too weak a light.
When I was in college I risked everything to “save” my father, though I was far from understanding what I was doing at the time.
I selected Hollins College in part because of a program called Hollins Abroad, one of the earliest European study opportunities, offered in 1958 when I entered as a freshman. The Hollins program was based in Paris. Students lived with French families and studied at the Sorbonne. The year spanned from the sophomore second semester through the first semester of junior year, with the summer spent touring Europe, including countries behind the Iron Curtain. This was called the Summer Tour.
I wanted this experience more than anything. My parents agreed but told me they couldn’t afford any costs beyond my college tuition. I won a scholarship and began reading André Maurois’s History of France. In an attempt to balance the scales, my mother gave me Art Buchwald’s lighthearted Paris for Christmas.
Dr. Degginer, the program’s director, and a dedicated Francophile, reeled off all the ways we could turn ourselves into Parisians during our year. Sitting in cafés reading the newspaper. Eating patisseries on the grass in the Tuileries. Buying a long baguette and walking home with it under one’s arm. Getting up in the dark and taking the Metro to Les Halles to haggle with the fishwives. I took notes. Daddy Deg, as we called him, explained French bathrooms: the john had a pull chain; the bidet looked like a john to uninformed American eyes but wasn’t; the tub was in a little room separate from the john. Newspaper was used instead of toilet paper. There was alarmed discussion about the newspaper.And not long after that one of the girls told us her father had calculated how many rolls she would need for the year at three squares a shot. Water down the experience like that? Not me!
That winter in Paris was dark and rainy. Or so it seemed. I was supposed to be having a French Experience, and to me that meant meeting scads of French people, talking French, and going to museums and cafés after classes with French friends. But I wasn’t making any French friends. So I walked around Paris by myself, from the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank, crossing the Seine to the Place de la Concorde on the Right Bank, stopping in a patisserie for a tart aux fraises as I marched from the Tour Eiffel up to the Arc de Triomphe. On the Metro I pulled out Strait Is the Gate by André Gide. That winter I worked my way through a depressing dose of Gide as well as Camus and Sartre. Finally it was April, and we had three weeks off for Easter. I made plans with one of the Hollins girls to travel in England and Scotland. I was really looking forward to speaking English and touring with someone besides myself. Bill Marsden, an English student of my father’s who had spent his senior year at Lawrenceville, had invited me to visit. It was there I met two French boys who lived in Paris.
After I returned one of them called and asked me to a movie. It was fully spring now, and my Parisian life suddenly looked a lot brighter.
The movie the French boy took me to wasn’t shown in a movie theater but in a large house surrounded by gardens. This was not what I expected, but it was a lovely place, and afterward the French boy asked me what I thought, as did a Danish girl and a few adults I met that evening as we drank coffee and ate cakes and they told me about their organization, called Moral Re-Armament.
I didn’t know what to think. The movie was about their founder, an American named Frank Buchman, who had come up with an “ideology” that appealed to all religions: Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Confucianists. The world was in danger morally, Buchman said. For instance, there was far too much drinking, especially among college students (no doubt about that!). Buchman was committed to making a “hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world” and fighting communism. That seemed like a good thing. We were still recovering from the Cold War, and no one I knew wanted to be labeled a Commie.
But mostly I was glad to be meeting people my age who weren’t Americans.
Classes were almost over, and the Summer Tour was about to begin. I had planned to spend the two weeks before then with friends my family had made in Copenhagen in 1952, but these Moral Re-Armament people wanted me to come to their European headquarters in Switzerland instead.
That night I talked this over with my roommate. “It’s a wonderful chance to see the Swiss Alps,” I told Abby.
“But what about this group? What do they do?” Abby asked. She could be annoyingly practical.
“They fight communism,” I said.
“What will your parents think?”Abby was sitting on her bed facing me from her side of the room, her feet flat on the floor.
“Oh, I’ll write them,” I said.
My new friends were there to meet me when I got off the train. We drove out of the valley up into the mountains, which looked just like I knew they would from reading Heidi when I was ten. The air was excitingly clear, and the sun bore down as though nothing could stop it. We arrived at a sprawling red-roofed structure surrounded by gardens in the glory of June. Several hundred people were staying there.
Before that first day was out I had made friends with another American girl, Joanne, the daughter of a well-known labor leader, who told me she had come to Switzerland while her father had gone to MRA’s headquarters in America on an island in Lake Michigan.
“Is your mother there too?” I asked.
Her mother wasn’t interested. “It’s very hard on my father. But we’re working on her. How about your family?” she asked. “Are they members?”
I had to say no.“I’m not really a member myself,” I added.
“Well, I hope you’ll decide to join us,” she said, hugely beaming. I liked her. She reminded me of a girl I’d played field hockey with in eighth grade who could turn fringe players like me into part of the team.
After breakfast we gathered in the main assembly room for prayers and announcements led by Peter Howard, Frank Buchman’s right-hand man, since Dr. Buchman was ill. Mr. Howard was tall, a whippet-thin Englishman. He had round eyes, dark and deep, that gave his face a cavernous, burning look. I was introduced to him but had no idea what to say. Everyone said he was very caught up in his work, which I didn’t doubt since my views of him were always from a distance as he melted out of sight down a hallway or through a closed door.
That first afternoon in the room I shared with the Danish girl, my friends told me about Moral Re-Armament’s important principles of sharing and guidance whereby it was made known whether a person was right for the group or not. They asked me to examine my life through four windows: Was it absolutely honest? Pure? Unselfish? Loving? I had to write down my shortcomings in each category. Then, as a group, we would discuss my “confession.” This was the sharing part, and they also urged me to mail it to my parents.
In the absolute honesty column I confessed to having ruined a good silk scarf of my mother’s. I had tried to force it through a funnel when I was watching my mother’s teenage helper iron sheets. The only way out of this was to cut apart the funnel, which ruined the funnel and, worse, put holes in my mother’s scarf. I had felt so bad about this that I folded the scarf very neatly and buried it in the back of her bureau drawer. Even though my mother had found the scarf and long ago forgave me, I thought this was the sort of dishonesty MRA would like to know about.
How had I acted selfishly? I’d been pretty consistent about grabbing the larger piece of cake, leaving my little brother with the smaller.
Was I absolutely pure? They meant sex here. Men and women. I felt enormously relieved that I hadn’t slept with any boys yet. But what level of detail would I have to go into? And girls? they asked. Think hard, they said. Finally I came up with my friend Taffy, whom I’d known since I was three and she was almost five. We climbed trees and went to all the ball games on the Lawrenceville campus, running up and down the bleachers, buying cokes and Mars Bars.
“Did she touch you?” one of my confessors asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“In private places,” she said with a stern look that made me feel that she thought I was keeping something hidden. “Feelings don’t always have to turn into actions,” she added.
In the confession I sent my parents I ended up stating that I had “lesbian feelings,” as they phrased it, for my childhood friend.
We moved on to absolute love, and I had to confess that I didn’t always feel loving toward my father, and then the whole family secret of my father’s drinking came out. I was embarrassed, ashamed to admit this. It was like telling them my father was a hardened criminal guilty of a white-collar crime like embezzling that could lead to an extended stay behind bars. But on another level I felt a strange sense of relief at being able to say anything at all about the biggest, saddest, scariest, most hurtful, harmful, and awful thing in my life. The thing I had never told anyone.
“Aha!” My friends assured me, “If your father embraces the tenets of Moral Re-Armament, he will be free of his alcoholism.” Why, they said, the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous had used MRA’s principles to form their famous twelve-step program!
Then we all sat around and applied the second important principle of guidance, which meant asking God for guidance in my particular case. Evidently word came down that I was worth their time and effort, if I was interested. By that time I was very interested. So I was congratulated and made welcome and experienced joy at being a part of this group that was making the world a better place. And besides, I’d found a way to help my family, since if my father embraced MRA he would ipso facto have to stop drinking. All this occurred within forty-eight hours of my arrival in Switzerland.
The next thing was to inform Professor McQuiggan, the faculty adviser who had come to Paris with us, that I wasn’t going on the Summer Tour. I’d had him in psychology. He belonged to the Skinnerian School, which frowned on words like soul. He told us we didn’t have “minds,” we had “brains.” Everything we did was in response to “stimuli” of some sort. We were like rats, Professor McQuiggan said, as we went through life trying to press the correct lever, the one that delivered the food pellets, not the electric shock. I didn’t get on with Professor McQuiggan, but I wasn’t too concerned about phoning him. By now I saw that he was a Communist; in fact, all my teachers at Hollins were Communists, or at least had Communist leanings. I knew my parents weren’t Communists—at least not the card-carrying kind—but for certain their academic friends were.
My parents called me—that is, my mother did. They had read my “confession” and didn’t think what I was doing was such a hot idea. They wanted me to go on the Summer Tour. But I resisted. It was easy to say no when I knew I was doing the absolutely right thing.
By the third phone call with Professor McQuiggan he said,“Is someone pointing a gun at your head?”
“Of course not! ”
“Have you talked to your parents?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“They want me to go on the Summer Tour.”
“Are you coming?”
“No.”
“Then,” Professor McQuiggan announced, “you will be expelled.”
“Expelled?”
“From college,” Professor McQuiggan explained.
College felt very far away. I didn’t see how I could be expelled because I hadn’t done anything wrong like flunk out or get caught with booze in my room.
When my mother called again (transatlantic phone calls in 1960 were expensive and were made only when the situation had reached a state of emergency), she said she’d bought a ticket for Geneva and I was to meet her plane. “Good!” I said. Things were going to work out after all. I had been there a month. Now my mother was coming, and she would see how MRA could help Dad.
As soon as my mother got settled—she’d been given a lovely room with a view of the mountains—she announced, “I’ve come over here to take you home.” This didn’t really surprise me. I could tell that after she’d got a grasp of what MRA stood for, she had heard enough. She joined me for meals, but she wasn’t socializing. She smoked in her room, another vice MRA frowned on, and poured herself a cocktail now and then from the bottle of bourbon she’d brought in her suitcase.
“But what about Dad?” I asked. I had told her about MRA’s stance on alcohol.
“Your father,” she said, “would never be interested.”
I knew it wouldn’t be easy to win Dad over, but I kept hearing their voices rising over cocktails in the living room. My father pounding his chair, delivering his ultimatum—“I am who I am”—when my mother, very occasionally, confronted him about his drinking. I saw my young self, alone in my room, bearing down harder on my math problems, which made absolutely no sense.
On the Fourth of July we had a celebratory dinner with the Americans and British in a private dining room where the Stars and Stripes shared the centerpiece with the Union Jack. My mother was at a far end, and every time I looked her way she was in animated conversation with the gentleman on her right. I was glad she was having a good time. Perhaps she would change her mind about Moral Re-Armament. At the end of the meal I heard her say, “May I have an ashtray?” A waiter scurried around, and a little dish was brought, since there were no actual ashtrays. A silence fell over the long table as my mother pulled out a Chesterfield. Most people began to concentrate on dessert. The man she had been talking to lit her cigarette with her lighter. She sat there, filling the pure air of MRA’s dining room with a steady flow of foul smoke. I had lost most of my sense of humor over the last few months, so I was surprised to find that as I stared at my mother I found this funny.
Back in her room my mother said, “That man I was sitting next to asked me what I was doing here.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said,‘I’ve come to collect my daughter.’” She paused.“I really made him laugh.”
All this time she’d been urging me to talk to Louis Rubin, my college professor and faculty adviser, who was teaching summer school at the University of Marseilles.After a week of this I just didn’t see how I could keep on saying no. Besides, I was devoted to Mr. Rubin, who knew my parents; my mother had contacted him before she left the States.
We would rent a car, my mother said, and drive through the Alps, across northern Italy, and into France down to the Riviera. I had to admit that sounded pretty appealing. “But,” I told her, “I’m leaving most of my clothes here.”
That first night we stayed up late talking over a seafood dinner in a restaurant Mr. Rubin knew about. He smoked his pipe and wanted to hear all about Moral Re-Armament—how I got involved, what they stood for, where I saw my life going from here. Mr. Rubin and my mother had cocktails and wine with dinner, but I didn’t touch a drop.
When my mother and I were preparing for bed back in our hotel room, my stomach began to cramp, and I just made it to the bathroom in time to lose all that langouste—my main course—in the toilet.
The next morning, when I mentioned this to Mr. Rubin, he said, “How did you feel after that, Laura?”
“Oh, much better!”
“I think this change of air is doing you good.”
My mother laughed.
The second day I continued trying to explain to Mr. Rubin about fighting communism and all that.
“Ideologies can be very seductive,” he said. “But they don’t have much to do with living one’s life in the real world.”
“But they’re trying to change the world!”
“That’s what I mean,” Mr. Rubin said. “Groups like that see things only one way, their way. Their beliefs—it’s a nicer word than propaganda —don’t allow for much straying from the party line.”
“But what they say includes all religions,” I said. Why couldn’t I make Mr. Rubin see this?
“Do you want to live your life in service to one idea?” Mr. Rubin asked.“In a cloister? At nineteen?”
“It’s for a higher cause,” I said.
“When people turn themselves over to one overriding idea they are called fanatics,” Mr. Rubin said.
I didn’t see how I was a fanatic, though I could see how this word applied to that hollow-eyed Peter Howard.
The next day Mr. Rubin proposed that we drive out along the ocean to Monte Carlo, where Somerset Maugham had lived. It was supposed to be very scenic. Mr. Rubin drove our rented car. My mother sat in the passenger’s seat in front, and I sat in back, though I was nearly on the floor, on my knees, so that I could see down toward the ocean, which was alive in the sunlight, and up into the hills toward the tile-roofed houses clustered just as I had seen them in my art history book.
“Have you read Rain, Laura?” Mr. Rubin asked.
“Maugham’s Rain?” my mother asked.
“No, I haven’t,” I said.
“It’s about a missionary. He’s a pretty intolerant guy. Then he meets Sadie Thompson. I think you’d find it interesting in the light of your MRA experience.” Mr. Rubin smiled to himself. “Sadie Thompson is a prostitute. I’ll lend you my copy.”
Somewhere on the road back to Nice I agreed to go home with my mother. I didn’t understand what had happened to me—either why I’d been drawn to Moral Re-Armament or why I was now returning home. But between Mr. Rubin and my mother, I’d been unbrainwashed enough to see that my life didn’t belong to a cult. At any rate, that evening at dinner I joined them in a glass of wine. Mr. Rubin advised us to drive straight to the airport in Geneva, but I said I wanted to pick up my clothes and say good-bye. “In that case,” Mr. Rubin announced, “I’m coming. I want to make sure you get on that plane.” He winked at my mother, but he looked very solemn too, his teeth clenched around his pipe stem.
On the drive back we stopped at a bistro for lunch, and my mother allowed as how she was dying for a martini. She hadn’t had a decent one since she’d left the States.
Mr. Rubin spoke to the bartender, who had no notion of what a martini was. So Mr. Rubin pointed to the gin, the dry vermouth, the ice, and mixed up a pitcher himself, pouring it out into three glasses: one for my mother, one for himself, and a small one for the bartender, who took one sip and, elevating his brows and narrowing his eyes in the inimitable French manner, handed it back to Mr. Rubin without comment.
When we got back in the car I mentioned that MRA’s no-alcohol policy had been a big reason why I got interested.
“Why was that?” Mr. Rubin asked.
“Because of my father,” I said. I couldn’t say anything more.
Mr. Rubin glanced at my mother. He was behind the wheel, as usual.
“Well, Tom drinks too much at times,” my mother mumbled.
“I wish I knew his brand,” Mr. Rubin said.
When we pulled up in front of the grand entrance back at MRA’s headquarters, Mr. Rubin said he’d wait at the car, adding, “I don’t even want to use their bathroom.”
My mother sailed up to the front desk. I was right behind her. I didn’t want to stay, but I felt a little bad about just walking out when they’d all been so nice.
“My daughter will be returning home with me,” my mother announced in an even tone to the gentleman behind the desk.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He looked at me.
“I guess I’d like to pick up my clothes,” I said.
“I must owe you something for my week here,” my mother added.
“Not at all, madam. You were our guest.”
My roommate, the Danish girl, wasn’t in the room. I quickly packed and on the way down the hall ran into the American girl, Joanne, who had been so friendly on that first day. It seemed a long time ago now.“I’m going home,” I said by way of explaining my suitcase. She looked at me, then at my mother, and I felt like I was letting the old team down.
Back outside Mr. Rubin was leaning against the driver’s door, grinning, his pipe clamped between his teeth. On the way to the airport he told me he’d see what he could do about getting me admitted to Hollins again.
It all came to naught with my poor, dear alcoholic father. He was my underlying “cause,” but a hopeless cause, since he wasn’t asking for anyone’s help. I was unable to articulate, even to myself, how much my father’s drinking hurt me, so the thought of actually telling him never crossed my mind. I had felt so helpless before the terror of the dinner table that I had put at risk my college education and my future. But the path I had chosen couldn’t work and made no sense. I chose it because I could.
This story had far-reaching consequences for my life with Guy: after the watershed year of his son John’s death in 1981, I began to live in fear in my life with him without knowing it. What I have now come to recognize as Guy’s depression generated a tension between us that I was never able to resolve. Yet, since I so longed for resolution, I strove like a mighty Trojan—at great cost and in the only way I knew how—always to be in a state of peace and harmony with my husband.