After she was married, my mother began following my father to a series of Texas airfields while he learned how to fly C-47 troop carriers. She’d wanted an adventure, and that’s what she got.
The wives of aviation cadets were not recognized by the military, which meant that Mom was not permitted on base. The first room she rented had cockroaches skittering across the floor and no windows. Outside another, two men got into a knife fight. She followed Dad, moving from one shoddy boardinghouse to the next. That was a lot for an eighteen-year-old girl raised in genteel Greenwich.
Dad was allowed to leave the base one day a week, and my mom eagerly waited to see him, but their honeymoon didn’t last long. My father would arrive at her room carrying a stack of airplane magazines and flop down on their bed to read, barely saying a word. The first time this happened, my mother ran outside and cried. As time passed, my mother would realize there was another reason for his apparent coldness.
My parents would be married nearly sixty-seven years, and they clearly loved one another. Yet my father found it almost impossible to express his emotions. But he had them, and he could be terribly sentimental. Once, when he was much, much older, he returned from a local landfill with a battered, eyeless Sesame Street Cookie Monster—a stuffed toy—that he’d rescued because he couldn’t bear the sight of it being abandoned there. He put the Cookie Monster on a shelf in his bedroom with other favorite objects. Despite these events, he found it nearly impossible to share his innermost feelings with my mother—or any of us kids. The only time we saw him cry was when he had to put down one of his beloved dogs.
Years later, when I was an adult, my mother would tell me that she suspected Dad’s inability to express his emotions was rooted in his childhood. His parents had shipped him and his twin brother off to rigid English boarding schools when they were seven years old. My mother said that when my father and his brother had been left for the first time at Summerfield, a venerable British boarding school, my father had chased after the car and leaped onto its running board, crying. The chauffeur stopped and literally peeled his little fingers from the car before driving away.
I’ve already mentioned that my grandfather Edward Bennett Close had not wanted children, and apparently he had little to do with either of his sons, except for the occasional beano.
I think an exchange between Mom and Dad that happened in January of 2009, shortly before Dad died, is telling. Dad was feeling ill, and late one night he turned to my mother and said, “Tell me you’ll never leave me.”
“Bill,” Mom replied in a shocked voice, “I will never leave you! By God, we’ve lived together as husband and wife for sixty-six years. Why would you think I would leave you now?”
Seeing an opening, Mom asked Dad if he loved her. There had been several times during their marriage when she hadn’t been certain that he had. All he would have had to say was “Yes” or “Of course!” My father had looked at her through sad eyes but couldn’t utter a word. It was as if he couldn’t mouth the words “I love you.” He could write it in letters and, later, in his autobiography, but he couldn’t speak it.
In 1944, my father completed flight training. A few months later, in June, the Allies launched the Normandy invasion. A week after D-day, Dad boarded a troopship leaving New York for France, where he immediately began flying over the front lines. Dad was smack-dab in the middle of combat, ferrying troops and supplies to the western front. One of his early missions was to supply General George S. Patton Jr. and his troops during the Battle of the Bulge, when the führer made his last-ditch effort to split the Allies’ ranks. After that decisive battle, Dad became one of the first Allied pilots (he was a copilot) to fly paratroopers and supplies into Warsaw, Poland.
My dad never bragged or even spoke much about his war years. When I was young, I happened upon some pictures of skeletal bodies piled on top of each other. I asked my mom about them, and she told me to put them away. They were photos that my dad had from Poland during the war. Mom said my dad would become upset if he knew I’d seen them or asked about them.
If my father had been distant before the war, when he returned in September of 1945—four months after Germany surrendered—he was even more detached. He had been gone for fifteen months, and my mom greeted him holding a baby. It was my sister Tina, who had been conceived on the night before my father had shipped off to Europe. Tina was six months old and teething.
Mom, Dad, and Tina moved onto my grandparents’ farm, Mooreland, taking up residence in Stone Cottage, a building that had been the farm’s slaughterhouse before being converted into a residence. They were only a short walk away from the property’s main stone house, called the Big House, where Mom’s parents lived. All the buildings were clapboard with foundations of local gray fieldstone dug up and dragged on skids by horses to construction sites.
Eager to pursue his dream of becoming a surgeon, Dad applied at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. Unfortunately, he had gotten bad grades at Harvard, so he asked my mother’s father, Charles Arthur Moore, to pull some strings.
My mom’s father was quite a character. In addition to being a wealthy industrialist, Charles Moore was a noted explorer who’d participated in an 1897 expedition to the Arctic with Robert Peary. He was well known in New York, and the letter that he wrote to the president of Columbia did the trick for my father despite its tone.
My son-in-law wants to become a doctor. Personally, I have no use whatsoever for the profession. However, his determination is such that I imagine he will make a good physician.
Respectfully,
Charles A. Moore
Although my parents rarely argued in front of their children, their marriage continued to be strained. One night while my father was trying to study, my sister Tina began crying.
“Why can’t you keep that brat quiet?” my father yelled.
My mother slapped him. “She’s not a brat!” she declared. “She’s your daughter!” It was the first and only time she struck him.
Mom had put aside her dream of becoming a nurse to rear a family. On March 19, 1947, my sister Glenn was born. She was twenty-one months younger than Tina, and they eventually became inseparable.
Despite their parents’ wealth, my parents were not rich. The GI Bill paid for medical school, and my dad worked at two part-time jobs to pay their expenses. This required him to spend most nights in Manhattan, where he lived in a modest apartment. At night he worked at a blood bank, and between classes he collected women’s urine from a retirement home for a professor who was studying postmenopausal gonadotropins—hormones that stimulate the gonads. Dad earned five dollars for each five-gallon jug of pee that he brought back to campus. The elderly donors called him the Cider Man because they didn’t feel comfortable saying “urine” when he knocked on their doors for their specimen bottles.
On June 28, 1949, my mother gave birth to a son whom they named Duncan, but he died ten days later because of a defective heart. They buried him next to my grandfather Edward Bennett Close at Christ Church in Greenwich. Duncan’s death permanently cracked my mother’s heart into many pieces. She never got over losing him. To this day she feels his loss. A year and a half later, on November 18, 1950, Mom gave birth to Alexander Drummond Close, my big brother.
Seven months later, in June of 1951, my father graduated from medical school and began his residency at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. He was thrilled, as he wrote later in his autobiography:
I experienced the urgent drama of a dropping blood pressure and speeding pulse as a patient’s life hovered on the brink of extinction. I heard the surgeon snap orders against a background of hissing, pulsating equipment as he enlarged the wound to expose and clamp an errant bleeder. I felt relieved as the pressure stabilized and the operation could resume… “Someday,” I said to myself, “someday it will be my turn to operate.” I loved the operating room… I spent many hours sitting with patients at night. I heard, in their whispers and sleepless sighs, the hollow sounds of pain and fear of the unknown void beyond. When death claimed one of them, I redoubled my efforts to learn more and work harder. Death was defeat and my aim was victory.
Dad moved into the hospital staff’s living quarters, where he put a photo of my mom next to his bed, but he only came home every other weekend. Most of those times, he was so exhausted that he only had time to eat and sleep before returning to Manhattan.
Roosevelt Hospital drew patients from poor and often dangerous neighborhoods. At least twice a night, ambulances with wailing sirens would arrive with a patient in urgent need of care. My father sewed together wounds of passengers injured in a dramatic subway-car collision and patched up gunshot and knife wounds. When there wasn’t an emergency, he walked the hospital floors, chatting with patients, investigating the most difficult cases.
It’s a funny thing about my father: while he found it difficult to express his emotions to those closest to him, he had a warm, reassuring bedside manner. He listened closely to his patients, genuinely cared about their well-being, and had an air of confidence that made them feel safe.
I arrived in our family on July 17, 1953, while my father was still climbing the intern-resident-physician-surgeon ladder. Mine was the only birth that my dad attended. Mom later told me that Dad was funny when it came to childbirth. He had no trouble doing surgery, but he had been known to faint during childbirth and couldn’t stomach seeing mothers in pain and screaming. Somehow, though, he made it through my birth without passing out.
Within hours after I was born, a nurse entered my mother’s hospital room, glanced at me, shrugged, and declared: “Well, you gotta take what you get!” Nice! I was a skinny infant but am told that I had a loud voice and rarely slept.
Tina was eight, Glenn was six, and Sandy was three. A family photograph shows Tina and Glenn, wearing cotton blouses and cuffed pants, sitting on their ponies in the front yard of Stone Cottage. In another family snapshot, Tina is sitting on a wooden cart while Glenn is on all fours in front of it, wearing a harness. Years later, when she was famous, Glenn would cause everyone in our family to burst out laughing when she revealed on The Tonight Show that she’d wanted to be a horse until she was eight.
We had a pony at the farm named Brownie, who came from an amusement park. He was only one of our family’s menagerie. By the time I turned two, my parents had bought another pony from a neighbor. They also owned three collies and four little dogs. Most had been rescued by Dad from the hospital’s labs because he didn’t want them used in classroom experiments.
Because his little dogs were mutts, Dad called them the Flea Pack. One weekend morning my father was taking a much-needed break. He’d borrowed a horse from my grandparents and was riding through the Greenwich countryside with the Flea Pack when they encountered a hunting party. The men were all dressed in their red-and-black riding gear and were mounted on stunning horses surrounded by carefully bred hounds.
The Flea Pack attacked, and a horrified master of the hunt called out to my father: “Sir, call off your dogs!”
Looking down at the fighting mutts, my dad said: “There’s not a damn thing I can do about this!”
The fox hunters were not impressed, but my father didn’t care. He much preferred riding with his scrappy mutts than being part of an exclusive hunting club.
My parents quickly outgrew Stone Cottage on the Moores’ farm, so they moved to the larger Close property, which was called Hermitage Farm, on John Street. Granny Close sold the farm, except her small house, to my parents at a cut-rate price, thinking they would live there forever. I wish we had.
The memories I have of my first five years on Hermitage Farm, refreshed by family stories and snapshots, are all wonderful ones. My brother, Sandy, and I would lie on top of the stone wall that encircled the farm. The rocks were warm from the sun, and we’d use our fingers to squish the tiny red mites that crawled through the crevices. The green lawn seemed endless. A barn that smelled of the perfectly wonderful scents of hay and horses held our ponies. I loved walking to the lake below the fields, holding the hand of whatever family member was willing to take me there. Granny Close kept an aluminum canoe on the lakeshore, and I remember being taken out onto the water—we would paddle around the tiny island that jutted up in the lake, a safe nesting place for migrating geese.
The main farmhouse had steep wooden stairs that led to a screened-in porch. My memories are of the kitchen, where I sat in a high chair eating from a brightly colored divided plate; of our collie, Ben, who was shaved one summer for some forgotten reason and who hid in the bushes from embarrassment; of a little outdoor slide that made me squeal when I zipped down it; and of a pedal car tiny enough for me to drive. I had my own tricycle, which I would ride around the circular driveway, singing and yelling.
I remember once my parents gave a dinner party and I stole a cold stick of butter from the kitchen. Then I found refuge under the dining room table. From my vantage point, I saw pairs of shoes pointed toward me from under a formal white tablecloth that reached down near the floor. I was perfectly content with my butter in my makeshift tent.
I was stubborn, even as a small child, I’m told. When my mom ordered me to go upstairs to my bedroom, I glared at her and then walked up the stairs backwards in defiance. Me? Ha! I already was planting the seeds for being the family troublemaker.
My earliest childhood memory of my sister Glenn comes to me as a scene. We were in the upstairs room that she shared with Tina, and she was teaching me my letters. Glenn drew each letter of the alphabet on a blackboard. I remember being fascinated by the dot on the top of the letter i, and I kept copying that letter because I wanted to dot the i over and over again. There is no other letter in our alphabet that has a dot over it, except for small j of course. Perhaps I was already drawn to the unusual.
In the fall of 1953, my mother was asked to speak during a memorial service at the Greenwich public library for local soldiers who’d died fighting in World War II. The library was dedicating a plaque in their honor. Mom’s brother, John Campbell Moore, and a cousin had died overseas. Mom had known most of the boys whose names were inscribed on the memorial because they had been her brother’s classmates at the Edgewood School in Greenwich and then at St. Paul’s. She told me that twelve soldiers were killed from his class. My uncle Johnny died on November 26, 1943, while riding on the British troopship Rohna, which had been hit by a glide bomb, a new weapon the Germans had developed. The ship had been overloaded with troops and quickly sunk in the Mediterranean Sea north of Algeria.
His death devastated my grandparents. Grandfather Moore never recovered from the shock of his only son’s death. He’d been hard on Johnny because my grandfather had been a tough businessman and adventure seeker, and he had wanted his son to grow up to be like him. Instead, Johnny had been a poet and gentle soul. I was told my grandfather died five years later, haunted by regrets.
In an emotional speech at the library, my mother eulogized Johnny and his classmates. Afterward she was approached by two women who asked if they could call on her and my dad privately in their Greenwich home.
When Mom asked them why, the women said they were on a mission—a dramatic one—to radically change the world. Mom invited them over. She was completely unaware of how that chance meeting was about to change her life and all our lives forever.