She was born in Havana, of all places. I’m not sure what her father was up to in Cuba, or what the sign on his door pretended. Whatever it was, Jeannie’s mother didn’t like it. Within months of the birth, she and the baby were back in Northampton, Massachusetts. Before much longer, Jeannie’s father had moved on, too. His next posting was in Caracas. Then he jumped continents and landed in Ankara. After that it was Delhi, Manila and Colombo. Somewhere along the line, he married a second wife and divorced her. The wife he brought with him to Istanbul in 1966 was his third. By 1970, she, too, had moved on – to Washington, DC, to pursue a law degree. The story on the grapevine (and I remember people being quite shocked by this at the time) was that William Wakefield was paying her tuition.
So he wasn’t your standard chauvinist. He had his own ideas about what a man should do, and what a father should aim for. I know he regretted not knowing his daughter because once, at a party at my parents’, after he’d had far too much to drink, he’d told me so, in what seemed to me then to be excruciating detail. Though he was sure Jeannie’s mother was giving her ‘the finest of American upbringings’ – there was ‘a world out there’ and it pained him to think that his daughter had never had a chance to see it.
But one day… This was the message, implied or explicit, in every postcard he wrote to her. Would he have been surprised to know she’d pinned 971 of them to her bedroom walls? Hyderabad, Luxor and Petra. Montevideo, Anchorage, and Hong Kong. Harbours, mountains and skylines. Statues, mausoleums and ships. Each of them a testament to the bigger, better world her father was waiting to show her. The idea to spend a year with him in Istanbul had been hers, not his.
Her mother had of course baulked at the idea. Istanbul was too far away, and far too dangerous – though a bachelor pad anywhere else in the world would have been just as bad. Her main fear (well-founded, as it turned out) was that Jeannie would be left to fend for herself. This was a man who let ‘nothing and no one come between him and his job.’ However, she seems not to have known what his job really was. Had she so much as guessed the truth, she most certainly would have used it as her trump card.
Instead it was Radcliffe that had the final say. They’d offered her a place, and instead of doing what most people did, and grabbing the chance before it disappeared, Jeannie had written to them to remind them that she was only sixteen, and would she not derive greater riches from her college career if she deferred for a year? She told him about her father, and her longing to see the world that had been kept from her for so long. She wrote about reading Gibbon, and the real Richard Burton. Gertrude Bell, Rose Macaulay and Freya Stark. There was not a waking hour, she said, when she did not ask herself how long it would be before she saw the enigmas of Near Eastern Culture at first hand. In so saying, she established herself as just the sort of student Radcliffe dreamed of serving. They wrote straight back to Jeannie saying that they were more than happy to back her plan. Their only stipulation was that (while she was in Istanbul, at least, and in addition to the journal she had already promised) she committed herself to some sort of formal study.
Six weeks later, she said goodbye to her distraught mother at JFK Airport and boarded the PamAm flight for Istanbul. She began her journal in what only an adolescent could call a spirit of forgiveness (‘it is easy to be charitable to one’s mother when one is looking down on her from a distance of 30,000 feet.’).
Her next entry, dated June 16th, begins in the same lofty tones:
‘I am glad now I had to wait so long. Glad I had a chance to read the history, and absorb it – make it real, at least in my head. For when we turned up that narrow, cobblestone lane that would take us along the great walls of Rumeli Hisar, and I set eyes on that first crenallated tower, I felt myself inside Gibbon’s prose. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I could see the Ottoman armies pouring over those walls, I could hear their battlecries as they thundered off to take the flower of the Eastern Roman Empire from the Greeks, its previous owners. I was so in the thick of it that I was literally beginning to hyperventilate. And then, when Father took me into the garden of his house to show me his view – when I stood here on this great glass porch, gazing with wild surmise at the distant and inscrutable twists and turns of the Bosphorus, I felt History itself rolling over me. I understood, for the first time, the meaning of the word “awe”…’
Here she stopped, knowing every gushing word to be a lie.