THE TRIAL DATE was fast approaching. My mother and I traveled to Michigan by bus the first week of August while Raul stayed behind in Denver. Old friends of my mother’s let us stay at their place in Detroit and let us borrow their car to drive back and forth to the courthouse. I had not been to Michigan for five years—half my life ago at that point. I was looking forward to seeing my father and Rosalind again, even while dreading the impending trial.
My father finally had my mother back in Michigan, on his home turf. This was his one chance to get me back. In the many documents he put together for the trial, he charged that my mother was a radical hippie, a church-hating atheist, an anti-American communist, and an anti-male and anti-marriage feminist who promoted polygamy and was determined to destroy the traditional family. He used a copy of my brother’s polemical comic book about the Rockefellers as evidence of my mother’s poisonous radical influence.
But winning custody was an uphill battle for any father; my mother was counting on the reluctance that courts usually showed when it came to taking a child away from the mother. My father was going to try to even the odds by depicting my mother as totally unfit, psychologically unstable, and downright dangerous, not only to her children but to American society and to Western civilization.
During the trial days I waited, tense yet bored, sitting on a long bench outside the courtroom, hoping for it to end. During court recesses, both my father and mother would emerge with forced smiles, trying to act as if they had not just spent hours engaged in the courtroom equivalent of trench warfare.
The trial was unexpectedly interrupted when Ronald was arrested back in Berkeley after a huge fight with his girlfriend, Beverly, a pretty redhead some ten years older than him. When the fight happened, she called the police. After the cops came and took him away, Ronald sat in the juvenile detention center for days until my father flew out to get him. During his days behind bars, the jail staff only fed Ronald hot dogs, and as a strict vegetarian, he only ate the buns. Ronald always projected such an air of dignified control that I imagine it must have really shaken him to be treated like a criminal, shoved into a police car, and made to wait in a cell without a decent meal, day after day, until my father finally arrived. No doubt the Michigan judge took notice that it was my father, not my mother, who made the trip to rescue Ronald. The trial resumed as soon as my father got back.
Right before the trial ended, the judge called me into his chambers, all by myself. He was a heavyset man with puffy cheeks, and his black robe made him look even bigger. The shelves were filled with thick, dark hardbound books, and the walls were decorated with framed diplomas. The room was hot and stuffy, and I was desperate to escape. I sat in an uncomfortable oak chair in front of the judge’s enormous desk, dangling my feet nervously, staring at the floor. The judge leaned back in his brown leather chair, arms folded behind his head, and looked across the desk at me. All he asked me was one question: “Peter, who do you want to live with, your mother or your father?”
I wilted into the chair. Instead of replying, after a long pause I tried to deflect the question by asking a question back: “Can I live with both of them, equally, half of the year with each? That’s what I’d like to do.”
He shook his head. “No, young man, I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”
“But why?”
“Well, you should really be in only one school during the school year, not going back and forth all the time between different schools in different places, and certainly not between Michigan and Peru. That’s just not good for you, or for any kid.”
After a long silence, I said, “Well, then, I guess I should just stay with my mother.” My reasoning was simple: my mother needed me more than my father did. I had a hard time imagining my mother without me, or me without her for that matter. And I knew my father would be okay without me, and me without him, because we were already doing okay. And he had Rosalind.
The judge stood up, extended his fat, sweaty hand, and said, “Thank you, Peter, we’re done.”
And then I went back to my bench in the hall and waited, watching the courtroom door.
An hour or so later, Rosalind came through the door with a huge smile on her face. She rushed over to me, crouched down, and put her hands on my shoulders. “Peter, you’re coming home with us, to live with us!” She gave me a hug. I hugged her back but felt numb inside. What had just happened?
My father then appeared, beaming. “Peter! It’s finally over.” He hugged me stiffly.
I was relieved the trial had ended, but startled by the outcome. We were supposed to be heading back to Peru now; we had only come to the U.S. for an extended visit and for the property settlement agreement. But that whole plan was now derailed.
Minutes later, my mother, wide-eyed, stumbled from the courtroom. She made a beeline for me, pulling me off to the side.
“What did you tell the judge?” she asked. Her voice shook with accusation. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I told him I should live with you. Really, I did.”
Maybe the judge would have chosen my father regardless of what I’d said or how I’d said it, but, either way, the decision had been made, the trial was over. And my mother’s worst nightmare had come true. She had the property settlement she had come back to Michigan for, but she’d lost me in the process.
Looking back, it’s not surprising that the judge trusted my father to provide a more stable home for me. The real surprise is how confident my mother had been that she would win. Even her diary entries leading up to the trial reveal no worries at all. A few days into the trial she wrote a letter to her father saying she remained confident in the outcome even though “Carl is taking every opportunity to make me seem like a wandering, irresponsible degenerate.”
My mother took the loss as a devastating failure—not just a personal one, but a political one, too. At the stroke of a judge’s pen, her dream of raising a revolutionary boy, free of the vices of mainstream America, was dashed. The Establishment had prevailed. And, worse, she had been an accomplice; by fighting for the settlement, she’d succumbed to the temptation of, of all things, money.
We all walked outside to the parking lot. It was a hot August afternoon and my mother, shoulders hunched, took my hand. We were both shocked that I was about to go home with my father and Rosalind forever. I looked up at my mother’s face. Her skin was pale and her lips were trembling. I’d never seen her look so defeated. She met my eyes and tried to smile. “Don’t worry,” she said, bumping her arm into mine. “I’ll figure something out.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I told her, suddenly painfully aware that this was much harder on her. “I’ll be fine. Just take care of yourself, okay? Please?” I wrapped my arms around her waist.
After wiping away her tears, my mother put her hand on my head, tousled my hair, kissed my forehead, and then gave me a long hug. “I’ll get you back, I’ll come get you, I promise.” Her words were confident, but her tone and body language screamed defeat.
I didn’t realize how hard on herself my mother had been over losing me in the custody battle. Her first diary entry after the trial read:
This page should be all black and all bloody. I have hurt myself badly and don’t really want to write it down. The system has come down on me and I was too dumb to not let it happen. I was like a cow walking into the slaughterhouse, knowing and not knowing, attracted by some stupid thing like food or shelter or sex. I went to Michigan and I lost custody of Peter. And Peter is there now with Carl and I don’t know what to do. I am tired of talking about how it all happened. I am amazed at how difficult it is to focus my anger, to recuperate my forces, to concentrate on anything else but Peter.
For my father, the “Peter problem” was finally settled, or so he thought. I had never seen him happier. Now he would have his youngest son back and we would live together in the nice suburban Michigan home he had originally built for the family. My old room was all set up, waiting for me to move back in, as if I had never left. The green-and-white quilt that Grandma Andreas had made for me when I was a toddler still covered the bed, with neatly embroidered squares featuring pictures of ducks, giraffes, and other animals. My little rocking chair was still there, too, right next to the bed, though I could no longer fit in it. A small maple desk hugged the wall, ready for me to do my homework on. Everything looked perfectly comfortable, but it would take time for me to actually adjust. I was suddenly stepping back into a life I had not occupied since I was five years old. In a few weeks I would go back to Meadowbrook Elementary School, the same school my mother had taken me from in late 1970 for our clandestine move to Berkeley.
To celebrate the start of our new life together, my father took me to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour the day after the trial was over. It was just the two of us. We both loved ice cream, so this was a real treat. The waitress showed us to a booth and handed us menus as we sat down. I studied the shiny plastic-laminated menu carefully, salivating over all the pictures of sundaes and banana splits. I was overwhelmed by so many choices and looked across the table at my father for some guidance.
“Order anything you like,” he said with a smile.
“Really?” I wasn’t convinced he meant it. My father hardly ever ate out, preferring to save money. That included ice cream, since he always had a well-stocked freezer.
“Sure, go ahead,” he replied in an encouraging voice. “Special treat.”
I studied the menu for another few minutes before noticing what I wanted. When the waitress came around and asked for our orders, I pointed to the featured dessert at the top of the page—by far the most expensive item on the entire menu. My father let out a muffled gasp. “Ah,” the waitress said with a knowing smile, “that’s the Pig’s Trough. You sure you can handle that all by yourself?” I quickly nodded.
“Maybe we should share that, Peter,” my father chimed in. I shook my head.
“Well, okay then, the Pig’s Trough it is,” the waitress said, giving me a quick wink and then scribbling it down on her notepad. She looked over at my father. “And what can I get for you?”
“Oh, just a small sundae. I might need to help my boy finish.”
When the Pig’s Trough arrived I stared at it admiringly for a few seconds before diving in. It was a beautiful creation: a double banana split with six scoops of ice cream topped with whipped cream, sprinkled nuts, and a cherry in the middle. I didn’t even leave my father a bite, just to prove I could eat it all by myself.
The waitress was mighty impressed. As a reward, she gave me a pin that read I MADE A PIG OF MYSELF AT FARRELL’S. I grinned. Calling someone a pig was a political insult in my old life with my mother, but now it didn’t bother me. I was proud of my accomplishment.
Within days of my moving in with my father and Rosalind, my mother wrote to me, in Spanish, so my father and Rosalind couldn’t read it:
I will be back in Michigan next week to demand a retrial to reclaim you. The trial will not be right away, and I will bring friends and make a public case of it because the first trial was very unjust. So you should know I am doing all I can. With enough organization, we—the poor people of the world who are in the struggle—still have some power. Many are thinking of you, Peter, and are going to help.
I could not bear the thought of yet another long trial, but I couldn’t say that to my mother. In truth, her plan to legally appeal the custody decision was mostly, according to her diary, “a cover for more concrete plans to take Peter out of Michigan about Christmastime—it’s not a capital or extraditable offense.” But she wasn’t going to bring me into my own kidnapping plan until she was ready.
What my mother also didn’t tell me is that many people were actually trying to convince her that she should see losing me as a blessing in disguise. She wrote in her diary: “Old friends in Detroit think it’s convenient for me to put my kid in cold storage while I make the Revolution. . . . Some people, including Dad and Mary Lou [her sister] . . . think maybe Peter will be better off with Carl and I should feel unburdened.” She angrily wrote to Grandpa Rich: “I am really hurt by your attitude in this matter—as if delivering my child to the enemies of the revolution would ‘free me up’ somehow to make revolution. That’s not the kind of revolution I’m into.” My mother rejected any thought that there was a tension between prioritizing her role as a mother and prioritizing the revolution. For her, the two were the same thing; we were in it together. Those who thought otherwise just didn’t get it.
When my father asked me about my mother’s letter, I replied casually, “She misses me. That’s all.”
“Why does she write to you in Spanish?” he asked.
“Oh, she just doesn’t want me to forget the language.”
“Ah, I see.” My father looked at me for a long time, saying nothing. How could I admit to him how divided my loyalties still were?
My mother’s petition for a retrial was denied, perhaps as expected. Still, she tried to stay optimistic in her next letter:
I spent the whole night talking and making love with Raul. We’re determined to get you back. Peter, you know it made me very happy to remember your words: “Don’t worry!” It hurts me greatly you are not with us but I know everything will turn out well in the end. I love you, and I have confidence in you, my dear son.
She worried, though, about my increasing comfort at my father’s house, which I didn’t hide from her very well. After one phone call to see how I was doing, she commented in her diary: “I talked to Peter earlier and felt kind of numb afterward knowing he is genuinely attached to Carl and Rosalind.”
Back in Denver, my mother was not used to being alone with Raul without me and spent much time brooding over my loss. But at the same time, Raul was becoming more important to her than ever. In her diary, she reminded herself to “trust Raul. He trusted me when I went to Michigan and came back without Peter. He didn’t put me down. He didn’t tell me what I ‘should have done.’ He didn’t tell me what I ‘should do.’ He felt with me the full grotesqueness of the situation.”
Privately, as time went on, her confidence began to crumble:
I wonder what I have to give to Peter, on what basis I am hoping to “reclaim” him. I don’t want him to be alienated, gullible, competitive, but I wouldn’t want him to be bitter and frustrated like me, either. Raul might have more to offer him than I do, but if Raul and I are in conflict all the time, Peter will get the short end of it and may yearn for the safer, predictable life he’s having now. I FEEL PETER’S REJECTION TERRIBLY AND AM NOT SURE I CAN RECOVER ENOUGH FROM THAT TO SUSTAIN OTHER HURTS.
Still, she put on a good face for me. When I wrote to my mother that September, telling her that I had started school and was liking it, she replied, “I am happy to know you are doing well in school. Later, when you are back with us and we return to Peru, you will not have so much time for studies, so it’s very good that you do it now.”
Raul added a short scribbled note at the end of her letter: “Hello son, you know I miss you a lot. I have confidence in you and I expect that when you watch TV—the idiot box—you critique what you see. And you should always think about the poor and the workers. Today I fought with four men using Karate. I had many wounds—thirty cuts!—but I beat them.” He signed it, “The communist with a Kung Fu punch, your papi, Raul.” It felt strange to get this from Raul, who still thought of himself as my father even though I was now living with my real father. I didn’t reply.
As the weeks and then months passed, my mother’s weekly letters got heavier and heavier. She worried that I might be getting too used to my comfortable suburban life and would be reluctant to give it up, that I was being bought off by my father and gradually turning my back on her and Raul.
She was right to worry. I was enjoying my new life, much more than I let on. I’d gotten used to the predictability of life in the modern and spacious suburban home at the top of a wooded hill. I liked having my father around, knowing when he’d be pulling into the driveway after work every day and hearing that comforting sound of the garage door opening, seeing him in his corduroy suit walking in smiling and asking me, “Well, how’s Peter today?” Then we would sit down together for a quiet, argument-free dinner every night and enjoy a bowl of Friendly’s ice cream after, maybe followed by a game of cards or Ping-Pong. I’d been making plenty of new friends and doing well in school. I was reading lots of books (Paddington: The Original Story of the Bear from Peru, was my favorite, even though, as I had learned from living in Peru, there were no bears there); and with my English much better by now I had earned an A on a spelling test for the first time. My teacher even said I was going to be skipped to the fifth grade to catch up to my age group after the Christmas break. I had a small part as a toy clown in the play The Velveteen Rabbit. I was surviving the weekly sermons at church by sitting next to my father and discreetly playing tic-tac-toe with him—fortunately for me, he believed more in going to church than in actively participating in it.
I did feel guilty about how easily I was adjusting, even ashamed. This was not how a good revolutionary boy was supposed to be—so quickly seduced by the comforts of suburban America. It was nice to own more than a few pairs of socks and not have to wash our clothes by hand. I had gone soft and I knew it. I kept asking myself, Am I a sellout? Am I betraying my mother? What would she think? Fearing the answers, I told my mother as little about my new life as I possibly could, and with my letters and phone calls to her getting shorter and shorter and less and less frequent, she became increasingly suspicious.
Dear Peter,
The judge and the lawyers are still playing around with me about the settlement money. I’m furious, and this makes it even more difficult accepting your incarceration by people who treat me so unjustly. I have written you many letters that I do not send because I imagine you will not want to hear about my preoccupations. You want to be free to enjoy your new life as the king of the universe and I don’t know how to remind you that you are a child of the people. You do not see the people from where you are and you start to view the people as a threat to your privileged life. The rich waste their time accumulating and buying, and guard against the poor. They may help the poor sometimes, but they will never want the poor to kick the rich out and take power. The thing that preoccupies me about you, Peter, is that you will fear the poor when the poor rebel (just like the rich always have), rather than rejoice when the poor rebel. You are so far away that you never see the rebellion. You are so far away from the realities of the world, Peter. You perhaps carry with you memories of what you once knew of the world, but that will fade if you stay there. And Peter, I very much hope you don’t feel that your “real home” is with the rich. I know that they try day and night to make you feel that way, showing you photos of your previous life there, and making you think that because your father entered my body one day to make you grow there that this somehow gives him rights over your life.
Carl is trying to get ahold of your passport. If the judge agrees to this and doesn’t allow me to receive the money if I don’t hand over the passport, we will have serious problems, Peter. Don’t talk about this with them, Peter. It’s very delicate. I just want to tell you this so you don’t trust them too much. Rosalind wants to give me rights and promises but she doesn’t have the power, and Carl is very slippery and manipulative, as always. You always love those who are around you, Peter, if they treat you well. But you must also think about what you are losing, if you stay there for years, how that will affect your mind, your attitudes, your personality. I continue to believe you are a sane boy, Peter. That’s why you easily adjust to new experiences, but you now need to think very seriously whether you want to totally adopt the life of luxury and security. Raul and I are a little crazy, for sure. We do not care at all about respectability. You have to think about why we have chosen to be this way. You can be stronger and more conscious from having spent a few months there, or you can sell out to the experience without caring. It was a risk to leave you there. You are young to be risking your life, but you have lived much and you are not so innocent. I may visit you within weeks—don’t announce that! You are in prison there without knowing it.
I love you,
your mama.
My mother wanted me to feel like I was in some sort of prison, but that’s not how it felt to me. She wanted me to feel like I would be a sellout if I stayed with my father, and I feared she was right. I didn’t know how to respond to her letter, so I didn’t write back.
A few weeks later, in early November, my mother came to Michigan to reveal her kidnapping scheme to me and to try to convince me to leave the country with her. Her plan was to pick me up at school during recess, drive across the border into Canada, and then travel to the Mexican border by air the next day to meet up with Raul and start our journey south to Peru. She kept phoning me over the weekend from her friend’s house in Detroit, hoping I was ready to go. But I wasn’t ready, and wasn’t sure I ever would be. I tried to stall her, saying, “Can’t we wait until school is over, I’m getting better at reading and writing English; I’m finally learning cursive,” and “I’m in this play, everyone is counting on me.”
My mother’s frustration boiled over through the phone. “But, Peter, don’t you want to live with me?” Yes, I do, I reassured her. “Well, then, let’s go now, okay?” But it wasn’t okay, at least not right then. As much as I told my mother that I wanted to be with her, it was hard to hide the fact that I was nervous about escaping to Peru and facing the possibility of once again being separated from my father for years.
My mother could tell I was reluctant to help her carry out my kidnapping. “Two short intense secretive conversations with Peter have produced nothing more than trauma for him,” she wrote in her diary. “It looks as if we’re in for a long separation.” She added, “I’ll have another chance after school today, hopefully, to make contact with Peter and if this doesn’t succeed in effecting a getaway (i.e. if he has overcome his reluctance, which is doubtful), I will leave for Denver tomorrow morning.”
That night, as my father, Rosalind, and I finished dinner and then sat on the couch watching TV in the living room, none of us suspected that my mother was spying on us, camouflaged by the trees behind the house, observing our every movement. She never told me about it, so I was startled to find out from her diary that she had spent the evening “watching the scene in the 2970 Heidelberg house through the back windows.”
My mother returned to Denver without me, the kidnapping plan on hold. But she would be back a few weeks later to try again. In the meantime, she sent me a poem:
A child travels between worlds
His heart in one
His body in another
He listens to the music of the people
He plays, reads, and studies
Doubts what his teachers say
Doubts what his friends say
Doubts what the grownups who take care of him say (they smile too much)
He does not think much about his future
He is not scared of God
He is a communist, and always will be
He is a wise and calm child
Aware that history is on his side
I threw away the poem after reading it, ripping it up into little pieces so that my father and Rosalind wouldn’t find it. But decades later I discovered a copy of it, folded in half, tucked away in one of my mother’s diaries.