I was coming up on thirty, and I was broke, but I didn’t want to think about that anymore. Here I was, like tens of thousands of tourists from Jersey and Long Island, gawking at some two hundred–plus ships, all shapes and sizes, circling New York Harbor. The sun was bright, a whiff of Atlantic breeze alleviating the heat, ruffling the lush white sails on the sixteen “Tall Ships” at the center of it all. It was the Fourth of July 1976, and America was drunk on itself, celebrating its two-hundredth birthday with, of course, TV cameras everywhere. To Americans, two hundred years was a huge deal. To older civilizations like China and Europe, it was just part of the tapestry. I say that because I’m half American and half French, and thirty years ago, on this very river—the Hudson—with its graceful Statue of Liberty greeting refugees from all over the world, my mother came across freshly pregnant with me. It was the hard winter of January ’46, and my soldier father was proudly accompanying her to a new home in this vast land. And today, thirty years later, we were here assembled, witnesses to history, a beast of a million eyes, stacked in the streets and windows of Lower Manhattan, drawn to the memory—in our bones—of freedom, of the promise of a better world.
Promise? The world was built on it. The Democrats were coming to town the next week for their presidential convention, the city jumping with money fever—stores, bars, hotels, restaurants. Some twenty thousand of them at Madison Square Garden would be screaming for Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia with the beaver teeth and shy smile. He was going all the way; we sensed this was destined because, even with Gerald Ford in office, people were still sick of Nixon and his secrets and lies. Reform was in the air. The Democrats back in power meant money in people’s pockets. And money meant freedom, and freedom meant sex. This crazy country was ready to “PARTY!” Barry White’s dance music would be our God and Donna Summer his Goddess. “Yeah! Give me some . . . mmm, mmm!” No more crackdowns. No more scary talk of “law and order” while giving us high crimes and mass disorder. Vietnam was over. Fuck this Nixon “War on Drugs” shit! America was on the move again. We’re gonna get high. Like in the ’60s before it got so heavy. The late ’70s were going to be Fun! Fun! Fun!
I was drifting through the thick crowd to the bottom of this $24 island, past the barbeque families waving little flags back at the ships, lugging their ice chests and folding chairs, my eyes picking out the girls of summer, so many of them, R. Crumb–like caricatures of midwestern corn-fed Amazons in their shorts and sandals. Summers in New York were sexy. The heat travels up through your feet into your loins as the sidewalks steam with a humidity that rips the shields off everyone; people walking around half-naked like they were at home and nobody was looking. It’s so hot somehow that who you are and what you do isn’t so important anymore; your identity, like candle wax, blurs and drips into someone else’s.
Wiry rat-faced vendors were making big bucks today, slipping through bodies, peddling orange sodas, hot dogs, and souvenirs destined for garage sales. I noticed an Albanian’s cash roll as he changed a fiver, maybe $300 or $400 there already, $700 to $800 by tonight. (And I’d made thirty-five bucks the last night I drove a cab.) Religious fanatics pitching “Jesus” and “The End of the World,” bald Hare Krishnas chanting cult rhythms were duck-dancing through the crowd. Screams of kids and their anxious moms chasing them like pecking pigeons. The dads were always here at these things on holidays—dependable working stiffs, humble and happy just to have a couple of kids, a wife, and a job, Jesus, a good job, which might not be there in the years to come. Even if you had nothing to say to them, it was nice to just hang with your bloodlines. They did it around the caves from the very beginning. I missed that. I missed a family.
In the harbor, I can now imagine my mother’s eyes, coming from a terrible war that nearly destroyed human civilization, sailing past on that icy deck, staring up at the giant island before her. It must’ve been so powerful, like Cleopatra arriving in Rome in the first century BC. She must’ve wondered who were these barbaric creatures who built these granite towers so high into the sky? Or those sailors and fur trappers who long ago went upriver into the dark and dangerous forests along the Hudson, looking for the ends of the earth, to plunder, to rape, to be free of kings and paupers. People here were not scared and poor like they were in Europe. These people were free. They were gods because, according to the histories written by the victors, America won this global World War, now known as Two, which for some 70 million departed souls and 20 million refugees looking for new homes had been an apocalypse—sealed when America dropped never-before-imagined atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. As 100,000 people burned, we danced in the New York streets in victorious joy as we knew that nobody—nothing—could stand up to America. We were the mightiest country ever—and the best!
My mother, like so many French, fell in love with the American movies of the 1930s. Their women—Crawford, Hepburn, Shearer, Garbo, Davis—became her role models. And when she read Margaret Mitchell’s massive best-selling novel, majestically called Gone With the Wind (Autant en Emporte le Vent), she dreamed of seeing the 1939 movie all America was talking about, its timing perfect—a vision of pre-bellum America. Oh, to be Scarlett O’Hara, as embodied by Vivien Leigh; fiery and independent, she’d go through hell to keep her family’s plantation, Tara. At first in love with her fiancé, the indecisive, noble southern aristocrat, Ashley, she’d fall for the outsider, the northerner Rhett Butler with not a trace of nobility, treating her like the spoiled child she was; he’d be embodied by her very favorite male, the mustached, grinning Clark Gable, the man’s man of American cinema at its peak, its Golden Age vanishing (the movie not screening in France till 1950) just as the war engulfed Europe. Great creativity and great destruction grow side by side, needing each other—in all things.
My mother was a natural rebel, finishing at eighteen her baccalaureate at Sainte-Marie de Neuilly. Her parents’ years of toil had saved enough to invest in a modest old five-floor hotel with forty rooms on the rue des Quatre Fils (Street of the Four Sons) in Le Marais, then hardly fashionable but one of the oldest sections of Paris. It was called “L’Hôtel d’Anvers—Tout le Confort Moderne,” which meant a bathtub on each floor, hot water when ordered, and a sink and a bidet in each room. They’d rent the rooms on a long-term basis to middle-class locals and expatriates who’d fled other, poorer countries like Poland and Romania. My grandparents, “Mémé” and “Pépé,” as they were called by the family, provided their only daughter the best of what they could, more than their only son. She had willpower, this girl, she wanted to rise above her class origins, and somehow she managed to wrangle a membership at the exclusive Racing Club of Paris in the Bois de Boulogne, where the favored of Parisian society were admitted.
Once there, Jacqueline Goddet rode and jumped horses, swam, played tennis, went ice-skating; she dated, went to movies, cafés. It’s hard to really know who your mother is when you know her only from a certain age on, but there were hints in the old photo albums that she was “une coquette,” as the French fondly call it, a young woman who enjoyed the attentions of several sophisticated men, whom the French termed “des boulevardiers.” Mom told me several times of her dramatic shock at seventeen, when, preparing to go out, she wore lipstick for the first time, and Pépé, shocked by her audacity, whacked her hard across the cheek and made her wipe it off and stay home. In France, there was a lot of slapping and hitting of the young, which was acceptable then, but my mother never forgot this particular humiliation. Hewing to her mountain stock from the Savoie region of southeast France, she was tall and big-boned, healthy in the Ingrid Bergman mold, a real in-the-flesh beauty with a charismatic smile that, throughout her life, attracted many friends. Sometimes, it seemed to me, too many, but that’s another story.
She wrote years later in the grandmother’s book she prepared for my children: “My ambition was to be married. I was raised to be a good wife.—cooking-embroidery-languages—to run a house, etc. Very old-fashion. Help my mother, take care of the dogs, take care of my room and clothes, respecting them, have good manners. Be polite and nice to humble people, and stay simple at all times with a king or a servant.” After graduating from the lycée, she enrolled at a cooking academy which later became famous, Le Cordon Bleu, and also took courses in “puericulture”—taking care of babies, the French way, “comme il faut”: “the right way.” Sometime in that period, she became the fiancée of a handsome young tennis champion at the Racing Club, from a good family in the commodities business; it was another step up to a better life, and her parents were very proud.
Her strapping, adventurous father, six-foot-two-inch Jacques Goddet, had moved up to Paris as an ambitious trainee in the cooking and hotel management field. By 1912, he made it to America as a sous-chef at the exclusive Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. But he returned home to take up arms against “les sales Boches” (the filthy German Huns) in what was then called “La Grande Guerre,” which began as a Balkan operetta in 1914 but did not end till 1918 with half an entire French generation between eighteen and thirty-five killed or wounded in the most brutal slaughter ever witnessed. Pépé started at the Marne in ’14 and served all the way through ’18 in the trenches cooking for the troops. He’d tell me stories about the war, the gas attacks most vivid to me, when I was a child, sitting on his lap. He married my grandmother, Adele Pelet-Collet, from the same Savoie region, after the war, and they stayed inseparable for the rest of their lives.
The next generation of Germans, reaping their vengeance from the First War, marched into Paris that May of 1940, just as my mother was turning nineteen. A strict curfew was imposed, snuffing out any semblance of gaiety and nightlife. All supplies, especially of meat, were rationed; any gatherings of friends were discouraged; waiting in lines was commonplace; and perhaps worst of all, no real news of the outside world was allowed. The Germans were polite, cold, smart, and above all methodical; they scared the French. They came regularly to check the papers of her family’s hotel guests, sniffing out the problematic ones, those of mixed blood and Jews. Her parents warned her repeatedly, “Don’t ever talk to the Germans, cross to the other side of the street, make sure you always take your ‘carte d’identité.’ ” Avoiding makeup, she wore clothes with no fashion sense and ugly cork-soled shoes. For four full years this went on. She despised the Germans as she would a disease, and one day she’d get her revenge for the lost years. By having fun. So much fun.
The tide of war began to shift in ’43 with the shocking Soviet victory at Stalingrad. The Red Army began pushing the Germans back across Russia into eastern Europe, while the Allies bogged down in Italy. Finally, in June of ’44, the Allies made their D-Day landing in western Europe and in August liberated Paris. The world was spinning suddenly on a new axis; all the rigid rules were being broken. With their money, nylons, cigarettes, and easy laughter, the Americans were gods to the poor French. But the war still had nine hard months to run, and with the Allies moving in from the west, and the Russians, at great cost, destroying the German war machine from the east and then taking Berlin block by block, the Nazi empire crumbled into ruins in May of ’45.
In that month, on a day redolent of the smell of spring, my father, Lieutenant Colonel Louis Stone, saw my mother on a bicycle heading to her Racing Club in a city still free of automobiles. On an impulse—always the best way, I think—he took off after her on his own bike. Somewhere in the Bois de Boulogne he deliberately ran into her, apologizing and pretending to be lost, asking directions. I would’ve loved to have been there to record those first words. At five feet, ten inches in his impressive uniform with his bull-like carriage, dark good looks, and his gap-toothed, Gable-like insolence, he was hard to say no to for a romantic twenty-four-year-old French girl; as part of Eisenhower’s staff in Paris at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces), how could he not have an advantage over any native living on ration cards? Speaking a passable French, he was bold, insisting on meeting again, and managed to procure her street address, although she found him much older at thirty-five than her fiancé in his twenties.
Much to her surprise, on the following afternoon, in the days before telephones were realistically available, he came calling directly—very Rhett Butler—introducing himself to her surprised family, sweeping aside any protestations on her part of a fiancé. Next came gifts from the PX; he brought an entire ham, coffee, chocolate, as he totally charmed these French “peasants,” who were most impressed that he was an officer on “le général Eisenhower’s” staff. And because English was an easy language to acquire, as Churchill boasted, “to conquer the world,” their daughter spoke just enough to communicate the basics of life with a charming accent, but not enough to share an interest in the other ideas that preoccupied my father’s attention, such as finishing a war which he didn’t think had really ended in 1945.
America was inheriting the world’s strongest economy by far, undamaged by bombing, and was the clear moral victor. The Russians were disqualified by their strange language and supposed crude behaviors against the “civilized” German female population—as well as a long-standing distrust of their 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. My father, who’d worked on Wall Street before being assigned to the G-5 financial branch of SHAEF, was sent from France on to Germany. In 1943 he’d sympathized with the underdog struggles of our allies the Russians, who now were our co-occupiers of Germany. But by 1945, he was joining the old struggle against communism. He denounced the poverty-stricken Russians as “cheating bastards” who were probably counterfeiting our currency in massive quantities throughout western Europe; he later told me they’d stolen our printing plates. He began to believe in General Patton’s unrequited ambition to push east against our “ally” to take Moscow and destroy communism once and for all. Many, though hardly all, shared this thinking but knew, if even achievable, it would’ve been at great cost and loss of life. The world was clearly beginning to divide, and my father naturally intended to stay on the right side of that rich-poor equation.
He later told me the French were “different” to him. He’d had girlfriends in New York, Washington, and London, but he found “les Françaises” more maternal, family-oriented, with their accents, their “savoir faire,” and they knew the allure of a woman’s perfume and clothes. Essentially, they dressed better than the English girls he’d known in London, who took wartime austerity as either an excuse or a vow. A French woman would always be vain enough to find a way to be wanted, and “look good.” Back in Paris from Germany, wooing my mother, he was now thinking of his future. He was adamant; according to my mother, he told her bluntly, “I want you to be my wife. I waited thirty-five years to find you. I don’t want to lose you.” And with those words, a pear-shaped diamond of ten carats, rolled in a piece of silk paper, suddenly appeared out of his uniform pocket.
On my mother’s side, if you’re a respectable Catholic girl, engaged to an attractive young Frenchman of good family, you simply do not break your vow to marry and suddenly run off with an unknown American soldier to an unknown country. In later years, when I came to know her fiancé, Claude, I never sensed she loved him as he had loved her. And so, discarding the noble Ashley, Scarlett committed to Rhett six months after the close of the war, and in December 1945, Jacqueline Pauline Cézarine Goddet and Louis Stone (born Abraham Louis Silverstein) went ahead and made possibly the greatest mistake of their lives—to which I owe my existence—and were wed at the mayor’s office in Paris. My mother wore a red dress from Jacques Fath with a coat of red wool lined with taffeta and a red feathered hat. The ceremony was attended by her family and American officers, as well as her fiancé, Claude, who she wrote “came hoping I’d change my mind.” I’m sure her parents were concerned, as they really didn’t know the American, but they did know their daughter well enough to recognize that, even if they were opposed, she’d roll over them. By this time, my mother’s knowledge of English had improved significantly, if not her charming accent, which, her family and I noted over time, she managed to carry to her grave without any marked improvement.
They spent their magic first night at the Ritz Hotel in the Suite Royale with white flowers tied everywhere on the drapes, furniture, and chandelier; the white silk sheets were embroidered with their initials. They honeymooned, with the privileges of a high-ranking American officer, in the South of France, and then moved into the Hôtel San Régis in Paris, where I was probably conceived between café and croissants amid white, fluffy, good French linen. And in January ’46, off they sailed for the New World with seventeen pieces of luggage, according to my mother, on a returning troopship with twenty thousand GIs—starring herself as the only female aboard, although she said she was a “stowaway.” It sounds like a movie, but my father, who was adamantly honest about my mother’s “exaggerations,” confirmed this tale. It was a freezing winter, one of the worst in memory in a desolate Europe, and the voyage intolerable in the gales of the North Atlantic. The bride threw up ceaselessly for some twelve days, not yet registering that she was pregnant, but if your first consciousness is violent and storm-tossed, I’m sure notice was taken by her surprise visitor.
From the railing at Battery Park in 1976, now imagining thousands of cheering GIs on the ship making its way past the Statue, I could equally imagine my young mother wondering, in a kind of innocence, not only what future lay in store but who really was this man next to her whom she’d married and whose baby she was now carrying. She later told me she found America to be an overwhelming and strange place, that my father’s Jewish family was “cold” and was unlike French families, where everybody knew almost everything about one another, because, for one thing, they were poorer and they shared smaller spaces, and their nature was open and emotional. My dad’s people had “secrets” and they judged, she said. They’d come from an intellectual tradition; some had been learned rabbis in Poland, their offspring emigrating to New York in the 1840s, while his mother’s people emerged from unknown parts of eastern Europe. They would pay “visits” to the East Side of Manhattan to see this French girl, Jacqueline, but they kept to themselves and their preferred Upper West Side.
So it was into this situation I was born on September 15, 1946, in a tempest of blood and pain. It was so difficult a birth, apparently, by way of forceps, that she’d never achieve it again—and I’m told I narrowly made it. Mom took a picture of me at six months beaming in her arms at the camera, where I seemed to be yelling “ba ba” or something similar; she later invented my dialogue in the picture—“Je suis fort!” (I am strong!) I was a happy baby, she said many times, even if I “looked Chinese.” Dad being a nonpracticing Jew, and she a naughty Catholic, it was somehow right that I’d be raised Episcopalian in the American tradition, attending Sunday school until I was fourteen—rich, healthy, and loved.
For my father, whom I grew to know far more gradually than my mother, as fathers often wait to confide in their sons, the war was an especially intoxicating time, and as the years went on, he’d wistfully say they were “the best years of my life.” Civilian life, the long forty years after World War II, could never match it. Born in 1910, he grew up in the 1920s into a rich manufacturing family in a new era of illegal “speakeasies,” women liberated by the First World War, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic. The four siblings, three male, one female, decided to change their family name from Silverstein to Stone, and were admitted, in spite of the Jewish quotas, to Princeton, Harvard, Yale (my father), and his sister to Wheaton. He was smart, mathematically inclined, and could write well. Being darkly handsome no doubt helped him.
The first of three major shocks imploded his life when, in October 1929, the stock market crashed. His father, Joshua Silverstein, had sold his Star Skirt Company and invested the proceeds in the market on so much margin that his savings were quickly eroded, except for a few low-renting Harlem properties. Thus my father graduated in 1931 from Yale into the heart of this Depression and was fortunate to find a job, at $25 a week, as a floorwalker in a department store. He often told me how shaken he was by this sudden reversal of fortune, but in another year’s time he’d found his way into a back-office research job on Wall Street, and by 1935–36 was licensed as a stockbroker. When the Second World War broke out, his connections secured him financial staff jobs in the army in Washington, DC, and then London in 1943. He continued to live quite a bachelor’s life in these cities without commitments, affirmed by several telling pictures of him with attractive women, but clearly no one stood out. It was his tall, graceful mother whom, by all accounts, he loved deeply; in fact he adored her almost as a saint who bore five children (one died), each of whom she lavished her attention on.
In what became the second shock of his life, with no forewarning, his mother perished suddenly of a heart attack in her early fifties in 1941, when he was thirty-one. How it affected him I can tell only from the way he talked about her, which is to say, never with any detail. Given that we generally criticize our parents for perceived hurts at the least, it’s quite surprising that about Matilda (“Tilly”) Michaelson there was not a word, an anecdote, something human. Grief, such as he might have felt, was summarily rejected, I sense, as “self-pity,” his emotions stunted at a deeper level than any of us ever knew. I believe a part of him died with her; a certain coldness, a remoteness that my mother and I both felt, ran through his heart. In my mother’s memory, he never cried, not once over anything; he always seemed in control, the model of a father figure, and his mother sacred, distant. I don’t think, for that reason, my mother would ever decipher the man she married.
In a poem from 1932, my father expressed his longing for something that would last and his belief that life’s destiny was arbitrarily dark:
“And Beauty, be it sight or sound or thought,
Was never meant to be a lasting thing.
It must be glimpsed, not stared at or embraced.
We will devise a way of ending it.”
They did.
Their doctrine is perhaps all wise.
The man is thankful for his glimpse of beauty.
He goes his way, a vision in his eyes.
I believe the war saved my father from his darkness, allowing him to escape his past—for a while. But he’d always be tainted by his financial fears born from the Depression. After the war, when the Republican Congress came to power in the midterms of ’46 on a “fear ticket” and the Cold War was beginning, Dad turned against his earlier positive opinions of Russia and fought with many of his liberal Jewish friends who defended Roosevelt, who wanted a postwar peace enforced by the United Nations and the “four policemen” (America, Russia, Britain, and, if united, China). My father, on the contrary, despised Roosevelt with passion, forcefully arguing that his New Deal had corrupted our society and not solved the unemployment problem—only the war had. And that in order to avoid another Depression, we had to keep fueling the military-industrial state that’d grown so strong in 1941–1945. By the time of the Korean War of 1950–1953, his argument was a given, and we never looked back after his hero and former boss, Dwight Eisenhower, took office in ’53 and the military numbers grew more gigantic and irreversible. America had moved from a Hot War to a Cold War with hardly a pause to reconsider. The unemployment fears of the Depression were no longer a problem, and any opposition was buried by J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Truman’s loyalty oaths, and the nationalistic media.
In the following twenty years, until the end of the Vietnam War, even when my father was making big money, he never really relaxed. He refused to own anything if it could be rented—an apartment, a New York town house, land, a painting, not even a car once leases became available. “I’m just passing through, kiddo,” or “Huckleberry,” as he called me, after the greatest creation of his favorite writer, Mark Twain. He particularly enjoyed Huck’s drunken father scenes, possibly because of the father’s complete irresponsibility; his favorite picture of himself as a young man was one taken after he went missing for a few days and reappeared disheveled and unshaven as a hobo. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t want to own anything; it involved Pride, which came before the Fall. “Into this world I came with nothing, and out of it, etc.”—which included me, of course, his sole heir. “No one gets out of here alive” and “life’s no bowl of cherries” were the dark maxims I heard throughout my youth.
Lest I give the wrong impression, my father did have a sharp, self-deprecating Jewish sense of humor, and it was appreciated by many; he also could tell wonderful bedtime stories, the main character from his dark side being “Evil Simon”—I’d say a predecessor to Lemony Snicket—who could assume innumerable forms and disguises to come after me, at times kidnapping me; Evil Simon terrified me as much as the Russians. In any event, my father made it quite clear I shouldn’t count on anything, as he presumably had before the ’29 crash. He’d put me through college, as his father had done him, and that was it. Although he was devoutly secular and would ridicule the insular behavior of Brooklyn’s Hassidic Jews—“Why can’t they act like Americans!”—he was more Old Testament than he’d ever admit. If he drove the insecurity of this life into me early and often—combined, of course, with his terrorizing me about the Russians infiltrating the country—it was partly because, I believe, he feared I might adopt my mother’s extravagant, “show-off” French mentality.
So then why did he marry his opposite? As a self-denying, discreet Jew in a white Anglo-Saxon-controlled society and a rational man under most circumstances, he must have known that marrying a French girl from “peasant” stock was a gamble. Or perhaps he recognized that marrying outside his tribe might paradoxically revitalize a tired gene base. His wife wasn’t bringing family money, breeding, education, or business connections to this union. She was outside the New York–Washington power structure that would come to dominate the world, and into which, even as a Jew, he could have penetrated with his Yale and military background. Mom was an outcast, a charming unknown to the high-powered women who decided these things. When I asked him why, Dad said quite candidly that he’d married her “because she’d make a good mother,” and in so saying would never admit the possibility of his loving her, and if pressed, would actually confess with unsettling honesty, “The only woman I ever loved was Mother”—his own.
It was sex, not money, that derailed my father. Sex, in fact, was the bête noire of that World War II generation. The hypocrisies of modern life were dramatized in the cutting-edge plays of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, later Edward Albee, and in the novels of Salinger, Mailer, Bellow, Roth, Updike, James Jones, and others. In the New York world of the later 1960s I would come to know, divorces from long, traditional marriages became an acceptable, almost inevitable second act. My mother later told me she ignored the infidelities, but by 1949, around the time the Soviets blew up the American bubble of being the sole possessor of the atomic bomb, the balance of power also suddenly and dramatically shifted at our home when my father was found out. She claimed she broke a mop on his back, and they’d had a terrible fight. Exaggerated and wild things were said, but Mom, in repeating this mop story over the years, made sacred her revolt, a French revolutionary now declaring that her husband had betrayed her and their marriage—and that if he misbehaved this clumsily, other people must’ve known, and now that her humiliation was public for both of them, then things could no longer be as they were: “the king is dead . . .” She’d been rejected. It hurt her deeply, her American dream shattered. But of this I knew nothing.
As many do, she tried to make things better by having another child, which my father and I both wanted. But carrying me had taken a severe toll on her system, and late one night, when we were guests at a house in East Hampton, I heard a disturbance from downstairs. Through the banister I saw medics taking my mother to the hospital, and then, I believe, I saw an aborted and bloody fetus of five or six months being carried out in a blanket, but I cannot be sure, it was so like a horror film.
With my father continuing his wandering ways more discreetly, and my mother playing the plucky heroine—hadn’t Scarlett also been rejected by Rhett?—she made the best of it. She decamped to France in the summers, sometimes with me when I wasn’t sent to some camp with an Indian name on a freezing cold lake in Maine or upstate New York. In France in the ’50s, my mother was treated like a movie star, bringing hard-to-find blue jeans, cosmetics, and electronics, and dropping me off with her parents in the peasant countryside east of Paris. Meanwhile, she’d be off to her richer friends’ country houses outside Paris, or the South of France, where she tasted a life of European sensuality, which in time, with America’s modern conveniences, would evolve into the new international “jet set.”
My French grandparents were the antipode to my parents. I’d spend several summers with them. Mémé always seemed old to me, stout and warm in the way of women raised at the turn of the century, down-to-earth, her handkerchief often pressed to a stye over a drooping, watery eye, which shut down part of her vision. Mémé was usually worried about something—the upcoming dinner, the food available, money, or when it wasn’t her daughter or son or one of the boarders, it was us—the grandchildren. “Quel souci!” was Mémé’s version of “Oy vey! Now what!” Or a singsong “Oh la la! Qu’est ce qu’on va faire!” (What are we going to do!) And yet she always saved something special for us, “un p’tit bonbon” or two tucked away somewhere in her vast armoire of clothing, a tin of sweets or luxury chocolates, and sometimes a little pile of crisp paper francs with writers and soldiers colorfully printed on them—big, bold postwar money to send us happily to the movies or the comic book store.
Because there was not enough space in their cramped Paris hotel, as the favored one, “l’Américain,” I’d sleep in Mémé’s bed with Pépé, and she’d tell me stories of “le Loup,” the wolf who haunted the rooftops of Paris—and could climb down chimneys while people were sleeping and, without the parents knowing, snatch an errant child right out of bed. France had a strong mythology of wolves; there’d supposedly been roving packs of them in the Middle Ages, and there still were rumors of them in the big forests. Invariably I would shiver and grab Mémé, as in the French fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood”—remember what the young girl found when she arrived at her grandmother’s house? I looked closer at Mémé. In the dark it was hard to see, but her mouth was certainly not a long, hairy snout with sharp, terrifying teeth. It was just Mémé, and her soft smile reassured me forever as she pressed me to her warm breasts. I could love her in ways more traditional than I could love my mother. It was simply that Mémé was always there for me, and Mom was . . . well, exciting but tempestuous and inconsistent.
Pépé was quick, in the French way, to spank misbehaving children, but now in his sixties would more often just growl like an old dog cozy by the fire. He was a loving man who, as I said, told me stories of the Great War. The nature of life was accepted stoically by these two—and, I noticed, this was true of most of the French; they’d seen enough of war. What I’ve grown to love about older people is their indifference to passing time and style and ideas. That’s the core strength that age gives us. Pépé was made better by Mémé, who stood by him, loyal to the end of their days. Together they were a rock. I never understood the observation I’d been told as a child—that a man may wander in his ways, but the woman must be firm in her allegiance—until much later in my life. Without a moral center—and it takes only one firm soul—there can be no strong family. And without family, we one and all suffer. I was to learn these hard lessons from my parents, whom I loved deeply.
It seemed when I was young, children from families with the means were stored with other children in schools, churches, camps, sitting down to meals at other tables and times than the adults, disciplined to be seen and not heard. And my mother, with her nervous temperament, could be as tough as her father had once been with her, which I believe shaped her strong and rebellious nature. It was the French way—“une bonne gifle” to my cheeks or my backside with a hard open hand, electrified by anger, could settle things very quickly with a misbehaving child. Strong, emotional words could be screamed, but they did clear the system without lingering guilt on either side. Several times over the years, my mother chased me around our apartment in a red rage, sometimes with a riding crop, and let me know who was boss. My father, though, was unable to raise a hand to me, but he could scold me harshly with words whenever he saw a C on my report card.
Many years later, Mom told my son a story that, when I was eight years old, I came to her crying, “You don’t love me anymore!”
“Why do you say that, darling?” she asked.
“Because you don’t spank me anymore.”
She told my son, “You see, children like to be corrected and told wrong from right. Remember that for your own children.” Like an addicted child, I missed my mother and loved her all the more, always watching for her return—or if I was lucky enough to spend time with her, then it was better at one or two in the morning, when she’d return from some party to give me a kiss good night. Emitting the overpowering allure of her perfume mixed with the alcohol she’d drunk, she’d cuddle with me, a sexy good night you see time and again in older European films but I see little of anymore. A Madonna and child portrait. My mother had a healthy, natural way about her, in sex and all matters. She’d walk around naked in her bedroom, and as a child, I’d see her often in the shower or on the toilet, no need to feel shame. After all, France had been so deprived during the war years—good soap was hard to come by, and showers were certainly an American luxury, along with amazing flush toilets—that intimacy in all things became habitual.
Thus my mother made me aware early that women were earthy human beings, and not the big-titted goddesses whose image so many men distort and fall prey to. Hers seemed a far healthier attitude than the repressed feelings in Anglo cultures. Yes, it’s true, her “sexy” manner may have given me a hidden desire for my mother, but did it distort my values? Possibly I adored her too much, but I’d prefer this fate to the cold, queer dislike or distrust of women I see in some men. Nor was she ever the shrew out of Tennessee Williams plays—castrating, bossy, loud. Selfish and self-dramatizing, yes, passionate and punishing at times, but always with a sense of love. “I’m punishing you, but I love you” is human to me. “I’m punishing you because I love you” is not.
I’m convinced our intimacy repelled my father, who I doubt ever saw his mother naked. He didn’t want to know more about women; he preferred them as fantasies in black nylons, although he enjoyed the company of women in social situations. And women, as I could tell in later years, certainly liked him.
I was sheltered from this ongoing dynamic the first fifteen years of my life. In my mind at least, the three of us were one—and the World was outside. I was loved by parents who clearly loved each other, and to make things even rosier, they were attractive, responsible adults with means. At primary school, I was so proud when my mother could actually find the time to come visit in her fashionable clothes—with that accent, asking questions of my teachers, the other, plainer mothers charmed to speak with her, and at the same time monstrously jealous of her style. Second grade, eighth grade, it didn’t matter. When she showed up, the other kids noticed, everyone noticed. You couldn’t miss Jacqueline Stone. In a movie, it would be Jeanne Moreau, with that animal warmth she shared with all. Yes, she was there for me, and yet she wasn’t; it was more like she was on display. Later in life, I equated our relationship to “either a close-up or a long shot, rarely a medium shot.”
But I’m being unfair because of what happened after. In those first fifteen years, aside from a terrifying hospital operation, I had a blessed life; I wholeheartedly adored my sexy mother, trusted and respected, sometimes feared, my hardworking and loving father. I had complete access to two cultures, two languages, able to think and speak in both. I was able to read everything I wanted, and to devour as much of this new television as I could, and my mother often snuck me out of school to go to double features at the movies, which she adored, and then covered me with written excuses; in short, I could have my ice cream and toy soldiers too. I never could’ve surmounted the obstacles I’d face later without that fundamental sense of optimism instilled by my mother into my nature. It became a basis to face life.
All was still well, even when they sent me off, at fourteen, to freshman year at boarding school in an isolated Pennsylvania town where we were allowed to return home only at Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring break, and of course the long summers. This was the next step on the ladder I had to climb to reach the “right” levels of East Coast society. Trinity, my first school at 91st Street and Columbus Avenue in New York, was fine through the eighth grade but would never do for the secondary years—although most of my class stayed on there till college. The Hill School in Pennsylvania, by contrast, with five hundred boys going through stormy growth pains, was suddenly “serious,” all hard discipline, nothing comfortable, sensual, or French. It had an American mindset, more like the marines in the sense of schoolwork and athletics, especially its famed wrestling and swimming programs. The motto of the school was “Whatsoever things are true,” and unlike in primary school, cheating was dealt with harshly, and a significant percentage of the class, for one reason or another, was thrown out during my four years. We were up by 7 a.m., freezing in the winter, fixed hours for chapel and dining hall, poorhouse food, five classes each day till early afternoon, mandatory athletics, early dinner, then three to four hours of study, and lights out by 10 or, in the upper classes, 10:30.
Nothing I’d done at my previous school seemed good enough. I’d been spoiled by New York, and if I wanted to get into Yale, like my father, I had to grow up fast. So I lived for four years in anxiety about not being good enough. Though miserable in many ways, I was getting the hang of it by the middle of my sophomore year, when, in the winter of ’62, I received the biggest shock of my life. It began with a cryptic note in my mailbox from our headmaster: “Your father called me. I’d like to see you at 2:30 today.” He signed it “Ed Hall.” He was a towering figure in our world, highly respected as a strong leader with Yale connections, as well as a macho image from coaching the hockey team. I was scared of him and had no desire to see him alone. He didn’t know who I was. My grades were good, my demerits insignificant, yet something was obviously wrong. Why would my father call? Something to do with my mother? An accident? Could she be dead?
Long-distance communication was not simple then. From one of the two old phone booths in the school’s main hall, I dialed my father’s office. Mary, his faithful longtime secretary, was anxious, I could tell; I can always tell when something’s off in a telephone voice. My father couldn’t talk now. He was in “an important meeting,” he’d call me tonight “from his hotel”—hotel! What was he doing in a hotel? Alarm bells were going off. Mary knew he’d spoken with my headmaster, and she asked if he’d seen me yet. It was getting worse every minute. I had no intention of going to see Ed Hall. I didn’t want him to know anything about my personal life, especially if there was some failure in it. But my mother was okay—or Mary would’ve told me. It was something else.
My 2:30 appointment came and went. I was now officially “in trouble” because I was not showing up as told. Suffice it to say, my mind was a blur. I reached my godmother, Suzanne, who was also French, in New York within an hour or two. She’d known both my parents from the war and had always seemed well liked by both. She didn’t tell me much, but enough to know it was serious, as I suspected. They were “separating.” What did that mean—separating? Not final, then? Temporary? She wouldn’t say more because she really didn’t know more. My father would explain. I asked her, where was my mother? I’d called the house and no one was answering. Suzanne reassured me that Mom was okay, but she didn’t know where she was now. It was the “now” that threw me. Yes, something had changed—and as I sensed, it was forever. All things change, I learned in time. And generally, if serious, they change for the worse.
Finally, I spoke with my father that evening at the hotel he was now staying in. It was a conversation, as I suspected, that would change my life. In hindsight, I see it now as the third and last great crisis of his life—the loss of security in ’29, his mother’s death in ’41, and now this break in ’62. He was sad, bewildered, stricken, not at all like himself—he was partially, only partially, in control. He asked if the headmaster had seen me. No, I told him. He paused.
“Oliver, your mother and I are getting a divorce.”
That was enough. I heard the rest along the way, I’m not sure in what order.
“She hasn’t been the same for a long time now.”
“She’s been crying every morning.”
“She’s in love with another man.”
“I can’t stand it any longer.”
“I don’t know where she is right now, but I think she’s going to France for a while. She’ll call you, I’m sure”—but he wasn’t really sure.
“Who, who is this man?”
“A hairdresser she knows. Miles Gabel.”
This was simply unbelievable! Miles was my mother’s “friend.” I’d spent part of the previous summer with him. Dad had rented a modern house in West Hampton with a big lawn, a pool, tennis court. Miles had been a hairdresser before, but now, with Mom’s help, had set himself up as a photographer with a small studio. He was a thirty-five-year-old man whom I’d come to really like that summer—movie star handsome, dark, dangerous, Siamese green eyes, earthy Queens Jewish accent, he loved life, women, dogs, his MG, and his beloved camera. He’d become an older brother to me, a link between my generation and my parents’. As my father stayed mostly in the city that summer, Miles would come out for stretches of time as a “houseguest,” Mom conspiratorially telling me not to mention this because “your father doesn’t like him”; I understood this explanation because Mom often liked people whom Dad didn’t like. It’d been such an exciting summer. Miles, who’d once been a lifeguard, was the physical father I never had, building me up in the ways of men, teaching me how to work out and lift weights and how to handle girls—but fucking my mother? It never once occurred to me; they were friends!
“He’s a bum!” my father’s voice rose emotionally. Miles’s temper was volcanic, my father said, unpredictable—he’d hit my mother. There’d been one time, yes, when I’d noticed a bruise on her face. My father went on. Mom was giving Miles money—Dad’s money. He was a “gigolo.” It’d been going on now for almost two years! Mom was acting wildly, crying each morning because she was “in love with this guy.” There was nothing Dad could do about it, it made him sick. He’d given her so many chances to get him out of her life, but she couldn’t. It was as if he realized, for the first time, that he’d lost my mother’s heart and couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept that it might have been through his own negligence. Now his decision was set, and everything I’d believed up till then about my life—that there could be security, love, and happiness between people—turned out to be a lie. There was no more love in Dad for Mom, I knew that on the phone. His mind was made up. He wanted me, but didn’t want her anymore. He’d now keep the “family” idea going only because of me—their only child. Now that I’d reached “the age of reason,” I was presumably old enough to understand these things. Perhaps that was why they’d sent me to boarding school, they’d sensed this was coming.
He told me the town house—our home—had already been sublet to the founder of a huge cosmetics company, whom he knew; all my things, my personal items, pictures, baseball cards, comic books from years past, toy soldiers, had been moved out of my bedroom in boxes. I found out later that my mother had been “locked out,” her credit cards canceled.
The divorce was settled over the next few months while I stayed in school, custody of me going to my father as the responsible party, as my mother had no means of support, and, most damningly, had been profiled in a psychiatric report, agreed to by her. My dad later told me the psychiatrist had described my mother as “still a child, living in a fantasy world, quite unable to function as an adult with a child.”
Mom never spoke of this psychiatrist. But she later told me the ends to which my father went to obtain the divorce, including hiring a private investigator to track her in Los Angeles, where he’d sent her to “recover her senses.” He set her up at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the detective hired a photographer, who got pictures of my mother and Miles, who’d secretly accompanied her, together in the hotel room. The blackmail worked, and she acquiesced to the settlement terms he offered. My mother’s Scarlett O’Hara prewar fantasy had come true in ways she’d never envisioned. Her home—Tara—was wrecked. She was wiped out, but she’d get up on her feet again, and she’d get it back! But not now.
Yet neither of them could come and tell me any of this in person? It was bizarre, hearing it all long-distance. Couldn’t my dad take a day, or two, and come down and see me? Or bring me to the city in person? The headmaster had told him it was not a good idea with the workloads the students carried, that I’d get too far behind or something like that. Dad said he was worried for me, yes, but he’d explain everything in detail in three weeks’ time at my spring break; he’d arrange a trip for the two of us to Florida, where we’d play tennis, be “bachelors” together, we’d talk, and we’d bond. And my mother would quietly recede to the edges of my life—a marginalized semi-adult.
But where was my mother? She hadn’t even called. She’d tell me later she was in shock; everything in her world had crumbled so suddenly. She was “embarrassed.” She didn’t have any money, and had to borrow $1,000 from a close friend. As I’d seen in the movies with Lana Turner or Joan Crawford, Mom was now a woman living in shame. In another century she’d have had a scarlet letter on her breast. Most of my parents’ respectable New York business community friends dropped her. Increasingly, she replaced them with new friends of her own, society’s outcasts—artists, fashion people, “faggots” then, gays now, divorcées, libertines, friends from Europe who wouldn’t judge her by American standards. She ended up returning to France for six months each year to be in their company—and also, so I gather, to avoid some taxes in the United States that my father would otherwise have had to pay. It made sense for him to keep her abroad.
But it was all really a lie. Dad, I found out, had been having affairs since the marriage began—with models, the wives of several of their friends, hookers, and even our chunky Swiss housekeeper/nanny when I was a boy of seven or so . . . which my mother said she knew about; she eventually told me stories of all those “girlfriends” who came to our house for dinner parties or canasta or bridge games, or were at the country houses where we were hosted, or the “old friends” from the war—Dad had fucked them all, it seemed! He was a satyr. Even so, my mother was “liberal,” not a scold. She was French, they understood “l’amour.” Men had that thirst in them, and to go against it and make a public scandal was ridiculous—as well as “against nature.” I gathered later from her own partners that my mother was naturally expressive and experimental in sex, exploring lesbianism among other adventures. But for my father, aside from some threesomes (two women, one man) he asked her to participate in, the sex with his wife wore off, as sex generally does, and he’d return to his chosen archetype of the tall, cold, leggy fashion model from the 1940s. He didn’t want his sex too realistic or too earthy; he preferred cerebral fantasies, which I guess is another way of saying my father never really let my mother fully into his heart.
It was a time of Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning The Apartment (1960), which uncovered cynical truths Americans were not yet comfortable in admitting. Mom, on her side of the equation, instead of discreetly having an affair with a younger man or woman, as some of her married friends did, actually had to go and fall in love with and support this young aspiring photographer. And she was emotionally way too honest to hide her feelings—and now, as a result, at forty-one, her life was falling apart faster than she could control.
Why, I still wonder, didn’t my mother put her taste and talent to work earlier in her life? She’d been ambitious as a girl to always better herself. From a Savoie peasant girl, she’d become a sophisticated woman of the world—in Manhattan, no less. She organized for charities and was also a wonderful cook, hostess, and housekeeper who knew how to do the things she’d hire others to do. She was practical, could fix things, and could be counted on to find a baseball lost in the bushes. She’d gone to interior decorating school in the early ’50s but, after two years of study, never followed up; she said once, “I’m sorry I didn’t go through with it. I had talent.” But again and again, she helped her friends decorate their houses without asking to be compensated. She cared about fashion, dispensing sought-after advice to several known designers. She had painters, actors, writers as good friends; she had taste in everything—in art, parties, houses, cooking, design—but not in lovers apparently.
But she’d tried, I believe. As she wrote in her grandma book, she’d always wanted to “be a good wife, to run a house, very old-fashion.” And I believe she would’ve been, if my father had been like her father—had been straight and true with his heart, which he was not. He was twisted. The truth is Scarlett tried to keep her side of the bargain, but Rhett, for his reasons, let her down in the end. And the door closed on her when she tried to make things work with younger, sexy men.
In the big picture, which no one really thinks about in the middle of a storm, it was the end of a family. I had no brother or sister to share the blow with. We were suddenly three different people in three different places, and if my parents didn’t even care enough about me to see me or pull me out of school, then what did I really matter to them? Well, then, I’d make myself matter to me—somehow. I’d have to become harder now, be on my own, not give in to grief or weakness or self-pity. I was also deeply ashamed. Something was wrong with me, considering that most of my classmates had solid families; very few divorces occurred outside the East Coast big city world, and for the most part, these were the “troubled” students who most often were expelled. The very next day, I was further embarrassed to be bawled out by Headmaster Hall for not respecting our appointment time. His consolation was telling me to find my “character” and overcome this adversity.
Three weeks later in Florida, I received one more tremendous shock. My father, reliving his Great Depression moment, told me flatly, disgusted, that he was “broke” and “$100,000 in debt,” which was a great deal of money then—and he blamed it on Mom, who’d seriously overspent, “pretending she was rich, always pretending to be something she was not.” He’d objected so many times, so many arguments, but it did no good. But I wasn’t to worry. He’d go on working, making a living, pay this off, and have enough to put me through college.
Mom would later defend herself, saying, “Your father was small. I made him think big. Lou made more money with me than he ever made. I introduced him to rich people; we had to entertain—to show them they could have confidence in your father.” This was only partly true, as Dad did have his own clients, some quite substantial. Mom began thinking of the marriage as the failure of an experiment that Dad didn’t have the courage to carry through with. “If only Lou had taken the chance and bought things instead of always renting them,” she said despairingly, he might’ve emerged on the other side as a big man in New York society. But I’m not sure he had that in him, or that he would’ve been happy in that role; later in life, he echoed my mother’s sentiment: “I’m a small man, kiddo, never was a big one.”
This profoundly affected me, because he was past the age of struggle—and seeing things differently. So Mom was right in a certain way, and he was terrified in another. And insofar as I hadn’t even been able to identify the phenomenon of a young man fucking my mother while I was sleeping in the other room, inured to all the signals, what could I ever trust myself to know? My naïveté at fifteen stupefies me. It’s a story that’s taken me a long time to process, if indeed I have. It’s a consciousness that is shared by most children of divorce. That our lives, our being itself, is the creation of many lies. If my parents had truly known each other before they were married, they would never have united, and I would never have existed. Children like me are born out of that original lie, and living a false front, we suffer for it when we feel that nothing and nobody can ever be trusted again. Adults become dangerous. Reality becomes loneliness. Love either does not exist or cannot survive. And my past, my fifteen years on earth, was a “fake past”—a delusion.
In November 1963, my last year at Hill School, President Kennedy was assassinated. All of us watching the black-and-white TVs, stunned, understanding nothing but the surface of things, the explanations handed down to us by our chief priests. Nor did we have any concept of the changes going on in America’s foreign policy as we moved closer to a war in Asia. After four long years, I felt like an overworked clerk, always under obligation to do what I was told rather than having a genuine curiosity over any subject matter. I was more robot than human, with excellent grades and varsity letters in grueling cross-country in the fall and gentlemanly tennis in the spring—and thus, with relief more than joy, I was admitted to Yale, my father’s alma mater. To which I went in the fall of 1964 and . . . oh, it’s difficult to explain why you come to a full stop. High achievement was expected of me; it was bred into my bones. American life is geared to upward motion; the only response to adversity I knew was “Never Give Up. Never. Never.” But suddenly I did—because I was “burned out” but didn’t even know it. You never do, as the psychological aspects of stress in those days were not acknowledged. I had no one I could talk to, no one I trusted. My father would only think it a lapse that could be corrected. And my mother . . . ? Truly, I needed her then, because I had no place to lay my heart down and I was scared, more scared than I’d ever been—and lonely. But at that place and time, I was hardened against her as a weakling who’d betrayed our family.
I negotiated with the dean at Yale to take a year off, something that was rare then. On a bulletin board was an offer from a Catholic Church group in Taiwan, strongly anticommunist, which had a school in Vietnam that needed teachers. As long as I could get myself there, the salary was low but livable. My father, devastated, nonetheless accepted my desire to go, assuming I’d return to Yale.
So in June 1965 I began teaching several large classes of English-speaking high school students in Cholon, an overcrowded Chinese suburb of Saigon. I’d never seen so many people in my life, every inch of space taken, squabbled over, prized—faces, smells, sex, and a mindset wholly different from the American one. Meanwhile, US military were filtering into the city in larger groups as the war expanded. Terror-bombing attacks were on the rise, but life was pretty good in general, as I whipped around on my motor scooter to all kinds of strange places at night without fear. I grew a beard and got as far away from the person I’d been as I could.
After six months and two school terms, I resigned and traveled alone around Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, then joined the merchant marine back in Saigon. I’d always been fascinated by the sea from literature, and in those days they’d book non-union personnel out of foreign ports to replace crew members who’d go missing in war zones in search of higher contractor pay, or a woman, or whatever. My job was that of a “wiper,” which is the lowest skill on the ship and the dirtiest down in the engine room, blowing boilers twice a day and cleaning out the gunk.
I traveled back to the States on a hard, storm-tossed thirty-seven-day voyage, which killed any further desire to go to sea. And once on dry land in Oregon, with my savings I took off for Mexico, where I holed up in a hotel room in Guadalajara. Here, to my surprise, I began writing day and night, in longhand, about all my new experiences. Really, I was pouring out my innermost feelings, because I had to. They flooded out of me like tears, beautiful, long, lush, looping sentences calling attention to myself—me! For the first time in my life, I existed not as someone else’s projection but as a person who was right there—on paper at least.
This was a glorious release, the strongest emotions I’d ever had. Rarely leaving my monk’s cell in that small hotel with a flowered balcony overlooking a church, an alley, and a barking dog, I spent the next four weeks vomiting up a raw two-hundred-page semiautobiographical “cry in the night” from the perspective of a young man. I called it “A Child’s Night Dream,” and it read big and bold, and feverish like a dream; certainly pretentious in areas, but confirming an independent existence.
Reading much of the literature that I’d missed as a young man, I reentered Yale in September of ’66. But my heart was not in it. My interest in this parallel universe outside New Haven had only deepened, and I kept at my novel with the same fervor I originally felt in Mexico. My course load of six classes seemed to slip away as I sat in my room most of the day and shaped what I’d written in blood into a more organized second draft.
So when the midterms came around, another dean called me in to inquire if something was wrong. After all, there was no record of my attendance at any of my classes. He presented me a document, and I remember staring at a long column of F’s—or was it zeros? I’d reached another breaking point, a terrifying choice I had to make. I can still hear the clock on the wall in his office ticking on this dreary fall afternoon, and the shouts of young men playing touch football in the distance. I could get to work right away and make it up, the dean said, or I could withdraw for a second and final time from Yale; but this time I could never come back. I imagined my father’s anger about both the tuition money gone up in smoke and my clear failure of will to become a Yale man and join the societal mainstream.
It’s a moment I’ll never forget. In a resigned voice I nodded to the dean and said, “I’ll leave.” He was surprised and asked me if I was sure, and I repeated what I’d said. I couldn’t waste words. I was numb, depressed. I didn’t know what I wanted to do as much as I knew what I didn’t want—and that was to be my father, whom I loved—but destiny is never clear when it arrives. Sometimes we just refuse to do what we no longer feel good about doing. These moments are mysteries in our lives, but we know everything will change.
With Dad’s grudging consent (what else could he do?) I returned to New York and, in my bedroom at his apartment hotel, feverishly kept writing, praying in my heart to be delivered from this self-imposed hell by a publisher who’d accept the book. I was just twenty, and I worked ceaselessly and guiltily to show Dad my resolve, and within three more painful months, my book was two hundred pages longer. On the streets in midtown Manhattan, I’d depressingly see people hustling, making all kinds of money in a new era of prosperity, and here I was into my own solitary narcissism. I hated myself for doing this. But I was after something else and it was important, but what?
The novel went out through a friend of my father’s to, I believe, two potential publishers. One replied in the negative right away, but surprisingly, the esteemed Robert Gottlieb at Simon & Schuster considered it carefully for several weeks, or so I’m told. In his decision, I thought, lay the balance of my life; if he said yes, I’d happily become a novelist in New York, and I’d stay.
When he finally said no—well, I’d expected that, but I took it very hard as a sign of my lack of worth. I’d overreached, flown too close to the sun, like Icarus, writing selfishly on and on about myself. I was filled with exaggerated shame and self-loathing. I gave up on myself, romantically assuming my heart was “broken,” however it is that a heart “breaks”; there were very dark thoughts propelling me, something stronger than me. Those of you who remember what it’s like being nineteen or twenty will recognize it as a dangerous time, even if adults in those days didn’t take adolescence seriously. If I didn’t have the courage to take my own life, perhaps God, in whom I was raised to believe, would take it for me in payment for my “sin” of hubris.
That’s why I went back to Vietnam in the US Infantry—to take part in this war of my generation. I “volunteered for the draft” in April of ’67, which was a way to go into the army as a draftee and spend two years instead of the three required of regular army. Nor did I want any special treatment, specifically insisting on infantry in Vietnam at the lowest possible level—as a private, rejecting Officer Training School, which would’ve delayed my wishes by several months. I was in a rush to get to the front lines before this war was over, which the media were telling us would happen soon. I wanted to be like everybody else, an anonymous infantryman, cannon fodder, down there in the muck with the masses I’d read about in John Dos Passos. My mother and father were truly puzzled but not overly worried, as, given their life experiences, Vietnam did not seem like a real war to them.
After six months of basic and advanced infantry training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, on the eve of my twenty-first birthday, September 15, 1967, I was shipped back to Vietnam . . . to find my answers. Ironically, my twenty-first birthday vanished into the blue Pacific when the clock skipped forward at the international date line to the sixteenth of September.
It’d be a long journey before I’d return. None of us, when we went, reckoned with the aftereffects. Odysseus thought he would return home when he left Ithaca. I wasn’t sure of anything . . .
The long, exhausting day was now setting over the New Jersey wastelands, a murmur of excitement stealing over the crowd, the temperature cooling just enough to leave the humidity sticky and sexy. The first fireworks shot out over the piers to the extended “oohs” and “ahhs” of the moms and dads, their children screaming above it all. BOOM! POW! POP! POP! “Oh, Say Can You See!” America at war. Kicking ass. Two hundred years old! The Tall Ships were now sailing in the glow of red, green, blue, white, and purple lights riding the shoulders of the past, the great cult goddess Liberty holding her torch at the center.
It was so beautiful. The populace adoring the soft pop of giant pyrotechnic flowers exploding into all shapes and sizes, fingers reaching down from the heavens in ecstatic glory. I wanted to believe like them, the million people around me, but I didn’t feel it. I felt the awe, but also a profound terror. Because I’d been here before. On a night like this, I’d seen the most spectacular fireworks of all—the real thing. An all-night battle where the artillery, the gunships, the tracers, the bombs never let up—not once—from midnight to dawn. And in the flash of those explosions, I saw bodies in such extremes of rigor mortis, they could’ve been sculpted by Michelangelo. Such power, so much death in one place at one time. Never to be forgotten.