Born Under an Assumed Name Read online

  As a child I was simply absorbent, but the incongruity of the guard’s behavior would strike me one day in my forties: the irony of stoicism at a tomb. The guard was almost like a tomb himself. I would imagine another culture where, at a similar tomb for unidentified dead soldiers, they might have a more appropriate, round-the-clock posting of keening and wailing men and women.

  But here and now, watching the marine cemented in for me a core notion: that in America, you were not supposed to be tender. I had no way of knowing that this emphasis on stoicism was an artifact of government service: that it was perhaps government-issue instead of American-issue. All I could figure out was that, in America, any dark rustlings of sadness, chagrin, or anger were a sign of weakness. You were supposed be brave and act happy.

  In school, I’d noticed, it was a dreadful thing to cry, or to blush, or to be bothered by someone else in public. If the other kids noticed you were about to cry, they’d say, “Look, Sara’s crying,” and point their fingers at you. If a boy got mad at another boy, the other boys would tell everyone to come and watch them fight.

  Mothers kept their feelings secret too. Mothers in America were always happy. Everywhere in 1963 American mothers had big, red-lipstick smiles. No matter what they were wearing—flouncy dresses with nipped-in waists, pointy glasses and hairpieces, or mink stoles—their most indispensable adornment was a red-lipstick smile, like a smile of armor. Mrs. Johnson, the lady down the street who had six children tumbling around in her big station wagon, was always cheery. Her bouffant hair was perfectly sprayed, and when we met her at the A & P, she always smiled and told my mother things at her house were “grand.” And other mothers were much the same. Even when you met them in front of their houses as they were trudging in and out of their kitchens with their twenty bags of groceries, they didn’t show a drop of fatigue. They said brightly, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” even when it was cloudy.

  My mother’s friend, Mrs. Lawn, came over one day and her eyes were all smudged up from crying, but when she saw my mother and me, she said, “Oh Sara, how are you, Sweetie?” like nothing was wrong, or ever would be. This, and the other happy mothers, would leave me craving the true feelings hidden under the lipstick smiles. I’d spend a long time during my early adulthood feeling allergic to two-sidedness, and driven to shine lanterns into all shadowy corners; smiles wouldn’t count at all with me. They would seem like mere fakery, and only sadness, to me, would seem like truth. My main goal in life during those days was to lift the flap of a smile—to see into people. For a time in my life, as I imagine it, people probably ducked out of sight when they saw me coming.

  Even when that brand of fanaticism died down and I realized perkiness had its place, feigned heartiness would drive me crazy. I would eventually find refuge in France where, it seemed to me, people were more honest about the mix of good and bad in the world, about the existence of suffering in life. You could still have joie de vivre (and perhaps even more of it) if you acknowledged the tough stuff. As Khalil Gibran, the sage of my adolescence, wrote, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

  But stoicism would confuse and plague me through to the present. What to show and what to conceal? There seems a basic doubleness to life: the secret you and the you whom you can safely show to the world. What and in which circumstances is it safe to reveal? What if you disclose and other people don’t? This often seems to put you in a weaker position—particularly if you’re with a woman with that extra-large red lipstick smile. But then, on the other hand, the truth is, disguising can open things up to a level of intimacy and humanity unachievable by any other means. Francis Bacon wrote in the 1600s of the vital importance in life of “sharers of troubles.” “A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart.”

  But at eight, I was prepared to tuck away disquieting feelings and act brave. Emotions were enemies to conquer, their vanquishing a duty to carry out. The trouble was, I was born hypertuned to those around me, and this had been heightened by the necessities of a life of constant country swapping. No matter what I did to make them behave, a whole barnyard of feelings brayed, clucked, and yowled inside me, trying to get out, and having them raise a ruckus, even if they were deep inside and I could hush them up, made me feel inadequate, like a faulty American.

  When my father returned—it turned out the State Department had trained him in Spanish—he squatted down and said, “Thank you for being brave and helping Mom,” and then he pulled from his pocket a beautiful bracelet made of silver Mexican coins that jingled when I moved my hand.

  My mother said, “Thank God you’re home,” when my father embraced her, and she snuggled against his suit. He gave her a handmade bronze necklace she would wear frequently and refer to as her “lavaliere,” which sounded like such a loving word—a word rolling with her love for my father. My father gave Andy a leather lasso that the Mexican cowboys used.

  Later, I heard my father talking to my mother about his trip.

  “Yes, Ed would be a much better boss. He is smart, honorable, fair—the best of men. But Latin America just doesn’t interest me like China does.”

  “I think you should move to Ed’s shop. I don’t trust Smith like you do.”

  “He can do nothing to hurt me. Anyway, there’s nothing to be done.”

  “You can transfer to Latin America,” she said. “You could even leave. I can support us as a physical therapist. Go back to school and get your PhD in philosophy. Or get a law degree. You’d love to be a lawyer for the poor. . . . Maybe you don’t really belong in that damned place.”

  My parents had an unusual marriage. Still, my father would have found it difficult to have let my mother be the breadwinner, even for a limited time. He had a keen sense of family responsibility and would have seen this as self-indulgent. And in the male-dominated world of the 1960s, even this culturally independent man would have felt diminished by such a setup. In another era, a different decision might have been made, and his life taken another course.

  “It’s a good life, Lois. Good work, with excellent retirement. And the new cultures, the language-learning, the travel . . . You loved Taipei and KamakuraAnd China fascinates me. . . .”

  Then she said—like it was a ceaseless incantation in her head—“Well then, by God, Charlie, if you’re going to stay in FE, you’ve got to play the game.

  “If I can do my part, you can do yours,” she added.

  “Don’t worry, Lois. It’ll be fine.”

  But time would tell: it wouldn’t. Troubles, once they’ve taken hold, don’t tend to disappear.

  My father’s decision to stay in the Far East Branch was another flick of fate’s fingers—the wrong fork taken. But, of course, my father didn’t know this. He thought the world was good, that there was justice, that it was incumbent upon a man to offer his best judgments, that the CIA was a meritocracy. My father was such an idealist—a trait I would inherit, for better or worse.

  By the end of third grade, I had mastered the American trick. Now when a boy called me stupid or a girl pushed me out of the jump-rope line—instances that would set off Chinese firecrackers inside of me—I became the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I swallowed the tears and tried to imagine there was a pole holding up my back. “Shoulders back, eyes straight,” barked out the marine. Through sheer, pioneer determination, Radnor Elementary had become my home. I had kneaded and pressed myself into the mold and achieved my goal: I had become ordinary.

  8

  america

  In fourth grade, I wound all the strands of Americanness into a ball. One of the strands was resourcefulness, a trait I honed at Brownies. At our very first meeting, we made sit-upons—decorated squares of canvas sewn on three sides with a Life magazine inserted inside—for our weekly meetings and cookouts in the woods. For Christmas, cleaving to the Girl Scout motto, “Always be prepared,” we filled milk cartons with sand, sealed them with tape, and
then spray-painted them silver. These were for our mothers to put in the backs of their cars, for extra traction in the event of snow. At Girl Scout camp we learned to lash fortresses and walls out of sticks.

  A few weeks after camp, my father loaded us up for a camping trip to Vermont. He’d wanted to take us camping in New England for as long as I could remember.

  At Dogwood campsite in Calvin Coolidge State Park, a place of green, dromedary-hump mountains, with my new Girl Scout skills, I taught the whole family, with my mother’s expert help, how to lash. All day long, we lashed long sticks from the woods, and by the end of the day we had created a gate that divided our campsite from the leafy driveway leading into it; we were safe from the rest of the world. I felt as triumphant as Daniel Boone.

  In the future, this skill would serve me better than almost any: this lashing together of sticks. I would be able to lash any sort—Maryland pin oak limbs, Bornean palm branches, Japanese bamboo fronds—and make them into a home. As an adult too, I would fashion homes from a corrugated Quonset hut in Patagonia, a decrepit duplex in Seattle, and an old mill in Spain. Over the years ahead, over and over again, I would lash my way home.

  When we left Vermont, following the instructions in the Brownie manual, we left our campsite cleaner than how we found it. I told Andy to pick a leaf off the grill and toss it into the woods. I was proud of how the campsite looked as we got into the car, and I looked back a couple of times as we drove off. Like spies in a movie, we hadn’t left a trace.

  My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Levy, was teapot shaped and feisty, with a loud voice. She dared me to beat my book report record from the previous year. Racing myself, I gobbled books at a rate of three a week—my favorites were the Landmark biographies of famous Americans.

  Most evenings, after I’d done my homework, in the dim coolness of the basement, I watched TV. I loved the cowboy shows: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Rawhide. I adored the moment when Clint Eastwood, the cowboy hero, rode off on his horse into the sunset, that moment when it seemed a man, alone, could conquer anything, and all the world was set to rights.

  I had a perfect 1963 American life. This was my fourth-grade routine: I went to Brownies, I went to school. I took art lessons at a low building in Rock Creek Park where I made clay ashtrays and painted pictures of the trees out the window. My mother and I shopped at Woodward & Lothrop (“Woodies,” as it was called), at Best & Company, and sometimes we even went to Garfinckel’s, the best department store in town. This was a hushed, somber-grey shop filled with tailored camel’s hair and navy blue clothes with gold buttons, where my mother liked to go “just to look.” I spent Friday nights with Charlotte. Snuggled in sleeping bags on the floor, we giggled until, suddenly, the Sandman sprinkled his dust. At Christmastime, Andy, my mother, and I stuffed grocery bags with old Washington Posts and made a papier maché Santa and reindeer. Life in America was hunky-dory, like it was on Lassie or Leave It to Beaver.

  But then some things happened that didn’t happen on TV. A girl in my class’s mother and father got divorced, something that almost never happened in those years. The girl’s name was Vanessa; her sister was Angelica—romantic English names like out of a book. I had Vanessa over a couple of times because my mother said I should. She lived in the ugly brick apartments on Bradley Boulevard. They were the opposite of romantic. I felt sorry for Vanessa. Sometimes I saw her chin wiggle in class as she tried to keep back her tears. I felt her shame and it made me look down. It made me feel too prim and lucky. Divorce was like a secret everyone knew—it made you live in a sad apartment with only your sad, frazzled mother who forgot to wear lipstick and whose clothes hung like sacks on her thin body.

  Missiles, lynchings, school buses to Mississippi: I had only a dim awareness of the world outside my school, but glimpses of the newspaper and snatches of grown-up talk drifted and rippled around me. The TV news showed crowds of shining-eyed black people singing “We Shall Overcome,” a song that swayed like an insistent pulse in my body. My father told us that attorney general Bobby Kennedy had urged his brother, the president, to back the civil rights movement led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a man with a voice like thunder.

  One day at school I went to the bathroom during the middle of class when no one else was there. The bathroom had a strong, unpleasant smell. A big Negro lady was cleaning the floor with a mop and a bucket. I was shy of her like I was of everyone I didn’t know. She stayed far from me and I stayed far from her. I tried to make my pee not make a noise.

  Despite my mother’s begging him to refrain, at the end of summer, August 1963, my father insisted on going downtown to join in the civil rights march. Though I knew my mother agreed that all people should be treated the same, she was troubled by my father’s participation in the civil rights movement.

  Her voice trembled when she and my father were standing in the front hall, and my father was getting ready to go. “You’ve got to play the game. What if Smith and his mafia finds out? He’s vindictive. You never know what those paramilitary types will use against you.”

  “By law, Lois, I have the right to my own private views, particularly when I’m in this country,” he said, rolling up the sleeves of an old Oxford cloth shirt and setting out for the bus to the Mall.

  “Don’t be such a maverick,” she yelled out the door. “You’re a sitting duck for that man.”

  When we watched TV later that day, though, my mother said, “Oh my Lord, there’s Charlie!” For a split second, we were sure we saw my father, in his baggy white shirt and his horn-rimmed glasses, in the crowd watching Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech. My mother’s voice was excited and proud now, even though she had been worried and mad before. We all dropped to the floor and watched the speech. It was so powerful that it was like the ocean was roaring through your body. “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside let freedom ring”

  My father came home with his eyes full of stars. He seemed astonished, ebullient, and proud. I’d never seen him so lit up. America was a grand country, my father’s squared shoulders and high-tilted head said. We won World War II and now we were fighting for freedom in our own country. “Look how we have struggled to defeat segregation and are finally doing it,” my father said, sitting at the kitchen table, telling us about the 1954 ruling that made segregation unconstitutional, the 1956 bus boycott, and now Martin Luther King Jr.’s thrilling speech. “We still have a long way to go on civil rights,” he said. “It is two steps forward and one step back, but we’re making steady progress.

  “We are a strong country,” my father said, pointing to the pictures of marchers amassed at the Mall in the Washington Post, “because we can criticize ourselves. We can look at our problems and then do something about them. This is what makes America exceptional. . . . And we are such a rich country that, if we handle our wealth properly, we can end poverty and illiteracy throughout the world.” My father’s eyes were excited and sure.

  “President Kennedy believes,” my father said, “that helping to raise the standard of living in poorer countries is not only the best way to help the people of those countries, but the best method for influencing people in favor of our way of thinking, and the best way to prevent the spread of brutal Communist governments, and other undemocratic regimes around the world.

  “It is a time of great hope,” my father said. His words made my heart thrill.

  What turned my father, this Missouri boy, son of an irascible Baptist businessman, into a liberal, and a civil rights marcher? A couple of times, my father told me of the sole visit he had made, as a young boy, to see his father’s father. That day, his father drove him to a street corner in Skid Row in St. Louis. There, surrounded by decrepit buildings and bedraggled people, his father introduced him to a bum standing at the curb: a grubby, scarily disheveled man—my great-grandfather. My father never knew the cause of his grand
father’s degradation: alcoholism, mental illness, poverty, unemployment—he could only guess. But the incident was lodged in a prominent spot in my father’s memory.

  Another story my father told me just once. I was in my forties and my father stood close to me as he spoke in a quiet voice. One day when he was a boy, he said, one of his uncles had displayed for him his prize possession: a hanging noose from a lynching. My own body chilled at his words, and I could hear the horror in my father’s unnaturally quiet voice, and see it in his trembling hands, holding the invisible circle of rope. Then and there, I knew how and why he had torn out his Missouri roots—and why he was a “yellow dog democrat,” as he called himself.

  Over the years my father would lean across a table in one country or another and fasten his eyes on ours. “Sara and Andy,” he would say, passion charging the timbre of his voice, “remember this. The study of history is very important. It is only through knowledge of history that we prevent repetition of the mistakes of the past.” In high school, my father had fallen in with a group of more affluent students from liberal families. He joined their more liberal church, had dinners with their families, learned of a different way of viewing the world—and cobbled his first new self. But still, what makes a man, or a boy, strike out on his own path, and seek to write his own history?

  My father would develop, during his college years, a passion for history and for liberal politics. To him, a liberal was a person who favored continual “progress and reform,” protection of civil liberties, and who believed government should assume primary responsibility for the welfare of its citizenry as a matter of right. To him, men like Ben Franklin were not dead, but sitting beside him on a bench, striding beside him in the woods, instructing him from a lectern. From studying history, he gleaned three core ideas: First, that the rich should give to the poor. Often, he summoned the words of Franklin Roosevelt, his hero and the president of his youth: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Second, he believed that service was what life was for. He always said the most important work was service to country, and the noblest jobs were government jobs. And third, my father believed, like Thomas Jefferson, that a good patriot asked probing questions to help his country change for the better.