Split (2 page)

I remember my grandfather in his sixties—overweight and wracked by emphysema—but Leila once showed me an old photograph that made me understand his appeal. He's in an army uniform, fists perched at the small of his back so his jacket is held at bay. This might be the way he always stood, but it has the look of a pose, a pose meant to call attention to his belt bristling with a soldier's accouterments: pouches and buckles, binoculars, a canteen. He smiles slyly from under his brows, the glare that fills one half of the photo eliding a sliver of his cheek, so his face looks almost lean—my father's face. Behind him: wheel ruts and a truck driving out of the frame, its cargo draped with a tarp. The man looks like he's up to something.

My grandfather returned from the war and began a slow withdrawal from the family. He made a bundle selling mailing lists, lost it, made another fortune in art, squandered that. Always remaking himself. During those years he kept a lover, and later he married her. When he finally abandoned the family, and failed month after month to hand over the child-support check, Leila took a job at a department store—working long hours to keep up the mortgage payments—and tried to fill the gap in her son's affections. More than once my father has acknowledged that his fierce loyalty toward the oppressed began in his own house, in his role as his mother's champion.

Still, in spite of her hard luck, my Grandma Leila moved through life with an astonishing absence of rancor. Growing up under her stepmother's shriveling gaze, she didn't choose bitterness. She visited her stepmother until the day she died, brought food to the nursing home, and listened even then to disparaging comments leveled from the heap of sour bed sheets. And of my grandfather, who used to take her down peg by peg over the dinner table, she can still speak fairly and evenly.

Looking back, Leila's gentle nature seems a miracle to me. I think sometimes of the families branching back into the millennium behind me: my father, my father's father, my father's father's father, until they become strangers, their names and stories lost. If we could pass through these families, we might watch a kind of undulating loss and recovery of happiness, of sanity—for surely certain lives are better than others—steered by material circumstance: famine or fortune, sickness or wealth or calamity. But also by choice. By one person looking at the people who raised her and deciding what to carry and what to toss away like useless freight.

 

Out of these varied pasts, my mother and father came together, a testament to the attraction of opposites. The only photographs I have of their brief union were taken during that time: four black-and-white frames from a coin-operated booth. My mother is nineteen, my father twenty-one. Their faces are pressed together in front of a pleated curtain, scrubbed and gleaming in the washed-out prints. My father could have stepped straight off a balcony in
West Side Story:
his curly hair slicked back into waves, his skin olive, lips full. He is laughing in the first shot, the gap in his front teeth giving him a vulnerable air. My mother's hair sweeps away from her face and cups his cheek, the last wisp seeming to give him a cleft chin. She says they had gone out to dinner in Greenwich Village and missed the train back to Valley Stream. Grand Central Station, 1
A.M.
; "God, we were so in love." And yes, it's all there in the photo: their faces full of the sharp present tense of happiness.

Not long after that, my mother brought my father home to Huntington, and her parents gave him a withering reception. Kate and Bob served an endless parade of highballs and tried to mask their disdain with tight smiles and platitudes about how some of their best friends were Jews.

My mother still can't say what proportion of crassness and wisdom made them warn her off my father, but she thinks that if they hadn't hated my father, she might not have married him. Their college romance was showing its seams. But as soon as her parents made their disapproval known, as soon as they brought their stuffiness and bigotry into the equation, she told them, "In a pig's eye. I'm marrying him."

And marry they did, in 1964, when my father had just graduated from Cornell and my mother had finished her sophomore year. My grandfather Bob, despite his rue, invited his business friends and spared no expense. At the rehearsal dinner my mother ate frogs' legs with garlic, and out of some mixture of fear and indigestion she spent the night before her wedding retching in the hotel bathroom. At the reception she and my father got separated, and she wandered through the cacophonous crowd, still faint from her sleepless night, being kissed and gripped by hundreds of near strangers.

After the wedding, my parents moved in with Grandma Leila in Valley Stream. My father took a job teaching in the Newark public schools, and my mother transferred to Sarah Lawrence to finish her bachelor's degree. The change in colleges suited her. Sarah Lawrence had no official majors; students were allowed to design their own curriculum. That freedom and rigor renewed my mother's interest in her studies, at a time when talk inside the classroom had begun to seem disconnected from the urgent mood in the streets. In the fall, eight hundred students were arrested at a sit-in at U.C. Berkeley. In the spring, Lyndon Johnson launched an all-out war on North Vietnam. My father went to teach in the ghetto and brought home stories of families barely clinging to the hem of working life.

Late in her second year at Sarah Lawrence, my mother took a poetry course with Muriel Rukeyser. The class met in a cottage set in a nook of the campus, surrounded by a flowering garden. Inside, the students sat in a circle, with the doors thrown open to the greenery, and talked about poetry and politics and daily life.

My mother thought of Muriel as a mentor and went to speak with her often, but one afternoon in particular frequents her stories. She had just found out she was pregnant, and at twenty-one, with a war on and her marriage under strain, the prospect of motherhood made her worry.

"I don't know if this is a good time to bring a person into the world," she said.

Muriel looked her in the eye. "Don't worry about the baby," she said. "Babies are powerful. They look helpless, but you'll see: the world will turn around it."

 

That summer, my mother graduated from Sarah Lawrence and she and my father moved to Newark to work on the Newark Community Union Project, part of a wave of student activists moving to the ghettos. NCUP ran a storefront office headquarters and held meetings that stretched into the early morning hours. My father went around ringing doorbells, visiting with people in the neighborhood, working with them to file complaints against the slumlords.

Around that time, my mother's uncle took her aside and offered her a job at his bond brokerage firm. She was a bright girl; he needed people like her. She could rent a place in Manhattan, get a nanny for the baby, and start socking it away for a house on Long Island. My mother smiled and said thanks but no thanks. She had set her sights on another career: she wanted to teach school in Harlem.

It would be a while before she fulfilled that goal, but in the meantime she and my father lived in a world her uncle would have found unfathomable. They rented a dingy one-bedroom apartment in a section of Newark that had cobblestone streets and erratic garbage collection. They didn't drink or smoke, never did drugs, never ate out, never went to the movies. Instead, they spent their days organizing rent strikes, trying to get the trash collected, and, in late 1966, backing a black liberal Republican, Earl Harris, in a bid for a council seat against a white Democrat.

In a profile of Tom Hayden in
New York
magazine (another clipping Grandma Leila saved) the writer has this to say about NCUP: "Newark Community Union Project: Romance drips all over it; the young radicals love it out there across the land." In a photo that went with the article, a group of these vanguard youth are gathered on a Newark street corner, dressed in what would now be called casual business clothes. Midway through the piece, my mother makes a cameo appearance, as "the Lost Daughter of Goldwater Parents." In the writer's description, Ann, "pretty, long hair falling to her shoulders, closes the door, heading for Earl Harris' headquarters. 'If Harris loses we're going to have a fight here. Some of the community people are carrying guns.' Her eyes are flashing. It is prom night all over again."

I read these lines to my mother not long ago, thinking she'd laugh at the patronizing tone, but instead some of that flashing resurfaced: "Prom night! Yeah, and Newark fucking exploded." She was almost hissing with the memory of those riots, which would convulse the city six months later.

But the writer, despite his glib style, did manage to capture my parents' shared conviction for political work. In the private realm, they shared less. My mother, who was tending to a newborn and keeping the house polished, was becoming disillusioned with the division of labor in the new society. My father wrote the speeches and she typed them; he was to speak at a meeting and she was to give him a ride. This had as much to do with the times as it did with the depth of my father's needs, but it seemed to my mother that even amid the radical movement some aspects of the old order remained the same. When they argued, my father went off to the headquarters and she stayed up into the middle of the night scrubbing the kitchen floor with a rag and brush.

 

When I was four months old, my parents' marriage came apart. My mother moved to the Lower East Side and took a job teaching school in Harlem, as she had vowed to do. My father stayed in Newark. From both of their accounts, the time after their split was one of unexpected liberation. Their divorce was to be a progressive agreement, part of the new society that was to come. They passed me off with a bottle and diaper bag wherever their schedules permitted. It seems they were better friends in those years than they had been when passion clouded the air between them. "We planned things together," my mother told me once. "We had never done that before."

Their separation meant that three days out of the week my father was fully in charge. He learned how to lull me to sleep, how to warm a bottle without scalding the milk. He laughs to recall how he would set out from my mother's apartment, holding me on one arm, the bag of creams and bottles on the other. "Ann would say, 'Don't forget to put the wet clothes in a plastic bag and the dry clothes in the bag marked "D" and the damp clothes in the bag next to the pacifier, which is on top of the pediatrician's phone number.' I would nod knowingly and start losing things the minute I left her apartment." Once, he showed up to meet my mother for the tradeoff, feeling snazzy in a new khaki suit, only to have her point out a giant blossom of urine on his pants. Still, my father says he was grateful for the chance to be a real parent: "In the evenings I would sit in a chair and read and you would crawl around, using me as a home base. I enjoyed being 'forced' to miss my political meetings for a while."

After the Newark riots, my father went to work for Students for a Democratic Society, organizing at colleges up and down the eastern seaboard. He was based in Boston, but would always manage to end up back in New York by Friday night, where he would take me for the weekend while my mother went out.

Sometimes he brought me along on the speaking circuit. We "crashed" on the floors of people's apartments, went to student meetings, and rode buses together. "We had to take a Port Authority bus from midtown Manhattan to Newark," my father wrote me once, describing that time, "and, not being able to occupy you for the whole ride, I would let you crawl around on the floor where you would proudly pick up cigarette butts and show them off to me and the passengers—who were horrified. I think that a lot of my permissiveness was an attempt to cope. I was looking for some type of parenting 'style' that would allow me to be in charge without feeling the need to control. Out of that you developed a highly self-sufficient style of your own."

While my father canvassed for SDS, my mother began to distance herself from politics. At twenty-three she had believed that if she could gain entrance to the White House, if she could get Lyndon Johnson to sit still in his grand leather chair and listen for an hour, she could make clear to him how purely wrong the whole war effort was, how cracked in its very foundation—and, in the face of her lucidity, he couldn't help but change his mind.

It was a measure of my mother's faith in her own power that she actually went to the White House in 1968 and camped on the steps with a group of her friends, insisting on a meeting with the president. They stayed for nearly two days, sleeping on the cold marble steps, with no one paying them much mind, until King Haile Selassie arrived for an official visit and the protesters linked arms across the gate. Then the Secret Service arrived and whisked them away. My mother's picture was in the
New York Times,
to my grandparents' mortification. Two Secret Service men are lifting her up by her arms, her crossed legs dangling in textbook civil-disobedience style, penny loafers on her feet. She looks, in fact, like the darling coed: pegged pants and cardigan and glossy hair flipped up at the ends. My father loved that picture. He described it to me once in startling detail, a wistfulness in his voice at my mother's former passion.

But although my mother and father were both bent on political change, it seems to me that they worked from different sources. My father identified with the oppressed. It was fury at their conditions that spurred him on, and if one method wouldn't work, he would try another. My mother was attuned to other people's suffering, but what drove her to action was the idea that reason could win out. As a young girl, she once dreamt she was appointed to solve the world's problems, and she set about fixing them one by one, until solving the last dilemma presented the solution to the first. But in waking life, the problems were more intractable, and all her smarts and energy were dwarfed by the country's ills. Gradually, my mother lost heart for the slow, backsliding muckiness of protest politics—all the evenings spent arguing with people who mostly shared her views. I suspect that some of her disavowal of mass movements was a reaction to her relationship with my father, but whatever its roots, she stopped going to meetings, gave up trying to change the government, and started looking around for a smaller sphere.