in and out,
back and forth.
My lids seek light
I open wide,
one tooth hanging
on the edge of a cliff,
another set in a tub of space
where it may wobble
and loose balance.
I panic at the thought.
I must bare my teeth
in self-defense.
I must chomp my way
into old age.
Ah, I smile
and open wide
and lift my electric toothbrush
off of its solid base,
and brush and brush
and brush.
10
Alone
THE STATE DEPARTMENT PERMITS new ambassadors to travel first class on their inaugural voyage to posts, and so I had a good night’s sleep on Swiss Air, stretching out completely under a cloud-soft duvet. When the sun came up and the plane door opened, I was greeted by Michael Polt, the deputy chief of mission who had served as ambassador in the interim between the previous ambassador and myself. My cousin Irene was there too, and we embraced. Irene and Michael each handed me a large and glorious bouquet of flowers.
The ambassador’s residence in Bern would be my home, but not mine alone. It had been furnished over many years by the State Department and by faceless previous ambassadors, and it would continue to serve as a public space. I would share it with countless visitors, as well as the butler, the maids, the gardener, and the chef.
The first thing I did after arriving was to remove the dusty, leather-bound books from the shelves in one of the two adjoining living rooms. A brown smell rose up; they had been untouched for a long time and were more like wallpaper than books. They seemed sad. No one had opened them in years. I stashed them in boxes and the butler relegated them to the basement. Instead, I filled the shelves with my favorite books with their gaudy covers and uneven sizes—a full set of Updike, Phillip Roth, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, and the almost complete works of Anita Brookner.
I felt, with a self-conscious pride, that I was revealing an important part of myself. The inventory was personal. Most intimate were the thin books of poetry I had acquired over a lifetime, some with covers that had begun to show their age. I wanted the guests to know who I was and also wished to provide an overview of American literature. In my more self-congratulatory moments, I believed my books would demonstrate that I was well-read. To be kultiviert earns more status in Europe than in the United States.
Then I unpacked photographs of my grandparents and my father and mother and placed them on an oblong table in the hallway. I wanted them there with me in the residence. They were part of the story. I placed my grandfather’s portrait next to my father’s. Both were tinted sepia brown, taken by the same photographer on the same day. My father holds a folded newspaper on his lap. His back is as straight as a soldier’s.
Through the Arts in Embassies program, the State Department allowed me to select my own paintings and sculpture for the residence, limited only by the generosity of museums and private collections. The day the works of art arrived and were unwrapped was one of my happiest. The walls would now reflect my taste, and I would be warmed by their company. I replaced the china plates in the dining room vitrine with jolly circus figures lent by Vermont’s Shelburne Museum. I wanted to give my guests objects that would elicit delight and prompt conversation.
The Arts in Embassies program is designed to function as soft diplomacy. I had hoped that my books would have the same effect, but their impact was subtle. I rarely heard a comment. Only two or three people commented on the Faulkner and Joyce volumes on my shelves. Most gave the shelves a languid overview, wine glass in hand, while searching for someone to talk to.
As ambassador, my residence was an attractive venue for diplomatic discussions with Swiss parliamentarians and government officials. I was frequently invited to dinner parties at people’s homes because of my status as the American ambassador, and I had the enormous benefit of being able to return invitations to dine at my own residence without lifting a finger. After breakfast, I would sit down with the chef and plan menus. Just before people arrived for dinner, I would survey the dining room table: ornate silver candlesticks, beautiful flower arrangements, sparkling silverware, and the official gold-rimmed china with its eagle crest. I was ready to be the host.
The subject of our diplomatic discussions, for almost my entire stay, was the role of neutral Switzerland during World War II when it was surrounded by Nazi occupied countries. The United States, under pressure from aging Holocaust survivors, was demanding that dormant Swiss bank accounts (accounts whose owner could not be found) be identified and returned to the heirs of the survivors or victims. The Swiss were adhering to their normal bureaucratic procedures and made no exceptions as they asked for death certificates from relatives of concentration camp victims. It was as if they were oblivious to the horror beyond their borders.
The spotlight was on the Swiss banks. In an effort to be transparent, they published a list of dormant account holders. While skimming the list in the Financial Times one morning, I saw a name: Renée May. My mother. They could have found her if they had tried. They could have found me. Was the same true of the other names? I kept these thoughts to myself.
“Did Bill Clinton appoint you to be the ambassador because you’re Jewish?” I was asked.
“Of course not. He probably doesn’t even know,” I replied.
Almost every day, I met or spoke with a banking or government official, or members of the international Jewish community. One morning I visited Herr Meyer, the head of the Swiss banking association, whose office was on the top floor of Bank Sarasin in Basel. The banks had found a mere handful of accounts by then, and I described the power imbalance between the banks and the Holocaust survivor or heir: there was a long form to fill out, and then a hefty sum to the banks to conduct a search, and that was only the beginning.
Meyer was on the defensive. There was no need to do anything. Very few Jews deposited their fortunes in Swiss banks; instead, they would send money to America, he explained. I tried to pierce his official position, but I failed.
I took the elevator down the eight floors to the lobby and was greeted, for the first time, by my French cousin. Germaine Molina had written me a letter when I arrived at the embassy and invited me to have lunch. We hugged for a long minute. As we walked down the street to her favorite Italian restaurant, I described my conversation with Meyer. Suddenly, tears ran down my cheeks. I could not stop.
When we sat down to eat, Germaine started telling me family stories. Cousin Andre and his wife, Mimi, were interned in a Swiss refugee camp. Andre’s brother was arrested in Paris and never seen again. Others were turned back at the border, only to fall into the hands of the Nazis. If only Herr Meyer could have seen their faces. Would he have understood? If only I could have made their case more effectively.
A conservative parliamentarian, Adolphe Blöcher, made a statement: “All the Jews want is money.” I winced. No, the search for the thousands of bank accounts was about the thousands of people who had died. The banks could not be allowed to make them disappear again.
I felt a deep responsibility. I carried it daily as I praised Swiss parliamentarians for inaugurating a study of Switzerland’s role during World War II and criticized the banks for stonewalling. I played good cop, bad cop. It took a toll on me emotionally when I had to control my frustration, even anger. There were few outlets.
But my books served me well. I took out a volume or two quite often after the parties had ended and I found myself alone with that special loneliness that follows all goodbyes. I had come to Bern soon after my divorce from the man who was the father of our four children, and to whom I had been married for thirty-seven years. I did not have a partner. I felt the vacuum, especially when everyone had left and I was alone in a way I never had been before.
MY PREVIOUS PRESIDENTIAL appointment had been as deputy secr
etary of education in Washington. I had been separated from my husband for much of that time but hadn’t experienced the same loneliness that I experienced in Switzerland. In Washington, I first had a small apartment on Porter Street, and then moved in with two housemates to Ordway Street. Any sign of loneliness was quickly dispelled by our shared conversations over breakfast or after work. We were three lonely women who pretended not be. And we had jobs.
Life in Washington taught me how to maneuver in social situations. I could walk into a cocktail reception by myself with a straight back and a forced smile. I would pause at the entrance, as uncoupled people do, and look around. The advantage of being single in Washington was that there were many single women in the city, some of whom held powerful government positions. They were interesting to talk to and they could extend a lot of useful information. It was easy to join such a cluster and have a good time without a man.
One August weekend, the air was thick with heat and no matter how hard I tried to rid myself of the teenage fear of facing a Saturday night alone, I could not succeed. I had bought a nice piece of salmon, one potato, greens for a salad, and a proper bottle of white wine at the grocery store on Connecticut Avenue. My plastic bag was digging into my hand as I walked slowly home down the hill on Porter Street. I was hot. For no obvious reason, I started to cry. No one saw me.
I asked myself, would I ever find love again? I had dated several men in Washington, but no one seriously. I had begun to feel that a powerful woman sets off a flashing yellow light to prospective male companions: caution, she may be too much for you. Accomplished as Washington women may be, the power apex remains male. Or a man might call me out of curiosity, wondering what it would be like to go out with a former governor. When I was in office in Vermont, men did not hesitate to kiss me on the cheek and remark, chuckling, “I never kissed a Governor before.”
In my job, at least, I was hardly ever alone. The US Department of Education employed three thousand people, and when I was on official travel, a staff person always accompanied me. I became close with the three women who reported directly to me, and they took me on a shopping trip to several discount department stores to buy formal wear for my new life in Switzerland. I tried on sequined gowns and satin dresses, both long and short. We had a wonderful time.
“That one is perfect.”
“No, that one.”
“I’ll take them both, the price is right.” And we all laughed. I felt elegant, svelte, and exactly like an ambassador.
In Switzerland, my social life was different. It was more difficult to make friends with other single women, and I soon learned that the Swiss concept of elegance is not formal wear, but rather a well-tailored suit made with expensive fabric and elegant buttons. I took my formal gowns off their hangers in the huge closets of my residence only twice a year, the first for the annual Marine Ball, a festive event held in the spring at every American embassy. The first year, I invited the French ambassador to escort me. I danced and sparkled happily. At the subsequent Marine Balls, he was not available, and I knew no other single men to ask. I would dance one dance with a very polite, elegantly uniformed Marine and leave early, drained of energy by my efforts to be sociable and to pretend that I was not embarrassed by being single.
At night, I often passed by my books and family photos on my way upstairs. I said goodnight to them before I mounted the curved staircase to my bedroom where the covers were already pulled back by the maid. For those three years, I never had to make a bed, shop for food, do laundry, cook, dust a photograph, wash the dishes, or set the table. Or drive. Vernon would appear at the front door with his spotless Lincoln Town car to take me wherever I needed to go, wait there until I was ready to leave, and then bring me home. It was a wonderful life, in almost every respect. But as I got undressed and into bed, I would wonder what time it was in America.
AUTUMN
I would like to know the secret
of the dull brown oak leaves
that hold on and hold on
to the black branches.
I watch them sway every which way
in gusts that follow
one another.
I see one fall, but it is
only a leaf swept up from the
ground and tossed as if
it were still alive.
11
Independence
MY BROTHER EDGAR voted for Eisenhower, I for Adlai Stevenson. I could not understand his reasoning. But I fell in love with Stevenson’s use of language and a little bit with him. We had met when he and his two sons and his entourage visited the Brussels World’s Fair. Carol Hardin, his first cousin and my roommate, was his host. When we walked down the street in Brussels and encountered two GIs, he pushed his hand forward and said, “Hiya soldier, where you from?” The start of a conversation. I sat in the back of the room when he held a press conference and was enraptured by his deft responses and clear language. But my only reaction to what I was witnessing was to think that someday, I might like to be married to a politician. I realized later, as Gloria Steinem said, that “we have become the men we wanted to marry.”
After I returned from the Brussels World’s Fair, Edgar and I decided to spend a ski weekend at a lodge in Stowe. At the time, my love life was complicated. I was still in love with Dale, my classmate at the Columbia School of Journalism, who my mother disapproved of for reasons that now seem secondary: Dale was not Jewish. Then, in Burlington, where I had taken my first reporting job at the Burlington Free Press, I met Arthur. He was an ideal husband—a doctor, Jewish, smart, and kind—whereas Dale’s future was unclear and he was not ready to ask me to marry him.
I observed Edgar at the ski lodge. He attracted women with his easy charm and movie star looks, and he enjoyed being a practiced flirt. But to me, the women seemed needy and sad even though they could not have been much older than I was, in their mid to late twenties. They looked old and I hated the game they were playing. I made a decision. I never wanted to embarrass myself to get a man. I would not place myself in that position. I would marry the man who would take me out of the hunt and make me (and incidentally, my mother) happy.
When I was a senior at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, I was awarded a thousand-dollar scholarship from the Massachusetts Women’s Clubs to do graduate work anywhere. I had been accepted at the Columbia University School of Journalism and at the London School of Economics. My German professor proposed that I attend the London School, but my mother did not want me to go to Europe and leave her alone in her apartment in Pittsfield. I felt the responsibility to compensate for my father’s death and take care of my mother, but the urge to follow my professor’s advice was equally strong. Studying in London would be an adventure.
Edgar sided with my mother. After graduating from Columbia, he told me, I could get a job, while the London School would lead nowhere. (Neither of us knew what a rich intellectual climate it would have provided.) I did not have the will to fight back. I obeyed and enrolled at Columbia, only to learn a month later that Edgar would be traveling throughout Europe with his friend Bob. He had not asked for permission.
I understood then that I had to emancipate myself from my brother’s influence if I were to become the person I wanted to be, even before I knew who that person was. I wanted to do what he could do, without losing my mother’s love. The perfect combination would have been to be become both the good daughter and the strong son. Good enough to stay, strong enough to leave.
I realize now that Edgar also had to distinguish himself from me. This became apparent when I was elected governor. He was a man; he was four years older; he should have been able to go first. He had been first when he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. This was the same year that my first baby, Julia, was born. When my mother, brother, husband, and I met in a Rutland secondhand bookstore (midway between our home in Burlington and my mother’s in Pittsfield) to celebrate, I held out five-month-old Julia for my mother’s admiration and Edgar held
out his Pulitzer Prize. That day my ambition was limited to finding a place where I could breastfeed the baby. Public breastfeeding would have been considered indecent in 1961, and so the bookstore owner led me to a back room where I wouldn’t be disturbed.
I EXPERIENCED THE FIRST STIRRINGS of political desire in Switzerland, during Arthur’s sabbatical year at the University of Bern. I had left behind me a part-time job teaching freshman English at Trinity College in Burlington, staying up past midnight correcting 150 papers from three classes and nursing a new baby. I looked forward to a year in Switzerland as a wife and mother.
It was 1971, the year that Swiss women were pressing for the right to vote, and I watched the televised debates and felt I was watching a replay of the American suffrage movement. American women had gained the right to vote fifty-one years earlier but still had not achieved what Swiss women were asking for: gender equality. Their arguments thrilled me. I decided that when we returned to the United States, I would get involved in the feminist movement.
Meanwhile, I immersed myself in the new feminist literature: The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, Sexual Politics, by Kate Millett, The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer, and Sisterhood is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan. I celebrated their messages. At last, someone was saying what I had been thinking. I was not alone in my rebellion against the social norm for doctors’ wives, which often required a woman to work to put her husband through medical school. Her happiness, status, and pride were all derived from being a doctor’s wife, not any achievement of her own. In Switzerland, the spouse of a PhD or a physician was called Frau Doktor, and if he was also a professor, like my husband, she was greeted as “Frau Doktor Professor.” I took the feminist call to action personally. It changed my timetable. I could reenter the world beyond domesticity. I had thought I would wait to pursue my life’s ambitions until I had completed the responsibilities of motherhood, when my children would be safely ensconced in college. That sabbatical year became a year of thinking. Yes, I would somehow do it all.
Coming of Age Page 6