From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  CR: He wrote about everything.

  SR: But that was part of my job. The fact that I was living with a family and taking these kinds of trips broadened what I saw and wrote about. My grandmother had a sister who had escaped from Europe during the Holocaust and moved to Israel. We went to visit her, and her son, on that trip, and she took me over to a photograph on the wall, a photograph of her father.

  CR: This was Steve’s first sighting of his own great-grandfather.

  SR: I choked up and I brought the kids over and showed them this very austere man in a beard. “This is a picture of your great-great-grandfather.” Lee peered up at the picture: “Oh, he looks like a Greek Orthodox priest.” That was his frame of reference. A bit of cultural confusion there. But that was not the part of the article that got people so upset; their anger went much deeper.

  CR: The fact that he was married to me was the main problem.

  SR: True. The mere fact that I had married a non-Jew set people off. We got letters saying, “You are carrying out Hitler’s work.” Others said, “How dare you take this mongrel family of yours to Israel.” But the part that was most controversial involved my grandfather. Early in this century he had been a Zionist pioneer in Palestine, and a number of letter writers said, in essence, “Your poor sainted grandfather, how upset he would be if he were still alive to know that you had married outside the faith.” To this day, when I think about those letters, they enrage me. The truth of the matter was that in his declining years, when my grandfather often didn’t recognize his own children, he would ask for Cokie because she had been so kind to him. Here were all of these people imposing their own prejudices and thinking they must know what was true for us. It hurt Cokie’s feelings but it infuriated me. It reminded me that there is still a lot of hostility toward mixed marriages. Still a lot of people who can’t get past their own fears and blind spots. The reaction caused considerable pain to both of us.

  CR: In fact, we had even thought, up to that point, that Israel would make sense as our next assignment. It’s a fascinating country which holds great meaning for both of us; it’s a great story and it didn’t require too much travel, or serious study of a foreign language because so many people there speak English. But after Steve’s piece came out I thought, boy, would this be a mistake.

  SR: A couple of years later I finally got a chance to vent my anger. After we came back to America and we were both covering Congress, we were traveling with a member back in her home district in northern New Jersey. We were standing in a shopping center watching the congresswoman greet constituents and she would occasionally introduce me. One older woman recognized my name and snapped, “Oh, you’re the Steve Roberts who wrote that article about Israel.” I stiffened as she added, “You’re older now, you must know better now the mistake you made.” Years of resentment just came spilling out…

  CR: I was so embarrassed.

  SR: I started screaming at this woman, “Yes, I did write that article. And the more I think about it, the more I know I was right, not wrong. You are the most bigoted, prejudiced person I’ve ever met.” Cokie was standing a few yards away—the woman never saw her—and she captured the whole tirade on her tape recorder.

  CR: This was not a good moment.

  SR: It was a good moment. It was a great moment. It was a moment of release and vindication. But it also reinforced something I deeply believe. You can stay true to yourself while respecting and embracing another tradition. You don’t lose your identity by loving someone else, you enlarge it. And you should not let others impose their prejudices on you.

  CR: That trip to Israel was one of many we took with the kids and they became quite seasoned and easy travelers. Still, we always wanted to have another baby, but it never happened. I kept saying, “This doesn’t make any sense. The only time in my life when I have both the time and the help and no babies are showing up.” I made some efforts to determine the problem, but my experiences along those lines were fairly unpleasant.

  SR: We already had two, and we had covered both sexes, but I think we’re both sorry we never had more. We even had names picked out, Sam and Molly, whose real name would have been Miriam, after my grandmother.

  CR: Finding ways to amuse the two we had was a constant challenge. There was no TV—only one channel and it was in Greek. There were few amusement parks or movies geared for kids. It was by and large reading and imagining, and years later both kids realized what an advantage that turned out to be. Without television they never formed the habit. When they returned home, they found their friends would walk in the house and turn on the TV. They never did that and still don’t. Years later they revealed that their return to America presented them with one socialization problem: all the kids in school talked about Brady Bunch episodes. They pretended to watch as well and found it was pretty easy to fake it. The story lines didn’t vary much.

  SR: No TV was fine with me. My dad had been a writer and editor of children’s books, and to him the tube was the enemy, a threat not only to our minds but to our living standards. I loved making up stories for the kids, and on one trip to Morocco, in the old city of Fez, the streets were too narrow to accommodate trucks, so the garbage was picked up by donkeys. Every night I spun out a different story about the adventures of a garbage donkey. On trips around Greece we would drive our green Fiat station wagon, and taking off from the Beatles song “Yellow Submarine,” we made up endless verses to our own version with the chorus “We all live in a green automobile!” But the Fiat never quite had the proper papers, and one night, when we were supposed to take an overnight ferry to Italy, the port officials wouldn’t let us on the boat.

  CR: Our whole vacation depended on us making this ferry.

  SR: It got more and more testy. The guy at the port yelled at Cokie and Cokie yelled back in her best Greek. Lee got frightened and finally burst into tears. Cokie screamed, “See, you made my child cry.” He shouted back, “No, you made your child cry.” Finally, in exasperation, he waved us onto the ferry with about two minutes to spare. When we woke up the next morning in Italy, we warned the kids, “Our papers are still not good, so we are likely going to have a problem getting off this boat.” Lee got this sly look on his face: “How am I going to know when to cry?”

  That trip also provided one of those tiny moments in marriage when you realize you’ve changed in some way. After we talked our way into Italy, we set off on a long drive eastward to spend the night in Naples. We didn’t have enough Italian money for the last toll on the road.

  CR: We were exhausted. We had two kids in the car. It was well past bedtime!

  SR: I tried to give the toll taker dollars, but when he didn’t take them, instead of getting into another endless argument, I just drove away.

  CR: And I said, “Yes!”

  SR: The guy was yelling at the top of his lungs.

  CR: For years Steven wouldn’t have done that.

  SR: If I had not been married to Cokie, I’d probably still be at that tollbooth.

  CR: He would’ve been a totally law-abiding citizen. What a great influence I am. But dealing with the Greek bureaucracy would make anybody a lawbreaker. There was the day the children and I staged a sit-down strike in a Greek police car.

  SR: The whole notion that anybody in Greece would pay a parking ticket is ridiculous. People didn’t pay taxes, why would they bother with tickets?

  CR: So if you parked illegally the cops would take the license plates off your car. I had actually gone through the process of getting my license plates back once before and it was endless. I had to go to the police station and walk around from one person to the next—the underemployment was enormous, so everybody had these little bitty teeny jobs—one person would stamp my paper and direct me to another person to stamp it, one stamper worked in the barbershop! It was awful, it took all day long, and then they told me to come back another day. It had me completely crazy. I was not ever going to let that happen to me again. The street I was parked on had spots
reserved for foreign press, but other cars were illegally parked there, forcing me to find another spot. Since I was only going to be there about ten minutes, I illegally parked. When I came back outside, a cop had taken off my license plates. I tried reasoning with him. Hah! Then I started shouting. “Let’s go to the Ministry of Information! Let’s go right now!” He growled a few words, then ignored me. So I put the children in his car and climbed in after them. Lee flipped through a stack of plates on the floor and pointed: “Here’s our license plate right here.” By this time I had certainly succeeded in getting the cop’s attention. He kept ordering me to get out of the car. I refused, leaving him with the choice of dragging a woman and two children out onto the street or giving me my license plate back. It was a hard choice for him because it involved losing face, stepping down. It’s something most men have trouble with, Greek men in particular. Finally, he gave me my license plate. It was a wonderful moment because the children went between thinking this was the most fun thing they had ever done in their lives and being totally terrified that we were all going to go to jail because of their crazy mother. But they were on my team. They were pretty good about hanging in there with me. Adapting to a culture is easier with children because they give you an incentive to cope.

  SR: The same is true for traveling with kids. Then it’s important to live on their schedule and not yours. We’d go to places like Egypt and spend the morning exploring tombs and the afternoon sitting by the pool, because the kids couldn’t manage another educational outing after lunch. We learned their schedule was a lot more relaxing and fun, and shared that knowledge in a newspaper article we wrote together about traveling with kids.

  CR: And we got a letter saying, “I’ve sat next to families like the Robertses in Europe and I hated having those brats all around me.” Can’t please everybody.

  SR: Living in Greece also gave us a chance to observe marriage in other cultures. One of the things that we ran into a lot was the marriage of a Greek to a non-Greek, often an American. Talk about a mixed marriage!

  CR: They made our situation look much easier.

  SR: In one case, a Greek man had gone to America for graduate school and met a fellow student. He was this dashing romantic foreigner and they agreed to get married and move back to Greece. Once home, he reverted to type and became a domineering sexist. At that time, most Greek men treated their wives that way. But this was an educated American woman. She was not having it. At one point the guy’s parents tore down the old family house and built a three-story apartment building on the site—one floor for each of their three sons. That did it. The American woman absolutely refused to move into the same building with her husband’s two brothers and sisters-in-law. It was a huge scandal.

  CR: The family couldn’t get over it. The parents moved into the third apartment, thinking they would keep it warm until she came to her senses. But her husband caught on and backed her up, and in the end they moved back to America. It was too hard.

  SR: Some customs stayed the same as they had been for centuries, others were changing rapidly, and many families were faced with a cultural crunch. I interviewed one woman in northern Greece who was a master weaver. With tears in her eyes she showed me a closet full of gorgeous things—bedspreads, tablecloths, pillow cloths—she had made over the years for her daughter’s dowry, or prika in Greek. But the young woman had gone to work in Germany, met a Greek boy there, and rejected all her mother’s handiwork as “old-fashioned.” The couple only wanted “modern” things. The mother was heartbroken. We heard a similar story in Crete, but there the mother was selling the weaving, so we proudly display her daughter’s dowry in our house.

  After the Cyprus war I talked to some families in the refugee camps who told me an interesting story. Because everybody had left their home villages and family wealth behind, young women were liberated from the tyranny of the prika. They could get married without one. The camps were a bit like California—people were freed from the traditions that had restricted their choices, but they had also lost the community support systems that helped keep marriages together. I told this story recently to a Greek friend, who told me about his own father, an immigrant to America in the late thirties. According to custom, the man could not hope to marry until he had helped his three sisters acquire their prikas and find husbands. During World War II he served in the American army and lost touch with his family back in Greece. When the war was over, he discovered that his sisters had all married without dowries—wartime had been like the refugee camps in Cyprus, customs had changed under the pressure of events. So my friend’s father was free to marry! When he got the news, his son says, it was the happiest day of his life.

  CR: The gardener who tended our citrus trees had three little girls, and he was already worried. When I would go to America I would bring back sheets and things for their dowries. And they were still babies.

  SR: The “cultural crunch” I was talking about affected many marriage customs. Greek girls would come in from the villages to Athens for school or work. In the normal course of things they would have romances and sexual experiences. But some of these young women were still expected to go back home and marry a man that their family had picked out for them. In the more traditional areas, the mother-in-law, the mother of the groom, had the right to inspect the bride to make sure she was a virgin. That led to a thriving business among plastic surgeons who would recreate hymens for these deflowered brides. I recently interviewed a woman on the radio who described a similar situation in New York, where young women from Latin cultures have the same operation revirginizing themselves before getting married.

  CR: These conflicts could be very painful. One woman we knew, who had moved her family to Athens in order to work, told us her daughter had been engaged and engaged meant sex was permissible. Then the guy broke the engagement, at which point the girl was unmarriageable. She was eighteen and her mother said, “I don’t know what to do about it. I would know what to do if we were back on the island.” Which meant murdering the guy. And no local island jury would have convicted her.

  SR: Living abroad put extra stress on many marriages, but fortunately, we found many of the trials and tribulations pretty funny.

  CR: When Steve’s boss came in from New York, we decided to entertain him at home, which was a big deal. We had invited fancy people, cabinet members and diplomats to meet with the foreign editor of The New York Times. The day started as a disaster when I got up in the morning and found a note from the latest baby-sitter saying she had left to go home to Australia. She was supposed to be helping me with the dinner. I cooked a big turkey and whipped up lots of interesting salads because it was hard to keep everything hot. A friend of ours dropped by during the day, the wife of the Times correspondent in Beirut, who had evacuated to Athens with her children during the civil war in Lebanon. We went into the kitchen so I could get organized, and I realized the turkey was missing. Where was the turkey? It was the centerpiece of the meal and it was nowhere. Gone. It had disappeared from the kitchen. I looked outside and there was a stray cat dragging my turkey. The cat had come in through the kitchen window and taken the turkey out the same way. I dashed outside, reclaimed the turkey, brought it back inside, and washed it off. The cat had only gnawed on the bottom of the turkey, so when I turned it right side up it looked just fine. I pleaded with my friend, “Steve’s job is in your hands. If you ever tell what I’ve done with this turkey, he’s finished!” I had no choice. The stores were all closed. It was the turkey or nothing. Fortunately, I had been very good to this woman and she said, “I promise you, I promise you!”

  SR: After she left Beirut, there were times her husband couldn’t reach her by phone, but somehow he could dial through to my Telex. Occasionally he would call me on the Telex and say, “Would you call my wife on the phone?” I would call her and read her messages he typed out on the Telex. She would reply and I would type back. So I was the link between these two people who were not having a happy time in their ma
rriage. The husband would write, “Tell my wife I love her.” And I would say, “He says he loves you.” And she would say, “Tell that creep to get back to Athens in the next two days or I’m leaving.” I would type out, “She says she loves you, too.”

  CR: We kept that marriage together for a year longer than it would have survived otherwise, though eventually the couple did split. But in that situation families always helped each other out because the pressures and the dangers were very real. The father of one of Becca’s friends was an undercover CIA agent, and when the station chief was assassinated right before Christmas one year, my first instinct was to call the mother of Becca’s friend and offer to help, because I knew the station chief’s widow would need her. But we had never openly acknowledged that we knew her husband’s real job. It was a dilemma. Finally, I called the house and, without any explanation, offered to take her little girls for a few days. She was deeply grateful and in fact no explanation was needed. It’s one of those situations where actions matter and words get in the way.

  SR: After more than three years in Athens we had to decide where we were going to go next. When we first went abroad, we had told The New York Times that we wanted to live in Asia, and they had penciled us in for Bangkok as our next post. But I had been in heavy travel jobs for close to nine years, and I was tired of it. I kept remembering a famous story told by another Times correspondent in those years named Henry Kamm. Kamm’s little boy had noticed that when his father left on a trip, he always carried his little blue portable typewriter. So one time he wanted his daddy to stay home so badly he hid the typewriter. The parents tore the house apart until they finally found it in the back of some closet. I didn’t want my kids to start hiding my typewriter. So as the time came closer to go to Asia, I balked.