They were creating monoclonal antibodies to "mark" the fetal cells so they could distinguish them from the maternal cells.
All kinds of rarefied research which Suits thought would eventually result in big cash. Beryl could have just done the work and gotten her salary and shut up, right? But not her.
She started feeling that the monoclonal-anti-body-producing-cells were her creation:
"I'm like God in a way, creating new cells that never existed before. No company has a right to say that the cells belong to it, they're mine, mine, mine . . ."
And she started storing/stealing the cells she was creating, married this Malaysian microbiologist who worked in another lab in the same building, mainly so she would have a place to store the frozen cells.
Only, of course, Dr. Wilenski, the guy in charge of the project, smelled something not quite right: some student had found some of the stolen cells in a incubator in Beryl's husband's lab and turned them in and they were eventually identified. Dr.Wilenski called for a meeting of all persons involved, and during the course of the meeting Bernadete rather naively defended Beryl: "She feels that the cells she creates are hers and don't really 'belong' to the company or anyone else, so she stored them in her husband's lab, which seems perfectly legitimate to me . . .”
But didn't seem "perfectly legitimate" to anyone else. Beryl wasn't fired but severely chastised, and Bernadete and I became THE ENEMY.
The next thing I knew, Nona filed for divorce, wanted custody of all the kids, child-support from me and Bernadete, and wanted to return to Kansas City where Beryl was trying to get into medical school, pile an M.D. on top of her Ph.D., get a new start. She wanted to put the whole East Lansing experience far behind her. And, let's face it: Beryl was sick, sick, sick—sadistic, monstrous, something science-fictionish, zombyish, draculaish—sick, sick, sick . . .
Nona wanted sole custody of Christopher, and I was accused of (hold on to your seatbelts) having sucked on the boy's penis.
All my Connie Fox stuff was brought up and made part of the divorce suit, Bernadete's immigration games, our not being legally married; whatever Beryl and Nona could dig up.
Although I don't blame Nona that much. She was just a sad, passive dupe, mainly. Beryl was the one who wanted revenge for her name having been sullied in even the slightest way: cell-stealer, indeed, she'd show us, bury us, drive stakes into our hearts.
In the back of her mind there were other, more subtle motivations, too.
She wanted to go to medical school, right?
She needed money, right?
If Nona got divorced and got child-support money, they'd have money, right?
Nona (with our help) could put Beryl through med school....and once she was finished and had her M.D . . .? More about that later.
But it went to court.
A judge named Kallman, who began the trial saying nastily, "I don't like any of the parties involved!!! Any! Any! Any!"
Bernadete and I had been forced to go to psychologists, make all sorts of depositions/question-answering sessions with Nona's lawyer, this super-hag, Nancy Wonch, Queen of Hell.
All kinds of stuff was brought in about me as Connie Fox. I was presented as Super-Queer, a veritable monster. Bernadete was presented as a conniving little monster. And it turned out that Nona got more or less what she (oops! Beryl!) wanted: custody, child-support . . .
And suddenly Nona, Margaret, Alexandra and Christopher were back in Kansas City and Bernadete and I were alone with Cecilia and Hugh B. Fox, III who, not long after the divorce one night told me "I'm taking off, man, time for me to get independent," and he moved in with his mother.
So Lucia had two of them again, Marcella and Hughie, and Bernadete and I were left with Cecilia who was just beginning to crack up, hear voices, drop out of the world entirely, and end up in a mental hospital . . . the beginning of a long life in and out of hospitals, getting mental disability checks every month which, believe me, she deserved.
Bernadete and I got married and we were fine, we healed. Her ex-husband, Lepasky, went to Boston, started studying architecture there. And we slowly "normalized," got up on the plateau of our lives again.
She went back into medicine. Enough experimental microbiology at Michigan State. Back to medicine.
She'd been a surgeon in Brazil, right? Only there wasn't any residency in plastic surgery in the Lansing/East Lansing area. Besides, like she told me one night—over Kibe sandwiches and falafel (and Bormas) at Woody's Oasis, this Lebanese restaurant over on Trowbridge right next to the university, where she started eating practically every night—"I'm kind of sick of surgery. Like one constant crisis, too much tension, and after all my experience in microbiology . . ."
Pathology.
Perfect for her.
Sparrow Hospital in Lansing.
We'd go down to Kansas City for holidays, never lost contact with the kids.
Couldn't stay with Nona, so we'd find ourselves a little hotel/motel someplace and they'd come to see us there.
Horrible little Christmas parties in motel rooms with a little plastic Christmas trees on top of bedside tables. Lots of presents, mainly from us to them, Beryl (blessedly) absent, and then we'd go out to some restaurant somewhere and have a turkey sandwich or something, all this sense of longing, absence, being wounded and the wounds not healed, between us and the kids.
It was pretty horrible.
We never saw where Nona and Beryl were living, but eventually the kids gave us the whole story. It was in the Kansas City slums, everyone in slum schools.
From affluent East Lansing, down, down, down . . .
You can imagine the influence on the kids.
Bernadete and I eventually put the whole horror story behind us and became the happiest, closest, best couple ever.
Something I'd learned from my grandmother: accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. I'd been hanging on to that old Rock of Gibraltar grandmother of mine the whole time I was growing up, right?
Alexandra ran away from Nona and stayed on in East Lansing with us for years. If there ever was a hippy-beatnik it was her. Always having friends over; Bernadete and I upstairs trying to get away from the noise.
I started using her drawings for covers of Ghost Dance.
Great artist.
No one like her around.
She eventually went back to Kansas City and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a photography major, is currently thinking about getting a
Ph.D. in Psychology.
Problems. Agoraphobia. Fears. Depressions. But still brilliant.
In 1986 I got a grant from the Organization of American States (OAS) to spend a year studying archaeological sites in the Atacama Desert in Chile and Alexandra came along with me.
I'd been working in archaeology for years, had had articles on archaeology published in the Indian Historian ("Mythology of the Ancient Tlingit"), Western World Review ("Taking the Edge of Strangeness off an Olmeca Glyph"), Pulpsmith ("The Voyage to the House of the Sun"), the Midwest Quarterly ("How I Decided the Sun was a Cannibal: The Beginnings of Reconstructive Paleo-Ethnology"), etc., and OAS took me seriously enough to give me the grant to go to Chile.
There had been a Belgian Jesuit working on archaeology in Chile for years and he'd come to the conclusion that there had been contact between the New and Old Worlds going back, back, back, all the way to Paleolithic times.
Alex came down to Chile with me, and it was the best daughter-father together-time year in the history of daughter-father relationships.
We stayed in Santiago for a while, and then went up to the Atacama Desert itself, and it was perfect.
No friction, no tension, just endless sunny days in the high desert as I slowly began to realize that the current theories that the American Indians had come to the New World via the Bering Strait during the ice ages were seriously flawed.
Like one day I was sitting in the patio of the boarding house we lived in talking to the boyfrien
d of the dueña, and he pointed to some distant mountains: "Los Indios por aca tienen una legenda que el rey Solomón estaba en las montañas alli.” (The Indians here have a theory that King Solomon was in the mountains there.)
King Solomon?
Of course I knew the biblical story about King Solomon making a pact with the Phoenician king, Hiram of Tyre, when he was going across the ocean to a distant land to get gold . . .
The source of all of Solomon's gold.
Where was the place across the ocean where all the gold was?
South America?
And had Solomon come with him?
Years earlier, at Tiawanku, Bolivia, I'd seen three letters on an ancient, ancient statue, had written them down in a notebook., and when I'd gotten back to Michigan State had gotten out Das Schrift, a world-encylopedia of ancient alphabets and "deciphered" them:
TI A NAKU
The letters had come from the ancient Middle East. TIANAKU written on a statue at what modern-day Indians call TIAWANAKU.
I was also very aware of the ancient Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, which is all about a voyage across the ocean (!) to a place on the other side of the world called ANAKU.
Date of Gilgamesh? 3,000 B.C.
I'd already written a book called The Mythological Foundations of the Epic Genre: The Solar Voyage as the Hero's Journey, which was published in 1989 by the Edwin Mellen Press, in which I claim that in all ancient mythology, Old World and New World, one of the central myths is about a voyage across the ocean to a fabulous land that is the Home of the Gods . . .
Anaku.
Tiawanaku.
Bolivia.
And here I was just on the other side of the moutains from Tiawanaku and someone was telling me that King Solomon had been there!
It made sense. It all came together, didn't it?
Alex and I wandered around in the desert for months. It was our best, our most wonderful time together, my genius-artist daughter and her scholar-poet father. What did we care about Nona and Beryl and stealing cells and horrible divorce trials, suffering and nastiness; here we were up at the top of the world, as close to heaven as you can get.
Looking back on it now I think she saved my life. A middle-aged gringo-professor wandering around in the Andes is one thing, but a father-daughter pair was something very different, wasn't it? Everyone treated us like royalty. Padre y hija . . . fantastico . . .
One day we were out wandering in the desert, looking down at rivers thousands of feet below us, when this llama shepherd spotted us and started talking to us.
"Qué tal? Qué bueno ver gente. A veces pasan semanas y no veo nadie.” (Hi! How good to see people. Sometimes weeks pass and I don't see anyone.)
He took us to his little house-shack out in the middle of nowhere, we went inside and he pulled out a box filled with spear-points, arrow-heads, bone-scrapers, you name it.
I still have them framed on the wall in front of me as I write these words.
Once he found out that I was there specifically for archaeological reasons, he insisted on giving me all the stone-points he had, all of them.
I gave him all the money I had with me, my watch; nothing else to give. But he insisted that I take them. So I did.
What I'm going to tell you next seems like an invention, but it really happened. Really happened.
A couple of months later, when we were in Santiago de Chile on our way back to the U.S., we got a room in a boarding house that was kind of half a retirement home for oldsters, and half for wanderers like us.
One day in the lounge we met this German who spoke a little English.
“Was machen in der Leben?” I asked him in my makeshift, rusty German.
“I’m an archaeologist, University of Cologne, the world’s greatest expert in stone-points.”
Stone-points? Stone artifacts. OK.
“Let me show you a few things,” I said, went into our room and brought out some spear-points and showed them to him.
He didn’t hesitate a moment.
“From Germany. Paleolithic—”
“From Chile,” I said.
“Impossible. They must be a forgery.”
Sure! The old llama shepherd out in the middle of nowhere in the Atacama desert was sitting around forging Paleolithic spear-points in his spare time. When I got back to the U.S., I went through the whole collection of facsimile-size books of Paleolithic stone-pieces in the MSU library, which, surprisingly, has a tremendous collection of such things, and I found a spear-point that exactly matched my spear-point from the Atacama Desert. Where was it from? The Negev Desert in Israel. Date? 60,000 B.C. Which to me (and Father Le Paige, the Jesuit who’d spent most of his life researching such things) proved New World-Old Word contact going back to at least 60,000 B.C.
Phoenicians in Chile? Solomon in Chile?
Why not, if there had been contact between the New and Old World going back thousands and thousands of years earlier?
We hated to leave Chile.
Hated to leave the desert, hated to leave Santiago, but back we had to come; I just had one term off.
And Alex eventually ended up going back to Kansas City to her mother, graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute with a photography major. She studied tattooing, opened a tattoo shop, never made enough to pay the rent, had to close down, worked for a while in a coffee shop playing Beatnik-Hippy with all her artist friends, worked for a while Xeroxing documents in a library in Kansas City, quit, decided she wanted to be an M.D., got into pre-med at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. But she couldn’t handle the biochemistry (taught by a Russian), and is now undecided as to what to do with her future, just broke up with her boyfriend, is floating, floating, floating . . . beginning to study psychology and very happy with it. I talk to her every day on the phone, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, and it’s pretty much the same story every day:
“Full of anxiety. I don’t know where I’m going, what to do—just confused, crying a lot of the day—I have to take care of myself, but I don’t know how . . .”
Another casualty of the divorce wars.
Margaret, Alex’s older sister, made a total break with Kansas.
Well, after Nona and Beryl had somehow managed to get together enough money for a house near a small creek in Kansas City. Small most of the time. During the rainy season it always overflowed and flooded the basement of the house.
Beryl’s father came for a visit from New Zealand, stayed for half a year, every day working on the house, adding a porch, building a “sea-wall—ooops—“creek-wall” around the property so it wouldn’t flood after heavy rains, painting the whole place, putting on a new roof. And when Beryl finally finished medical school, all of a sudden she started getting very nasty with Nona and Alex and Chris, their seemingly totally harmonious union suddenly degenerating into full-time war.
She knew what she was doing: driving Nona out.
And it worked.
Nona left, rented another house, and totally cracked up.
Ended up on disability, started taking all kinds of anti-this and anti-that drugs, put on an enormous amount of weight, started sleeping fifteen hours a day, started having all sorts of problems with her back.
Bernadete was/is making a very solid salary as a pathologist, and we started giving Nona some thirteen hundred dollars a month so she could not just survive but have a little comfort as she slid toward old age.
We’re still supporting Alex, paying her car payments and everything else.
But Margaret; Margaret was very different.
She left Nona and came back up here to East Lansing.
“I need to get back into ‘reality,’” she told me, “out of all that solipsistic self-indulgence down in Kansas.”
Solipsistic.
Eighteen and just finished with high school. Which she’d done by mail, unhappy with the schools in the neighborhoods Nona and Beryl lived in in Kansas City.
Solipsistic.
“OK, so what’s ne
xt, college? Michigan State?”
“First I want to take off six months and work. Clean Water Action. You go from door to door and get money for this organization that’s fighting for clean drinking water.”
“OK.”
At first a little cynical.
But she started going out every night, walking around knocking on doors, ringing doorbells, very organized, very efficient, a very definite area to be dealt with, nothing casual or relaxed.
Started bringing in some solid cash, began to feel good about herself.
“I need to get back into the real world. Mom’s just totally divorced from reality now: all she does is sleep, watch baseball, football, golf, wrestling or go to psychologists and psychiatrists, take pills . . . I want to get back into reality-reality . . .”
And it worked.
Six months working, and the following fall she went to where I’d been teaching in California: Loyola. Goal: to become a film star.
I was in the middle of becoming Jewish.
I mean I’d kind of always been Jewish, hadn’t I, having been so thoroughly raised by my Jewish grandmother who never ever said one word about being Jewish but who couldn’t have been more Jewish.
But Menke Katz, Harry Smith’s favorite poet, just before he died at 85 (the age at which he wanted to die), one night when Harry and I were up in the Catskills visiting him and his wife, Rivka—after our usual long, long, long dinner of fish and matzo balls, salads, delicious cake and ice cream (Menke was 100% kosher)—turned to me and said, “I have some suspicions about you...what was your grandmother’s maiden name?”
“Roos. My father used to always say Ross, but she told me Roos....”
Tears in his eyes.
“What I always suspected. She was a Jew. And you should become a Jew too, it will immensely enrich your life....”
Words I will never forget -- IT WILL IMMENSELY ENRICH YOUR
310.
LIFE. Remember, that was the night he told me my grandmother was Jewish and when I asked my mother about it she hung up on me?!?!
Who, Me? Page 22