by Jessie Close
Roosevelt Hospital drew patients from poor and often dangerous neighborhoods. At least twice a night, ambulances with wailing sirens would arrive with a patient in urgent need of care. My father sewed together wounds of passengers injured in a dramatic subway-car collision and patched up gunshot and knife wounds. When there wasn’t an emergency, he walked the hospital floors, chatting with patients, investigating the most difficult cases.
It’s a funny thing about my father: while he found it difficult to express his emotions to those closest to him, he had a warm, reassuring bedside manner. He listened closely to his patients, genuinely cared about their well-being, and had an air of confidence that made them feel safe.
I arrived in our family on July 17, 1953, while my father was still climbing the intern-resident-physician-surgeon ladder. Mine was the only birth that my dad attended. Mom later told me that Dad was funny when it came to childbirth. He had no trouble doing surgery, but he had been known to faint during childbirth and couldn’t stomach seeing mothers in pain and screaming. Somehow, though, he made it through my birth without passing out.
Within hours after I was born, a nurse entered my mother’s hospital room, glanced at me, shrugged, and declared: “Well, you gotta take what you get!” Nice! I was a skinny infant but am told that I had a loud voice and rarely slept.
Tina was eight, Glenn was six, and Sandy was three. A family photograph shows Tina and Glenn, wearing cotton blouses and cuffed pants, sitting on their ponies in the front yard of Stone Cottage. In another family snapshot, Tina is sitting on a wooden cart while Glenn is on all fours in front of it, wearing a harness. Years later, when she was famous, Glenn would cause everyone in our family to burst out laughing when she revealed on The Tonight Show that she’d wanted to be a horse until she was eight.
We had a pony at the farm named Brownie, who came from an amusement park. He was only one of our family’s menagerie. By the time I turned two, my parents had bought another pony from a neighbor. They also owned three collies and four little dogs. Most had been rescued by Dad from the hospital’s labs because he didn’t want them used in classroom experiments.
Because his little dogs were mutts, Dad called them the Flea Pack. One weekend morning my father was taking a much-needed break. He’d borrowed a horse from my grandparents and was riding through the Greenwich countryside with the Flea Pack when they encountered a hunting party. The men were all dressed in their red-and-black riding gear and were mounted on stunning horses surrounded by carefully bred hounds.
The Flea Pack attacked, and a horrified master of the hunt called out to my father: “Sir, call off your dogs!”
Looking down at the fighting mutts, my dad said: “There’s not a damn thing I can do about this!”
The fox hunters were not impressed, but my father didn’t care. He much preferred riding with his scrappy mutts than being part of an exclusive hunting club.
My parents quickly outgrew Stone Cottage on the Moores’ farm, so they moved to the larger Close property, which was called Hermitage Farm, on John Street. Granny Close sold the farm, except her small house, to my parents at a cut-rate price, thinking they would live there forever. I wish we had.
The memories I have of my first five years on Hermitage Farm, refreshed by family stories and snapshots, are all wonderful ones. My brother, Sandy, and I would lie on top of the stone wall that encircled the farm. The rocks were warm from the sun, and we’d use our fingers to squish the tiny red mites that crawled through the crevices. The green lawn seemed endless. A barn that smelled of the perfectly wonderful scents of hay and horses held our ponies. I loved walking to the lake below the fields, holding the hand of whatever family member was willing to take me there. Granny Close kept an aluminum canoe on the lakeshore, and I remember being taken out onto the water—we would paddle around the tiny island that jutted up in the lake, a safe nesting place for migrating geese.
The main farmhouse had steep wooden stairs that led to a screened-in porch. My memories are of the kitchen, where I sat in a high chair eating from a brightly colored divided plate; of our collie, Ben, who was shaved one summer for some forgotten reason and who hid in the bushes from embarrassment; of a little outdoor slide that made me squeal when I zipped down it; and of a pedal car tiny enough for me to drive. I had my own tricycle, which I would ride around the circular driveway, singing and yelling.
I remember once my parents gave a dinner party and I stole a cold stick of butter from the kitchen. Then I found refuge under the dining room table. From my vantage point, I saw pairs of shoes pointed toward me from under a formal white tablecloth that reached down near the floor. I was perfectly content with my butter in my makeshift tent.
I was stubborn, even as a small child, I’m told. When my mom ordered me to go upstairs to my bedroom, I glared at her and then walked up the stairs backwards in defiance. Me? Ha! I already was planting the seeds for being the family troublemaker.
My earliest childhood memory of my sister Glenn comes to me as a scene. We were in the upstairs room that she shared with Tina, and she was teaching me my letters. Glenn drew each letter of the alphabet on a blackboard. I remember being fascinated by the dot on the top of the letter i, and I kept copying that letter because I wanted to dot the i over and over again. There is no other letter in our alphabet that has a dot over it, except for small j of course. Perhaps I was already drawn to the unusual.
In the fall of 1953, my mother was asked to speak during a memorial service at the Greenwich public library for local soldiers who’d died fighting in World War II. The library was dedicating a plaque in their honor. Mom’s brother, John Campbell Moore, and a cousin had died overseas. Mom had known most of the boys whose names were inscribed on the memorial because they had been her brother’s classmates at the Edgewood School in Greenwich and then at St. Paul’s. She told me that twelve soldiers were killed from his class. My uncle Johnny died on November 26, 1943, while riding on the British troopship Rohna, which had been hit by a glide bomb, a new weapon the Germans had developed. The ship had been overloaded with troops and quickly sunk in the Mediterranean Sea north of Algeria.
His death devastated my grandparents. Grandfather Moore never recovered from the shock of his only son’s death. He’d been hard on Johnny because my grandfather had been a tough businessman and adventure seeker, and he had wanted his son to grow up to be like him. Instead, Johnny had been a poet and gentle soul. I was told my grandfather died five years later, haunted by regrets.
In an emotional speech at the library, my mother eulogized Johnny and his classmates. Afterward she was approached by two women who asked if they could call on her and my dad privately in their Greenwich home.
When Mom asked them why, the women said they were on a mission—a dramatic one—to radically change the world. Mom invited them over. She was completely unaware of how that chance meeting was about to change her life and all our lives forever.
CHAPTER FOUR
The two mysterious women arrived at our doorstep carrying a pamphlet entitled “What Are You Living For?”
Only the very selfish or the very blind person is content to leave the world as it is today. Most of us would like to change the world. The trouble is, too many of us want to do it our way.
Those words had been penned by American evangelist Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, a charismatic preacher and founder of a “world-changing through life-changing” international movement called Moral Re-Armament, or simply MRA. Buchman launched MRA in London on May 28, 1938, when the winds of war were gathering over Europe. Great Britain was arming itself, and Buchman struck a popular chord when he declared before a rousing crowd of three thousand gathered in a theater that nations not only needed to arm themselves with military weapons to defeat Germany but also needed to “re-arm morally.”
Buchman’s rearmament sermon was reprinted in a book entitled Moral Rearmament: The Battle for Peace, which sold more than a half million copies. By 1940, Buchman’s message had attracted fo
llowers in the United States, and when Americans entered the war, the ranks of MRA swelled.
Harry Truman praised the organization’s war efforts, and after the war ended, Buchman turned his sights on creating world peace. Flush with cash, MRA bought a hotel in Caux, Switzerland, that had housed 1,600 Jews rescued by the Kasztner train. Their lives had been spared after a ransom of gold, diamonds, and cash had been paid to Nazi death camp supervisor Adolf Eichmann.
Buchman’s devotees revitalized Mountain House Hotel in Caux, Switzerland, above Montreux and the lake of Geneva. It served as the inspiration for the Hollywood animated classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, turning it into a showplace.
Eager to recruit followers in the United States, MRA began holding summer conferences on Mackinac Island, Michigan, where Buchman’s disciples preached that world peace and moral integrity came from adhering to MRA’s “Four Absolute Standards”—Absolute Honesty, Absolute Purity, Absolute Unselfishness, and Absolute Love. “Changing the world starts with seeking change in oneself,” the Reverend Buchman declared.
My parents proved easy targets. Still fragile from the death of her father and infant son, Mom was also still mourning her brother Johnny’s death and wanted to prevent future wars. “People are still fighting and dying in the world,” she told her two MRA guests during their visit. “That’s got to stop!”
My father would later confess in his autobiography that he’d been drawn to MRA because it offered him a way “to straighten out a few personal ‘sins’ ” that he’d committed during the war and “immediately jump into a world arena.”
While Dad was enjoying his residency, he wasn’t looking forward to paying his dues as “a junior physician attending in the varicose-vein clinic.” That drudgery seemed boring, especially when “compared to the prospect of a ‘world mission’ that would change people and entire nations!”
There was yet another reason why my twenty-nine-year-old parents were seduced by MRA. My father would write frankly about it later.
At that time our marriage was under considerable stress. I was preoccupied with surgery; Tine [my father’s nickname for my mom] was at home taking care of four small children. My work at the hospital was exciting and sometimes dramatic; her days were routine and repetitive. She craved adult conversation; I longed for sleep. My visits home were rare and short. Tine felt that if we both faced our natures squarely, and were honest with each other, our marriage might be saved…
The first that we kids learned about MRA was when an MRA nanny moved into our house. Mom and Dad were leaving for an MRA brainwashing camp, although I’m certain the Reverend Buchman hadn’t called it that.
When they returned, my father announced that he was resigning from his surgical residency six months early. Granny Close was furious with him. During the coming years, MRA nannies took care of us while Mom and Dad made MRA pilgrimages to the Philippines, Burma, Japan, India, and other parts of the world.
Four years after their introduction to MRA, my parents sold Hermitage Farm and donated most of their money to the movement. If Granny Close had been disappointed before, she was absolutely livid then.
Mom and Dad moved us to Dellwood, an estate in Mount Kisco, New York, that had been donated to MRA by Mrs. John Henry Hammond, a descendant of the wealthy Vanderbilt and Sloane families. Like any proselytizing group, MRA was targeting America’s wealthy and disenchanted widows. They also targeted celebrity families and young idealists who wanted to change the world. In addition to my parents, their recruiters got Grandmother Moore to give them a sizable contribution, but Granny Close refused to have anything to do with “those people.”
Because my family had made major donations, we were allowed to live in Dellwood Cottage, one of the nicest houses in the compound. My parents once again hit the road, and we saw them—mostly Mom—only when they returned periodically to look in on us. I was only five, but this is when I first began hurting myself. I would rub a spot on my left hand between the thumb and finger until it became raw, and began to bleed and scab over. Then I would pick at the scab. My parents, nannies, and siblings all noticed, but no one said anything. I think they thought it was just a passing stage, but it would become a lifelong habit that I would return to over and over again whenever I came under great stress.
My best friend at Dellwood was a girl named Betsey whose parents didn’t have much money, so they lived in a tiny house far from the main building. One day while walking there to see her, I discovered a hole in one of the large stones that was part of the property-line fence. I stuck my finger in the hole, and it soon became a habit whenever I was going to or coming from Betsey’s house.
Many years later Glenn and I would return to Dellwood on a trip to investigate our pasts. A land developer had purchased Dellwood and flattened the entire compound. All the beautiful buildings—the farm with its barns and sheds, the pool and playground, everything that I remembered from my past—was gone. Glenn was driving, and I asked her to stop when I saw the stone wall near where Betsey’s old house had been. I leaped from our car and ran to the wall. The stone with the hole in it was still there; I realized that my memories of that place had been reduced to a hole in a stone.
It’s difficult for me today to look back at my parents in 1958 without wondering: What the hell were you thinking, joining a religious cult?
But I stop myself, because that’s unfair. My mother had lost her only brother, a baby, and her beloved father. Dad had seen unspeakable atrocities. Both were haunted by the war and wanted to make a difference. The Reverend Buchman’s call to “morally re-arm the world” touched them.
You must remember that this was also before the 1970s, when nontraditional religious groups, such as the Children of God, Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, and the Hare Krishnas began appearing on our streets. It was before 1978, when the Reverend Jim Jones committed suicide along with 909 of his religious followers in Jonestown, Guyana, prompting magazine cover stories about “brainwashing” by “religious cults.”
I try to keep an open mind about others’ religious beliefs, but to me MRA was a cult, plain and simple.
In 1959, our family attended a summer conference at Mackinac Island in Michigan, where MRA had a huge center. The Great Hall, where everyone gathered, was made entirely out of logs. As a five-year-old, I would stare up at the tall ceiling of logs and wonder what kept them from crashing down. An enormous dining room and conference rooms fed off the Great Hall. Everyone was given a job, even me. The children set tables, cleared dirty dishes, filled water glasses, and served coffee. I learned the proper way to set a table.
Just as we had been in Dellwood, that summer we were lodged in a lakefront house called Bonnie Doone. Sandy became an expert at skipping stones, but I had trouble making them bounce against the small waves.
Most of my memories of Mackinac Island are fond ones that bring back a smile. Sandy and I had become buddies who plotted against Glenn and Tina. All of us would walk into town and buy the fudge the “townies” made. I remember the taste of maple with walnuts, although I liked vanilla and chocolate fudge, too. There are no cars allowed on Mackinac, except for a police car and fire truck. Everyone else walked or rode in horse-drawn buggies or rented bicycles. You could ride to any beach. Picnics were all the rage among MRA families. Peanut-butter sandwiches were warmed by the sun; the grape or strawberry jelly would soak into the top piece of the white bread.
My MRA nanny, who was named Meta, got married that summer on the island. She asked me to be part of the wedding party, and I decided, during the ceremony, to try to stand on my head. My panties showed, which didn’t please either my parents or the other stern-faced MRA adults.
Sandy and I roomed together in Mackinac. I felt safe going to bed, knowing my brother was there with me. I remember being scared of my dad. I’d had a nanny nearly since birth, and I don’t remember Dad having much to do with me.
My best memory of that summer was when Dad gave me a new tricycle with mult
icolored plastic streamers flowing from its handlebars. My worst memory was also of my father.
One night my dad overheard Sandy and me talking. Someone said something about going poo-poo or pee-pee. Dad burst into our room, and when he saw that we were sitting next to each other on the same bed, he snatched Sandy up and slammed him onto the other bed. Our conversation had been completely innocent, but Dad began yelling at us for “dirty talk.” Not satisfied, he grabbed our hands and dragged us into the bathroom, where he crammed a brick of soap into our little mouths, all the while haranguing us about not talking “dirty.” Sandy still remembers that it was Ivory soap. I remember pieces of soap stuck to my teeth and how that tasted later. The only things that encounter taught us were to whisper and to be afraid of my dad. The next day Sandy and I were put in separate bedrooms, a wall between us; a wall of righteousness.
Sometime thereafter, a thunderstorm hit the island. Terrified, I pulled the covers over my head, but I could still hear the thunder and see the lightning through my light summer sheets. I wasn’t supposed to get out of bed, but I couldn’t bear being alone. I tried to remember everything Meta had told me about thunder. She claimed it was God moving his furniture—or did she say it was his angels? I’d also been told the sound was made by clouds crashing into each other, but that seemed unlikely. No one had ever told me what caused lightning.
Storms on Mackinac Island can be especially intense, and when another bolt of lightning and a thunderclap burst outside my window, I dug myself deeper and deeper into the mattress, trying to disappear. I reached one arm out from under the covers and raised my hand above my head until I could feel the wall. Making a fist, I struck the wall three times hard, waited, then hit it again.
Sandy was in the room next to mine. Was he awake? Was he as scared as I was? Was that possible? My brother was brave.
After what seemed like forever, I heard a tap back, so I hit the wall again, and he responded. I tapped again.