by Jessie Close
“How long do you think you’ll be gone?” she asked him.
My father would later write:
I looked at her, but turned away. I wanted to take her in my arms and hug her, but that was “impure” in MRA, so I stood there, an empty, hollow feeling mixing with fear of the unknown.
My father wrote that MRA expected him and the others to be in the Belgian Congo six weeks. My mom started crying when he told her that he’d be away that long. Instead of comforting her, my father recited a passage of scripture.
Jesus said, “I tell you this: there is no one who has given up home, or wife, brothers, parents, or children, for the sake of the Kingdom of God, who will not be repaid many times over in this age, and in the age to come, have eternal life.”
MRA expected sacrifices from him and my mom as well as us kids. It was all part of some grand scheme.
My father kept a journal about his mission trip. He and the others arrived in Leopoldville, the Congolese capital, a few days before the Belgian government relinquished control of the country to its own people. The Belgians had governed the country with a brutal hand for more than seven decades, and the Congolese people hated them and other whites with good reason.
Patrice Lumumba was elected prime minister, and three days after he took control from the Belgians, his troops mutinied against the white Belgian officers who were still in charge of the military. Riots and looting broke out. Whites were warned to stay off the streets. Most Europeans began fleeing the capital. My father and the newly arrived MRA missionaries were told to get out while they could, but all the roads to the airport had been seized by Lumumba’s men. Whites were being beaten and murdered in broad daylight.
The other MRA missionaries hid in an apartment, but my father grabbed his medical bag and slipped out under the cover of darkness. Hiding behind trees and ducking down alleys, he dodged the soldiers patrolling the streets and made his way to the Hôpital des Congolais, four blocks away.
The hospital was overrun by wounded patients and was in complete disarray. My father introduced himself to the Congolese emergency room doctors and immediately began helping out. All the other white surgeons had fled. My father moved from one emergency to the next, pausing only long enough to use the bathroom. When he became so exhausted that he couldn’t physically continue performing surgeries, he slipped out a side door. He realized that he could not possibly rest at the hospital, so he found his way back to the MRA apartment for a sandwich and some much-needed sleep.
A few hours later, he risked his life again by returning to the hospital, only to be caught by guards outside who threatened to beat him. Fortunately, hospital nurses recognized Dad and intervened.
My father performed more than three hundred surgeries during the next eighty days, according to his logbook. He removed bullets, amputated fingers and legs, performed skin grafts, and dealt with non-war-related medical issues, such as tuberculosis of the spine, penile cancer, and sickle-cell anemia. He even repaired a soldier’s harelip.
At one point during the unrest, Prime Minister Lumumba asked the Soviet Union for help in stabilizing his country. The United States responded by secretly starting a civil war in the Congo and throwing its support behind Colonel Joseph Mobutu and his troops.
The number of wounded escalated, and one afternoon my father asked to be driven to the gate outside Mobutu’s fortified military encampment. When Mobutu’s car emerged, my father stepped into the middle of the road, blocking Mobutu. Guards confronted him with their guns drawn. The only thing that saved him from being shot was that he was white and wearing his doctor’s coat. And it helped that he was fluent in French.
Mobutu lowered his limousine window, and my father said, “I’m a surgeon at the Hôpital des Congolais, and I wondered if you could do something about the violence in town so we can catch up at the hospital.”
Apparently his request stunned Mobutu, who paused, stared at him a moment, then said, “Yes, I think I can,” before his driver moved on.
A few days later, my father noticed that the number of patients streaming into the hospital had begun to decrease—although he was never sure why.
Four weeks after that dangerous encounter, Mobutu sent a car to the hospital, and soldiers told my father that the colonel wanted to see him.
Many Congolese were still resentful of whites, and my father wasn’t certain why he was being summoned. He was escorted into Mobutu’s paramilitary camp, to a grand house where Mobutu lived. Inside, a concerned Mobutu was standing next to his great-aunt, who was gagging. Mobutu said they’d been eating fish when a bone had gotten lodged in her throat. My father could see the tip of it peeking over the crest of her tongue, so he grabbed it with a clamp and pulled it out. My father was sent back to the hospital.
A few days later, Mobutu sent his soldiers again. This time the colonel asked my father to visit and examine another aunt who was living in the capital. She was dying, and there wasn’t anything my father could do to save her. He wasn’t certain how Mobutu might react, but my father told him bluntly that there was no hope for the elderly woman. Mobutu said he had not dispatched my father to treat her but rather as an act of presence to comfort her and her family. That gesture was a sign of respect and also of Mobutu’s power.
Thanks largely to the CIA, Mobutu toppled Lumumba, who was arrested, beaten in public, forced to eat copies of his own speeches, and then made to disappear. Rumors circulated that he had escaped from his captors. The truth was that Lumumba had been murdered.
Because my father’s missionary trip had turned into a several-month-long adventure, my mother flew to Africa to visit him. One morning my parents discovered that thieves had broken into their apartment while they had been sleeping and had made off with my father’s medical bag, my mother’s camera, a radio, and my mother’s purse. The thieves had left behind two large stones on the floor next to my parents’ beds. The police said the stones were there to smash my parents’ heads if they had woken up.
My father’s work at the hospital angered his MRA colleagues, who had come out of hiding by then and were doing missionary work, primarily teaching Buchman’s Four Absolute Standards to the Congolese. They needed my father as a translator, but he was busy operating. Senior officials in Caux ordered my father to stop going to the hospital and to start evangelizing.
That order came too late. Being at the hospital had reminded my father of his first love, and spending time around people who were not MRA devotees had helped him snap out of the MRA spell. He announced that he was not going to stop working as a doctor. His rebellion infuriated MRA leaders, but it turned out that there was nothing much they could do. By this time, Colonel Mobutu was running the country, and he asked my father to serve as his personal physician and take charge of the Congolese army medical corps, which oversaw the army’s medical operations. My father realized he would have to live in Africa for as long as Mobutu wanted him there.
“I don’t know anything about military medicine,” he told Mobutu.
“Don’t worry. If you have any difficulties, just apply article fifteen,” Mobutu told him.
A Congolese officer told my father later that article 15 didn’t exist, that it meant “débrouillez-vous—work it out any way you can.”
When my father told MRA that he was not returning to Caux, my mother decided it was time for us children to leave Switzerland, too. Mom booked passage on the RMS Queen Mary, and in August of 1962, Tina, Glenn, Sandy, and I left for the United States, where we were going to live with Grandmother Moore. I was happy to be reunited and happier yet to be leaving MRA’s headquarters, although none of us was completely free of MRA—not yet.
CHAPTER SIX
A knock on our classroom door caused everyone to look away from our elementary school desks. Hollywood actor Vic Morrow poked his head into our classroom and barked: “Private Close! You’re needed at the front!”
Obediently, I sprang from my desk and marched forward while my teacher and schoolmates watched w
ith open mouths. At eight years old, I was off to join King Company’s Second Platoon—a fictional World War II squad whose exploits were chronicled each week in the popular 1960s television series Combat!
This was my daydream. I was obsessed with the black-and-white drama, and I often dreamed about how fantastic it would be to have Vic Morrow or Rick Jason suddenly arrive at the Parkway School in Greenwich to tell me that I was needed—on the front!
My brother, Sandy, and I were given an air-powered pistol that looked somewhat like a Browning automatic. It shot BBs, pellets, and little darts that had green and red hairs. I loved that gun. During the summer of 1963, my sisters, brother, and mother could find me patrolling the grounds of Grandmother Moore’s estate, armed with the air pistol, a kitchen timer that served as my radio, and rawhide dog chews that served as my rations, along with banana-flavored Turkish Taffy. My dog, Rocket, had an army-green colored leash, and he was my constant, beloved companion. Even then, my favorite way to play was to be alone with my dog. Hunting imaginary Nazis kept me entertained.
Rocky was a Shetland sheepdog, and he would bark and run beside me across the terrain, occasionally stopping to wag his tail and wait when I fell to my knees, barely escaping machine-gun fire only I could hear. At night, we even snuck out my bedroom window to patrol and spy on the few neighbors near my grandmother’s house. Most of Grandmother Moore’s estate had been sold off after Grandpa died, but I was a welcome guest on the land that used to be ours.
I wanted an army uniform more than anything that summer, and I asked Mom to take me to the toy store on Greenwich Avenue, where I’d seen uniforms in the window. After days of pestering, she finally agreed, but I made her promise that she wouldn’t tell the sales clerk that the uniform was for me. We would say it was for a boy who happened to be my size.
I immediately picked one that was just what the men on Combat! wore, and I was excited when we made our way to the register. That’s when Mom betrayed me.
“It’s for my daughter,” she announced.
I was so embarrassed I wanted to melt into the floor, but I had my uniform.
When I wasn’t patrolling the grounds on Nazi hunts, I was in my bedroom, writing or drawing. I completed my first book—a story about a family and its pets—before my ninth birthday. I illustrated it, too, and thought myself very clever, as each character’s face was shaped differently.
Mom had a wing added to Grandmother Moore’s house for us, and I had my own room with strawberry-patterned wallpaper and an off-white carpet. My bedroom furniture was painted a happy light green to go with the leaves in the wallpaper, and the whole room was Rocket’s and my domain. After living in a hotel and borrowed MRA houses, I was glad to have my own sanctuary. At some point after moving in, I stopped rubbing the “worry spot” between my thumb and forefinger that I had irritated in Caux—no doubt because this was the first time had I felt an actual sense of family, even though my father wasn’t with us.
The two and a half years that I spent with Grandmother Moore, Mom, and my siblings are golden in my memory. To me, they represent my only childhood. It was a time when I got to ride my hand-me-down pony, Nubbins, and actually spend time with my sisters and Sandy, who had become strangers to me in Switzerland. The summer when I turned ten was special, too, because my Mom was home with us. This was a great treat. Mom, Rocky, and I would pile into her blue station wagon and drive to Nielsen’s ice cream store at the top of Greenwich Avenue. I always chose raspberry sherbet and allowed Rocky to lick one side of the cone while I licked the other. Mom didn’t mind. Then we’d head down to Indian Harbor and watch the water and boats.
Round Hill Road intersected Mooreland Road, and that was where I waited for the school bus in the fall, winter, and spring. Each morning, Rocky would trot along with me and stay until the bus carted me off. He would be waiting when I returned. Together we would have made a wonderful Norman Rockwell painting.
Although my parents had irritated the MRA hierarchy, my sisters were still deeply caught in it. Tina gave testimonials at MRA conferences. Glenn sang and performed in MRA’s Sing-Out ’65. Mercifully, Sandy and I were spared. Because my dad was not much a part of our lives, Sandy’s father figure became Alec Duncan, a Scotsman who worked for my grandparents for more than thirty years on their estate. We kids called him Ikey, and he became such a substitute father figure to Sandy that my brother began referring to Ikey as his real dad.
Suza, or Suzanna Mannagotter, was my rock during those years at Round Hill. She ruled her domain: the kitchen, her little dining room, and an apartment upstairs. Suza was an elderly German woman who kept her red hair until the day she died at age one hundred. She wore cotton dresses and little white socks and always had the same kind of shoes: leather, with laces. When Suza spoke to me she would grab my wrist and wouldn’t let go until she finished saying what she wanted to say. She did the same with everyone. She always had a snack ready for me when I got home from school which was a glass of very cold whole milk and a piece of pound cake or cookies. She taught me about taking care of animals. She always said, “Acht, Miss Yessie,” in her German accent, “you must feed your animals before you eat. They cannot get it for themselves.” She made friends with my canary and two little turtles. And of course, she loved Rocky. She knew I wasn’t allowed to watch Combat! but turned a blind eye to me sneaking up to her apartment to watch the forbidden show. Whenever I could, I would arrange a situation that would get me sent out of the big dining room to the kitchen. I remember once, when I had a spoonful of apple sauce and was threatening to flip it; my mom told me that if I did I would be sent to the kitchen. I did. I much preferred eating in Suza’s dining room and she liked the company.
I was terribly shy; I frequently felt awkward and much preferred the company of Rocket and my imaginary pals to others my age. I was younger than most of my friends by a year because the schooling at the MRA school in Switzerland had been so rigorous that I was allowed to skip third grade upon our return. I do remember talking to my siblings about our futures. Tina said she was going to be an artist, Glenn an actress, Sandy a truck driver, and I would be an author. I remember Glennie’s belly laughs when I told her that if I cut myself, monkey hair would pop out. I wonder if I was already feeling uncomfortable in my skin.
Sadly, our time together proved brief. When the school year started, Tina and Glenn left for Rosemary Hall, the boarding school that our mother and her mother had attended. Sandy was sent to the Harvey School in Katonah, New York. I was left behind, and that sense of family that I had discovered was soon replaced with a new feeling. For the first time, I began to sense that I was a “problem child.” I was the reason why my mom couldn’t be with my father in Africa.
By 1965, it had become clear that my father had no intention of leaving the Congo—which, after the Belgians left, had changed its name from the Belgian Congo to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. President Mobutu had issued him a certificate he proudly displayed above his desk. It declared that William Close was the president’s personal medical adviser and authorized him to wear the uniform of the Congolese army as a lieutenant colonel.
I knew Mom missed Dad and wanted to be with him, so I asked her one day why we all didn’t move to Africa together. I would forever regret that question, as it quickly led to the end of a period in my life that I still dream about.
We didn’t all move to the Congo. Only Tina and I went with Mom. Sandy remained in boarding school, and Glennie stayed in the States to continue working with MRA’s Up with People, a new show being performed by MRA’s youth.
I was inconsolable when it was time to say good-bye to Rocky. I had been given a beautiful Arabian gelding the summer before by our neighbor, and when I went to say good-bye to him he pressed his forehead into my chest. I breathed in his scent and felt his velvet muzzle and cried some more. And Nubbins, who was as naughty as a Shetland pony could be—I would miss him, too.
After the interminable flight to the Congo, we moved into the Hotel
Memling in the nation’s capital, Kinshasa—formerly Leopoldville. The hotel had been built in 1937 and named after a fifteenth-century painter, Hans Memling. From our windows we could see the Congo River drifting by, and at night the darkness was pierced by a large beam of light coming across the river from Brazzaville. It was the capital of the Communist-controlled Republic of the Congo, and the two different sides shined spotlights at each other across the river at night.
Moving from Grandmother Moore’s spacious house, with its sweeping lawns, to one of Africa’s biggest, most congested cities came as a complete culture shock for me. Outside our hotel, traffic snarled, impatient drivers honked, and hundreds of bicycles darted between the cars. The smell of garbage and sweat permeated the air, and I learned very quickly what it felt like to be a minority; it scared me at first.
The first night we were at the Hotel Memling we chose an outdoor café for dinner, and I heard something that sounded like it was coming from under the table. It was a man with no legs who traveled on a low wooden cart with wheels, pushing himself with his calloused hands. I screamed. Mom gave him a few coins.
Safely inside the hotel, there was absolutely nothing to do. Tina and I played endless games of double solitaire, and then I would retreat to my room and cry. I missed my animals. My heart was broken.
We finally moved into a house in the paracommando camp where President Mobutu lived. He wanted his “docteur” close by. There were still a lot of violent uprisings happening across the country, although we were isolated from them. Dad turned the house’s master bedroom into a clinic where he set up a lab to test blood and feces. Sometimes I would get to help him. Working in his lab gave me a chance to be near my dad. Patients would bring stool specimens wrapped in leaves and secured with thin vine. I would put on the nose clips that I used for swimming and open the package. Dad showed me how to make a slide and what to look for through a microscope. There was always a long line of people waiting outside the clinic, and everyone was always staring at me. I hated that!