On the weekend before Thanksgiving, at 3:30 when it was already black as crows, we drove to the church in Leiden from which the pilgrims set out for the New World. The American ambassador made a speech in a long, dark coat. Then a priest intoned from a dark wooden box up above the congregation. The words were all Dutch, but occasionally I picked out the word “Amerika.” The church was dark and half-empty. It was so cramping-cold we were shuddering in our coats and hats by the end of the service. My father’s step was light, though, as we left. “Just think of it,” he said. “Setting out from this cold, dark church for the unknown!” His face shone with vision.
For the Thanksgiving vacation week, we went to London—via a very rocky overnight ferry from Hoek van Holland—and stayed in an American embassy hotel right in the wet, splashy bustle of the city. We paraded after my father as he led us, head high, to the Tower of London, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey. I’d never seen him so happy. My father adored England, a place sunk deep and dripping with history. England, history—my father sucked them in like a man dying of thirst. For my father, holding one’s counsel, a bit of beer and bread (or a box of K-rations), a history book, a moss-covered trench, a blanket on a heath: they were what he needed to quench him.
It was springtime, and giddy like the Dutch at the sun, we set out for a hike. As we wended through the flat, green countryside, my father fired history questions at us. When did the Civil War begin? Who were the Union generals? When did Lewis and Clark cross the country? Where was the Battle of the Bulge? How many men were with Columbus? Where were they hoping to go? What do you think they ate on shipboard?
The questions about Columbus set my mind to making pictures. I saw men with ragged beards on ships holding their heads high in the blasting wind, chewing chunks of salt fish, heading to the New World: my country. This idea was enough to stun me forever: America was that grand.
My father—the way he talked, the way he looked toward the horizon—offered me glimmers of something else, another way to exist, another realm beyond that of my school: the possibility of walking out into all the hugeness of the world. He gave me a continent where people walked directly into rain, or straight up mountains.
Following my father from country to country, from medieval cathedral to 1915 trench, led me to expect to follow a man from place to place. I would take to athletic, outdoorsy men who could light fires with wet sticks. And I would equate staying put with boredom. When I was twenty-four, sitting beside my boyfriend as he contentedly watched the sun strike a golden Santa Cruz field above the Pacific, I’d say, “Hey, I miss Europe. Why don’t we get jobs in England?” While this freewheelingness might have had its charms, it would make me a hard woman to please. I’d marry a New Englander for his roots—that other, clamoring, contradictory part of me—and then expect him to sashay with me out into the world. I would constantly lust for the heath.
I didn’t know it, but this was the last perfect summer, the last summer to contain the shining perfection endowed only by the young child’s happily blindered eyes. For this last summer, my world was still my family. I was the sandwich meat, plunked like a round of bologna, between the two different pieces of bread of my mother and my father. Everything was in balance: My mother was earth; my father was sky. My father was for the mind, my mother for the body. My father was the thinker, my mother the doer. My father was for outings, my mother for daily life. With my mother I had to be good; with my father, I could dream. My mother was the bread and my father was the ice cream.
I watched my father take his bath in the long tub in the wide, open bathroom in our row house—as I had watched him from the time I could toddle. After he was naked, he waited for the tub to fill. He stood on the plain of white tile like a statue: tall, thin, and milk-white. Once in the tub, he was quick. Lying submerged with just his head up against the slope of porcelain, he splashed water over his chest and then ducked his whole head under, back of head down, with a sputtering, joyous gurgle-groan. He took a bar of Dial soap, lathered up his dark hair, and dunked again. In a moment he was standing in the water, swirling soap over his chest with the patches of black hair, and on down his frame. He ran the soap down each strong, thin leg, up and around his backside, and up his back in shoots, the soap held precariously at the tips of his fingers. In a final flourish, he soaped the fur above his penis. It got wonderfully sudsy and made squishing sounds. His penis, as he washed it, flopped and wobbled and dove playfully like a smooth-skinned mammal from the sea.
As I watched now, my father’s body, which I had seen all my life, was like a reassuring assurance of something comfortable and real, something normal.
Watching my father’s baths and receiving my father’s thoughts bolstered me now through all the fumblings with boys—as they would years along, when my love of boys transformed from an attraction to arms, legs, and cowlicks to real people with prickable hearts and serious thoughts.
These were the gifts my father gave to me: the sense that a girl who was a thinker drew a man’s gaze; the sense that a penis was a friendly thing; the sense that love between a lady and a man was as comfortable and natural as two deer on a hill. That love was a quiet stirring.
Nights, in dreams, I was my father. I was striding alone up a mountain. I reached the crest. I gazed out over an infinity of rising and falling green-and-purple mounds to a sky so blue and deep I imagined that I could soar out into it forever. I took in chestfuls of the good wind. In a while, I took out my penis and peed over the side of the cliff. Then I ate my lunch of leidsekaas and chocolate. I read a paperback that fit into the pocket of my windbreaker, and snoozed under my cap.
12
the pistol
We spooned bowls of thick pea-and-ham soup for dinner, and then my mother drove us to the embassy where my father was serving as “duty officer” for the night. My father, whose straight, dignified posture and lean, pleasant face made him look like a diplomat in the movies, emerged from a room off the embassy’s clean, milk-white entrance hall. The instant I took him in, my body flashed cold and a stone of fear thudded in my belly: my father was wearing a revolver strapped to his waist.
As though this was an everyday occurrence, Andy pointed and asked what kind of gun it was. “A Colt-45,” my father said, patting the holster. “Just in case there’s trouble.
“But don’t worry,” he said, looking at my mother, “there won’t be any trouble. Sometimes a loony does something like climb over the fence or once in a blue moon, an embassy is attacked—but that would never happen in Holland. Mainly, the embassy just needs someone here in case an important cable comes in.”
Then he showed us all the supplies that kept him safe and comfortable through the night: a store of canned food, a cot, and a mustard-colored sleeping bag made of soft, warm goose down. (Later, this setup would seem like a still life, the essence of America: Spam, fluffy sleeping bag, cold gun.)
My father hugged us all goodnight out by the marine guard’s desk, and then he heard the cable machine and slipped away into the little cell.
As we stepped into the black rain that was beating like a tide, I felt stilled— startled and filled, like a vessel to the brim, with awe at seeing that cold, metal killing tool attached to my gentle father’s thin frame. Disturbance fluttered inside me. What does the pistol mean? What does it mean about Pop? What does his work require? Could he really shoot someone?
Another afternoon it was so dark, it was as if the grey-dark sea had taken to the air. My job was to help my mother get ready for an official dinner party she and my father were giving for some American and Dutch dignitaries.
My mother set down a beautiful centerpiece of orange and yellow tulips, and then she stood with a pile of plates against her bosom, sorting out who should sit where. Everything had to be perfect, in accord with protocol. “Let’s see, Meneer Peereboom is the highest-ranking guest, so he should sit here on Pop’s right. . . . And Mr. Klein, the highest-ranking American, should sit on Pop’s left. . . ,” she said, setting
the plates down in a certain spot. “And Vrouw Peereboom should sit to my right, and Mrs. Wilson is a good conversationalist, so she should be seated next to her. . . .”
My mother had taught me all the rules for how to be a perfect diplomat, and a polite diplomat’s daughter.
• The first rule was: When you are invited to someone’s house, never put people out; be accommodating. Fold yourself into the ongoing activities, rather than imposing your own wishes. When people ask what you’d like to do, say, “Anything is fine with me. What would you like to do?” Also, eat whatever food is offered. Never ask for something special. Just ask for what the child before you asked for, so the hostess doesn’t have to do anything extra just for you. The sin of all sins is that of imposing on someone else.
• The second rule had to do with conversation: When you are talking with a Dutch person, or any person you don’t know, always, always make the other person feel comfortable. Be sensitive to the impact of your words on others. For instance, if you already have a gift someone gives you, don’t let on. Just say, “Thank you so much. This is just what I have been wanting.” (This would translate for me, in adulthood, into a wild, chilling sense of shame when I discovered I’d brought a replica of someone else’s gift. The sign of a truly refined, well-mannered person was her unfailing, intuitive sixth sense for the perfect offering.)
• The third rule: If you don’t like the wet grilled eggplant, or anything else that is being served for dinner, eat it anyway, and furthermore, tell the hostess that it is delicious. The only time to tell someone something that might embarrass them is to save them further embarrassment. You might whisper to a friend, but not an acquaintance, that her slip was showing, for instance, though not so anyone else could hear.
• Fourth: Take an interest in others and make them feel interesting. At embassy parties, and in conversation in general, get the other person to talk about himself. Ask him questions about his work or his thoughts on topics such as politics or movies. Somehow the injunction to take an interest in others fit me like a dress made by the queen’s tailor, and stayed with me for a long time. I seized the notion that everyone had a story and my duty was to find it. I loved sitting at people’s feet, drinking in their tales.
All of these rules were connected to the effort not to be “an ugly American,” which my parents considered very important. I had seen that book, The Ugly American, by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, on my parents’ bedroom bookshelf. An ugly American was someone who was loud, pushy, and bossy, and wanted his own way all the time, never cared how people in other cultures did things, and tromped on other people’s feelings.
The truth was, these diplomatic rules made life manageable in different places. A kind of universal language, they gave me a recipe to follow anywhere I landed. By the end of my time in Holland, they would become a reflex that would stand me in good stead for a long time—until, one day many years on, it would come to me, like dawn in a brand new country, that not every human encounter merited a diplomat’s unveering attention, that being a well-mannered diplomat could cramp and even offend.
Meanwhile, here in embassy circles in Holland, this approach worked like cream melting into tea. I studied my parents at dinner parties, talking to the Dutch. My mother was a warm, bubbly, American-style hostess; she charmed and entertained. She turned toward the man next to her, looked him in the eye, smiled, and said, “What do you think of the new exhibit at the Mauritshuis, Meneer Peereboom?” or “Your tulips are splendid.” And my father was a master of diplomacy. With his elegant manners; his soft, intent gaze; and his shoulders bent toward the other person in a slight embrace, he could draw the quietest or the most bombastic person into earnest or freewheeling conversation. If my mother was a trumpeter in a marching band, my father played the wooing woodland pipes in a forest glen.
My father’s Dutch colleague, Meneer Wandersee, and his family were over for a visit. We kids—he had three girls—and the two mothers were drinking Coke at the table on the brick patio at the back of our house, while my father and Meneer Wandersee were drinking Grolsch beer and sitting on lawn chairs off to the side. I glanced at the fathers while the mothers tried to make us kids talk to each other.
The fathers talking shop (both were in the clandestine services of their respective countries) seemed not so much burdened, as puzzled and engrossed by their work. Their tone, as they spoke half in English and half in Dutch, was one of decoding befuddling happenings. They shook their heads and laughed aloud over their beer. They seemed content, glued to their chairs and rollicking inside their incessant conversation.
My father’s laugh with Meneer Wandersee was happy. When he and Meneer Wandersee talked, there was an intimacy like that of my mother and her lady friends, only different. There was a sense of inside jokes, of the secrets of men who work together, but there was even something more. And for the first time, I detected a new strand in my father’s laugh—a little streak of something I’d later be able to name: “irony.”
I didn’t know that there were two Charlie Tabers. The one I knew, the father-diplomat, was gentle, kind, thoughtful. I assumed the father at work was the same man, but was he? With Meneer Wandersee, and sometimes with other colleagues, I sensed he was some kind of different person.
Into the deep pockets of his raincoat and his tweed jacket, my father was always slipping things: flash cards, newspaper articles, binoculars, radios, thick glasses, folded notes, secrets. The secrets had to do with his work at the embassy. All fathers, I assumed, had such secrets.
During my fifth grade, sometime in 1965, Andy, my mother, and I had gone to see my father at the embassy. We went up to my father’s office for a little while, the room with all the piles. My father had told me that his work at the embassy entailed reading and writing all day, and going to meetings. Some of his meetings were in restaurants, others in different cities. He also sent out cables. Sometimes he took a cab to Schiphol Airport, to meet the “courier,” who was the man who carried the “top secret,” “classified” embassy mail from Washington in a white ruck sack.
There was something stirring about this work my father did, about the way he and my mother talked about it. It was as if their voices suddenly had in them a quietness and an honoring. They stood nestled together in a way they didn’t when they talked about grocery shopping or weekend plans; they stood close, as if they were each other’s best and only friend. This hush and intimacy between my parents tinged all the work my father did with significance and mystery. Shivers trickled up my back when he mentioned the courier’s arrival or a trip to an off-the-beaten-path koffiehuis in Haarlem on business.
After our stop in his office, my father shepherded us out for lunch at a restaurant in the centrum. “This looks like a good one,” my father said, squinting at the posted menu in front of a small establishment through his fogged-up horn rims. The café was cozy as a bird’s nest, with only ten tables, each covered with a deep-red patterned rug, lit by a candle, and with a tulip in a slim vase. It smelled pleasantly of patates and sweaty wool, coffee, and steam. We sat at a table positioned between the wall and the window.
I ordered a broodtje mit leidsekaas —a sandwich made up of a roll, butter, and a delicious hard cheese with little stick-like cumin spices in it. Andy ordered a wurst, a kind of hot dog that popped and spurted when bitten into. Andy got an appelsap and I got a big cup of hot chocolate—with whipped cream, of course. In Holland they topped everything with it. My parents ordered bottles of fizzy mineral water I found disgusting. They shared a bowl of pea soup “thick enough to hold a spoon sticking straight up” and an appelkoeken.
While we ate, my father updated us on world events. “China is in a new phase,” he said. “Mao is now trying to export Chinese revolution to other countries. This is of concern to our government because we want countries to choose their own systems, and preferably to choose democracy. Our government is keeping a very close eye on Communist Chinese activities here in Europe because they are trying t
o push Communism here as well as in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. . . .”
Decades on, I’d read that, via the New China News Agency, a front for their intelligence service, the Chinese were using tenacious, rough methods all over the world to support subversive Communist groups, undermine foreign governments, and install Communist regimes.
After lunch, with a whispery, intimate voice, as if he couldn’t stop himself anymore from letting my mother in on a great secret, my father said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He drove us to a place in the centrum, and then he did an odd thing. He drove down a little street that was lined on the right side, where I was sitting, with a high brick wall. He turned right and the wall continued all down the next block. He turned right again, and the brick wall was still there. He turned again and the brick wall was still going—and we were back where we started. At nowhere in the circuit, it seemed to me, was there any way to see whatever it was that was inside the walls.
My father pulled up against the wall and put the clutch in neutral. In the resulting quiet, here in the middle of the city, the car engine hummed like a sea over a dune.
Then, his voice full of an import I didn’t understand, my father said, “That’s the Red Chinese Mission.” I took this to be my father’s work: circling walls, like our dog Gracie did when she was investigating, listening at cracks. In fact, as I would discover years hence, the United States had bugged the Chinese mission, and my father had listened in. I would also discover that my father had been involved in another operation that must have stayed with him throughout his life—but for now, all of this was hidden behind a curtain of Dutch rain.
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 19