After looking at me in his meaning-packed way for a while, Pascal winked and said, “A bientot“ and disappeared upstairs.
There was something troubling about French boys like Pascal Evans, something about their presuming ways that made me squirm. I was used to American boys who acted like cowboys, shrugging off their mother’s shoulder pats with scowls on their faces. There was something I would only much later be able to label as intimate and seductive in Pascal’s relationship with his mother, and it extended to all females. Pascal even kissed his sister, Sophie, hello, and to my half-discomfort and half-pleasure, he always kissed me when I was forced to go to his house. He loved to tug my hair and embarrass me. It was as though he wanted to break me down with his kisses and his taunting eyebrows—and though this half repelled me, it also magnetized me. It was as if he made me fancy him against my will.
Dutch boys were simpler. They seemed more like American boys, but brighter colored in their orange and royal blue sweaters, wonderfully scruffy in their baggy pants and rubber boots, and made for the open air. Their cheeks were always blazing red from the cold, and they looked as if they’d just returned from eight hours of soccer, hay-raking, or constructing dikes. They seemed strong and open faced and their voices were loud and forthright as they yelled to one another across a school field. They sometimes kissed their mothers, but the kisses were hasty, matter-of-fact smacks, not lingering and tender like the French boys. They and their mothers seemed to talk a lot, with loud, emphatic voices that also carried back and forth grins and good will. I liked the hay and chocolate look of Dutch boys.
It was a perfect Dutch winter day. The air was sharp cold, the trees surrounding the pond were perfect black outlines against the creamy blue sky, and I was skating round and round. There were only a few people on the pond—just Andy, me, and six or so Dutch people. Suddenly a cute Dutch boy with a thatch of gold hair and a long maroon-and-yellow scarf skated by me, almost touching me. On his next circuit, he grabbed at my hat. The next, he took it and raced off with it across the ice, looking back at me, daring me, waving it, with a grin on his face. Without even thinking, I roared after him as fast as I could. For a breathless half an hour, the Dutch boy and I chased each other, grabbing at each other’s scarves and hats, laughing and falling down, and then blasting after each other again. The feeling inside my pounding chest was not only an urgent need for breath but an almost unbearable pulsing of hilarity and attraction. This encounter with the Dutch boy adhered to no boy-girl rules. It was a pure draft of pleasure.
The boy and I kept racing until I heard a forceful Dutch woman’s voice call from the top of the hill, at the edge of the park. The boy spun around me once, said “Dag!” and then left the ice.
For a long time afterward, I looked for him when I went skating. He seemed like both a boy of my daydreams and an honest-to-goodness, real boy I could like, a blend that would be just right, but our paths never crossed again.
14
home
If, in eighth grade, I had achieved the goal of proving myself an American cowgirl, I had also proven myself in the other important circus of my life.
Crepe paper streamers were drooping from the ceiling of the parlor-auditorium at school. Roger changed LP after LP on the record player: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” . . . It was like the music—no maybe all the world—was wooing me. Mike and I were dancing, then Link cut in and then Sam, the new boy, and then I was back with Mike again. We were slow dancing. Our bodies were wrapped together swaying to “Nights in White Satin,” and it did feel like this bliss would last forever. With all these boys wanting their turn to dance with me, I was a bird soaring over the world.
Now, in June, at an end-of-school beach party, all of us eighth graders were clumped in a circle on the Scheveningen sand, handing around a guitar. One by one, we each played “House of the Rising Sun”—the first song most of us had learned to play on the guitar, back in fifth or sixth grade—and all the rivalries of the last years melted into love. We nestled close, shoulder to shoulder, sprawled, jumbled, and intermingled every which way—interlapping with the sun and sand of the beach. As we played the sad song over and over again, it was as though we were both celebrating ourselves and grieving our soon-to-be-lost childhood.
The ecstasy of last days . . .
In a photo from that day of that final week of school during my last year in Holland, I was lying beside Candy on the sand. In the background, you can see the pier, with its spaceship-topped tower, and a calm sea with gentle, lolloping waves. Candy and I were sprawled out on our stomachs on top of striped beach towels, our boyfriends lying beside us—Mike and I had been going steady for a couple of months now—and there were other boys and girls flopped on towels surrounding ours. All around us patriotic American kids, crumpled on the sand, were our Dutch miniskirts, our striped Dutch jerseys, and our bottles of Dutch suntan oil. I had on a pair of round hippy George Harrison sunglasses and my Dutch bikini, and there, on that beach, in that picture, looking straight into the camera, I seemed utterly happy.
During this last year in Holland, I feasted on it: the glamour, glitter, and glow of sweet, smug self-satisfaction. I tasted the elixir, the feeling of being just right, popular, enough. Of emitting laughter into the air and not caring where it fell. (What is the name of the fairy godmother who appears and, with her wand, changes you from outcast to insider?)
My recently achieved steady relationship with Mike was just one more bit of evidence that I’d made it as a popular girl, but deep inside of me (that sense of truth slipping through my fingers again), I knew there was something wrong, but what was it? In some respects, Mike—by nature shy as I was—was simply a vehicle, a status symbol, like wearing a fraternity pin. Our pairing was mostly a stiff sort of affair—a marriage of convenience, like a French noble’s. Even though it felt real in some ways—we were beginning to talk about how we felt rather than just gossiping and it was a kind of love—in another way, it was all acting something out. But this was murky to me now. For now, I just saw the sand, the sunshine, the boy.
The truth is, in these past few months, I had become the insider, popcorn-eating, all-American girl I’d aimed for. I was also perhaps the least myself that I would ever be—the shallow girl who edged up to the popular girls just to steal their glitter—and later, via a circuitous, painful road, I would have to find my way back, but this state tasted like some sort of melt-in-your-mouth cheesecake, very rare and rich. Maybe there is a kind of genius or triumph to be applauded in stretching as far as you can, like an actress, out of your natural character.
Years onward I would think, as I looked back on it, that this moment of such divine thrill may actually have been the nadir of my life. Was the belonging more a constriction than a freedom? Was it, rather than a kind of sublime joining, a kind of voluntary self-disposal? Popularity sometimes seems awfully close to emptiness. And belonging seems to require excluding somebody else. And how many people did I trample or claw on my way up to the summit? How does a person atone for such things?
The crux was this: at this moment, this age of thirteen, I was sure I was at the summit of my life. I had been cut loose from my prison of self-consciousness and I was in with the in-crowd.
Meanwhile, as I was wheeling, like a bald eagle, over the globe, something had been happening between my mother and me. As our time to leave Holland drew nearer—I had to suck down the urge to cry whenever I thought of how few days I had left—a fury had built up in me. It wasn’t as if my mother was doing things she’d never done before. It was just that now, the same old things she’d always done, whatever they were—the way she sneezed, the way she put on her nylons, the way she breathed—made me want to get to the furthest corner of the house. Gone were the days I absorbed her words like a good girl. My father could do no wrong, but with regard to my mother, it was like I was a secretive Taiwanese krait, curled up, on guard, poised, at any moment, to flic
k its deadly, forked tongue.
One Saturday afternoon, I wanted to go to the centrum with Candy but my mother said, in her most commanding tone, “No, I want you at home today. I need you to help me with some things.” But I was equally determined. I was dying to see the new summer dresses on display in the boutiques and I wasn’t going to let my mother stop me. This might be one of the last times I’d get to go downtown with Candy before we both left Holland.
“You can’t make me,” I said, standing up straight, and looking right into her pine needle-grey eyes. As I said the words, cocking my hip—even I could hear it—it was as though I actually was Candy and her words were coming out of my mouth.
“You little brat,” my mother said. “Well, you’ve cooked your goose, Young Lady. That’s the last time you’ll be going downtown for a while,” she called as I tore upstairs and crashed into my room.
Feeling like my fury would grenade all the windows in the house, I hurled myself down on my bedspread with a shriek of anger.
While my mother held the fort and the line, my father struck out for cathedrals and the sublime. One weekend toward the end of school, he took me to the Mauritshuis, the principal museum of The Hague. It was one of the places to which my father took me that enabled me to expand bigger than my ordinary self. This was to be my last visit for many, many years.
We strolled through the rooms of paintings that looked like they’d been painted with crushed and liquefied ebony, rubies, and lapis lazuli. First, there were the still life paintings that seemed to burst: full of candy-striped tulips, berries, and caterpillars. Then there were the duskier ones with clocks or candles. These were vanitas, still lifes, my father explained: paintings that pointed to the fact that life on earth was temporary. The candles and the clocks, my father said, represented the idea that human existence could be blown out in a single puff. A single puff: I could only half-understand this. Does my father mean we’re all eventually going to die, or does he mean an atom bomb could go off? I knew he was concerned about our competition with Russia over atomic weapons. In a flicker, the paintings suddenly expressed full-force my dread of leaving Holland and I had to squeeze my eyes to stop from welling.
Shifting to the next room, the art drawing me in, I suddenly recognized that many of these paintings were full of glee. Against the dark backgrounds of the sixteenth-century Dutch paintings, the darkened wood of Dutch farmhouses, and the landscapes of flat, wet land, ordinary people cavorted. The paintings showed jolly women drinking, men playing the pipes, children blowing bubbles, mothers cleaning baby bottoms, and ladies hitting their husbands with shoes. And scroungy dogs slinked around at the bottoms of the paintings. Way back, three hundred years ago even, Dutch people laughed at themselves.
There were the silly paintings of everyday life, and then there were the serious portraits that my father loved most. I watched his lit-up eyes as he took in the luminous faces against shining black walls. One of Van Dyke’s portraits showed an elegant woman in pearls and black satin. Rembrandt’s portrait of Homer and his straight-in-the-face, serious-eyed self-portraits had, my father said, “a haunting, stark elegance.”
The Mauritshuis also had many portraits of girls and young ladies. These were the ones I loved most. Gerrit Dou painted A Young Woman at a Casement with a Lamp, a hardy-looking, pink-cheeked girl with light on her fingers. Then there was Michiel Sweerts’s Portrait of a Young Woman, which showed a shy girl, almost beautiful, with direct eyes shining like the inside of a shell. I could only look at her sideways. It was almost like I was her and she was me. Beauty and liquid pain: they would always be together.
Most riveting of all was The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Vermeer. The girl in the saffron dress with the starched white collar, the girl with the soft, intent, unblinking eyes. It was like I could never get to the bottom of her look. The brochure said the painting was one of “ineffable beauty . . . blended from the dust of crushed pearls.” I wanted to dive into its beauty, the truth of the girl. My father had to pat my back to lure me to leave the room when it was time to go home.
The Mauritshuis was like a tour of all the faces and places of Holland. I wanted to drink up its paintings—every last one. I wanted to eat the whole museum: every painting and the building, too, so that the beautiful pictures of sadness and happiness, ease and struggle, would become a part of my body.
After the Mauritshuis visit, I had much to ponder. I will be a painter when I grow up, I decided—it was firm—and I will paint everything I see. Then it will be there, and anyone whose eyes light upon it will see what I saw: There is a red bench. There is a pail in the sand. There is a man bowing his head before his wife. There is a boy kicking his feet in the air with tears rolling down his cheeks. There is a girl standing at the side, her back straight like her grandmother’s. I will paint and paint and paint until the whole world is on canvas, and then I will die happy.
I crammed into my mouth three round rusks slathered with rich butter and dotted with chocolate sprinkles—eating as though I could never get enough. Then I went down to the little bakery shop around the corner and bought four boxes of sprinkles, ten Bounty bars, and a sackful of licorice. Later, I took the tram down to the centrum to stock up on other Dutch things I had to buy to take back to the States with me—the things I desperately needed in order to hold the world in place. Once I was downtown, though, in Vroom & Dreesmann, I froze. I couldn’t decide what to buy. Nothing was all of Holland.
This moment of decision, in the middle of the department store, this moment of desperate loss and craving, left me greedy, insatiable, for all the countries of the world.
From our years in the Netherlands, in a bucket from a Scheveningen kiosk, I took with me a toss of miscellaneous Dutchisms: a predilection for liberal social policy, a conviction that bicycles are the best way to get around, and an inveterate fondness for cream puffs. My years in the Netherlands left me fierce—almost too loyal—about friendship. And shaped me into, too, the ultimate sponge, the quintessential linguist, a confirmed chameleon, malleable as a spy. I’d been bred, in more ways than I knew, to take on any persona my country might require.
At one of the going-away parties people at the embassy gave for us, the embassy wives presented my mother with a flute-edged silver plate. In the center of the plate were the engraved words, “Every Post Should Have a Lois Taber.” In her little acceptance speech to the ladies, my mother joked that we were going home to “The Land of the Big PX.” As she talked, holding her plate, sadness flushed through me. I was suddenly puffed with pride, even though a minute before I couldn’t stand even the way she breathed. And when my mother came back to her chair, I hugged her so hard I might have broken her ribs. She welled up, said, “It’s okay, Sweetie,” and hugged me too.
My mother had her silver plate as a tribute to her service in Holland. What did my father feel he’d accomplished in his Dutch time?
“Well, there was a Chinese man I worked with in The Hague who defected after we left—but after a time with us, he went back to the other side,” my father said forty years later, sitting on the blue corduroy couch, whose ridges were now worn smooth. He always played these keys, these little one-notes of information, very softly. Of course, I didn’t know if he was thinking of Mr. Hsu, who died at the foot of the row house, or of another. His tone implied that the defection was something beneficial from the Agency’s point of view, but counted little to him.
Nevertheless, I think Holland was where my father found himself—if only to have to leave himself behind. Perhaps because he was sharing the weight with the Dutch, and because he was away from Mr. Smith, his work didn’t seem to trouble him as much in Japan and Taiwan. Most of all, Holland seemed to nourish the historian-social philosopher he was meant to be.
The tide was nearly high. It would not be long now before its missive would surface and spill from the sea. Within a year, my father would tell me the truth about his work—a truth so close I could have touched it any time, if I had just known,
or been curious enough, to reach out my hand.
The long-held secret would simply slip out into the room, as I imagine my father slipped into and out of an obscure café or airport—and leave its salt, sprinkled, unobtrusive but glittery white, like a necklace at the high tide line.
The secret was wet, though—and would chill us all, in time, through our rocks and sands down to our deepest pits and tissues. The strain on my father, of assumed names, secrets, and unwise missions, would taint us all. It was one of those things that would take a lifetime to make add up.
This June of 1968, my uniform was hippy bell-bottoms and hot-colored tank tops. I was growing my hair long, like Joan Baez and every other girl in Holland. My Villager dresses were long tucked away, and my childhood truths were wavering, like my country back home. I could feel the sap, all the hidden things of the world, pushing up from under the ground, like the tulips.
I was growing up and the world was heating up, as my father’s dinner table talks had made plain. In February, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, attacking hundreds of South Vietnamese towns and American bases, and General Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, had to call up 200,000 more American soldiers to fight. Now there were over 500,000 young American men detailed to the Vietnamese jungle. The war had become fierce, and many Americans were being killed. The Dutch were furious, and President Johnson had even stopped making public appearances in the face of massive antiwar demonstrations back in the States.
And other really terrible things had happened. In April, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. As a result, riots had erupted in 167 towns and cities all over America. And now, Sen. Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.
For a few more months, disturbing as these events were, they were far away and across an ocean. For a few more months—no more than three—I could continue to remain naive, as though Santa Claus existed.
Born Under an Assumed Name Page 23