Born Under an Assumed Name

by Sara Mansfield Taber

  In short order, patriotism would no longer seem so simple as eating peanut butter and flinging out sassy comebacks. Soon, the truth—truths of many kinds, about my father, my country, myself—would stare me in the face. As my father had taught me, I would have a chance to prove myself: to look into the mess of the world, face my fears, and take a position.

  Meanwhile, as my country was being looted and firebombed across the Atlantic, I, oblivious, was spinning my own little world by the tail. As I joshed and slouched around with perfect embassy daughter confidence, I was sure I knew it all. Even though I had no real picture of America in my mind, I didn’t even have to think about what life would be like back in the States. When we got back, people would be welcoming and nice, because, in the States, everyone was friendly. And, of course I would fit in. I would belong without trying. I didn’t realize how quickly the princess’s robe would slip off my shoulders, or how used I was to being special.

  It was fortunate that I couldn’t imagine the social challenges lying in wait for me at the elite private school I would be attending. Or how the reality of the war would burn into my heart. Or, for that matter, how soon Washington would spirit us off again—to a rainforest across the Pacific, complete with headhunters. Or how, most potent of all, the poison of my father’s secret would concentrate in the years ahead.

  The last week that I was in The Hague, on a day of hippo-grey skies, we visited Maria’s house for the first time. She had insisted we come for hot chocolate and koeken. We ate deep-fried apple balls, sitting in the overstuffed chairs of her living room, and then she said, “Saratje, Andytje, I want to show you something.”

  She took us up a squeezing, narrow staircase to the very top of the narrow row house. We emerged onto a terrace with a little room occupied by a set of cages set on a bench. Inside were twenty or thirty grey and white doves. She showed us how her husband, “mijn man,“ let them out to fly free, and how they returned for their food each day. As we watched, she let one fat dove out and it flew out over the city roofs.

  For the first time, as I watched Maria’s dove fly, I realized that Maria had her own life—separate from mine. It came to me that, all the time I had been here, I had been only partly in Holland. I had dwelt mostly in a Victorian house-sized world, serving as an actress in The American School of The Hague, a Hollywood movie. The whole world, it turned out, was separate from me. This was something to open my eyes to now, and to discover.

  Maria gave us a basket of tulips and hyacinths, and chocolates, and then she began to sob, her big, heavy body sinking against my mother’s. Then I began to cry too—looking at Maria’s red eyes and red cheeks with the tears wetting them. Suddenly I was flooded by other eyes—Chinese-dark and glistening also—in a long-ago world. Seeing both pairs of eyes, I was nothing like a marine.

  Seated on a metal trunk, watching others like it be filled with our belongings, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to leave a place where we had lived. (Holland was the place I lived longest of all the countries of my childhood.) I despised the embassy, and all embassies that were ever created. My whole being collapsed at the thought of leaving my chocolate sprinkle at the edge of Europe, my land of rain-soaked farm fields, of windmills thrumping in the wind, of lumpy wool and apple cake, of Van Gogh, of frigid winter walks by the sea. My chest just would not bear the rupture of never again seeing my Victorian house school, or the best friends that existed in the whole world ever, ever again.

  Leaving my land of rain brought on a drought that would last, in some ways, the rest of my life. Forever more, my soil would be cracked, for I was leaving my mud-wallow, the one place I had ever felt completely at home.

  This ripping-away from The Hague would instill in me a keen sense of dying, of time ticking. I’d always now have a sense that, no matter how true the friendship, it would eventually vanish. And, as the poet Alison Townsend has written, “No one in our lives can ever really be replaced.” From this time onward, I’d be a kind of pigeon that homes in on grief. I’d calm myself, always, with the Dutch word, “dag,” the soft Dutch greeting that means both “hello” and “good-bye,” the story of my life.

  I would travel back with not only The Hague, but Bethesda, Taipei, and Yoko-suka—whole countries—packed in my trunk. Can anyone imagine how hard it is to conquer, then embrace whole countries, and soon to have to unlock your arms from those places you have trained yourself to love, and let them go?

  My mother tugged out her tattered, old line, “You can do anything for a year,” but, to me, it was a rag I wanted to tear apart. I yelled at her, running up to my room, “This is not ‘just a year’ or ‘doing anything’! This is leaving Holland!”

  I couldn’t be a brave American soldier.

  I cried for nine and a half days—from the day the packers came to the day we left town. Then we loaded our thirteen pieces of luggage into our new tan Volkswagen squareback, and I wept all the way to Le Havre. And when my grief was finally spent, something in me was broken. It was the kind of fracture that hurts with the sharpest pain the first time around.

  Holland was my first broken heart.

  My father held my hand as we looked back over Europe from the deck of the ocean liner, the SS United States. “We’re going home,” he said. “Another great adventure.”

  When we set sail, the captain blasted the foghorn, and my body started. It was like a pistol shot.

  PART II. THE SHORE

  Book 4

  WAR

  Washington, D.C.,

  1968–1970

  15

  america the ugly

  These next two years, my fourteenth and fifteenth, spent back in America, made a clean sweep of my sense of America and of myself—and took me on a journey into class and war, a journey I never expected.

  A lot of young people have a year or two in their lives—full of emotional sticks and stones that do hurt them—that they somehow manage to erect into serviceable shelter.

  It was the summer of the assassinations, and the country was sweltering. The tenements of 14th Street, in Washington, D.C., had been burned into charred, hulking ruins from the riots following the killing of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Thirty thousand young Americans had died in the padis of Vietnam and there was no end to the war in sight. From California to the District of Columbia, the country was awash in marijuana-smoking hippies, shouting revolutionaries, and sign-toting peaceniks objecting to the war, and the rooms of the Capitol were a pitched battleground of confused and vociferous politicians. America was ready to boil—and the protected child of a “diplomat” was about to arrive on its shores.

  It was 5 a.m. America was a blur. I could just barely see the torch and draped silhouette of the Statue of Liberty through a cool fog as we sailed by on the SS United States, but still, my heart trilled.

  We disembarked at the dock in New York into what looked like a huge warehouse. In this enormous, vacuous Quonset hut with a concrete floor, we waited, our good clothes wilting in the humidity, for our trunks to be trundled down from the stateroom. Then we waited again for our new VW squareback to be disgorged from what my father called “the bowels of the ship.” By the time we loaded the car, it was 11 a.m., and five minutes after we got on our way, Andy said, “Okay Pop, time to stop at McDonald’s.”

  “Yeah, you promised, Pop,” I said.

  My father heaved a big fake sigh and said, “Oh, all right,” and he pulled into the first hamburger joint we came across: golden arches set deep in the grime of the city amid high-rising rusted girders and boarded-up buildings. Hamburgers, fries: Ah! The glorious taste of America! Then, bellies slopping with chocolate milkshakes, we began the long drive down the New Jersey Turnpike.

  These were my first views of America: not beauteous waves of grain or a Bier-stadt canvas of magnificent mountains, but the under-bridge of New York and the grim, endless, traffic-streaming asphalt aisle of the New Jersey Turnpike.

  We hauled our suitcases and trunks into the elevator at the
Alban Towers, a dusty and dreary Gothic apartment hotel near the National Cathedral that reeked of cleaning fluids and seemed to be inhabited by old ladies in house dresses with odd smirks and twitches. When I read Rosemary’s Baby later in the year, the Alban Towers would come to mind.

  Soon after we settled into the grim billet, the Washington Post, which my father fetched from the desk each morning, had a big headline that said Richard Nixon had won the Republican nomination for president in Miami. Neither I nor the country had any clue as to what was in store.

  While my parents went out house hunting, Andy and I stayed in the hotel with the large, dark rooms of brown scratchy furniture, a dim space inside Venetian blinds, as the window air conditioners grinded away. For the six weeks of waiting for my new life to begin, I watched As the World Turns and Days of Our Lives. I hadn’t watched TV in five years—I’d lost a whole hunk of American culture forever—and I was magnetized. I’d never seen soap operas and was entranced by the unfailingly beautiful Americans engaged in crisscrossed loves, betrayals, unwanted pregnancies, and disastrous illnesses. People in my country seemed so good-looking, rich, and lucky, even with all their troubles.

  When my programs were over, I wrote to Lizzy, Candy, and Mike, and ate heads of iceberg lettuce cut in half. This food, cool and the lightest of green— dolloped with ranch dressing—was safe and soothing to me.

  Sometimes, between my soap operas, I checked different channels to see what was on. Often, shots of soldiers wading through swamps or shooting rifles from scrubby hills appeared on the screen, and even though Andy wanted to watch, I changed the channel to commercials. “War is dumb,” I told him.

  On August 20, between programs, I dialed the channels and again happened on the news. I watched, munching my lettuce wedge, as, on the screen, Soviet tanks rumbled into somewhere in Europe. Andy made me keep the news on, and in the evening, when he asked our father about it, he explained that there had been an uprising of liberals in Communist Czechoslovakia and the stricter Russian Communists had gone in to crush it. “Now the Soviet Communist party boss, Leonid Brezhnev, has warned that the USSR will attack any Communist government in the Eastern Bloc that doesn’t conform to its way of doing things.”

  For a fleet instant, thinking of the liberals who had been killed or jailed, he had that haunted look again, that look of remembering things unutterably sad. But then, like he was dragging himself out of a faraway capsule, he gathered himself and said, “Prague Spring was a real bid for freedom.”

  The word “freedom” sent my blood tingling: that fine George Washington word.

  One day, my parents took us to see one of the houses they’d found. It was a small white bungalow in Chevy Chase. I pleaded with them to buy this one over the few others they’d shown us. I wanted this house because it had one bedroom with a pink carpet and a pink Princess phone, another bedroom with a powder blue rug and a powder blue Princess phone, and a tan living room with a tan rug and tan Princess phone. I didn’t realize that the house wouldn’t have the phones when we moved in and that my parents would choose one black rotary dial phone for the kitchen.

  One sweltering August day, my parents took me for an interview at a private school, a Quaker school, a kind of school I’d never heard of before. The admissions office was situated in a stately brick house with beams of white light glancing off the clean windows. For the interview, I was ushered into a grand room with a fireplace at one end. I talked with a tall man in a tweed jacket and tie, with big hands. We sat in upright wing chairs and he leaned toward me slightly and listened closely as he asked me questions. I answered but barely knew what I said. I was still in a blur, half in Holland and half at the Alban Towers, not really in America at all.

  When I was accepted into the private school, my mother asked me whether I’d prefer Sidwell Friends School or Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, the big public school we’d peeked into the windows of—to see bare classrooms with desks pushed up against the walls. I didn’t have any idea how to make such a decision. I couldn’t conceive, really, of what difference it might make to go to either public or private school. “You decide,” I said. Thus, the Fates chose for me one kind of America over another.

  We moved into the little cottage on Ridgewood Avenue, and my parents enrolled us in the two different private schools where we’d been accepted. Andy wasn’t accepted to my school and I was too old for his. I would attend the inside-the-beltway bastion of Capitol Hill politicos’ children and Andy would be going to the Potomac School, a country day school with uniforms across the river in Virginia where Bobby Kennedy’s children went—two different flavors of the liberal elite.

  My mother and father believed education was the most important thing in life. My father treasured learning and “the life of the mind” above anything else. It might have looked crazy to other people that he and my mother, who lived on a government salary, would spend all their money on private school, but, to them, a fine education was the greatest gift you could give your children. It was a thing that would enrich their lives forever, and could never be taken away—unlike money or belongings.

  Paying for private education was nothing to my parents; sacrificing for their children was second nature to them. They bought us new school clothes at Woodward & Lothrop while they ironed the old, frayed clothes they had had forever. My mother wore an old pair of British sandals from Hong Kong that she said she still loved even though the leather was so dry it was tearing, and my father wore his old Hong Kong desert boots run slanted at the crepe heels.

  August 29, at the new house, I was in the TV room, still cluttered with half-unpacked crates. Our new TV was unpacked, so I plopped down on a sealed box and looked for something good to watch. There was nothing on so I just settled on the news. My father had told us this was a critical day. The Democratic Convention, to choose the Democratic presidential nominee, was being held in Chicago. From my crate I watched as, outside the Hilton Hotel where the convention was being held, policemen were beating crowds of shouting, rock-throwing long-haired hippies with clubs and rifle butts, and loading them into vans. Someone on TV shouted, above the din, something about the police and the “Nazi Gestapo.” What was all this? I’d seen lots of rowdy hippies in Holland but I didn’t know they had them in America too. This was a different country than the Bermuda shorts-and-cowboys hats America in which I’d lived in 1963.

  Over TV dinners from the A & P, my father explained that hundreds of young people and revolutionary groups had gathered in Chicago to protest the war in Vietnam and try to influence the Democrats. “The Chicago police tried to prevent the protestors from entering the amphitheater where the convention was being held, and the police got out of hand. Seven hundred people were injured. The hippies were throwing rocks and bottles at the police, but the police should not have retaliated so forcefully. It’s a very complex situation, with fault on both sides.”

  When vice president Hubert Humphrey finally gained the Democratic nomination, amid the tumult, my father looked satisfied. “He’s a good man, an old-fashioned, yellow dog Democrat,” he said. My father’s confident tone reassured me: America always righted itself and was always right in the end.

  My father was back at the State Department China Desk. He was gone late a lot at meetings and he heaved a sigh of relief when he walked in the door. When he was home, he seemed more preoccupied than he had when we were in Holland, and grimmer. He tiredly ran his hand through his thick hair and shook his head. “At the office it’s just Saigon, Saigon,” he told Mom.

  To us, he said, “The poor Vietnamese are just tinder for the Cold War bonfire.” I imagined two immense puppet figures, one of Chairman Mao and the other of Uncle Sam, heaving immense logs on a raging fire yelling, “Take that!” and “No, you take that!”

  My mother was working as a physical therapist again. She was a missionary or a peace corps volunteer at heart, and, in some ways, she was happier here working with people with disabilities than she had been translating in Holla
nd, though she’d loved The Hague. She said, “I know I’ve had a good day when someone’s life was made better by my having touched it.” While her patients told her stories of the Holocaust or society dinners, she forced them to lift their weak legs one more time, and this helped them become stronger. My father was a Rembrandt portrait of noble sacrifice and she was a Winslow Homer, depicting the triumph of hard work and willpower.

  Andy, who was losing his puppy fat, gobbled up history book after history book, and cocked his head in thought as he asked my father about the Battle of the Somme, or the Normandy invasion, or Dien Bien Phu.

  So that my mother could keep the VW for her commute to her physical therapy job, my father bought a battered red tin-can Fiat with backward doors that had been advertised on the bulletin board at his office. The plan was this: my father would drive me to school first each morning. My school was closest to home—just down Wisconsin Avenue from Maryland into the District. Then he would drive across the Potomac, drop Andy at his school, and turn back across the river on the Roosevelt Bridge to the State Department.

  Right up to the last moment before my father’s astonishing revelation, it never occurred to me to question this morning routine. My father had always put himself out for me and I wasn’t conscious of the great inconvenience this route would cause him. I certainly didn’t consider that my father might be telling me a lie, nor did I have any clue that the Central Intelligence Agency was three blocks from Andy’s school. My father’s secret was tossing about in the waves that were now licking at the high tide line. I could have easily plucked it out of the water but I was oblivious. Only my little brother picked up the slips and asides, the telltale whispers in the tide.

  Late, empty summer, the cool, promising fog of New York harbor; the pleasant—if scratchy—limbo of the Alban Towers; and the green, open-ended hopefulness of house hunting paled. As I walked around our new leafy neighborhood beside the old frame bungalows with porches and stately brick colonials, I felt nervous about my new life in America, which hadn’t yet taken any sort of shape. I told myself things like, “It’ll be fine. I was popular in Holland. Why shouldn’t it be like that here? After all, this is America, my country.”