Enemies in Love

by Alexis Clark

  Village Creek quickly developed, and residents enjoyed community tennis courts as well as a shared marina and an idyllic beach on the Long Island Sound.11 But people who moved there invested in more than scenic homes on the water—they were sending a message. Village Creek was progressive and represented modernity in design and thinking. The homes were mostly midcentury modern, with natural light to take advantage of the beautiful views. And beyond the aesthetics, Village Creek welcomed everyone—something Elinor and Frederick had never experienced as an interracial couple. “Those of us who started Village Creek had a special kind of a community in mind,” reads the Village Creek’s 1951 prospectus. “We were looking for a good place in which to live and bring up our children, a community which would be in itself a model of democracy. We wanted a healthful place to live, waterfront, view . . . but above all else we wanted a community with a completely democratic character—no discrimination because of race, color, creed or politics.”12

  The neighborhood seemed too good to be true, too utopian and unrealistic, and there was some backlash. Real estate brokers didn’t share the village’s vision of diversity, and for the first ten years of the neighborhood’s existence, agents refused to show any houses to white families once word spread that the community allowed blacks.

  One of the Village Creek founders, Roger Wilcox, recalled the pushback he received for showing some of the plots to an African American family. “I couldn’t get FHA insurance for mortgages. We were told flatly that we would have to get rid of our covenants if we wanted FHA mortgage insurance,” he said. The covenant included a commitment to maintaining a racial balance in Village Creek, and every member had to sign it. “I told them, ‘We are a cooperative and we are not going to change our covenants.’ The covenants were the whole basis for why we were there in the first place. And they said, ‘Then you don’t get any loans.’”13

  Homes in Village Creek were advertised mostly by word of mouth—and it worked. Even though mortgages were hard to obtain because Norwalk banks feared the community would become “too black,” the residents thrived, and Village Creek lived up to its goals. It maintained a healthy balance of white, black, and mixed-race neighbors.14

  Elinor and Frederick purchased a split-level house in Village Creek, on Split Rock Road, and settled into a community where they finally could walk hand in hand down the street without feeling self-conscious. There were even neighborhood children, white and black, for Chris and Stephen to befriend. For the first time since they married, Elinor and Frederick had found a welcoming neighborhood. Just a year prior to their move, in 1958, a Gallup poll recorded that only 4 percent of white Americans approved of interracial marriages.15 Elinor and Frederick had found a community that fell into that small percentage.

  The children were thrilled. There were trails and playgrounds where kids could hang out for hours. Chris and Stephen rode their bikes up and down the street and visited their friends anytime they wanted. There were always community parties where neighbors came together for picnics and sports.16

  But the utopian environment couldn’t erase prejudice beyond the neighborhood. Chris, because he was much younger, didn’t experience as many socially isolating moments as Stephen apparently did. He had been a toddler during the period when the family moved frequently. As both children got older, however, the question of where they fit in was subconsciously planted in their minds. Elinor and Frederick didn’t actively acknowledge that their sons were in fact different from their classmates. It was something Chris would discover on his own.

  When he was seven or eight years old, Chris was getting dressed in the locker room for gym class. Intense conversations were hardly common in second grade, but his friends Joe Johnson and Robert Little were certainly having one.

  “All of a sudden they got into a real animated discussion,” said Chris. “And they went back and forth and I was kind of listening. And finally Robert Little said, ‘Well, his mother’s black so he’s got to be black.’” That was the first time Chris noticed he was different. It had never occurred to him to ask his parents about his racial identity, because Frederick and Elinor never discussed it. Being mixed-race had never come up.

  The way Elinor and Frederick were raising their sons—with no open dialogue about identity—inadvertently created distance between the parents and their children. Something was missing in the Albert household, and the lack of acknowledgment of racism and their unique family characteristics contributed to that. There was a division in the home. Elinor and Frederick were on one side, totally in love with each other, and the children were on another, emotionally neglected and figuring out how to be half white and half black by themselves.

  Elinor and Frederick chose to keep much of their personal story a secret even from their kids. They didn’t talk about their time in the army and how they had to sneak around to be together. The two didn’t share vivid details about their respective upbringings, family dysfunction, or the social climate of the time. They had programmed the family to function in such a way that it wasn’t normal to reveal past grievances, despite the fact that it would have made the children feel much closer to their parents. Conversations that would have seemed obvious to have with the children never happened. With the exception of a few anecdotes, Elinor rarely elaborated on her moments of despair while serving in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, or her anger toward the military and the people of Arizona, who humiliated her with segregation and discrimination.

  Her niece Hope was an adult when she learned about Elinor’s time in Göttingen. And that was only because Hope described herself as naturally inquisitive and unafraid to ask her aunt questions, especially about her past, something Chris and Stephen didn’t do.

  It was clear that Elinor wanted to protect her sons from the evils of racism, and avoiding the topic was one way to do that. She may have feared that if she shared painful moments, her children would begin to expect the worst from people or start to believe that they were different or inferior. But the reality was that outside of Village Creek, the Albert family was different. There wasn’t a population of black women in the United States who had married German POWs. It was a complete anomaly. And by ignoring the most obvious elements of themselves, Elinor and Frederick didn’t prepare Chris and Stephen for the kinds of questions they would encounter at school and in the real world.

  Situations that were awkward for Chris as a child were much easier to understand as an adult. Growing up, he thought it was strange that Frederick would always walk ahead of his mother when they entered a restaurant. Being a kid, he figured his father was just in a hurry and walked faster than anyone else in the family. Later, he wondered if his father was distancing himself from Elinor and their two sons to ensure that they would get a table without any problem. “When we’d go out to eat, up until I was at least nine, I wasn’t really aware of the dynamic. Here’s an interracial family going to sit down at a restaurant in a setting, in most cases in Fairfield County, at least in those days, in which at least 90 percent of the attendants and guests in the restaurant are white.” He remembered some stares within the first five minutes of seating—nothing menacing, but “I felt it.”17

  What Elinor and Frederick could do was share their hobbies. For Elinor that was antiquing, mentoring, and gardening; for Frederick, that meant playing jazz, sailing, or painting.

  “The closest I ever felt to my father was the period where his hobby was boats, each increasing in size,” said Chris. “The first boat he had was a sixteen-foot, then he had a twenty-one-foot, then he had a twenty-three-foot, then he had about a twenty-eight-foot, then he went back to a smaller boat. But there was a period of about a summer or two summers where we would regularly go out, just the two of us. And occasionally my mother would join us.”18 But those moments still never included too much conversation. Usually Frederick sailed alone or went on the boat with just Elinor.

  The few times when Frederick was social, he hid it from his children, as if he believed showing a playful side
was inappropriate for a parent. Once Chris rode with Elinor to pick up Frederick from work and was shocked to see him holding court with a group of coworkers, everyone laughing. “I never really saw that social side of him.”

  “You’d assume a father and son—every weekend—would have some kind of project. Fixing the car, working on the house,” Chris went on. But what would begin as an endearing father-son moment with Frederick would usually end with one of his sons getting his feelings hurt. Chris remembered that when Frederick was working on one of his cars, occasionally he would need a tool to help him repair something in the engine. “I’d say, ‘Hey, Pops, you want some help?’ He’d say, ‘Hand me that number two wrench,’ and ‘Hand me this.’ Then it’d be about three to five minutes before I’d hand him the wrong tool and he’d say ‘Hell, get away from here!’”19

  Frederick wasn’t intentionally cold like his father, but he struggled with showing affection to his children, and he displayed a level of intolerance that could be cruel and dismissive. He was at home much more often than his father, which could have been why he didn’t see himself as hard on his sons. And there was some warmth; the boys received hugs, and for a time Frederick kissed them good night. But Chris remembered that his father abruptly stopped being affectionate when he was around seven or eight years old, and a year went by without Frederick kissing him good night. It must have bothered Elinor, because she told Chris one evening before bed, “Give your father a kiss,” and he did. Looking back on it, Chris felt as if she knew that Frederick had created unnecessary boundaries and she didn’t want that to continue.

  Chris learned to accept his father’s reticence. He understood that Frederick’s upbringing was largely shaped by Karl’s coldness and lack of interest in his own family. “There were no warm experiences,” said Chris, about Frederick’s relationship with Karl. “The first time my father taught me how to dive or the first time my father taught me how to swim, or the first time I sat on my father’s lap when he was driving—none of that stuff was going on.”

  Frankly, Frederick showed as much affection as he was able to. In comparison to the relationship he had with his own dad, that was an improvement, but it was still not adequate.

  “I really noticed as an adult, when I had access to other families and [could] see their closeness, that there is a difference,” said Chris.20

  The fact that Frederick was so much more willing to shower attention on his wife than his children became so obvious that relatives wondered if Elinor and Frederick ever should have had children. They were so into each other that their children seemed secondary. It impacted Stephen the most, who as an adult struggled with periods of estrangement from both of his parents and had no interest in sharing any memories of them.

  “It would have been hard for anybody to be Ellie and Frika’s child,” said Hope. “Frika loved the boys, you know; they were his pride and joy as well. But in terms of affection and open affection, Ellie was the only one. That’s a tough thing for a kid to grow up with.”21

  What was clear to everyone around him was that Frederick made Elinor his center of social contact. He didn’t have friends or hang out with his colleagues after work. He never came home from the office to drop off his briefcase and say he was running out to have a beer with the guys. He didn’t have any “guys.” If the phone rang, it was for Elinor, or one of the boys once they were older.

  “He never really got a personal, friendly phone call where somebody would call up and they would have a conversation,” said Chris, who couldn’t recall his father inviting anyone over for a drink, to watch a game, or to listen to music and talk. Elinor was the opposite. She would sit in a chair in the kitchen where there was a wall phone and talk to someone for forty-five minutes. On the rare occasion Frederick had a call, it lasted five minutes at best.

  During the holidays when the family drove to New Jersey or the Bronx to visit Elinor’s relatives, Frederick was ready to go as soon as the presents were opened or the meal was done. He didn’t have any time for just talking and laughing—that didn’t come naturally to him. The idea of spending all of Christmas Day at someone else’s home was too much for him. No matter how tired the kids were, they always drove home the same day and never spent the night. Frederick was always ready to leave.

  It wasn’t just family gatherings that made him uncomfortable. Even a neighbor’s adult party made Frederick socially awkward. He would talk only to Elinor, which isolated her from other people, the last thing she wanted.

  “My mom, she liked to dance,” said Chris. “In fact, that was always a point of—it wasn’t a disagreement, it’s just that my father was self-conscious of the fact that, you know, he’s German, and he didn’t have a sense of rhythm. A song would come on and he’d be clapping to the wrong beat.”

  There was something Frederick managed to truly bond with his sons over, and that was his obsession with jazz. He never lost his love for it, and he willingly, openly, and unapologetically shared it with his sons. The good times together as a family revolved around jazz, especially when Stephen and Chris were of the age when they could appreciate the sound. If there ever was a moment when Frederick became animated, it was when jazz was the topic of conversation. When the boys were old enough to play instruments, they challenged their dad on different styles. Chris was more inspired by bebop and post-bop jazz, like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis; Stephen loved Chet Baker. Frederick, however, was exclusively drawn to jazz from New Orleans. The debates were lively and fun. The three would even have impromptu jam sessions from time to time.22

  “When he would come home from work, he would have rented either a brass instrument like a trombone or more frequently, a trumpet or clarinet, and then probably before dinner, he would pick up the horn and just play it furiously, in the most musical way he could conjure up,” said Chris. “He would put on a record of Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet and he would try to play along. But of course with no training or no intuition in terms of any brass technique, one out of every four notes might be right.”

  There was jazz playing at the Albert house nonstop. Elinor and Frederick played records every single day, all day. The music added warmth to the home, making the lack of communication between the parents and their kids less obvious. Seeing Frederick talkative lifted everyone’s spirits, especially Elinor, who was naturally loquacious. She had become a delight to her neighbors and a beloved resident of Village Creek.

  Pamela Ballard was a teenager and friends with Stephen when she first met Elinor. “There was a couch, and I would come and sit on that couch in the early afternoon, late morning. I’d be here until about ten of five, until she’d say, ‘Oh! I didn’t realize—where did the time go? I’ve got to fix dinner for Frika.’ And she’d go running into the kitchen and say, ‘You’ve got to go!’ That happened so many days.”23

  Elinor loved taking care of her family and was a gourmet cook. “She could make wiener schnitzel like killer,” said Chris. She sent him to school with decadent sandwiches. While other kids were eating peanut butter and jelly, Chris had roast pork or tuna on homemade bread. She made sure dinner was lavish. She could make every kind of cuisine imaginable, including Bavarian food, which she would fuse with soul food.

  Her energy even inspired Frederick to occasionally bake at home. He and Chris would make kaiser rolls and donuts, and eat them fresh out of the oven—one of the few tender moments between them.

  Since Elinor had long given up the idea of working, she put her energy into gardening. For years she wore her white nurse’s jacket and would sit on a stool weeding and planting for hours and “sweating like a pig,” said Chris. She tended to the garden almost every day; that became her job. When Frederick left for work, Elinor went to her yard. Tomatoes, corn, flowers, exotic plants, perennials—she cultivated a beautiful garden that neighbors stopped by to admire.

  Elinor was always caring for something or someone. She was a nurturer, and her garden reflected that. She never burdened anyone wit
h her problems, but she was always around to listen to theirs. Teenage girls frequently visited her, and she showered them with gifts—dresses or jewelry. She was an avid collector of art and antiques, as well as a mentor and volunteer at Planned Parenthood. As long as Elinor was taking care of someone, obviously Frederick first, she was happy.

  As the children grew older and the civil rights movement became more pronounced, the Albert family still functioned in their bubble of racial avoidance. Elinor didn’t participate in protests and didn’t have any talks with her sons about what it meant to be black in America. There were no references to the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., or Malcolm X. She once made a comment that they would never travel to the South, which irked some of her family who lived in Virginia. There were never any family outings to protests, or any acknowledgment that mixed marriages still weren’t legal in several states and would remain so until 1967.24

  And Frederick continued his infidelity.

  Chris remembered that when he was a young teenager he once saw his father riding as a passenger in a woman’s car at a time when Frederick should have been at work. Once he saw Frederick duck, he realized that his father and the woman were engaged in something illicit. When Chris returned home and saw his father later that night, the two exchanged a lingering look that was an acknowledgment of what had happened, as well as an unspoken act of solidarity ensuring that Chris would not mention it to Elinor. And he never did.25

  Flawed marriage and all, Elinor and Frederick remained devoted to each other. She knew that Frederick would never leave her for another woman, because she was the most important person in his life. They had been through too much together and were completely dependent on each other.