A Song in the Night (7 page)

Later she participated in lunch counter sit-ins in her hometown. Those events took her all over downtown Nashville, including Harvey’s, the city’s largest and most elegant department store, where her husband was a senior manager. When his business colleagues asked why he couldn’t control his wife, he told them to mind their own business. On another occasion GrandMolly invited an African-American friend to have lunch with her at a well-known segregated pancake house.
The nervous manager tried to escort them to the back of the restaurant, where they would not be observed. GrandMolly, always polite, stood her ground. She pointed to a table next to the big front window, where she and her companion would be visible from everywhere. “Young man, we are going to sit right there,” she said. When they sat down, she unfolded her napkin and said to her companion, “I have always believed that in order to make change, we have to make ourselves seen.”

I did not know what it meant to live as an African-American in a country consumed by race. At the same time, because of my experiences with hemophilia, I did know what it was like to walk into a room and to have people dismiss you in the space of a few seconds. I knew that my bandages and braces and wheelchair created a gap of anxiety or outright fear between me and those I met. I understood the desire to be accepted despite my appearance. And I knew how tiring and unfair it was to have to project warmth and confidence toward skittish strangers in order to induce them to accept one’s elementary humanity.

Most of my days were spent crossing the long vistas of boredom and loneliness created by my slow recuperation from hundreds of joint bleedings. By this time we lived in a stately, crumbling Victorian house in Irvington, New York, that my parents had purchased in a fit of romance and financial folly. Known as Sunnybank, the hundred-year-old building needed endless repairs; for years we had to avoid slamming doors to avoid being doused with plaster dust from cracks in the ceilings above. The home exuded personality, though, likely a
huge, shaggy old dog, and it sat on four acres filled with glorious trees—ramrod elms, soaring pines, and an immense 250-year-old copper beech that arched into the sky. Local historians said that Hessian troops—German mercenaries fighting against the American army during the revolution—had camped beneath its red canopy at the time of the Battle of White Plains, a detail that filled my mind with images during the long hours I stared out the window at its leaves and at the Hudson River in the distance.

For weeks on end, my primary instrument of propulsion was my wheelchair. It became an extension of my body. I knew just how fast I needed to be going to bump over the thresholds between rooms. I knew where and how to seize the doorjambs in a way that would allow me to slingshot around corners. I plucked the metal spokes of the wheels to create strangely attractive twelve-tone tunes. And I relieved the pressure on my back and legs by lifting the small front wheels off the floor and balancing on the two rear wheels, something I could do for hours on end.

I was able to move freely around this friendly ark of a house because of a large manual elevator hidden behind a door in the room where my father wrote. Designed like a huge dumbwaiter, the large wooden cage moved between the first and second floor through an ingenious system of counterweights and flywheels. I operated the device by yanking on thick ropes that opened the brakes and rotated the wheels to move the platform up and down. I was able to go downstairs for lunch, upstairs for the afternoon, and then downstairs for
dinner, alternating venues as often as I could to alleviate the paralyzing tedium of convalescence.

As I headed into my teenage years, my circle of freedom and understanding expanded steadily. When I was eleven years old, a new treatment for hemophilia was invented: a high-potency form of Factor VIII that could be kept at room temperature and injected by the parents of boys with hemophilia or even the boys themselves. The availability of this new product was a godsend. It meant that bleedings could be treated quickly and effectively. With the support of these products I knew I might be able to build up the strength of my legs to the point where I could remove one, and then both, of my leg braces. The process was full of risk, because too much stress could plunge me back into weeks or months of incapacity. The reward, however, was potentially miraculous.

I remember one afternoon in particular when I was given a small taste of the freedom that might lie ahead. I was sitting on the back steps of our house, looking at a tire swing that my father had suspended from a maple tree. I had just removed my braces and was wondering how many steps I might be able to take without them. I realized that though I had often watched my sisters at play on the swing, I had never been on it. Somehow I limped and stumbled across the yard until I could grab the swing with my hands. I tucked my legs through the center and began to glide back and forth, side to side, in great swooping figure eights. As I moved through the air, I felt a rush of liberation. The speed, the windy air, the circular motion, were all new to me. They instantly evoked all the things I could not
do: run, skate, or fly. As I swirled around I was experiencing life in a new manner, through the eyes and body of someone who was no longer tied to the ground.

It was an illusion, in many ways, but it gave me a foretaste of what would happen if I could remain disciplined and break free from the devices that tied me down. In the moments I rode on the tire swing, I experienced the exhilaration of motion, the joy of a new form of dance, both physical and spiritual, that lay just ahead. And within months, supported by the new medical technologies and motivated by this new vision of freedom, I finally took the braces off.

Yet I could not throw them away. The metal bars and leather straps and carefully handmade buckles had been part of my life for too long. Even though I had feared and resented them, they had given me what little mobility I had had over many years.

They now lie in a large plastic box in the cool darkness of a small room in our basement. Every few years I am down there looking for Christmas ornaments or old books and I come across them. When I open the lid, they always shock me, and it is all I can do not to weep.

In the fall of 1968 my parents moved our whole family overseas to the magnificent city of Paris. They had completed their work on my father’s first book,
Nicholas and Alexandra
, and with its publication and overnight transformation into a bestseller we suddenly had the resources to do new things. My
mother, who had been born in the United States to Swiss parents, was especially eager for us to learn French so that we could forge ties with our relatives.

To move my parents, my two sisters, a babysitter, and me, along with all of our luggage for a year, we decided to take the S.S.
France
, one of the last of the great fleet of transatlantic ocean liners that went back and forth every week. As we stood on the deck and felt the huge vessel pulling away from Manhattan, my mother leaned over and reminded me of the conversations we had had when I had been frightened, strapped to the hospital bed many years before. “I told you that someday we would go to Paris,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

Though our original plan was to go for twelve months, we ended up remaining for the next four years. The first year Susanna and I attended the Ecole Bilingue, which accepted both English- and French-speaking students. I was placed in a small classroom of French beginners who were twelve or thirteen years old. Within a few days I discovered that Paris worked its magical effects on people of every age.

We eventually moved to one of the oldest sections of Paris, the Marais, and lived in a four-hundred-year-old apartment building. We had a small garden in the back, and just over the garden wall were the barracks of the Garde Republicaine, a cavalry unit of the French army much like the British Royal Horse Guards. The president of France often used this regiment, in full dress uniform, swords drawn, to welcome foreign heads of state or to escort him in parades. Every morning as we drank our coffee and prepared to go to school, we could hear
the clip-clop of their chestnut horses as the guards practiced their maneuvers, often combined with the brilliant harmonies of their trumpets.

Coming from America, we were captivated by everything that was different. Many of the city’s streets revealed the capital city’s preoccupation with two of its major pursuits: fashion and food. I was mesmerized by the endless number of places to eat. Every street was lined with bistros and cafés, with patisseries (selling pastries and ice cream), boulangeries (selling all the popular forms of bread and many other prepared foods), and fromageries (cheese stores). Specialty stores for fish, meat, fruit, vegetables, and wine squeezed into tiny spaces next to each other from one side of the city to the other. At that time there were few supermarkets and the refrigerators in most apartments were tiny, so most people bought something fresh for their meals every day. When they didn’t want to eat at home, people sat at tiny outdoor tables on the sidewalks of the boulevards and ordered food and drink from well before breakfast until long after midnight.

After we spent a year in a supposedly bilingual school, where, unfortunately, we learned very little French, my parents transferred us to a new school, the Collège Sévigné, on the Left Bank. The experience plunged me into yet another setting in which I was made aware of my differences from the community around me. I was an American in a school full of French children, and a boy in a sea of girls.

Established in 1880 as the first nondenominational school for young women in France, the Collège Sévigné had endured for nearly ninety years as a single-sex facility until the turbulent
events of 1968, when an explosion in French society pitted leftist university students against a conservative government and a tough police force. The crisis led to months of anarchy in the schools and factories, and thousands of other institutions simply stopped functioning. Seeking relief from the chaos, parents clamored for the schools where they had enrolled their daughters to admit their sons as well. I entered in the first coeducational class. In my eighth-grade class there was only me and a French boy named Jean-Yves Grindel with twenty-six girls.

It was not easy to win acceptance in such a setting, particularly since we were all skidding into puberty. Teenage Parisian girls, like their counterparts around the world, showed little interest in boys their own age. The thrill in their lives came from high school boys, even college students, who arrived at the end of the school day on their buzzing mopeds, their long dark hair and scarves trailing in the wind, cigarettes hanging lazily from their mouths. My female classmates would hop on the back of these machines, wrap their arms around the waist of the boy in front of them, and go speeding off with the sound of squealing tires and laughter. Sometimes I would spot them in nearby cafés, smoking and drinking red wine with their wire-thin admirers, while I sighed, reshouldered my book bag, and trudged home.

Though I was barred from these emerging romantic encounters, some girls still reached across the cultural divide to include me. They found my strange accent, my clumsy verbal mistakes, and even my unusual medical problems interesting. Their affection was similar to what one would show to
a pet. It didn’t help that in France my name, Bobby, was the stereotypical name for a cute little dog. At the same time, there was an element of mercy in their efforts of inclusion. Some girls, recognizing that I had absorbed almost nothing of what was said in class for the first few weeks, cornered me in the corridors, at lunch, or in study hall to offer emergency tutorials before the next class.

At the time, the French national system of education, designed by Napoleon to create a uniform national standard of excellence, thrived on ranking, ordering, grading, and excluding. There was no sense that a child—especially a middle-school child—should be offered flexibility and room to grow. The goal of the system was to sort children quickly into the areas in which they would best serve the state. By the time most children were fifteen, they had been classified into iron categories that determined what they would be allowed to study, what universities they would be permitted to attend, and thus what careers they would be able to pursue—elite careers in science or government for those with the best scores, teaching careers in the humanities for the next ranks, and trades for everyone else. Once these decisions had been made, there was virtually no chance to alter the outcome.