Flirting with Danger (18 page)

My mother had remarried, this time to a man who had much in common with her. Tim, with his shaggy beard and curly gray hair,
looks like Karl Marx and has socialist sensibilities to match. He is kindhearted and will do anything for anyone in need. One winter evening he arrived home barefoot, having given away his shoes to a homeless man. Another time he brought home an abandoned boy, John, whose drug-addict mother had left to live in the bus station in New York. John ended up living with Tim and my mother for a couple of years, along with his temperamental pet parrot, Iggy. Anyone who sat under the bird’s cage was bombarded with bird shit or cherry pits. Both my mother and Tim loved birds and wildflowers and would spend hours walking and pointing out all manner of weeds to each other. Tim would bring back offerings from the woods to her. I came home one holiday to find a dead mole tucked away in the freezer as though asleep among the ice-cream cartons and coffee tins; another time a baby fox was in deep-frozen slumber, and a wasp’s nest adorned the hallway. And, just like my mother, Tim is a voracious collector of facts. So with twenty-four-hour coverage of Diana, those two helped fill a lot of airtime on CNN.

Since my mother is British, she had her own opinions about Diana, and the least I could do, as a price for the instant reference library, was listen to her rant. She felt it inappropriate for Diana to have gallivanted in public, and to have aired the royal family’s linen in such an aggressive way. She was also appalled by the outpouring of emotion after Diana’s death. “I don’t even recognize the British anymore, wailing in the streets like that,” my mother said. She called it the “Oprah-ization” of the entire world. Americans were vulgar enough, with their feelings constantly on display, my mother felt, and now the British were becoming just as bad.

My mother disliked Diana for all the reasons I adored her. What I saw as an effort to know herself, my mother labeled self-indulgence. I thought baring her soul to her public improved her image. My mother branded it as weak and shameful, a kind of promiscuity of
emotion. My mother is one of the most giving and caring people I know, doing anything for a complete stranger, rescuing the Bosnians or feeding the homeless. But, like many of her countrymen, she is more comfortable with other people’s pain than her own.

My mother’s disdain for emotion reflects her generation and culture. She was born late, to Victorian-era parents. My grandfather ran Belfast’s poorhouses, orphanages, and hospitals. He often took his young daughter on his inspections, so concern for the underprivileged was drummed into her psyche from an early age. Her elder brother, Brian, joined the navy during the Second World War. When his ship, which was bringing supplies to the Soviets in Murmansk, was temporarily believed to have sunk, it was not discussed in my mother’s family. Secrecy and tightly contained emotion were not just family traditions, they were part of the national character of the time.

On the day of Diana’s state funeral, a week after her death, I was outside Westminster Abbey with a cameraman, Todd, with whom I had worked for years in Russia and in London. He is one of the few people in television news who understands where to draw the line between capturing human emotion and tragedy and allowing people their privacy. He is sensitive to one of the hardest parts of our job, which is sticking the camera in the faces of people in pain. I was always uncomfortable with this aspect of my job, feeling like an intruder. Diana’s funeral was one of those rare moments when, as a journalist, I stopped observing, analyzing, and poking and instead got swept up in the moment. Todd put down his camera and I put away my notebook and together we wept with the bikers, punk rockers, old men, taxi drivers, and tourists who gathered in the streets. It felt good to share a glance or a hug or a tear with so many strangers who had let down their guard. It felt good to be part of the human race and not just an observer.

To me, Diana’s death was also a resounding reminder not to drift through life. I had this coveted job and glamorous career, meeting world leaders and history makers regularly. But I often felt empty at the end of a day. The price was getting too high. I would go home each night to my elegant London apartment full of treasures I had collected from around the world. Max was always dutifully waiting for me, and pleased to see me, but it wasn’t enough. I lay in bed at night, stroking his furry head, and wondered how I had ended up alone in my late thirties, with no family of my own. I wanted my own tribe, my own people. In Chechnya I saw that I had to get out of Russia to save my life. Now I knew I had to get out of reporting to save my soul.

The Orangemen

I
t was time to find a man and start a family. That phrase was becoming like a broken record in my head. But I found myself unable to quit. Every time I started to talk with one of my bosses about taking some time off, news would break somewhere else and I would be off on the road again. I complained to my friends about the burden, but the equal truth was that I was secretly relieved when news broke, because it diverted me from thinking about myself and my dilemma.

Getting sent to Northern Ireland was a welcome distraction. When I went back to Belfast, my birthplace, I was most concerned about avoiding my mother’s indoctrination. Her identity as Ulster Protestant defines her to this day. Her home is full of Union Jacks and bulldogs and commemorative plates depicting the royal family. She hates the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York, especially the dyed green beer. When I was a child, on every St. Patrick’s Day,
she defiantly put orange ribbons in my hair while all the other children at school, whether Jewish, Italian, or Irish, wore green. I recited to anyone who would listen how a Protestant king had defeated a Catholic king three hundred years ago, and the Protestants need to wear orange in protest of this Irish Catholic holiday. I repeated the stories like a robot to the other girls at school, and I was so absorbed by my mother’s prejudice that I actually felt contempt for the Catholic Irish-American children decked out in green and shamrocks. I felt betrayed if my close friends wore green on that day and didn’t take my side and wear orange. It made no difference that she lived in New Jersey; my mother felt unseen. She felt nobody understood her identity in this Kennedy-worshiping country. So I grew up hearing only one side of that story. It wasn’t her fault. People naturally tell their version of events. But it was another way that I learned about the roots of ethnic hatred in my own home.

When I went to Belfast as a reporter, I was easily accepted by Catholics and Protestants. Siobhan is a very common name in the Catholic community. Gerry Adams and his Sinn Fein party, the political wing of the IRA, welcomed me, assuming I was a sympathetic Irish-American Catholic. The Protestant Loyalists just needed to hear which street I was born on to assume I was one of theirs. The fact of the matter was that I was neither. I was some mixed-up half-Jew, half-Protestant who felt at home everywhere and nowhere and certainly didn’t belong to any tribe. I can feel linked to another person through the shared human experience of tragedy or beauty or kindness but rarely along some superficial accident of shared geography. I’m more likely to feel kinship to a Bushman touched by the beauty of a sunset than a fellow Northern Irishman burning tires on Guy Fawkes Day.

Northern Ireland is one of those conflicts where the U.S. news media took a stand long ago and developed a knee-jerk sympathy
for the IRA as the underdogs against British rule. I carefully monitored myself for any residual prejudice against the Catholic side from my childhood but I was also anxious to tell the less-heard Protestant viewpoint. As reporters we often cover the side that is most vocal, whoever plays the better victim. Sinn Fein were masters at getting their story out and fawned all over the press. The Protestants hadn’t quite grasped that essential aspect of modern warfare: get the press on your side.

I was surprised to see the Orangemen in action. There was something archaic about these men who marched in bowler hats and sashes and went to bonfires burning the Irish tricolor and the pope in effigy. They were nothing like my mother. I was out covering a bonfire one night where just about everyone sported a tattoo and a beer can. I called my mother on my cell phone to describe the scene to her.

“I’m with your people,” I told her.

“That crowd certainly aren’t my people, I can assure you,” said my mother in her haughtiest voice.

Sometimes I met people in Northern Ireland who could rise above their cultural and religious identities and find strength in their identity as humans—as fathers, as brothers, as people who simply wanted to live in peace. Usually something so terrible had happened to them that all those symbols of their identity had lost meaning, like a man I met the day after a cease-fire was declared by the IRA. His teenage daughter had been the last victim of sectarian violence—that round, anyway. She was a seventeen-year-old Catholic. She was shot dead in bed. Her crime? A Protestant boyfriend.

“I forgive her killers,” her father told me and my crew, sitting in his garden two days after her death. “Revenge just keeps it going—you kill my child, I’ll kill yours. Somebody has to stop the cycle. If my daughter’s death stops this cycle, she won’t have died in vain.”

We stopped the camera. I thanked him, went into our van, and burst into tears. I have so many stored up for every mother I’ve interviewed who lost a son to an IRA bomb or every Balkan villager who has lost his home, and every husband who lost his wife in a plane crash. I have been collecting tears for so long that now the tiniest pinprick can unexpectedly unleash a torrent.

Then there are the ancient tears. They have waited a long time to wet my cheeks and come out of their dark well of hiding. The old ones mix with the new ones. A small girl’s unshed tears. Tears so old and in need of shedding that any hint of sadness lures them to the surface.

It was during moments like these that I couldn’t imagine ever doing anything else with my life. To witness people in their darkest moments reach inside themselves and find courage inspired me to do the same.

The “Swan” and the Land of Bunkers

W
hen I sat down to think about the array of men I was dating in my thirties, I could finally see what any sensible person would have noticed right away: none of them wanted the same things I did. Trevor was an action junkie who was addicted to adrenaline, completely miswired for anything resembling a relationship; Julian was young and undomesticated, still looking at women as notches on his belt buckle. When Mel came along, talking about a burning desire to settle down and make babies, I thought he was the guy I had been waiting for.

OK, so he was forty and still lived with his mother in Beverly Hills, but that was because he came home when his father died and stayed a few years longer than expected. Sweet, I thought. This guy cares about family. Maybe I should have suspected something when I came to visit and we slept in his older sister’s long-vacated room, frilly pink bedspread and all. I noted the parallel to my father and
his unnatural attachment to his mother. But I could hardly write off every man simply because he had a mother. The other sign I underestimated was his constant worry about his weight. He was tall and skinny, but always stepping on and off the scales. Over the years I’ve learned to be wary of a man without a huge appetite. If they hold back at the dinner table, chances are they may show similar restraint in the bedroom.

There was something comforting in this tall, lumbering, matzo brei–eating Jewish male. He was smart and funny, and seemed to be just the type of person I should make a life with. Plus, he was a budding screenwriter, like everyone else in Los Angeles, so he could easily pack his computer and come to be with me wherever I had to go. I was smitten on our first date: dinner overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles. Mel compared himself to a swan, wanting to mate for life. I was used to meeting men who were more apt to liken themselves to alpha-male baboons in search of a harem. I fell hard for it, responding with the story of a black swan I covered in England. When the swan’s mate died, he seemed to be dying of loneliness himself, prompting a nationwide search to find him a new mate. Mel and I looked deeply into each other’s eyes. It seemed right.