Still Me (9 page)

Tophy (right) and Beejy on a Sunday morning.

My parents' romance began during the Christmas holidays in 1950, when he was at Columbia and she was still at Vassar. They met because of an unusual family connection. Mahlon Pitney was my mother's uncle, and he married my father's mother, Anne d'Olier Reeve, after her divorce from Richard Reeve, Sr. My mother and her parents, Horace and Beatrice Lamb, were invited to Mahlon and Anne's house on a hilltop in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. My mother had not been particularly interested in going until Horace told her that Anne had two sons, Franklin and Richard Reeve, Jr., who were both bright, handsome college students.

She was immediately taken with Franklin. As they were decorating the Christmas tree in the great family room, Franklin pulled a Styrofoam ball off a branch and teasingly threw it at my mother, who quickly grabbed another one and threw it back at him. A playful indoor snowball fight ensued. They spent most of the family holiday together, and no sooner had she returned to Vassar than my father called and asked to come visit her the following weekend. She was both excited and taken aback by the intensity of Franklin's interest in her. But this was a part of his character, which I think I inherited: the single-minded pursuit of a particular objective. My father was a real romantic in those days, prone to strong passions, whether in politics, ideals, or love. Whatever captured his interest became all consuming, at least for a time. He courted my mother ardently, driving up from Columbia almost every weekend. They took long walks by the Hudson and lingered in coffee shops near the campus. Soon her mailbox was filled with stories, poems, and love letters.

In the summer of 1951 my mother went to Europe with several of her college classmates. My father wanted very much to come along on this trip, but Horace and Beatrice strongly objected. I think they felt their daughter was too young for such an intense romance. So instead Franklin spent the summer working on the docks on the West Side waterfront, “shaping up” every morning with the longshoremen, waiting to be chosen to unload banana boats. From this experience he developed an interest in the labor movement and socialism.

Franklin had come from a prominent Mainline Philadelphia family. His grandfather, Col. Richard d'Olier, was the CEO of the Prudential Insurance Company for more than twenty-five years. Money was never an issue; all his heirs attended the best prep schools and colleges in the East. On the other hand, Horace Lamb had come from a working-class family in Sandusky, Ohio, won a scholarship to Cornell, and eventually become the senior partner in one of New York's most prestigious law firms, with homes on Sutton Place and in New Canaan, Connecticut—virtually the definition of a self-made man. I think he resented the idea of my father, a rich young Princeton graduate, transforming himself into a “workingman.”

In spite of the long hours on the docks, Franklin always found time to send passionate letters to various American Express offices in Europe, keeping up with my mother's itinerary. When her ship docked in New York in early September, my father greeted her on the pier with an engagement ring. Over my grandfather's objections they were married at the Presbyterian church in New Canaan on November 23, 1951. She was nineteen and Franklin was twenty-three.

But a widening gulf was developing between my parents when I was born. Franklin was beginning to turn away from his privileged background and to become more involved in his new interests—socialism and Russian language and literature. Coming from New Canaan, used to a privileged society, my mother still had a limited and rarefied view of the world, and she lacked confidence in herself. When she was eighteen she had an old-fashioned coming out party in New York. But afterwards the phone did not ring and no eligible bachelors appeared at the door. I once asked her what that was like, and she said, “Well, I came out, but I went right back in again.”

She was very pretty. In the pictures of her when she was young, she is a knockout. But when she was still in her early teens she was sent to an all-girls boarding school in Arizona because of her asthma. Then she came back east and graduated from Westover, another girls' school, in 1949. She had never had a boyfriend or even dated, so Franklin probably seemed too good to be true. He was extremely handsome, bright, funny, and charming. He was a scholar, a poet, an athlete (he set a record in the hammer throw at Princeton that lasted for decades). He was also something of an actor, having written and performed with the University Players.

My mother's father, Horace Lamb, at the time of my parents' courtship.

Everything changed for my mother that Christmas of 1950, when she suddenly found herself in a whirlwind romance with an extraordinary young man. She got married less than a year later, became pregnant at nineteen and a half, had a baby at twenty, then gradually discovered that she was married to someone who was going off more and more in his own direction. His romantic interest in her was gradually being replaced by an equally romantic interest in his work and colleagues at Columbia. My mother was never an intellectual, and before long they had little to talk about. The atmosphere in our home became increasingly tense.

It must have been overwhelming for my mother to have to cope with two rambunctious boys at such a young age. Ben and I were usually going at each other, competing for attention and space. My father was devoted to both of us and enjoyed taking on much of our daily care. I think he even felt he could do a better job than my mother. But as my parents drifted apart, my mother had to take more responsibility. On some deep level I wished she were more confident and able to take control of us.

When she was a young mother, she loved us very much, but she let people push her around, including me. I'm more ashamed now of having taken advantage of her than I was at the time, but then I was always testing her. I wanted her to say, “No, you can't get away with that.” I needed boundaries. Now I realize how young and frightened she must have been when her marriage to Franklin broke up.

My strongest memory of that New York apartment was the day we left it. A moving van pulled up in front of the building. This was a cause of great excitement for a three-year-old because the van was so huge. I remember running around inside it while they were loading the furniture, the clothes, and the bric-a-brac. I was only dimly aware that we were moving because the marriage was over.

We went to Princeton because my mother really didn't know where else to go. There she had friends from the days when she and Franklin were dating. We had half a house at 66 Wiggins Street and settled in on New Year's Eve 1955. Horace paid the bills. My brother and I went to the Nassau Street School, just up the block. I was very happy there. We had to wear nice brown shoes every day. The minute I came home I would go upstairs to change so I wouldn't get them dirty playing.

At first Ben and I visited Franklin on a fairly regular basis, but gradually that tailed off. We were supposed to spend six weeks with him every summer, as well as alternate weekends and holidays, but it didn't work out that way. Within a year of the divorce the particulars of the court settlement became increasingly irrelevant.

In the early years he had changed our diapers, fed us, taken us for walks, and felt extremely proud of us. But when we ended up in Princeton, and especially when my mother married Tristam Johnson, a stockbroker and a Republican, Franklin had a harder time relating to us. After getting his Ph.D. in Russian, my father had applied for a teaching job at Princeton in order to be near us. But friends of my mother who had influence with the president of the university blocked the appointment, accusing him of being a Communist. This turned out to have a lasting impact on our relationship, because it meant he couldn't see us as much as he wanted to or be as involved in our development. In 1956 he married my stepmother, Helen Schmidinger, a fellow graduate student at Columbia, and in February of that year they had their first child, my half sister Alya (of the famous President Clinton phone call). Two sons, Brock and Mark, soon followed. After the rejection by Princeton, I think Franklin was bitter and disappointed. He realized that Tris would become a more prominent figure in our lives, and that he would be far less of an influence on Ben and me. While the door was still open for visits, he turned his attention to his new wife and family.

I remember my father in the late fifties and early sixties as being both magnetic and unpredictable. Much of the time Ben and I basked in the glow of his interest and praise. He taught us to ski and played tennis with us patiently in the park. We used to lie down on gratings in the sidewalk and watch the subway trains roar by beneath us. I loved the trips back to Princeton in his red Volkswagen Beetle. It didn't have a gas gauge, so my father would write down the mileage at each fill-up, and we would take turns guessing how far we could go before the next one. He always turned off the engine when he went downhill to save gas and would never take the New Jersey Turnpike because he could save eighty-five cents by taking Route 1. When we stayed with him we bought root beer to have after our naps and often had a glass of ginger ale in the evening, joining the grown-ups for “cocktails.”