by Tod Davies
My mother, living in occupied Japan after the war, relieved that the bombing was over, believed every lie she was told about the United States.
"I thought every American wore a dinner jacket!" she said later, in the pretty little kitchen of the pretty little bungalow where we lived in San Francisco. And she looked with an expression of mingled amusement and despair at the kitchen's wallpaper written all over with the names of spices in script of turquoise and green, and at the dinette set of gray formica and black metal at which we had our meals of Swanson's TV dinners.
She tried, for a while, to make us all speak French at the table. But this proved more than quixotic — it was literally impossible. The bemusement of my father, child of a long line of hard drinkin', hard drivin', hard shootin' tractor trailer cap wearing rednecks, was more than enough to put a stop to that.
I, thinking such a refinement quite elegant, gave it a try. But no matter how hard I worked, and despite being at the top of my class at the Convent school my parents made huge sacrifices to send me to — a branch of that same school she had gone to in Tokyo –, I couldn't do it. I couldn't speak French. I was fine at the written tests. But I couldn't speak another language to save my life.
My four brothers, all equally good at academics, were similarly lousy at the living languages. The only language one of us ever ended up being able to speak was Ancient Greek. Later, puzzling over this, I formed a theory that I've seen nothing since to refute.
We're a nation of refugees, we Americans, all terrified that the nightmare isn't over and that we can be thrown out, interned, killed at any time. (This is why we go through periods of intense xenophobia — as if by having new peoples to be the immigrants, we establish ourselves ever more safely and securely on the ladder up.) The only safe language to teach children to speak is English — American English. My mother, who spoke Portuguese, French, Cantonese, and a little Japanese, would never, ever speak any of those languages to us. When she spoke on the phone to my Aunt Celia in the languages of their childhood, she would lower her voice to a whisper. Foreign languages meant foreign nationalities, and foreign nationalities meant you weren't American and you could get thrown out at any time…thrown back to those countries where the Americans would bomb the hell out of you before going back to their own prosperous, strong, laughing land where they would wear dinner jackets at night and talk about how they were Lords of the Universe. In English, of course. Or French, if they were very posh.
Now, when I look back at so many things in my childhood that perplexed me utterly, this is the magic key that seems to open the door to the Truth. My mother was simply terrified that she would be killed, and that we would be killed, too. And so many of the things she did that seemed utterly bizarre and completely nutty to us kids came from that one terrifying fact. Her insistence that I remember that the little bits of jewelry I had could always be traded for food in an emergency. Her pushing us out of the door to take the buses to school all the way across town — three buses! through the ghetto! — when I was five years old! When I was six, I was taking my brother, and when I was eight, two brothers. Even then I thought it was weird. Surely we were too small to be getting on these buses by ourselves? But I liked the independence, even if it was often a frightening experience, and I learned how to deal with the men who exposed themselves or offered me quarters, and how to make quick friends on the street corner no matter where I was when the bus broke down. These are skills that have served me well over time, and have often been a source of secret pride. Years later, when I contemplated under what circumstances I'd acquired those skills, I wondered what in God's name my mother was thinking — sending a five year old out into the world like that. But now I know. She was thinking: "If there's ever a war, and something happens to me, she'll know how to get across town by herself. And she'll know how to take her brothers with her."
I would have, too. In any murderous confusion, I could have gotten the three of us all the way across the Golden Gate Park to my grandmother's house and safety. I could have done it when I was five. And what seemed irresponsible, almost deranged behavior to me as a child, who had only know peacetime, looks to be quite canny foresight on the part of my mother now.
So. To go back a little ways in the story. She was eighteen years old. She was scared, she was pigheaded, she was valiant. In Tokyo, she determined to get herself and her mother and older sister to safety in America. My aunt, by nature far more prudent than my mother, had already fallen in love with an American in the occupying forces — another immigrant to the US, this time from Mexico, assistant to an Army chaplain, my future uncle, a man of infinite kindness, innate civility, and natural honor. But my Aunt Celia had a wariness about affections formed by wartime, and decided they needed to wait until their feelings were clearer. My Uncle John, equally sensible, equally patient, agreed.
My mother was not about to wait. This has been both her charm and her demon from the beginning, as far as I can tell — that she'll always jump before inquiring how far down is the fall. She was and is many things: vivacious, energetic, magnetic. But she is not sensible, and she is not patient. She wasn't now. Maybe it was better that way. She was determined to become an American as quickly as possible, to choose an American husband from among the many conquering heroic men America had to offer, to have as many children as she could, and to be safe…to be safe. Oh, she was confused. Her confusion about the American class system, for instance. She believed that horseshit that there wasn't one — that all Americans were top of the tree. And then there was her determination to rush at it and get the better of it and get a safe place for her and her children, too. She made mistakes. How could she not? But she was in a hurry. And she was very strong. Maybe too strong.
With the greatest dispatch, then, she applied for scholarships at Convent Colleges in the United States. She got one, too, in San Francisco, at the campus of Lone Mountain, a situation in the middle of the city of almost other worldly beauty. And she moved my aunt and my grandmother along with her, lickety split. Getting citizenship wasn't a problem; there was a quota system after the war, and not too many people like my mother's family could afford the journey, the stress, the sheer nerve it took to apply.
She could though.
She prowled. I don't know this for sure, but I imagine it. I imagine her in a fever every night, lying in the little apartment she now shared only with her mother, now that my Uncle John had come and taken my Aunt Celia away to the comfortable wooden house on Arch Street, I imagine her lying awake every night turning her goal around in her head. She would marry and she would marry the best.
She picked my father, a gentle man who could look like a Lord of the Universe when he had to, and they all had to, those mild, frightened men my country was made of at the end of World War II. My father was supported in this vision by an adoring mother and sisters, second generation German-Irish Catholics, from immigrant families, but just established enough to have the scorn of the newly made insider for the new outsider. My mother was at school with the sisters. These, my aunts, idolized my father, even though — or perhaps because — theirs were the stronger personalities. But in postwar America, the opportunity to surge forward, for the whole family, rested with the boys. And my father was the standard bearer for his aspirant mother and sisters.
They worshipped him. Like all idols, he suffered from this, was trapped by it. But like many idols before him, he had no choice but to gleam and strut and do his best to live up to the belief in him of his admirers. And they did believe in him. They believed in him so much that they thought his infatuation with my mother was beneath his dignity. He, the first in their family to go to college, he who had taken second honors as St. Ignatius school for Boys, he who would be an engineer! And she, a mere foreigner. An Oriental one, at that.
There is no prejudice against the outsider like that of an outsider only recently let in. My family is a testament to this.
Maybe it was the silent scorn on the part of my aunts that spurred my mother on. She became determined to marry my father. She had many offers — five others, in fact. But she determined on him, and once my mother determines on something, she runs at it and runs at it and runs at it until it gives up out of sheer exhaustion. My father was no match for her in terms of sheer energetic will. Few men would have been. He must have been fascinated and horrified in equal measure. How could this smooth-skinned beauty with a waist the size of his two hands, this child of the upper class verandas of European Asia, how could she want him? It was too much. He ran away. To Europe, on business, — that was his excuse, a common one then, the excuse of an entire generation of postwar husbands and fathers. She wrote to him there and said that if he didn't come home and marry her right away, she was going for one of the other offers.
Of course he came home and of course he married her. Not only was she the most glamorous, fascinating, and downright beautiful woman of his (or anyone else's, for that matter) acquaintance, but a lifetime of performing up to the standards of demanding women had given him no other choice. He had to keep up those standards or lose his prestige.
I've often thought it was this prestige that fooled her. That, and that she was in such a hurry. Because while my father and mother are both lovely people in their own way, they have in common — or they did, rather, at the start of more than fifty years now of marriage — absolutely nothing.
"Your mother is a very remarkable woman," my father would often say to me when I was a girl — and the look in his eyes was like that of a snake looking into the eyes of a snake charmer. "Remarkably nuts," I used to think to myself with the typical ruthlessness of a child toward its own parent. That was before I understood the reason for her storms of emotion, the sudden tantrums that would sweep through our house like a tropical hurricane, leaving everything waste behind it, everything, that is, except my mother, smiling unconcernedly, still standing, while the rest of us cowered in corners and under furniture on the floor. Of course my brothers and I blamed her for these natural disasters, rather than my gentle, affectionate, cheerfully checked out Dad. That was before I had the whole picture a little clearer.
They were furiously ill matched, my parents. To this day, more than fifty years after their marriage, I find myself saying, "Dad, what I think Mother is trying to say…" and
"Mother, I don't think Dad meant exactly that…" I have found myself too often in my professional life mediating between two sides that clearly don't have the foggiest idea of the other side's position to think of it as anything other than a fate assigned to me very young. I was born, in a way, to be my parents' interpreter. As so many of us born in the late Fifties and early Sixties were. It was as if America itself was crying out for a generation to explain itself to itself.
And it needed one.
The craving they had, that whole Generation, I can see it very clearly now: it was to be safe. This must have been the craving of the whole world at that point, but on this I have no personal information. The craving to be safe in my own world took the place of some fairly strong myth-making, as if telling the story the way it made the world look best was a way of making it an authentically kind and welcoming place…instead of the mean, exploiting, murderous place it so obviously had been and probably was still.
One of the myths was that we were all middle class. While it's obvious to me now that we are NOT all middle class, or, rather, that some of us are more middle class than others, I now recognize that it was this sheer heroic stupidity, this brave mythmaking on the part of many, many secretly terrified families, that has turned us now into the most middle class country the world has ever known. The well-known myth, in America, is that anyone who works hard enough, possesses enough virtue and stamina, can become a contented, safe member of that middle class. By which means your children will be educated and safe, in the professional classes, you will drive a car and have a television and…well, the myth goes on to intimate you'll be able to actively participate in the polity — though this turns out to be even more untrue than any other parts of its story. Because the more of us there are who get bought off as families with the creature comforts and apparent safety (but for how long?) of our lives, we still have a price to pay. In the US that price is a muteness in any say about what happens with our government. If you want to have a say you either have to be 1.) very, very, very rich (and I don't just mean a little rich, either,) or 2.) willing to act as lackey to the very, very, very rich.
This is not a statement of cynicism. This is a statement of fact. And this was the statement of fact that my parents and their whole generation, and the ones that came after them closed their eyes too, closed them wide shut.
Because what they wanted most of all was to be safe. And who can blame them?
The question is not only who can blame them, but who can really look at them and say that theirs was not the right course at that point? That was the most important thing in the world, just then: to be safe and to make sure your family was safe. Any mistakes made in pursuit of that object were mistakes that had to be made.
I am a grateful product of that quest for safety, you know — I and many others. We all of us have that as our unacknowledged subtext…that our parents' first concern was that they and we be safe. It's not just interesting for me to see that, acknowledge it, I see as I do that it's imperative. It's imperative because it explains where I come from and who I am. And it explains that that quest has been done, and that like so many other quests, when it's taken too far it tends to turn into its direct opposite. The quest for safety taken too far becomes the quest to hide from the Real World. I know that quest well — I've lost myself pursuing it plenty of times, unable to look at myself, at my world, at my position in it as a woman and as an artist, and make any hopeful sense of it. Often I've wished I had a tenth of my mother's bravery, that bravery she showed when she was so young. My mother's quest was to be safe, and that was a good quest, and the mistakes she made in that quest were honorable ones, the wounds she suffered in that quest were worthy ones. But my quest now is a different one. And safety, I'm afraid, doesn't much enter into it anymore. There are no safe places now, if there ever were; a shivering, clear look at the news will tell you that if you have the eyes to see it. And the sooner I know that, the sooner I can take on the bravery of my mother and get on with being her daughter and the sooner I can get on with building what I can with the people I can against an even more dangerous future than any past my mother ever knew.