Free Blue Genes by Christopher Lukas

beautiful face some distant thoughts that were not for me or for repetition.
    I remember Dad coming home at night, tired and cranky, usually too late to come up and say good night, though I strove to stay awake long enough for him to do so.
    Missy used to visit several times a month, taking the slow train up from New York City and remaining several days.
    There are some photographs of her when she was in her twenties. Tall, regal, with prematurely silver hair. There is a picture of
her
grandmother that I’ve seen, too. It was at the New-York Historical Society some years back. Titled “Mrs. Bamberger Comes to America,” it portrays a well-dressed woman, floating, fully clothed, in the ocean while clinging to a piece of flotsam. Behind her a vessel appears to be swiftly sinking, its four masts barely protruding above the murky water. The painting was done in the nineteenth century. It’s based on a true incident that involved my great-great-grandmother. On Mrs. Bamberger’s face there is no sign of panic, no sense that she is in danger. She will make it to shore and will go on with her life.
    I hold this image in my mind, knowing that some people come face-to-face with disaster, then, letting go of the debris, turn their backs on the past and survive. Most of us are treading water, even though we don’t know it. What we do next is the crucial thing.
    I remember Missy walking across the grass at 250 Rosedale Avenue. It was six in the morning, and she was in her nightgown; I can almost
feel
the dew on the lawn as it softly rinses her bare feet. The sun crept up over the woods that bordered our property. Birch, oak, and maple trees, shining in that lustrous morning light which I remember well, beckoned to those of us who were awake. As soon as I was able to walk, I became an early riser, and I liked to put my elbows on the windowsill in my room and watch the sunrise, the squirrels on the trees, the change of seasons in the rose garden that bordered the house. But this memory of Missy has always been confused with a photograph of another white-haired woman, also in a nightgown, also barefoot, walking across the grounds of an old-age home in the Midwest. This shot appeared in
Collier’s
magazine as part of a story on forgotten people. In remembering the picture, I always think of the place as an insane asylum, not an old-age home. And I always think that it is Missy walking there, not some anonymous old lady, lost in her crazy thoughts. I know I really did watch her in those early mornings, rounding the corner of the rose garden, her head down, her long prematurely white hair falling over her shoulders, dreamily experiencing the coming of day. I always feel the event not as Missy says she felt it—a lovely oneness with nature—but with a premonition of terrible things to come.
    In the late 1930s Dad made a decision to get out of courtrooms. He didn’t actually do it until late 1940, and there are several versions about how this happened. His friend Robert Lindner—the psychoanalyst who made a stir as the author of
Rebel Without a Cause
and
The Fifty-Minute Hour
—told me that Dad had been asked by a big importer-exporter client to go to Veracruz, Mexico, in the fall of 1940. Apparently Mexican authorities were holding up permission for a freighter to leave port for Japan.
    Dad found out why and phoned the owners.
    “Your father was drunk when he called from Veracruz,” Lindner told me in 1955. “He had discovered that the owners of the ship had a cargo of scrap metal they were sending to Japan. By this time, such shipments were embargoed. The United States knew the Japanese were going to use scrap to make planes to fight China, or ourselves. Your father hated being used that way. So he told the owners to shove it.”
    “He was drunk?”
    “Yes,” Lindner said. “He’d had half a bottle of tequila.”
    This was the first I’d heard of any such behavior on Dad’s part. It was very dramatic. The resulting