Buying the Night Flight (8 page)

The third great influence on my life was my brother, Glen. Ten years older than me, tall, handsome, charming, and far too generous, Glen was in many ways a young, surrogate father to me. When I was just a baby, he took me under the long wing of his long arms and unwittingly prepared me for a world that would be a stage.

Glen, later to become a leading dress designer, had a genuine artistic sense that I never even approached; everything he touched turned to beauty. For me he created a marvelous fantasy world. He turned everything into a kind of theater for me, and so I learned early how to move in the kind of world of half-reality and half-fantasy that I eventually created for myself. I could have done little that I have done without him, his constant support, and his love.

But no amount of scrutiny of my childhood can explain why I wound up in Guatemala stumbling through the mountains ... or in Gairo talking with Anwar Sadat ... or in the rice paddies of South Vietnam ... or listening during a vicious sandstorm in Khartoum while American diplomats were gunned to death by Palestinian terrorists .... But as far back as I can remember, I wanted to know - - I
had
to know -- everything in the world. At ten I wrote a 110-page book (with myself as the heroine, naturally). In high school, in the absence of any guidance, I read right through the library. Even as a child I was terribly concerned about truth -- truth, that is, in the sense of "what is" in the world. I was also concerned about those "couriers" who carried truth. I looked outward for truth, not inward, and broadcast it with the ardor of the missionary I once wanted to be. Eventually I chose journalism because -- in opposition, for instance, to philosophy, where truth was theoretical -- our truths were concrete and approachable, if only because they were small, relative truths.

***

On a sunny fall weekend in 1952 my parents delivered me, an expectant package of sixteen, to Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. Very soon I felt I had arrived in paradise. This was the era of campus fun, of university joy, and of sorority parties -- but of great intellectual inquiry, too. All of the doubts of high school fell away. Suddenly it was not the cheerleaders of high school who were the popular symbol; it was the serious though socially-minded coeds. The conformity of high school also suddenly disappeared. We were free to dream, to be socially angry and intellectually productive; those of us in the prestigious Medill School of Journalism took these possibilities particularly seriously.

We of Medill were a close-knit, elitist group, no doubt about it, despite the dour ugliness of the old dark-brick building that stood on the lakefront. Indeed, on graduation, my closest friend, Mary "Miki" McDermott, whose father, Frank, had been the Irish boss of the South Side, decided to do something unthinkable in those times -- we gave a party in an off-campus apartment from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. and invited all of our professors! They all came in a state of surprised and pleased shock; that was an era in which professors and students stayed a formal distance from one another.

We were suddenly free to dream, and Miki and I saw ourselves as adventurers. We were going to live: fully. And love: fully. It was Anais Nin's "I will not be just a tourist in the world of images." Or, said in a heavy Bogartesque whisper, "He travels fastest who travels alone."

Despite the unfair image of the fifties generation as socially unconscious imbeciles, we had our very real causes. I did a paper on Paul Robeson and the prejudice against him and broke down sobbing as I wrote it. When the Supreme Court decision on integration came, we applauded wildly in classes and walked around the campus singing. And I made wonderful friendships, friendships that have lasted until this day: Lucy Woods Wiesner, Lynne Reich Basta, Carol Krametbauer Petersen, Phyllis Oakley .... People most definitely were not interchangeable in those days, nor did we have discontinuing selves. We were loyal and loving, and relationships lasted.

I also had my own feminism, and I researched it and wrote about it and talked about it in an era in which it was not even suggested as an historical subject. Everybody thought me quite dotty but I really didn't care much; I have never been much of a philosopher, but it just seemed frankly wrong to me that women should be considered inferior or that they should be expected to do only one thing in life. It was wrong, it was inhuman; and I wouldn't put up with it. It was only much later that I found out how hard the world made it not to put up with it.

Much, much later, actually in 1982,1 expressed to a young woman student at Rollins College in Florida what my real idea of feminism was, really from the very beginning.

Lizz Jacobson, a thoughtful young woman, asked me: "There are two types of women that can be very successful in this 'man's world': the woman who becomes like a man, and the woman who retains her femininity. What do you think about this?"

I answered: "I think a lot of women, and I don't want to be critical of them -- the ones who sort of become male by taking on male qualities in any profession in order to get to the top -- are denying their female qualities just as much as men have denied the value of female qualities. Even from the beginning I didn't want to change things so that women would become like men; I wanted to change things so that what was female would be respected by both men and women. I think the women who in effect have become men in their working habits and in only prizing work in the professional workplace have done exactly what men have done throughout the centuries, which is to degrade whatever women do."

There was only one thing I really wanted to be: I wanted to be free intellectually. I wanted to be able to investigate and see and know the world and everything in it. But every one of my experiences with men--and with the idea of marriage -- showed me with desperate clarity that I could never have that freedom tied to a man. It was a terrible choice to have to make -- and I never quite gave up my anger at a world, which would tell a human being, of either sex, that you could not have love and "knowing" too. And so I made the only choice that, in my heart and soul, I could make. I made my way by myself.

I hated the journalism nuts-and-bolts courses: reporting, copy reading, in particular typesetting. What I loved was the humanities, and I drowned myself in history, in political science, and in literature. But even this education, which most people would think of as pretty good, left a great deal to be desired. I am still suffering from the fact that I never had a single course in philosophy, physics, anthropology, sociology .... If anything allowed me to know cultures in a special way later on -- and if anything helped me to form the judgment necessary for making quick and right judgments on events, it was this much-maligned "liberal arts" education. There is no shortcut, and why, with all the joys of learning history with all its passions, should there be? You've simply got to know everything if you are to be a good journalist, and in particular you have got to know how this race of man made its way to those of us today who are suffering over the same dramas and joys and tragedies that men and women have always known.

Our third year Miki and I decided to do something daring; we would go to Mexico for the winter quarter to a hedonistic school in the mountains outside Mexico City called Mexico City College. Medill allowed us to transfer credits but not grades, so we had the best of all possible worlds.

If Northwestern had been paradise, Mexico was the next higher level of paradise. Almost all of the students at the college -- and three quarters of them were men, most of them GIs on the GI Bill from the Korean War -- lived in upper-class homes with Mexican families. This was nice and very proper, but it also meant that you had to keep very strict hours and take part in family life. At first Miki and the two other girls who came with us were horrified when we saw where
we
had been put. It was a big, gray, penitentiary-style building on the Avenida Melchor Ocampo, and the apartment could at best be called lower-class functional. Our "housemother" was a handsome, fortyish divorcée who had a big "friend" who came every afternoon at four o'clock to "visit." Clearly, if the college knew about the "unhealthy" aspects of our housing, it would have changed us to one of those dull rich houses, but I soon instinctively made one of those mutually convenient trade-offs. We would not tell on
her
if she did not enforce hours. We became the four most popular girls at Mexico City College, if only because at any party we could outlast all the others.

When it came time to leave after three months, I died deaths. Life had finally been precisely as I had dreamed it: adventure in a strange culture, joy, mystery, intensity of act and emotion. Miki and I soberly agreed we would never again in life be so happy.

In the fall of 1956 I went to Vienna on a Fulbright scholarship. Vienna was then still a haunted city, her body whole but her soul ravaged by all-too-recent holocausts. It had only been the year before that the four-power occupation government--one of the most unusual arrangements of all times--had ended. Now, with the Russians blessedly and miraculously gone, there was an arrested sigh of relief, but it remained arrested. They were so close, and Vienna was such a desirable, somber jewel. Yet it was also a world that was once again pulling itself together. The assurances that all of us felt in our world, in our Western world, remained unbroken.

Then one morning that October I woke up in Vienna to the German-language radio broadcasting the last cries from Radio Hungary: the Hungarian revolution had begun.

With other students from the university I traveled in a bus to the border. It was already wintry cold in the rolling hills that flowed between Austria and Hungary, and the sky was gray and forbidding. The people fleeing across those snowy hills had the empty, searching faces of refugees everywhere (I was to see many too many more of them in my life) and their dark, dreary clothes expressed their suffering. The Austrians behaved like heroes in those first months, when every school and hotel and municipal building in the charming old villages of the border provinces were opened to the waves and waves of refugees. They slept on floors, on makeshift beds, on the ground. They stood in silent lines waiting for the food we students were dishing out in the cold old Hapsburg courtyards. I was filled with the excitement of it all--but for the first time I was to realize that "living intensely" also meant suffering and observing suffering and absorbing suffering. I was heartbroken. Heroism had failed. Goodness had lost. What was the matter with the world?

Naturally I had to fall in love with a Hungarian, and naturally I chose a handsome, blond, charming one. We worked together on the border, we suffered together over the Hungarian tragedy, we stayed up listening to Radio Hungary. On New Year's Eve -- a bitter cold, white afternoon and evening in which the whole world was lost in the undifferentiated whiteness, the kind of day when it seems that there will never be another -- we drove out to the border and watched a refugee "show" that moved us to tears. In the crowd of hundreds in this hall one after the other would get up, dance, sing folk ballads from his village or recite poems, while tears flowed freely down every face.

But there was something else that year in Vienna that left me with a new kind of joy: I learned, rather quickly, actually, to speak good German. I am always so saddened for people who, seeking the fickle outer joys, which never seem to make them happy, do not or cannot understand these inner joys. Learning a language -- and then finally experiencing this magnificent world it opens you to --
is
like having a creature growing inside you. Suddenly you have something new inside you; suddenly you can recognize an entirely new world. The day I finally could speak German was a day of sheer joy for me; after that, I studied languages whenever I could. It was almost an addiction.

When I left Europe in the fall of 1957, as heartbroken and emotional as I had been when I left Mexico City after my magic time there, our relationship gradually died out. But I also came home with a dire case of hepatitis. It was serious indeed, because I was in bed with it for a full year, and I was in a coma for two full months. But it, too, taught me very special things: It taught the girl who thought she could will anything and everything that she could not; it taught her the patience that people must have who cannot raise their hands higher than one inch more each month; it taught me respect for patience. And I thought a lot.
The
Chicago Daily News
that I joined in the winter of 1960 was still considered one of the great papers of the nation. What's more, it was the "reporter's newspaper." Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, John Gunther, Ernest Hemingway -- all of them and many more had passed through its generous and creative doors.

Ben Hecht's description of this unique and scurrilous and wondrous band in the twenties held up still when I arrived forty years later. "We were a newspaper tribe of assorted drunkards, poets, burglars, philosophers, and boastful ragamuffins. We were supermen with soiled collars and holes in our pants; stone broke and sneering at our betters in limousines and un-mortgaged houses; cynical of all things on earth, including the tyrannical journal that underpaid and overworked us, and for which, after a round of cursing, we were ready to die." It was a heady and wonderful atmosphere in which to start work. My dear friend David Lazar many years later perhaps expressed to me best why we were all so enthralled with newspaper work. "I used to stay up until two a.m. on the old
Sun-Times
when the first bulletins came in," he said. "It was so damned exciting, because I knew that I was the first one in all of Chicago to know those things." That was it--that was the addiction, the bait, the hooker: "knowing" things before anyone else did.