was 1962. I was twelve years old.
I was a prodigy. A term usually reserved for child musicians or chess players, it perfectly described my early aptitude for business. I always had a job—or three. Money was my security blanket.
Working gave me a purpose. It grounded me in a topsy-turvy world that threatened to come completely apart when in second grade I developed a fear of elementary school. The phobia was not of crowds or cafeterias or chalk dust but of the very idea of school itself. I simply refused to go. I’d stay in bed, or sometimes my parents would coax me out of the house, saying, “We’re just going for a walk.” Then they’d walk me to the school, which was only two blocks from our house in Forest Hills, Queens. A hundred feet from the school, I’d refuse to budge.
The Board of Education assigned a child psychologist to find out the problem that kept me out of school for six months, but I guess he didn’t get too far because the principal of my school asked me to come in for a conference. I agreed to hear the man out.
“Listen, Francis,” the principal said to me in his office. “I know you had a really good time in kindergarten and were very close to your teacher. What if we gave you the job of kindergarten monitor, working with Miss Brooks? Would you come back on that basis?”
I thought that was an okay deal, so we shook on it and I returned to school, where I spent a couple of weeks assisting Miss Brooks until one day when the principal came into our classroom.
“It’s time for you to go upstairs,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve gotten over your fear. It’s time for you to go to your regular classes.”
“No way!”
He grabbed me and dragged me upstairs to my other horrible class where he forced me into my seat. At lunchtime, I escaped, ran home, and took matters into my own hands. Using the phone book, I found the number for the central Board of Education and called. After I asked for the president, I was connected to his secretary.
“I’ve been abused by the principal of my school,” I explained.
People were sensitive to that word even back then. The secretary immediately patched me through to the president and I told him the story. My principal was investigated, but it didn’t change anything; I still had to go to school.
I don’t know what precipitated my strange relationship with school. Later in life, a therapist posited that I was insecure about my relationship with my mother. There certainly was a lot to be insecure about.
My mother’s great desire in life, as far as I could tell, was to be a writer. It seemed to me she wrote for my entire childhood, although during that time she only published one book in 1973. A Private Treason was a memoir detailing her war years and why she chose to reject her native Germany when the Nazis came to power.
There was nothing in my mother’s background to suggest such a rebellion. Born Ingrid Grütefien into a solidly bourgeois Berlin family (her father was a journalist and her grandfather an architect), as a young woman she made the bold decision to leave Germany in the thirties because she found the specter of Nazi politics anathema. Her leaving, and where that took her, defined the rest of her life.
After a short stop in Vienna—just long enough to start studying medicine, get married to another medical student, and divorce him—she left medical school and moved on to France, which by then had been invaded by the Germans. In a house in the Brécourt near Grenoble at the foot of the French Alps where Resistance fighters were hiding out, my mother fell in love with one—André Dubreuil. Their affair was the stuff of big-screen romance. Separation and reunion. Heroism and the constant threat of death. “We saw in the other’s eyes that the fears each tried to keep to himself lay bared,” my mother wrote in her book. “We reached for each other, but our embraces could not comfort, because they were forever perhaps the last embrace.”
Their affair ended when André was tragically killed in the mountains of the Vercors while waiting on news of the invasion of Normandy right before the end of World War II. Still, he remained the love of my mother’s life. And the father of her first child.
My half brother, André, never met his father, who died while my mother was in her first weeks of pregnancy. Still, the man remained a permanent shadow lurking around our house the entire time I was growing up. My mother and father fought constantly with, or over, my brother, whom she aptly called André since he was in her eyes the reincarnation of her dead lover. (My brother’s legal name, written on his original birth certificate, was Patric-André. As explained to him by our mother, Patric, the K-less French version of Patrick, was chosen to represent the British-French armistice. But after my father adopted him, his name was officially changed to André Patrick Greenburger.)
My brother was a difficult kid, acting out all the time, but if my father tried to assert discipline in any way, my mother wouldn’t have it. “He didn’t mean it” was her constant refrain. One Sunday afternoon at the end of a weekend in the country, André, who was thirteen at the time, didn’t want to leave, so he kept us captive by hiding the distributor cap from the car.
“He didn’t mean it,” my mother said as we sat hostage for hours while André refused to return the necessary part.
“What do you mean, ‘He didn’t mean it’?” my father shouted. “He could run us all over with the car and you’d still say, ‘Oh, he didn’t mean it.’”
Everyone knew what the fight was really about; André was the only remnant of a doomed and noble love. When my father attacked him, it was like he was attacking her dead Resistance fighter. In turn, my mother protected my brother at all costs.
As the sun fell to the tree line, sparkling through the reds and yellows of fall’s leaves, my parents started to go after each other in the usual fashion. I couldn’t stand when they argued and believed I had the magical ability to resolve the conflicts that popped up constantly. “Don’t fight,” I said with all the earnestness of my nine-year-old self. “Dad just needs to get home because he’s got a big meeting tomorrow with someone from Gallimard. And Mom knows how André likes to fool around. I’ll go tell him we need to get back and to bring the part he stole back.”
And with that I ran off to make peace as I always did, my way of creating a role in a family where my place was always on the periphery. If I wanted to make my mother happy (and what boy doesn’t), I should have just left her to her writing. The happiest I ever remember her being was on the publication of A Private Treason. Although she worked part-time at the agency doing clerical stuff, her raison d’être was her story and her writing. Because English was her second language, she spent many years writing and rewriting it with my father’s help.
My mother, Ingrid Grütefien
My parents were at their best while revising my mom’s manuscript. A team with a common goal. Otherwise, they were at one another over André, money, and other disappointments. If I intuitively understood that my mother married my father because when she came to America with a young child she didn’t know anyone, but that she wound up feeling compromised by the bargain, then my suspicions were confirmed by a comment she made to me over the lunch table when I was six years old.
“I have some adwice for you,” she
