Leaving Egypt

Family legend has it that our ancestors didn't leave Egypt with Moses and all the other Jews because great-to-the-nth-grandfather was playing cards with Pharoah at the time. Instead, we waited until 1953; one year after the abdication and exile of King Farouk, a year after the last hand of gin rummy had been played at the Montazah Palace in Alexandria. My father always remembered the card game at the palace when Farouk’s four kings trumped his four aces. ”I have five kings,” said King Farouk as he fanned four of them onto the card table, “these four,” and placing his hand on his heart, fixed my father in the eye, “and I am the fifth!” Not for long, thought my Dad.

I am standing on the deck of a large ship under the strong Egyptian sun, surrounded by odors of hot deck paint, salt, wet ropes and fuel. My shoes and socks look very white, and I feel very small next to Yasme, my Turkish nanny. She is round and a little shifty. My mother is crying and hugging Uncle Mohammed. He bends down to kiss me and gives me a pink and gold bag full of chocolates. “Have a good vacation, I will see you soon. Don’t eat the chocolates until the boat is far away from the shore. Do you understand?” I nod, and kiss him goodbye. The steam horns blow, the ship shakes off its ropes, we pull away from the crescent harbor into the sapphire sea. I can no longer distinguish Uncle Mohammed waving on the dock. Dolphins dance round the boat. It is time to eat the chocolates. I pass the bag to greedy Yasme. When she finally gives it back, I peer into the bag to see what's left, and feel a stab of disappointment to find the chocolates gone and, instead, my mother's jewelry glinting at me through the empty bits of gold foil.

I had been told that we were going on vacation, but we weren't. It was 1953 and we were fleeing Nasser's Egypt. I was two. We had no papers and no home. Just a chocolate bag of jewelry.

For the next two years we lived in many places. Istanbul, where it was so cold that the Bosporus froze, and where a lobster Yasme was cooking lunged from its pot and grabbed my sweater. Paris, where we stayed with Aunt Vicky, Uncle Edouard and my three older cousins in a building with a triangular front, like the Flatiron. You could see the Eiffel Tower from the kitchen where Uncle Edouard sang 'It ain't gonna rain no more, no more' in a Scots accent while making us fried eggs for breakfast. I can smell the butter, hear it sizzle, taste that intensely yellow yolk on my baguette. So many years later, it is still the ultimate egg.

We lived in Lebanon in the mountains above Beirut where the air was fragrant with cedar and the forest was peopled with porcupines and gypsies with dancing bears. There were scorpions under rocks and fields fat with grasshoppers. We ate ice cream flavored with the resin of the cedars. In Switzerland, we lived in Vevey, at the Beau Sejour, where Henry James wrote Daisy Miller, and you could pick your trout from a tank in the dining room. At the Palace in Gstaad, I tortured the slugs in the elegant gardens with my salt shaker, and drank the world's best hot chocolate. I'm sure they made it with cream.

Hotels, usually rather grand ones, were home. My father loved luxurious hotels, but we stayed in them without him. He was off working, trading rice, mostly in India, which was much farther away then and not a place you brought your wife and child. My mother, Yasme and I lived the strange half-life of refugees. Reasonably well-off political refugees, yes, but none the less people without passports or permanent address.

We have an album full of photos of me smiling and my mother looking brave, surrounded by people whose names we never really knew. I ate meringue swans at birthday parties for children I'd met the day before and never saw again. I honed my table manners at dinners in hotel dining rooms where expatriate American jazz musicians played wondrous music while the haute bourgeoisie of countries that no longer existed ate their meals in silence. There was an antique Russian couple in ancient evening clothes, (I may be imagining her tiara), who each night sadly raised their glasses to the Czar and his poor family in lugubriously accented French. These were my companions, now memories, their legacy a sense of intimate kinship with deposed nobility. Believing what I was told that children should be seen and not heard, I sat silently and ate up my surroundings.

My mother pined for my father and for Egypt, became ill with hepatitis that was treated with spoonfuls of olive oil. She was sick and unhappy. I was blissfully unaware; completely oblivious in that totally self-absorbed way that only very young children can get away with. Eventually our visas came through, and we were notified that we would be allowed to enter the US under the Swiss quota, my mother having by chance been born there, since the Egyptian quota was filled. We left for Genoa and set sail for New York on the Cristoforo Colombo after a hotel Christmas. We celebrated New Year's of 1955 with champagne, caviar and gorgeous balloons while an Italian band played Old Lang Syne in the snowy North Atlantic.

We settled in New York after I complained to my mother that I didn’t think much of our hotel, and when were we moving. Instead of going to Rio as planned, my complaint to my mother backfired and we stayed in New York for good.

I was enrolled at the Spence School, where I spent the next dozen years. Spence taught me to love to learn simply for the love of learning, and remains the source of my endless love for the written word. It was a very rarified atmosphere, to say the least, where my classmates had museums named after them on Fifth Avenue, slept in Abraham Lincoln’s camp bed, had their great grandfather’s statue gracing Grand Central station.

My grandfather wore a fez, was a scholar of Arabic literature and either knew TE Lawrence or simply loved The Seven Pillars of Wisdom above all other books. On Father’s Day at school when I was a child, I wanted desperately to have a father like my classmates who wore big ugly shoes with holes punched in them called wing tips, that looked suitable for the gamekeeper, who lunched at their clubs, and worked, or seemingly did nothing at something mysterious called “being in bonds.” My father, with his European accent and fine Italian shoes spent his time on the phone doing business in six languages, and pacing the hall at night hoping his deals would go through. He was very foreign, Italian my friends said, and a terrible embarrassment to me. I dreamed of waking up named Penelope Appleby, having straight hair, and with any luck, a grandmother with a house in Bermuda.

In 1965 I fell love with a long haired Australian boy who went to Collegiate at a Lester Lanin subscription dance at the Women’s Republican Club. We hung out at the Night Owl, the Five Spot, Gerde’s Folk City, the Café Wha? Our days were spent in Washington Square. We played the guitar and listened to Dylan; Peter, Paul & Mary; Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel. When he went back to Australia, the bottom of my world came unscrewed. To cheer me up, my parents sent me to summer school.

And cheer me up they did. They sent me to study at Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1967, the summer of Carnaby Street, Sergeant Pepper, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds…The Summer of Love, for goodness’ sake, and a wonderful place and time to be sixteen with a broken hear and a thirst to sample everything. I have no idea what my parents were thinking.

Amazingly, I went to class, and fell in love with the Romantics, and when I wasn’t riding my bike through miraculously, heartrbreakingly beautiful Oxford, or punting with English boys, I threw myself headlong into the bad boys, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Byron, and the even worse boys, the degenerate Restoration guys, De Quincey, Wilde….Not to mention the very worst boys, Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, Cream, and the Who.

By the time I returned to junior year at Spence, I had expanded way beyond the confines of Spence. We cut school and hung out at the Modern in front of Picasso’s Guernica, the best place in town to meet smart guys. On another day, my friends and I cut school and went to a peace rally at Columbia, where everybody was smoking pot. A Spence teacher busted us and we were hauled in to see the Head of School, a Victorian lady who had barely adjusted to the 50s, and didn’t even want to hear anything about tuning in, turning on and dropping out. I opted out of Spence and went off to boarding school in Switzerland where a rigorous academic schedule and lots of skiing kept me on a self imposed straight and narrow. It was an extraordinary year.

That year at Montesano I completed either two or three British A Levels, a Diplome Superieure de Langue et de Civilization Francaise through the Unviversity of Nancy, France and a couple of AP tests. The one thing Montesano lacked was a college advisor, which instead of seeming like a drawback really appealed to me at the time. Although I had wanted for years to study archaeology at Yale, and they were accepting women for the first time that year, I didn’t even apply. My parents, who subscribed to the out-of-sight-out-of-mind school of parenting had never once in the entirety of my eighteen years and academic career never asked me what I would like to do with my life, or where I would like to go to school.

No member of my immediate family had ever gone to college, and women, after all, were going to marry anyway. As I grew older, my father’s deeply middle eastern views clashed more and more with my life. I moved in with a guy I knew, and got a job selling poetry at Brentano’s. My father did not speak to me for over a year, he told me I was dead to him. Not long thereafter, a situation arose where my roommate suggested we marry. Woodstock had come and gone, the world hadn’t changed. He was a sweet guy, and an excellent poet but the Irish in him made him write his verses on cocktail napkins which dissolved before last call. I married him, only to find out years later on my father’s death that he had entered into a financial agreement with him and had paid him to make an honest woman out of me. My father had secretly orchestrated my marriage to a man I didn’t love in order to save face.