Seductive Poison (5 page)

My mother, Lisa, was born to Anita and Hugo Philip in 1915. Although she shared few of her childhood stories with me, I had glimpses into her past. It was my father who bragged about her life. I knew she was proud and had grown up in Hamburg surrounded by vast amounts of art and culture. Concert musicians used to play in her extraordinarily modern home that was designed and built by her cousin through marriage, Ernst Hochfeld, a pioneer of the Bauhaus architectural era. There were built-in cabinets for their extensive art collection, a humidity-controlled vault for Grandpa’s tobacco and cigars, and the beloved music room where Mama’s Steinway and her father’s Guadagnini violin were kept.

Mama explained on several occasions that the bronze nude in our living room was not an object to snicker at but a famous sculpture,
Die Erwachende
(“The Awakening”) by Klimsch and that she loved it. I understood that her father had packed it together with a few other valuables and brought it from Germany. Why her parents hadn’t hired a moving company to ship all their belongings from Hamburg was a question that never seemed to be answered. There was the beautifully shaped silver cutlery we used daily, some exquisite jewelry Mama kept in her silk-embroidered jewelry box, and several large pieces of art, paintings and sculptures that Grandpa Hugo and Grandma Anita had personally carried to America.

I loved hearing the story attached to each one. There was an etching of Albert Einstein, signed by the genius himself, his hands so dirty his fingerprints showed clearly next to his signature, and an etching of Pablo Casals tuning his cello, signed by the maestro. Beatrice d’Este of Ferrara, the painting commissioned by my grandfather
in Italy that stared away past me in the library, wore a headdress of leather and pearls and was covered in a maroon dress with a luxurious black velvet cape. I often wished the statue on the table, a beautiful bronze woman, her bared breasts firm, her long, sleek legs taut as she stretched upward on her toes, had considered wearing clothes on the day of her posing. My mother’s legs were beautiful, too. I loved to sit on her bed each morning and watch her pull her stockings up over her ankles, then point her toes and extend her legs into the air as she attached the silk to her black garter. My mother was what I wanted to be: an enchanting enigma.

I sensed that my mother missed her life in Germany. The past seemed to consume and console her. When I was a little older I wondered what it must have been like to leave a place one deeply loved, all one’s friends and relatives, and never see them again. But it was many years before I grasped that my mother’s world was filled with sorrow, guilt, and regret. And it wasn’t until years after that that I learned why.

Long before I came onto the scene, my mother had begun to spin a cocoon around herself. From her place of solace, she wove interesting stories and gave them to her children as protective shields against the painful truths she could not bear to tell. The one most closely associated with me was the story of my arrival. My birth, it seemed, was a momentous occasion. I loved the pretty stories of the long discussions and appeals from my big sister, Annalisa, for a baby sister. Mama, too, said she desired “just one more” baby. I grew up knowing that I was the only really planned-for child because, at age eight, my sister had successfully convinced my parents that she would take care of me. However, the truth was far different. It is only now that I realize my conception must have been on the evening of May 10, 1952, the evening my mother learned of her own mother’s suicide. I imagine the night was filled with tears and profound despair, my father holding and consoling my mother, trying to dissuade her from her crushing guilt. On February 7, 1953, exactly nine months after Grandma Anita’s death, the secretly grieved-about baby arrived in Tooele, Utah. Although she cared for me deeply and listened intently to my never-ending questions, she seemed sad, preoccupied, and sometimes in awe of me. Perhaps my presence reminded her of the mother she believed she had forsaken. Somewhere deep inside my mother’s heart she must have wondered from where my spirit arose.

MAY 10, 1952

My friends,

Know that I, free and proper, am a good American. But I was a gossip
and have been entangled in a network of intrigue. I no longer have the
strength to free myself from it.

Forget me not, my beloved children and family.

And you, Hugo, forgive me.

Live well. All of you loved mankind so much!!

–A.–

On the morning of her suicide, Grandma Anita left behind what at the time seemed a mysterious missive written in German. No one understood why she mentioned being a good American. Sadly, however, Anita had a basis for her belief that she was entangled in some terrible intrigue.

In 1951, my father had left his associate professorship at Johns Hopkins to accept a prestigious position as Associate Director of Chemical Warfare at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. My mother was apprehensive about the assignment, as was her mother.

Anita had become very involved with the American Society of Friends (Quakers), the organization that had safeguarded her and Hugo’s journey out of Nazi Austria to the United States. The Friends had kept the Nazis at bay while desperately trying to obtain the last of the emergency visas granted to Jews. On March 20, 1940, the Friends gave Anita and Hugo the precious gift of another life in America.

Now Anita was a devoted Friend and believed in their gospel of peace and nonviolence. Her son-in-law’s involvement in research on how to “kill humans with chemicals” was abhorrent to her. She talked with her daughter about her misgivings and begged her to convince Laurence not to take the job.

In 1951, Anita could not know that after her son-in-law’s arrival in Utah, he was promoted to chief of the entire Chemical Warfare Division. With this high-level appointment, Dr. Layton required the highest level security clearance possible and the FBI began to conduct a thorough background investigation. My father, one of the government’s top men at Dugway, was married to a German woman, an “Alien of Enemy Nationality” as denoted on her passport, and her parents had to be closely investigated.

J. Edgar Hoover was in his prime. He was a xenophobe and believed the Society of Friends to have Communist leanings. Hoover’s
men, with little concern for the fallout of their investigation, began to question my grandmother and her Quaker friends. These men deemed it unnecessary to explain to the Society of Friends and the neighbors of Anita and Hugo why they were investigating the loyalties of the Philips. Anita had no idea that this was a routine inquiry regarding a government employee. All she knew was that “people” were asking questions about her. Anita wrote to her daughter that she was being followed and spied upon. Unaware of the FBI’s investigation, Lisa and Laurence thought Anita was becoming paranoid; to them her fears were incomprehensible. Of course she had been persecuted in Germany, but that was Nazi territory, it could not happen here. Never in America! Terrified and not knowing where to turn, Anita jumped to her death from her apartment window.

At the time, my mother did not know that her parents were being investigated. And she could not have fathomed the effect of such an investigation on a Jew who had just escaped from the Nazis. Much later, I would discover how deeply my mother blamed herself for having disbelieved her mother’s fears. Long shadows now loomed over Lisa’s universe. The world she had hoped to escape into was suddenly soiled. In 1952, Mama had three children under age ten, a husband with an extremely sensitive government job, and a new baby on the way. For reasons I think I now understand, Lisa chose to silence her sorrows. For the sake of her husband and her children, desperately wanting to give them the future she had hoped for, she suppressed her past and hid her own identity as well as her mother’s.

Lisa Philip, born in Hamburg, to nonreligious Jewish parents, was raised a German, not a Jew. Her family never attended synagogue and were completely assimilated into the fabric of Germany’s high society. Her father owned a seat on the Hamburg Stock Exchange. The family’s circle of friends was predominately Jewish but the Philips often entertained government dignitaries and luminaries from the world of art and theater. On May 6, 1938, the life and world Lisa loved was wrenched away from her. At the age of twenty-three, in order to escape the Nazis, Lisa bid farewell to her parents and her friends and boarded the S.S.
Manhattan
for New York.

It was a hard transition. She was lonely and longed to settle down
and attach herself to this new world. In 1939, a year before meeting my father, she wrote to her closest friend in Hamburg, Annelise Schmidt, that she felt worthless and alone. Her friend wrote in response:

You don’t have anywhere to go when you are lonesome, but Lisa, you must not give up the longing for something beautiful … A strong love would be the most cleansing thing for you. The memories of the past are there, and you feel that you have been plucked from your past, but I am sure that you will rebuild your roots. If you have a devil within you, don’t hide him but put him in front of your wagon so that he will use up all his strength by pulling you forward.

My parents met while my father was in graduate school. Vastly different in every way, they found each other attractive and believed the other’s attributes would help them secure the future of comfort and shelter they both longed for.

Laurence Layton had no secrets. He was born in Boomer, West Virginia, a poor coal mining town. Almost all of the inhabitants worked deep down, under the earth, but Laurence’s father was different. John Layton was a college-educated engineer. Life for Laurence began a little better than for others in Boomer. His father spent hours with his son discussing ideas and allowing him to help perform experiments. But when Laurence was eight years old, his devoted father died unexpectedly. Within days, his mother was forced to move back in with her father, where she instantly became a servant. Laurence Layton, the child who became a man overnight, resolved that his siblings would never feel his desperation or loss. He assumed the paternal role until his mother remarried. At that point, he was dealt another cruel blow when his new stepfather told him to leave the household. He was determined to rise above his lot in life, but his adolescent perceptions of desertion and betrayal became the basis for a lifelong fear of abandonment.

By 1938, the year Lisa was torn from the life she loved, my father had escaped from his world of poverty and betrayal to the world of college intellectuals. Intelligent, enterprising, and seemingly confident, Laurence now lived far away from the coal town of his youth. He stylishly joined the Socialist party and, for the first time in his life, met educated Jewish émigrés. He aspired to one day join the world of the bourgeoisie.

In 1940, Laurence was introduced to Miss Lisa Philip, the physical therapist at Penn State’s Student Health Services. I believe it was my mother’s cultured and affluent background that enchanted the young doctoral candidate. Lisa, a beautiful German, lent legitimacy to my father’s own endeavors. Her distinguished lineage (her cousin, James Franck, won the Nobel Prize in Physics; her uncle, Oscar Hirsch, was a world-renowned Viennese brain surgeon) provided impressive credentials to the ambitious student from West Virginia.

Desirous of making a life with promising roots for herself, Lisa began to date the Ph.D. candidate and in 1941 they became engaged to be married. But my father, who had remained chaste, was very troubled that his fiancé had been intimate with another man before him. Her culture and experience cast a shadow on his fragile self-esteem.

However, Lisa believed if they truly loved one another, her past could be forgotten. Fearful of any more upheavals in her already tumultuous life, my mother became apologetic, outwardly meek, and obedient. On October 18, 1941, their marriage of thirty years began.

Unfortunately, Lisa would never be able to bury her past enough to calm the demons inside her innocent country boy’s head. In 1943, she made the following entry into her diary:

There is one thing that is causing me to be more desperate and unhappy than I ever thought I could be, living as well as I do, having a perfect little son and a good husband. It is the opinion another person one greatly cares for has of one … I would have repented and tried to be as good a person as I could, but now things seem to be pulled out from under me. There is nothing. I see, no ground to stand on …

A few months later, she wrote a letter to her husband:

Dear Larry,

There is neither a going back to, nor a future. All I have ever hoped for seems to be denied to me … I want a home and children … I want to feel part of you. When things are all right between the two of us, my love for Tom is happy, and it fills me with contentment and a feeling of security to see him play and feel good. But when things are the way they have become now, my love for him is not a real, true unselfish love, because I try to regain from my love for him, what I have lost in you. And since this is not possible … my love becomes desperate … You cannot believe my feeling toward you, because you cannot feel it. You are a prisoner of yourself, because selfishness prevents you from overcoming your limits …