a “paralegal.” Fed up, she had quit her job at the law firm and married John’s handsome father Harry. Harry was the son of poor East European immigrants, and had started out at a Hebrew Yeshiva and gone on to do brilliantly at New York City College’s tuition-free medical school. Doris had met him when he was starting his residency at Mass General in Boston. A pioneering scientist of occupational health, but awkward socially, Harry never figured out how to help his wife fulfill her potential in that sexist era.
Unlike me, John was not one to parade his feelings, but it was clear—from the bits of information about his mother he provided me during three years of courtship and two of marriage thus far—that he worshipped her. His worldliness, his sense of what was done and not done in fashionable circles, which served him well at Harvard and beyond, evidently came from things Doris had told him or showed him, even though she was not herself a member of that world. I deduced that she must have been an acute outside observer, a trait her son had inherited. But it would take me decades to realize how much John’s life with his mother would influence his life with me.
Fresh out of the army at age nineteen, John had been spending a year in India with his parents before starting college, when his mother died in Delhi of the long-term effects of alcoholism. His father by then was a Public Health Service officer on loan to the American Embassy to advise the Indian government on health risks to mica miners. Harry had then married a nice widow, the sister of a diplomat at the embassy. In the summer of 1953, John, his father, and his stepmother had sailed back home, crossing the Atlantic on the United States. John (age twenty) and I (seventeen) would meet a month or so later during our first week at college—and fall in love.
. . .
Now, in 1958, five years after that first meeting, the street scene around us after we left Jakarta’s Kemayoran Airport may have reminded John of China and India, but it was brand new to me. We inched along potholed streets that were jammed with vehicles of every description, from oxcarts and horse-drawn carriages to shiny black limousines with license plates showing they were embassy vehicles, such as the car that had collected us. There seemed to be dozens of bicycle rickshaws that John called becaks (pronounced bechaks), with the passenger seated on a bench facing forward, sometimes under a shabby but garishly colored awning, while the barefoot driver sat on a bicycle seat behind, and pedaled.
Slowed to a snail’s pace as they approached the city, all the car drivers were leaning on their horns while the becak drivers rang their tinkling bells. Workmen and peddlers walked calmly down the middle of the crowded street with a long pole balanced on a shoulder or across the back. Each end of the pole was bent down by the weight of a load of rice or fish or raw rubber or small electrical appliances or lumber or firewood.
John’s experience of life overseas and his diplomatic aspirations fascinated me. By age sixteen, I had already known I wanted to be part of a bigger world than I could find within my own country. It must have been already obvious to my New York City high school classmates, who chose for my senior yearbook a verse by Edna St. Vincent Millay to go under my picture: “The world is mine. A gateless garden, and an open path / My feet to follow and my heart to hold.” And then, during my first week at Radcliffe, I met John, fresh from India.
Until the plane trip that brought us to Jakarta by way of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore, I had never been on a ship or an airplane, much less abroad. But I had lived in Poe’s and Hemingway’s Paris and Conrad’s Africa, Dickens’s England, Eric Ambler’s Eastern Europe and Levant, Somerset Maugham’s Southeast Asia, and Kipling’s India. Those places were as real to me as anything I had seen myself. Looking back on our contemporaries in the Foreign Service of those days, I think we were typical: the husband long interested in a career in diplomacy or foreign policy, the wife ready to go where her husband took her, both of them well-educated and eager for adventure.
When we finally got to the middle of town, the view out the window changed: we were now among nineteenth-century colonial houses in a scene straight out of the stories of Somerset Maugham. I began to be intrigued.
That first day, we were given lunch and much good advice by John’s boss, John Henderson, and his wife, Hester, in their lovely old Dutch colonial house in town, set in a tropical garden. The house had marble floors and massive rooms with high ceilings from which hung 1930s ceiling fans. Hester explained that the old-fashioned charm of the house helped compensate for unreliable electricity, no air-conditioning in the public rooms, and no hot water. She said that less than a year earlier, in December 1957, President Sukarno had expelled the tens of thousands of Dutch who had been living in Indonesia up to then, in her house and others like it.
After lunch, we were driven home—a trip that could take anywhere from a half hour to an hour and a half, depending on the traffic—to one of a row of eight embassy-owned prefabs that had been designed for northern climes. Were it not for the palm trees and the tropical vines that clung to the wire fences, our street could have been in an American postwar mass-produced suburb, such as Levittown outside New York City.
I could reach up and lay my hand against the ceiling of the tiny rooms under a flat, black, tarred roof that absorbed heat when the sun shone and leaked when it rained. The kitchen, with its white enamel kerosene stove and fridge and wooden-faced built-in cabinets, looked almost American. But our embassy guide explained that there was not enough electricity to run a stove or fridge. Thus the need for kerosene.
Fortunately, there was enough power (from a noisy generator next door to our house) to allow all eight prefabs to run a window air-conditioner in the master bedroom. We were advised to keep anything leather in that room. “Otherwise, in three days in this humidity, mold will turn your shoes into blotting paper.” All the windows had screens, shutters, and crisscross security bars as well as venetian blinds, making us feel a bit as if we were living in a miniature fortress.
We were introduced to what seemed to be a lot of servants, mostly inherited from our predecessors, and we changed out of our wilted clothes into fresh ones.
I quickly learned that diplomats in Indonesia in the late 1950s, in addition to having a big domestic staff, were exposed to a variety of dangerous diseases. Chief among these were amoebic and bacillary dysentery, malaria, typhoid, and dengue fever, and, more rarely, polio and tuberculosis. Entertainment consisted of lunches, dinners, and teas at people’s houses. One communicated with friends chiefly by hand-delivered notes. There were occasional engraved invitations to formal dinners and balls on gilded, embossed cards. Even the most informal notes inviting people to supper arrived on folded “informal” cream or white stationery with the hostess’s married name engraved (never printed) in black on the top page. The whole scene seemed vaguely familiar to me, striking a chord in my English-major brain. And then I realized what living as a diplomat’s wife in Jakarta in those days most resembled. It was not so much the 1930s exotic, colonial world of Somerset Maugham as it was the earlier, smaller, class- and caste-ridden world of Jane Austen’s rural England.
The squirearchy that ran our little social world was headed by our ambassador and his wife. Important secondary roles were played by the deputy chief of mission (DCM) and his wife and, in our case, the political counselor and his wife.
International diplomatic etiquette—which had been transmitted without change from the nineteenth century—required that I pay calls on the wives of all the officers at the embassy senior to John, beginning at the top, and then call on the wives of John’s counterparts in other embassies in town. (Whatever their country or language, John’s counterparts at the different embassies in town and their wives had also all been taught to pay and receive calls.)
My first protocol call took place in the Puncak (pronounced poon-chak), a retreat in the mountains, where the air was cooler. The Puncak was two hours away by road from Jakarta, southeast on the road past Bogor toward Bandung. John’s boss, Political Counselor John Henderson, and his wife, Hester, had invited us for our first weekend to go there with them.
On the drive up through lush tropical and semitropical scenery, the first stretch of green we had seen since arriving at Kemayoran Airport, John Henderson explained that their weekend house was on a few acres belonging to the representative of the American motion picture industry, Billy Palmer. Billy was an old Southeast Asia hand, he added,