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 said, her German accent turning her Vs into Ws. “Don’t let some woman marry you for your money.”
That didn’t seem too difficult since I didn’t have any money.
“And,” she continued, “never have children.”
Even though my parents left me pretty much alone, choosing to focus their futile energy on arguing over how to handle André, I quickly got sick of our family dynamic. By the time I turned twelve, I had missed most of the fourth grade, preferring to devote my energies to the agency during the day and billiards at night. Still, the tumult of our neighborhood pool halls was no match for the Sturm und Drang among the members of my family.
I was lying in bed one night when I made a decision to give up trying to be an emotional part of our family. Nothing special happened, no apocalyptic fight, just the inevitably ordinary moment that always precipitates a big change. I’m not going to do this anymore, I vowed to myself. These people are nuts, and if they want to drive themselves even crazier, they’re doing it without me.
I divorced myself from my family emotionally but not financially.
My father was terrible with money. His knack for mismanaging it, losing it, or not making it in the first place was an incredible source of stress within our family. He never gave my mother enough allowance to run the household, so after André, money was their second biggest source of argument. My mother would always go up to my father and say, “I need another twenty dollars.” And he’d either have it or not. She never knew where she stood.
I had already taken charge of the bookkeeping at the agency, so organizing the family finances was a natural outgrowth. Setting my mother up with a fixed amount of money every week was the easiest thing in the world for me to do. I had always been phenomenal at arithmetic, not really higher math with its abstractions, but real numbers. They appeared in my head as clearly as objects in a room, making up a coherent interior. Because I created a picture in my mind, I could see the relationship between the basic data and the conclusion, and I knew when the conclusion was wrong.
“Look. I can manage the money,” I proclaimed to my parents, whether they were listening or not, about my new role. “The rest, you guys have to take care of on your own.”
No more Francis the peacekeeper or Francis the child. Francis the worker was the role I much preferred. The only time I was really truly happy in school was during sixth grade because my teacher, Mr. White, in charge of a lot of the school programs and also a bit of a drunk, was more than willing to hand over his responsibilities to me. I ran the audio-visual department, setting up the projector anytime a class showed a movie. As Mr. White’s boy, I was the lunchroom monitor and ran the milk crew, organizing the deliveries of milk to the lower classes. I didn’t get paid. Being in charge was enough for me.
What I decidedly wasn’t interested in was homework. By 1963, when I was an eighth grader at Halsey Junior High School, my schoolwork was something I relegated to the daily ride on the F train after school from Forest Hills to 57th and Madison, the offices of Sanford J. Greenburger, where I arrived at four o’clock and remained until six thirty when my father, mother, and I would go home to eat dinner.
I loved the agency and literally grew up there. Even when I was a little kid, I would hang out for hours in the incredibly shabby office on 42nd Street my father had before moving to his spiffier digs fifteen blocks north at 595 Madison. During the thirty years my father spent on 42nd Street, the place never had a paint job. He used to sit in his leather tilt chair, cracked to the point where stuffing protruded, but when he tilted it back it would eat away at the plaster on the wall behind him. So by the time we left, there was a big hole in the wall.
The décor suited the agency’s revolving door of characters, who were always scheming, breaking rules, and dreaming about the big payday. My father had one client, Max Werner (real name: Aleksandr Mihailovich Schifrin), who was famous for his prescience when it came to military matters. Exiled from his native Ukraine after the Bolshevik revolution, the self-taught military analyst landed in Germany, where he became widely known as the political editor of a socialist paper and author of more than a thousand articles.