The Barber's Daughter - Chapter Three

As dawn came up, fair to the north we saw the fiery lips of morning kissing snow gods of stupendous size. The earth itself seemed to do obeisance to their supra worldly splendor as the plains lay prostrate before the majesty of the still growing giants which are the Himalayas.

I was aboard the military attache's plane, en route to Calcutta where the Deputy Chief of Mission, Winthrop Brown, had an appointment early that February morning. As was customary, he had invited some staff members to share the pre-dawn flight, among them Pat Billson, cheerful, practical Pat who made each passage through the file room a delight. We'd be seeing Jane Kiernan, another of the code clerks with whom I'd worked in Washington. She now was at the Consulate General in Calcutta living in quarters too small to accommodate any guests. She too had moved from Meridian Hill to the YWCA near 17th and K, a possible walk bak and forth to State when we weren't too pressed for time. But whereas my life outside te Department was mainly George, hers was Lois, her very beautiful friend from Boston who only wore one suit, but what a suit. A stunning black brown tweed which reflected the soft elegance of one to the manor born.

Incredibly it was cold, so cold that February morning, that I wore a handsome light grey tweed coat I'd bought at Peck & Peck, the coat in which George had photographed me by the P Street bridge in Georgetown. I guess George really did love me because I looked so beautiful in those snapshots. Quite a contrast to those my Mother took, her forefinger always obliterating a corner of the scene and me always glaring, awkward and angry.

Soon the DC 3 started its descent as the Hooghly River, the westernmost channel of the Ganges snaked through its delta toward the Sea of Bengal. We spiralled down over a maze of makeshift buildings and boats riding a river of mud. Dispersed among them were fragile settlements in which hundreds of thousands of human beings clung to lives so tenuous that a few feet rise in the tide could easily obliterate all evidence of their being. But when the waters receded they or their descendants returned again and again like abused children who prefer the known violence of out-of-control parents to the ministrations of caregivers who rule their lives with colder cruelty.

The door of the plane opened and the heat which entered was as palpable as childbirth. It almost blew us back into the cabin.

We rove into town from DumDum, the airport named for the nearby arsenal which had produced the infamous bullets used by the British to put down dissent among the natives. It became evident that all of Bengal gave new meaning to the word teeming. Wave upon wave of milling humanity melted before the onrushing limousine as we raced through a maelstrom of moving creatures.

Mr. brown dropped us at the Great Eastern Hotel where Jane was waiting to take us on a tour with the local representative for CARE. Bob Kelly replicated Jane's tall, black-haired good looks and his sardonic intelligence matched her Boston Irish wit.

"It's hard to pick the worst of the worst in this hell hole but the railroad stations are as god a bet as any," Bob said, as he maneuvered his Landrover through the streets which millions had the misfortune to call home.

We arrived at Howrah where some five thousand refugees lived in cardboard boxes or corrugated cans awaiting a respite from the age old Hindu/Muslim animosities so that they could return home. Too poor for the blouse-like choli, modesty also was too precious a commodity for their women who scratched the scorching streets for a few dropped grains of rice or an abandoned object which might bring a rupee from some other indigent. Bereft of home and of homeland, they took no notice when their saris fell from ther shoulders. The eyes of strangers had no meaning.

Bob was not as pitying as Pat and I. "These people persist n the Muslim/Hindu hatreds. We/ve resettled hundreds of thousands of the estimated five million refugees who've come to West Bengal since partition but they resist any change even if it means survival. They're so inflexible that if they come from a wheat- eating area, they absolutely refuse to live in a rice-growing region. And if they are sent to a wheat-growing area, the variety must be exactly the same as that to which they are accustomed. Otherwise, they still won't eat."

I remembered that Doug had told me that Americans had earned much opproprium when some years earlier tons and tons of wheat shipped in response to famine proved unacceptable. The villagers though they were being poisoned, a fear perhaps fanned by clever communists concentrated among the unemployed intelligentsia in Bengal.

Bob next drove us to Sealdah, a station slightly smaller in size but so overwhelming in misery that the Government of West Bengal refused to allow the Prime Minister to see it during an official visit. We concluded the afternoon with a visit to the Kali Ghat, the place where the dead are burned to the extent that their relatives can afford sufficient wood. Although a local guide said we could take pictures, we chose not to insult the wretched any further.

Numbed by our afternoon excursion, we sank into catatonia on the drive back to the hotel. I thought of Doug and our after hour chats in the embassy during which he caressed the solitude of my soul with his cheerful civility and encyclopedic knowledge of the subcontinent. But mainly he spoke of a beautiful land lost in time.

"Once you go to Nepal, you'll never be the same. There is a magic in the air. The higher you climb into the hills, the nicer the people become. Perhaps it's because the heat no longer is so intense that life is somewhat easier. Water is more accessible and crops grow more easily than they do in the burning plains to the south." He promised to take me as soon as he could.

That promise was to be fulfilled sooner than I expected...

When Bob and Jane dropped us at the Great Eastern, there was a message for me. Doug Heck would call again at 7 p.m. It was now quarter to. Pat and I raced up to our room and tore off our clothes, sopping as we were from our whirlwind excursion through the inferno outside.

"think you can break away to join a convoy taking jeeps to Kathmandu? I'm flying in tomorrow with Marilyn, my secretary, and we're leaving the following morning with several folks from the consulate to make the delivery. Ask Pat and Jane to come along. Believe me, the more the merrier and you'll have the adventure of a lifetime."

I called Gerry Mull to arrange additional leave but Pat and Jane demurred. "Gee, Delphine, I'd love to tag along. But Miriam is going on leave next Monday and I have to be back or the whole embassy will fall apart. You know no one else can find anything in that file room."



Proper Patricia, good Catholic Pat, never said don't go off with a married man. No everyone assumed that I knew what I was doing as they'd done for as long as I remembered.

Five jeeps were packed with food and water and luggage when ten American officials assembled at the Consulate General in the pre-dawn coolness. We drove out past vestiges of decaying empire and through streets of still shrouded bodies not yet resurrected from their sleepless night. The ceaseless cacophony of Calcutta followed us past beggar colonies and sprawls of vendows setting out their modest wares.

As morning rose, we continued north through suburbs somewhat more sedate than the never ending whirlwind within the inner city. After an hour or so, we turned west toward the industrial belt which rings the city. Here factories and mills spewed mountains of soot, magnifying the misery of the oppressive heat. Doug wet a cloth and wrapped it round his face as much to breathe as to catch the rivulets of sweat cascading down his body.

We alled the jeep the green gari and I drove despite the fact that non-diplomatic personnel were not encouraged to do so. The Hindu might twist and break the tail of his bullock a thousand times and prod its genitals raw but woe to any foreigner who even grazed its flank. Americans were officially advised to flee if an accident occurred and report isntead to the nearest police station rather than risk a lynching right then and there.

The first night out we stopped at a government rest house, one of the many built throughout India during the Raj so that government officials had some place to stay as they travelled in the hinterlands. The one room hut was spare and sturdy and clean but we all preferred to put the charpoys outside in order to catch any wayward breezes. Doug held me on his lap for a few moments while we considered the spectacular stardust strewn across the sky. No westerner who's not travelled o smogless, smokeless spaces of underdeveloped areas of the world can claim o have ever seen the infinity which is the Milky Way. In the pre-dawn a bird landed on my sheet wrapped body. I was too terrified to uncover myself to see if a vulture thought my moribund.

After an austere breakfast of tea and bisquits we continued west through the scorching plains of Bihar until we came to a river crossing somewhat east of Patna. We were to be ferried across the Jumna in little craft of matchstick construction whose seaworthiness suggested toys in a bathtub. Doug and I were the last to place our jeep and our lives in the hands of four smiling boatmen who propelled our vessel across the clay colored river. Midway across Doug gave me a scarf of heavy Italian silk with muted colors, cream and grey and beige, in honor of my first crossing of the holy water. "It's so you'll never forget this trip," he said softly, kissing me lightly on the forehead.

On the other shore we soon found the new road which led to Kathmandu. For hours the only rest stops were leafless trees in fields of umber with an occasional camel to break to monotony. After a time the earth grew kinder. The villages were kissed with green and their wealh measured in heaps of dung. Each locality seemed to have devised a pattern of its own, much like the brands on cattle in the great American west. I was astonished to see girls of the most beautiful mien and carriage follow after the bullocks to catch their droppings.

Doug laughed at my distaste. "Not only do the Indian woman use the dung as an antiseptic against wounds a d as a cleaning agent in their huts, they also drink the bullock's urine to ensure their fertility."

The ground grew higher and the fields more lush as we continued north. We had fallen behind schedule and the other jeeps were nowhere to be seen. But Doug didn't see any problem in not reaching Kathmandu that evening. "There an AID couple living in the Rapti Valley. We'll spend the night with them."

The Rapti ran through a belt of land in southern Nepal known as the Teria. The US government had done much to banish malaria in the area but it remained a place where elephants rescued mechanical road builders and maharajas assembled for tiger hunts. The valley felt as new as it must have on the first day of creation. I asked Doug if I were among the very first white women to enter. He smiled and said perhaps among the first hundred.

The Wrights were pleased to see us and they produced a fine meal out of their modest quarters. They only westerners living in the Rapti, they obviously enjoyed Doug's company and the three had many tales to tell of the exigencies of attempting to work with people to whom the fifteenth century was more real than the twentieth.

They told us that now that the road from India was completed, the King was anxious to further extend his transportation network farther south in order to decrease Nepal's vulnerability against the great colossus which had swallowed Tibet with scarcely a protest from the western world. Thus did a medieval monarchy in Shangri-la find it prudent to seek protection from the world's largest democracy as well as from the world's most powerful. And that why Doug came to have the joy of establishing the first American embassy in Kathmandu.

As the green gari headed north out of the valley the next morning the hills grew into mountains with terraced landscapes making their mark upon the great glories of God's creation. The manicured villages in the Alps were not as close to heaven as were these hovels clinging to the youngest of God's mountains. Nor could the dour Swiss compare to the shing faces to be seen along the roadside near these magical aeries.

Thew air darkened and the road continued to curve upward. Solitary figures occasionally appeared, the women who worked only in their long heavy skirts, men who sat lacing the split calluses on the sole of their feet. Doug said that only western mountaineers required special boots . Their Sherpa guides wore none until they reached the intense cold at 20,000 feet.

Finally the valley of Kathmandu appeared. We pulled to the side of the road and walked across a treeless meadow to the edge of a precipice overlooking its vast expanse. The play of sunlight and shadow upon the scene was consummate manifestation of yin and yang, black and white, good and evil - all the duality in nature. We lay together in the grass until Doug discovered the fragility of the overhang.

As we began our descent, minarets and castles, maidans and prayer flags were everywhere in a fairyland of Elizabethan wooden structures. The hills were brilliant with the colors of Cezanne but the high mountains hid themselves behind foreboding clouds.

The all-knowing eyes of Swayumbonath, a striking Buddhist temple, stared everywhere across the valley.

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The Barber's Daughter - Chapter Two

"Where on earth did you get the idea that Delhi is not turning out well? Nothing could be further from the truth! I'm invited to dinners and parties and gatherings of all kinds and I'm even learning to ride."

So I wrote in exasperation to my Mother some six weeks after my arrival. I knew Daddy was behind the words in her letter. He wanted me back, back from college, back from the Foreign Service, back under his Old Testament thumb. He wouldn't let her use the money I had started sending so that Ricky could go to Canisius, the best of the catholic high schools on the Niagara frontier.

No, Mother talked big about plans for our future but she always caved in when Daddy dictated ambitions more mundane than those his family fancied. "No one ever made it out of his class in just one generation," he would say.

Of course, the gradations of class were of some interest to Daddy since his peasant family from the area south of Lvov was somehow superior to Mother's stock who came from Tarnow. The floor of humanity, he would call her, when he was really angry.

I had moved into the Taj with Khalum ensconced in the kitchen and Lady wherever she liked. I first had a one room unit which meant I shared a long narrow bathroom with the AID secretary next door, a rather worn looking woman who once asked me to pop a large blackhead on her back. Fortunately, a double unit soon became available and I had the luxury of both a living and a sleeping room. As I sat outside one evening a perfect ring of clouds encircled a pregnant moon. In my budding contentment, I felt certain that the circle augured well.

Lady lay nearby as my thoughts idled back to that Life magazine reporter who'd been aboard the USS Constitition. He'd written a bestseller called "Don't Go Near the Water" and offered to put me in touch with his publisher, Bennett Cerf, the king of Random House. Bill Brinkley had waved to me as he disembarked at Gilbralter, earlier saying that he'd be passing through Delhi in a few months. But, like the time Dr. Barnette , for whom I worked part-time at the University of Buffalo, offered to arrange a job for me with Sloan Wilson who was to teach at UB the next semester, nothing really registered. These things happen to other people. They weren't within the realm of possibility for a shy little girl from upstate New York.

And then there were all those baby-faced Marines who regularly came banging on my door. All the girls said that you had to let them in whenever they appeared even if they'd been drinking, which seemed to be most of the time. Otherwise they'd just force the flimsy door doors wide open. Drinking was about all most Americans seemed to do in their spare time, at least those I came in contact with.

When I finally bought my very first bottle of Scotch at the commissary, I felt like I deserved my fall from Daddy's grace. But so many people had wined and dined me, I just had to reciprocate in kind. In kind in Delhi meant liquor and more liquor.

Of course, apart from alcohol and cigarettes and a few staples like Crisco, there was very little else I could buy since the prices for everything were prohibitive for low ranking staffers. We had to depend on the local produce grown in night soil, a euphemism which at first I didn't understand. To avoid the embarrassment and anguish of Delhi belly, we would eat only fruits and vegetables which could be peeled. No lettuce, no berries and everything else soaked in an iodine solution. The other girls thought me especially favored when one of the Lotharios from the Military Attache's office left an American grown stalk of celery at my door upon his return from a supply flight to the US Air Base in Dhahran.

My first formal dinner, catered by Khalum, was for Lee Rose and his new wife Gertrude, a secretary in the political section who had tried to get me to play bridge. But remembering the old Foreign Service hands on board the Constitution who never seemed to leave their cards to take a breath of sea air, I declined. I had come to India to see India, not to sit in a poorly air conditioned room with a bunch of people who mainly gossiped and complained. They blathered endlessly about the heat, about the servants , about the bugs, about how little they were making, even though most of them were probably living better than they ever had before.

But Gertrude and Lee were different. The three of us went one night to hear Ravi Shankar. Never had I seen and heard such exultant joy as the master of the sitar sat cross legged on a rug in the middle of an otherwise empty stage improvising ragas with his tabla player for hours on end. Here was Mozart reincarnated in an eastern mode before my very eyes, laughing with the universe. Gertrude too reveled in the ecstasy of the moment but Lee signalled his disinterest by falling asleep midway through.

After the four hour concert, we returned to my place where Khalum had prepared a feast, with the piece de resistance a rooster formed of mashed potatoes with gravied chicken in its back. Gertrude and I ooh-ed and ah-ed appropriately but Lee refused to touch it. "I don't want anybody playing with my potatoes before I eat them," he said, removing himself to the couch where he promptly returned to his nap.

It hadn't taken too long to discover that servants were not a luxury. First of all shopping had to be done each day because there was very little refrigeration. And since Hindus are not meat eaters, Khalum had to travel to Old Delhi on his bicycle to find Muslim meat wallahs who would sell the mutton which came to be a staple for me and for Lady. The dhobi who washed and ironed my clothes by hand worked six days a week as did the sweeper. For the services of the three I paid out a grand total of $22 a month. The old hands thought me extravagant. Maybe I was, but for five dollars a month more than the going rate, I got the best servants in the compound.

Before I received my assignment to Delhi, I knew India was on the other side of the world. Like most Americans that's just about all I knew evern though I'd studied history with the best, Selig Adler, who did not believe in the theory of progress. Fortunately the Embassy sent new arrivals to a two-week orientation course sponsored by the School of Economics at Delhi University. We were given a survey of the history, art and religions of India, together with her place in the contemporary world. They also threw in a few Hindi lessons. We met in a brand new building , so new that noeating facilities existed for miles around. They did manage coffee and tea, however. Among the highlights of the session was the wise and reasoned welcome of our own ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker.

Ambassador Bunker epitomized true American aristocracy. Tall and distinguihed are but paltry external descriptions. I shall never forget the Saturday afternoon soon after my arrival, when, as duty code clerk, I was called to the Embassy to deal with a "Niact" (night action), a telegram which required immediate attention. Ambassador Bunker arrived in his limousine within a few minutes and together we waited for the Marine guard who was making his rounds. When the young soldier finally appeared to unlock the door, Ambassador Bunker held i open for me, perhaps then the lowest ranking member of his American staff. Such behavior described all aspects of his being.

The Marines, despite their posture of cynical bravado, would recount with awe and admiration the time the ambassador left his briefcase in his office, a serious security violation from which even ambassadors were not exempt. Returning to the Embassy to retrieve it, he said: "I believe you gentlemen are holding something for me," saluting the boys for doing their duty well.

Mrs. Bunker, too, that is the first Mrs. Bunker, was graciousness personified. Her big project in India, for which she became much beloved, was to secure long handles for the sweepers so that they were not constantly on their knees but could stand tall like other men even though they were the outcastes, the untouchables banished by birth from intercourse with all save other souls who similarly defile the easth. Gandhi called them the children of God.

I started exploring many different parts of Delhi, both old and new. The "new" city, built a century earlier during the height of the British Raj, was where the fashionable shops were to be found on Connaught Circus, where the Parliament buildings were of such size that anything in Europe made one smile at the pretensions of the western world. It was where the maidans or open public spaces were so wide that they might easily accommodate returning hordes of Mughals. Now golf clubs coexisted with polo fields and the diplomatic enclave pressed against the city's eastern boundaries. Bullocks and barefoot paupers wandered at their pleasure, even up the magnificent staircases of Rastrapati Bhavan, an enormous palace of red sandstone built for the British viceroy but since 1947 occupied by the president of the world's most populous democracy.

But to go into Old Delhi was to pass into the glorious age of Akbar and Shah Jahan. The Red Fort stood guard over swirling dervishes of color, a constant kaleidoscope of motion. Tongas and bullocks and taxis fought for their share of the streets with prostitutes and chickens and children snd saddhus and street corner merchants.

It was here that the Lord Krishna danced his eternal dances of wonder and love and struggle and courage. It was here the beloved blue incarnation of Vishnu reigned supreme. It was here that there was life without end.

As I wandered the narrow streets luxuriating in the sights and smell of mango and chutney, of tandoori chiken and silvered sweets, of orange blossoms and opium overlaid by the odor of dung from both man and beast, I paused to examine some gold colored bangles of spun glass. A band of beggar children besieged me with demands for naie paise. I was beside myself until Doug Heck appeared. He cajoled them away in ragged Hindistani. They laughed and went away.

Doug was playing pukka sahib with his two young daughters. Judy, the younger, was fey and freckled; Betsy dark and tall and self-possessed. He suggested that we all have tea on Chandi Chowk before heading back to New Delhi in a tonga. The old India hand charmed the bearer who brought chai to the children and to the young woman who felt more like a third, less knowing daughter, so tongue-tied and tentative were my attempts to enter into the easy familiarity with which they enjoyed this pungent universe of motion, heat and sound. The four of us rolled back to Delhi behind a skinny Sikh and his even skinnier horse.

The monsoons soon chased away a little of the appalling heat. One day during alull the Marines came rapping on doors to round up recruits for a trip to Agra. Six of us piled into a jeep and off we charged hellbent through many villages, maintaining our speed while the driver blew constantly on his horn to part the seas of souls who momentarily evaporated as we sped pellmell through the space they seemingly still occupied.

As we continued south, the rain fell so heavily that we saw neither shape nor color in the opaque greyness running down the windshield. The mud dwellings were dissolving into Daliesque deformity and armies of vultures sat silently in the fields, drying their wings in the intervals between the rains.

But to call the monsoon rain is like referring to a hurricane as a breeze out of Africa. A monsoon is solid water. It is a relentless river under which one lives without surcease for months on end. It is the cascading Niagara of all downpours and when it abates the holy rivers flood their banks and the earth inland begins to steam. The poor wretches in the villages and on the streets need not fear hell since they already knew its torments. They warned us that the water would soon reach our windows if we continued.

Some weeks later we ventured forth again, this times in the early evening. Three hours later we arrived in village much like many others. We navigated the narrow, twisting streets and stopped at a small enclosure. Even at 5'4" I had to stoop at a low opening. There, across a long reflecting pool, was the most ethereal monument to love ever constructed by hand of man. The Taj Mahal floated in the shimmering light of the full moon, its minarets magnifying the voluptuous dimensions of Mumtaz, the eternal queen whose bones lay buried with her husband beneath its Nughal dome.

The Shah Jahan had emptied his treasury in order to build this testament of his love for the woman who died giving birth to his fourteenth child. His son, Aurangzeb, took umbrage, imprisoning his father and seizing his throne before a twin black marble mausoleum could be completed cross the River Jumna. I would see the Taj several more times before I left India, but never would it be more beautiful than it was in that first breathtaking glance through a service entrance.

A few days later as I was leaving the code room after seven in the evening, Doug called to me from his office. "Some AID consultants are in town on their way to Nepal. I'm having a little picnic at the house for them this weekend. It would be great fun if you could join us."

The house was much like any large old rambling bungalow on a tree shaded, Norman Rockwell block except for the heavy perfume of orange blossoms and the presence of a dour Bengali who passed silently through the awkward little group, offering iced drinks and removing our overburdened plates. As evening fell, Betsy disappeared and Judy shivered by the pool. Several couples soon said their goodbyes and I remained with Judy and an AID man.

"Don't leave," Doug whispered. "This fellow is convinced that I'm with the CIA and he wants to stay and fish for confirmation." I felt uncomfortable as Libby, Doug's wifer, was out of town but since the company was much more graceful than that of post-adolescent Marines, I stayed. Long after dark the AID fellow finally left.

Suddenly a star streamed steadily across the sky. "It's the Sputnik, man's first step into the fiery firmaments," Doug said, giving me a little hug. "The Soviets have proven once again that all things are possible. Now all we have to do is play catch up."

I softly volunteered that there once had been a time when I'd know all the constellations in the sky. But that was long ago when I was ten or so, when I still dreamt big dreams and thought I'd join Copernicus in calculating the measure of infinity.

Doug laughed and said that 23 was not so very old. Perhaps I'd learn to track the heavens yet. He offered to drive me home but I demurred, instinctively knowing that a taxi would attract less attention on my way back to the Taj.

"Before you go, there's something I've been wanting to tell you," he said, pouring himself another "snort," the inelegant term he always used for yet another glass of scotch. "A lot of people think I'm with the agency because I'm opening up Nepal. I do deal with some of the operatives including Dewey Clarridge who is my very good friend. So I know a few of the code words. But I'm not a spy. It's very important to me that you believe this."

Orion stalked his prey in the brilliant autumn sky.

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The Barber's Daughter - Chapter One

My Lord Krishna died last month and I feel nothing. It's been years since I've seen him whenever Orion owned the sky, years since my innocence orbited in daily thought around his gentle grace and kindness, years even since his last epistle well into his second marriage.

We met in 1957 in a fantastical world where each day five thousand years of history collide in the colors and the heat and the filth of a karmic land whose milling masses live out their lives in unquestioning acceptance of the casual cruelty of their gods. He was a rising star in the old boy network which ruled the Foreign Service and I, I was running away from the claustrophobic confines of my birth.

I had gone to New York to see my friend Joan right after exams in May of 1956. At my Father's behest, I then was at Buffalo State ostensibly studying elementary education. I had first gone to Syracuse for its journalism school before retreating back to Buffalo and the American Studies program at UB because it would save the cost of housing. Daddy no longer permitted Mother to neglect him by going off to work for so paltry a reason as tuition for her daughter. No she was not always going to get to put the kids first. Besides which he needed her to bring him his drinks and to sweep up in the barber shop when he got too busy to look after things himself.

Even when the Dean of Students tried to motivate me by telling me that my percentiles were off the scale, I made no effort to excel. I didn't want to teach and wind up to be the old maid my Mother said I'd turn into whenever I displayed a bit of temper just like my Aunt Vicky. No, the young Tatiana hidden in my Slavic breast awaited her Onegin not the safety of a school marm's life.

One morning after Joan and her roommate Dot and I had roared around Manhattan in the middle of the night to catch a few breezes off the rivers and count the ships in port, an ad announcing staff openings in the U.S. Foreign Service appeared in the New York Times. I went for an interviews but in my shyness did not presume to apply. The State Department sent two letters to North Tonawanda inviting me to join and by the end of October I was ensconced with other new recruits at the Meridian Hill Hotel on Sixteenth Street in northwest Washington. So casually was my future formed.

Nine months would pass before I sailed away, a gentle gestation among my fellow novices to prepare me for the world abroad. Or did the security clearance process take so long because, as rumor had it, the Department needed new recruits to do the most mindless of the chores in Foggy Bottom?

Whatever. I had become the typist which my Father considered an appropriate aspiration for the little girl whose grades he had bragged about since she first made straight E's in grade school. It was, of course, a step up from the mills where his sisters labored. Whatever you do, make sure you do it to the best of your ability had been his frequent admonition. No one in the State Department's communication center ever matched my daily quotas. Thus I became a favorite of Elsie Crim at whose pleasure code clerks both old and new were shuffled around the globe. Miss Crim herself seemed permanently rooted to a rolling chair which barely contained her soft southern amplitude.

"Delphine, I can send you to Paris or to Rome if you insist. I know you young ones all join to go to Europe. But you'll resign within six months because you won't have enough money to live on and do the things one goes to Europe to explore. Let me send you to India where there's staff housing and a hardship allowance to supplement your salary. You'll be welcomed with open arms and you'll save a bundle."

My painful shyness did not desert me and once more I deferred to those who spoke more loudly.

My first night in Asia was spent in Karachi. The Panam prop put down into an ocean of brown dust, destroying in its descent the blood red sun which exploded over the sands of the Rajastani
desert in the early dusk. The Afghani government officials with whom I had shared the flight from Rome hurriedly consumed the last of their whiskeys as they readjusted their mantles of Muslim morality. Before we were allowed to deplane, Pakistani health officers came on board and sprayed us, the clean and healthy foreigners. some of whom were about to look upon the face of famine and disease for the very first time. Surely I had tumbled into wonderland.

The airport personnel were solicitous. They offered me the very best of the rooms at the adjacent motel. This meant a long, long walk in bone-colored pointed heels in order to reach the only air-conditioned wing. An American ambassador on his way to a new post in Asia had warned me about those shoes when he and his wife had included me in their limousine ride from the dock of the USS Constitution in Naples to my hotel on the Piazza Navonna in Rome. Henry Byroade's concern, however, had not been my comfort but rather the signal those shoes sent to the ever hopeful gentlemen of the Eternal City.

The favor I was shown seemed rare indeed as the porter brushed aside a hundred little lizards before he opened the door to a stale and sour room. Inside the startling incandescence of a single bulk suspended without cover from the middle of the ceiling caused a scurrying of a seemingly limitless number of the miniature reptiles. For someone who had grown up in upstate New York here only the occasional fly and a few mosquitoes marred the perfect of a summer day the shock of sharing an already outlandish place with such a primordial multitude was overwhelming. I pulled the wrought iron bed and its meager mattress into the center of the room and like the Buddha I sat cross legged under the blazing bulk until the dawn.

George Mitchell spoke to me again, George the Catholic convert whose passion for God and for me and for all things French had begun to color the greyness of my life. George, who had bestowed upon me my first kiss since a little boy in the second grade leaned over me while passing out papers, mourned my departure into absence and into existential error.

I feared anew the elephantiasis with which some living in the subcontinent were afflicted. Those photographs of people horrendously deformed with pumpkins on their necks compelled attention to the fact that I still could not swallow vitamins or any other pills. The virulence of my reaction to the tetanus.typhoid shot had forced me to look into death'd door if only for one feverish night.

In the morning Barbara Blodgett with whom I'd worked in Washington came out to give me a taxi tour of downtown Karachi. Her sweet disposition did little to dispel the foreboding occasioned by the heavy brown which overlay everything but the garments of the figures who floated through the heat and dust. Months later I would hear that Barbara had disappeared into the proscriptive world of a Pakistani wife.

The afternoon flight to Delhi arrived at dusk. My new co-workers were waiting in a ramshackle building at the end of a single runway which formed the in town airport. Inchoate monsters on a nearby temple seemed to wrestle for the sovereignty of the night. The heat was gelatinous even in the absence of Surya, the Hindu sun god.

Gerry Mull, the code room supervisor, and his colleagues Barbara Smith and Mary Farley welcome me to my first overseas post. Gerry was from Ypsilanti and because of him I would come the learn the meaning of the word uxorious. Barbara, crisp and dark-haired, told me of a bearer named Khalum who was immediately available. "He's the best in the compound and you'd better act quickly if you want him." she said.

A full time servant to look after just me! The barber's daughter could hardly see the need.

"And you'll also need a dhobi and a sweeper. Khalum will cook and shop and clean everything but the floors. The dhobi washed clothes for half a dozen people and the sweeper does the floors and takes away the trash. This is India, you know. Everything is different."

They drove me through the strangeness to the Janpath Hotel and said an embassy car would come for me at eight the next morning.

I thanked them in the great heat and moved into a modern hotel of less than luxe pretensions. Once in my room I sat freezing on the edge of a narrow white bed while I tried to figure out how many months I'd have to work before I'd have enough money for my airfare home. New government employees are not eligible for return at taxpayer expense until they've completed two years abroad.

Two years to a twenty two year old stretch beyond belief but to my baby brother Ricky who then was twelve, I now know that that hiatus meant abandonment. The light of my life and the focus of our family's fitful joys had come to New York with our Father to see me off as I sailed away to my first adventures beyond the sea. Ricky had become almost more my child than my Mother's not through any dereliction on her part but simply because even at the age of nine my passion, stirred by Dostoevsky and his peers, required a great love, and all others in my life were wanting.

I had to run away, away from Daddy who stood with self-conscious importance on the dock below, away from his constant yelling, his constant need to be so right. I couldn't make him understand that his rightness was not my own although I didn't know just what my own might be. Manhattan disappeared as I stood on deck smoking my first Dunhills, the elegant wine and gold package a goodbye gist from my precious Rick. I don't recall that my other brother even crossed my mind.

In July of 1957 Edward Stone's world famous confection in the new diplomatic enclave on the outskirts of New Delhihad not yet been completed. So I reported to a sprawling old yellow estate in town which then served as the U.S. Embassy in India. Within half an hour a human perpetual motion machine named Lee Rose had briefed me on all office procedures and every variant which could possibly occur during the course of an entire assignment. Lee went on to caution me that each contact point on the rotors had to be polished by hand with chamois. "Don't cheat with a pencil eraser. The residue will clog the machines and John Smith, the regional tech, will have your head. It's the only thing he really gets upset about."

Actually John was as sweet and helpful as was Lee. I never had to polish a single rotos or even change a ribbon because John would do so for hours on end when he wasn't out of town servicing another post.

We used rackety code machines with one time tap[e systems to communicate with Washington and most of the rest of the world, but messages to the consulates in India and to Kathmandu were laboriously encrypted with substitution pads.

The United States did not yet have a formal diplomatic representation in the capital of Nepal and it remained the mysterious magical world of mountains and our dreams of Shangri-la. The Beatles had not yet sung their songs and the flower children were not yet to worship in the shadows of the Himalayan snow gods.

The political officer in charge of U.S. Nepalese affairs was a pleasant man whose nondescript office abutted the file room on the second floor through which we had to pass in order to enter the code room. Doug couldn't have been more cordial and he graciously allowed me to use his office when George would call from Washington to importune my return. Standing at his desk as the waves of sound faltered back and forth, I wondered f he detected the falsies with which I then enhanced my still adolescent figure.

L. Douglas Heck had literally been born into the Foreign Service. As son of the U.S. Consul General in Istanbul, he grew up in a world of courtesies and ease and intellectual stimulation unknown to the daughter of a first generation Polish-American whose immigrant family had been too poor to pay his passage into the priesthood. Elizabeth, Doug's wife, was a tall and serious woman, a Swarthmore grad, who seemed to spend much time up in Simla, one of the hill stations north of Delhi to which first the British and now anyone well-to-do enough retreated during the great heat.

I first met the Hecks two days after my arrival at the Fourth of July part hosted by the Marine guards for the entire American community. The big bash was held at the Taj, home to the Marines and to almost all non-diplomatic employees. Unlike the seventeenth century tomb, the Taj consisted of some 50 or 60 single units constructed during the second world war to quarter American military officers.

Scotch and waters flowed as freely as the fountains in the city circles. Among the heavy imbibers was Miss Boo, a happy golden retriever, whose previous owner had abandoned her to the exotic ministrations of the militantly masculine young Marines. "Here pretty lady" called one of our hosts, putting down a saucer of mi;lk and whiskey. As someone whose family maintained an array of bottles mainly for display at Christmas and at Easter, I was appalled. But in my thirst, I too downed many a glass with no discernible difference in my behavior or so I thought.

While the uncommitted bachelors circled tentatively, Miss Boo provided more agreeable company. Soon after I moved into my own unit, I made her mine. Lady as I preferred to call her quickly became one of the two great new loves of my singularly sheltered life.

The Barber's Daughter - Prologue

I was born bald, just like my Daddy. Well, not completely bald. Mother said I had a fringe around the edges which thankfully grew into a full head of silky dark brown hair within weeks of my arrival at Gramma's small frame house on Seventeenth Avenue, the house that Mother always felt she had paid for with the sweat of her young years at Kimberly Clark's packing plant in Niagara Falls.

But it was a scare and maybe even a sign that her daughter would have the same ferocious temper that fused the follicles, the temper that had had her bridegroom screaming at the musicians who played the polkas and the mazurkas at their wedding party in Gramma's backyard.

Mother would say that she should have left him right then and there. But she didn't and nine days short of a year after Father Konstantego Cyrana consecrated their union at Our Lady of Czestochowa, I entered this vale of tears in the midst of the Great Depression. The church on Oliver Street was the center of gravity for the local Polish community. Immigrant families settled within a few blocks and their children often grew up to marry a neighbor's child. Oliver Street also was known for some 39 bars but my Daddy was not a regular customer, although he did indulge in an occasional fish fry with Mother and his sister, Vicky.

No, during the glory days when Daddy had the barber shop on Payne Avenue, he kept an ample stock of whiskies and sweet cordials but they were meant mainly for visitors at Easter and at Christmas. Such visitors almost always were close family with whom grievances were constant but the holy waters effected temporary truces in keeping with the holiday spirit.

My Daddy was born to be a priest. To the end of his life, he would see the world darkly, refusing ever to be happy. It was his children's most bitter legacy. He ranted and raved constantly, just like the rotound keepers of the faith of their fathers who each Sunday compelled collection after collection for all manner of special assessments decreed by their dioscesan superiors.

Despite the fact that he and his older brother, Charlie, had been forced to fend for themselves almost from puberty, Daddy somehow managed to attend a seminary in Michigan where the young sons of Polonia, born to peasants transplanted from the Carpathian villages south of Krakow, came to see the Church as continuity and change a corruption of the Devil.

But the miracle which took him from a blacksmith's overburdened household to the tranquil shores of Orchard Lake did not last more than a year when money, or rather a lack thereof, dictated a retreat from the peaceful pines back to the troubled waters at the confluence of the great Niagara and the Erie Canal. This is the place the Iroquois call Tonawanda, or running waters.

Today there are several Tonawandas. That north of the Erie Canal where I was born was, at the turn of the century, the largest lumber town in the world. A great fire in 1913 destroyed the mills and rendered the town a mere stop on the "high speed" trolley which ran between Buffalo and Niagara Falls until the late 1930's. North Tonawanda would remain famous in upstate New York but only because its lumberjacks were regularly reincarnated as the high school football team which reapeatedly trounced all regional opposition.

When I was growing up in the 1950's there were some 35,000 souls in the city. The Poles who lived on the numbered avenues off Oliver Street comprised that part of the population that worked in the mills and foundries and chemical plants. The Germans with swastikas built into the design of their porches were the foremen. The Italians owned the greengrocers, the pizzerias and the bars. And the WASPS controlled the banks and the newspaper.

Many of the Polish kids went to the parish school at OLC where the nuns capitulated to the language of the new world for only the hour each day mandated by a lower law. Daddy wanted my brothers and me to go there too but Mother insisted on the public schools and a more contemporary church. A battle was drawn each Sunday when she and Daddy would argue about whether to attend the church of their patrimony or Ascension which Mother perceived to be more "American" since the homilies were given in English. We wound up going to public schools and taking our religious instruction one afternoon a week at Ascension. I barely remember the black-robed brides of Christ but I do remember the day of my First Communion.
As I pulled on my dress, I glimpsed a momentary darkness over my heart and I knew that I was evil. One of the long curls had caught inside the flimsy white froth, surely a warning from God the Father against accepting the body of His Son into my own when I hated my corporal Daddy so. Unknown heavenly wrath, however, paled before the immediacy of Daddy's mouth and so I placed the veil on my head and went out to the black Ford for the tortuous drive down Oliver Street to partake of my first formal feast as an obedient member of the family of God.

Actually, Daddy was a good man. He blessed the Lord, honored his parents, fed his children and placed his wife before all others. Even though he was always carrying on about money, we ate well and we lived in a big house on the corner of two main streets in town. Of course, we lived on Payne Avenye because Mother has "plunged" Daddy into buying the place so that he could have his own shop again.

Daddy had been the most successful insurance agent in the local Polish community for years. He believed in insurance and to the end of his life old timers would consult him about their needs. But he had become sick and tired of working for Prudential. He didn't like to be bossed around by people less able than he, another legacy he bequeathed his offspring. However, he needed Mother to be willing to take the blame in case things didn't work out.

Amd take the blame she did each and every day. Daddy complained constantly for the twenty five years we owned the big Victorian store front. When he finally sold it for a pittance after broadcasting its shortcomings to his customers for years, he became so remorseful that Mother had to stop him from buying it back for twice the price.

About a year after he opened the shop, Daddy was able to buy a brand new Buick. His customers resented it and business fell off, but only temporarily, because Daddy was the best barber in town. Nobody else could race through twenty customers during a typical lunch hour so that they could back to their jobs in time. Of course, Daddy complained nonstop that he wasn't able to sit down exactly at 12 noon each day but he had Mother running back and forth with juices and soups whenever he rang a bell.

Mother used the back downstairs bedroom as a beauty shop until Daddy told a State inspector that she was out of business. She was very angry because, more than the money, she enjoyed her customers. Daddy, of course, resented any attentions not devoted exclusively to him. Before we sold the previous house on Nash Road, I had warned her about 24 hour a day togetherness when Daddy's lunchtime appearances during his days with Prudential caused such stress.

While I was in high school my name was in headlines each time the local paper published quarterly grades. I would hear him bragging to his customers through the living room door but he never said a word to me. To him I was just "she," the disobedient daughter who refused to sweep up while customers were still in the barber shop.

Daddy bought me a brand new Smith Corona for my sixteenth birthday upon the advice of the highly respected George Vetter, the social studies teacher and coach of NT's winning football team. Of course, Daddy's intention was that I become a typist, an ambition as lofty as might be expected for a member of a first generation family whose most illustrious member had been coachman to a Polish count.

When I was fourteen the Tonawanda News gave me a weekly column writing high school news, a job I had for three years. They also offered me a job as assistant to the Society Editor during the summers. Daddy was pleased because his cousin Sophie had been working at the News for years. But he ceased to be pleased when, the second summer, they rehired me at the same salary. He said I should quit. So I did and then he yelled at me for leaving.

When I mentioned college in my junior year, Daddy was astounded. "We would have planned, if we'd known you wanted to go." I remembered Daddy telling Uncle Louie at his gas station when I was six or seven that I'd be the first in the family to go to college because any kid who never got less than an A, or rather an E for excellent in those days, deserved to go. But Daddy didn't remember and I never could say anything to Daddy, at least not out loud.

Mother went to work at Remington Rand to earn my tuition. My Aunt Vicky worked there her entire life and even Gramma spent some years making the slips with huge lace bodices and borders, a few of which are still packed away in my trunks.

Even though I won the Elmira Key as outstanding junior girl, I didn't want to go to a small girls school of which no one had ever heard. No, I wanted to be a journalist so it was off to Syracuse I went. I who barely spoke to classmates and teachers, let alone a school counselor, did not even apply for scholarships. After all we weren't poor. We gave our used clothes to those living on the lower numbered avenues. And when my grade point average dropped my senior year from 99.9 to 97, I felt undeserving. I withdrew my application to Cornell. Of course, Mr. Lowry, the principal, and my teachers thought I was so smart that I knew what I was doing. "Brainiest" it said under my photo in the yearbook to my utter desolation.

I attended Syracuse for a year but I had to transfer back to the University of Buffalo so that I could live at home. Daddy felt deprived by my Mother's workday absence. "Always looking after those brats first," he harangued. But even UB proved too expensive so I dropped out for a year to work as a receptionist for a prominent architectural firm in downtown Buffalo, earning little more than money for sundries and the bus fare back and forth.

Daddy next decided that I should become a teacher. This meant Buffalo State. I hated the school and I hated listened to how lucky I was that I had free room and board. During a trip to New York to visit my friend Joan I saw an ad for overseas employment in the New York Times. I visited the State Department's recruitment office but did not formally apply. Two letters of inquiry arrived and some months later I joined the Foreign Service as a code clerk. I thus became the typist that Daddy deemed sufficiently exalted a position for someone of my background. After all, he regularly would say, no one climbed out of the circumstances into which they were born in just one generation.

It would be several years before Mother told me that Daddy had used their last hundred dollars cash to buy that typewriter soon after he had opened the barber shop on Payne Avenue.

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