Born Under an Assumed Name by Sara Mansfield Taber

Author:Sara Mansfield Taber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Published: 2012-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

PART II. THE SHORE

Book 4

WAR

Washington, D.C.,

1968–1970

15

america the ugly

These next two years, my fourteenth and fifteenth, spent back in America, made a clean sweep of my sense of America and of myself—and took me on a journey into class and war, a journey I never expected.

A lot of young people have a year or two in their lives—full of emotional sticks and stones that do hurt them—that they somehow manage to erect into serviceable shelter.

It was the summer of the assassinations, and the country was sweltering. The tenements of 14th Street, in Washington, D.C., had been burned into charred, hulking ruins from the riots following the killing of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Thirty thousand young Americans had died in the padis of Vietnam and there was no end to the war in sight. From California to the District of Columbia, the country was awash in marijuana-smoking hippies, shouting revolutionaries, and sign-toting peaceniks objecting to the war, and the rooms of the Capitol were a pitched battleground of confused and vociferous politicians. America was ready to boil—and the protected child of a “diplomat” was about to arrive on its shores.

It was 5 a.m. America was a blur. I could just barely see the torch and draped silhouette of the Statue of Liberty through a cool fog as we sailed by on the SS United States, but still, my heart trilled.

We disembarked at the dock in New York into what looked like a huge warehouse. In this enormous, vacuous Quonset hut with a concrete floor, we waited, our good clothes wilting in the humidity, for our trunks to be trundled down from the stateroom. Then we waited again for our new VW squareback to be disgorged from what my father called “the bowels of the ship.” By the time we loaded the car, it was 11 a.m., and five minutes after we got on our way, Andy said, “Okay Pop, time to stop at McDonald’s.”

“Yeah, you promised, Pop,” I said.

My father heaved a big fake sigh and said, “Oh, all right,” and he pulled into the first hamburger joint we came across: golden arches set deep in the grime of the city amid high-rising rusted girders and boarded-up buildings. Hamburgers, fries: Ah! The glorious taste of America! Then, bellies slopping with chocolate milkshakes, we began the long drive down the New Jersey Turnpike.

These were my first views of America: not beauteous waves of grain or a Bier-stadt canvas of magnificent mountains, but the under-bridge of New York and the grim, endless, traffic-streaming asphalt aisle of the New Jersey Turnpike.

We hauled our suitcases and trunks into the elevator at the Alban Towers, a dusty and dreary Gothic apartment hotel near the National Cathedral that reeked of cleaning fluids and seemed to be inhabited by old ladies in house dresses with odd smirks and twitches. When I read Rosemary’s Baby later in the year, the Alban Towers would come to mind.

Soon after we settled into the grim billet, the Washington Post, which my father

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