Infancy, or How he came to be

1. Infancy, or how he came to be

We are born infants; vulnerable, fragile and unable to care for ourselves. In the same manner, we die crippled shadows of who we used to be - vulnerable, fragile and unable to care for ourselves. What we are when we are born or when we die is not important. It’s what we make of ourselves in the years between our first and last breath that matter. No one knew this better than John Hope. John was a friend of mine, who knew very well the twists and turns life sometimes makes. He learned most of the things he knew “the hard way”, as they say, but to describe his experiences as merely hard is, however, understating it. There was one quality in John that was marvelous: despite the many let-downs in his life, he always remained the most kindhearted, optimistic person alive. He had an outlook on things that very much agreed with his name.
     

John Hope was born in 1941, on a cold November day in New York City. His bad luck started before he was even born - nine months before he was born, at the moment of conception, to be exact. Before I can tell you of John coming into being, however, I should tell you about his mother. Anne Schmitt was a young Viennese woman with a weakness for handsome young men, a weakness that would be her undoing. She was often seen around town on weekends with a new man by her side every week. For a while, people looked on with amusement as she picked her way through Vienna’s men, seemingly trying them on for size, but soon the laughter turned to disapproving tuts and upturned noses. Anne began to gain a reputation with the men of Vienna.

“Have you heard about Anne Schmitt?” someone would say. “I’ve been told she’s fast as lightning.”

“I’m seeing Anne Schmitt this Saturday,” says another, “but I wouldn’t tell my mother about it.”

“The girl’s clearly a nymphomaniac!” someone, in a very blunt manner, cried. “What would old Freud have to say about her?”
     

Europe, which we think of now as a liberal minded and bohemian place - well, I do, anyway - was at this time quite the opposite. Women may have gotten the vote, but the vote didn’t mean a girl was free to go about town with any number of men. Anne was ahead of her time in thinking a young woman should have every right to go about town with whatever number of men she wanted; society wasn’t ready to accept a girl taking charge of her own love life in such a manner quite yet. In some ways, I wonder if society is unready to this day for women openly courting men with the sole intention of having a bit of fun. If you think about it, society reacts in much the same way now as it did then: women who sleep around are labeled and judged without further thought. I always thought of Anne as a brave woman, a woman who stood up for herself and what she believed was right. Isn’t it strange how people who defy the stale old dogmas of society are always the first to be shunned, but somehow the last to be forgotten?
     

Anne’s father had for some time been eyeing the horizon anxiously. He knew something big was happening in Germany, and the talk about town - about all of Austria - was that Herr Hitler and his national socialist party were planning to annex Austria. What angered him most was that the Austrian government didn’t seem to be doing much to stop them. Wilhelm Schmitt didn’t know much about politics. He had never been interested, and until now, he hadn’t needed to be. Biting his thumb (a nervous habit of his that Anne had picked up), he damned himself for not having read the political section of the morning paper. If this talk about Herr Hitler waltzing into Vienna to take over was true, shouldn’t the government be preparing for war? Would they really put up no resistance? Wilhelm knew there were many people in both Germany and Austria that had been wishing for the two countries to be adjoined for quite some time, but he also knew, despite his feeble knowledge of politics, that Chancellor Schnuschnigg wished for Austria to remain independent.

“As it rightly should!” he scoffed to himself and continued watching the horizon, as if he expected Hitler himself to come riding into town on a stallion, brandishing the Nazi banner.
     

Then, a scandal occurred. With Anne being Anne, a scandal was bound to occur at some point, and perhaps it was just as well that it occurred when it did, or Wilhelm wouldn’t have had the idea to send her to America and she would never have met Scott Hope. I’m getting ahead of the story here, as Scott Hope didn’t appear in Anne’s life for another two years; let’s return to the scandal. As she always was, Anne had been taken out by a young man. Ever since she had gained a reputation, she found that none of the men she would have liked to go out with were particularly keen on asking her out. Instead, she had to settle for men like the oaf she was out with that night. There was nothing terribly wrong with him; he was perfectly nice, but perfectly boring; he had strawberry blond hair, and she really preferred dark hair on men; his eyes were hazel, which she found interesting as she thought of blonds as having blue eyes, but they kept slipping down to stare at her chest (despite her constant reminders that she may be rumored to be a nympho, but she wasn’t a cheap piece of meat for him to ogle); his nose was too big for his face, his ears stood out at an odd angle and his lips were too thin. She had already decided she would not be kissing him tonight, or any other night. Resigned to returning home to spend a quiet evening with her father, she sighed.
     

Across the room, she noticed a pair of curious eyes looking at her. The eyes belonged to a face that was far more handsome than that of her beau of the evening. It was an older gentleman, perhaps in his mid-forties, with an aquiline nose and wonderfully arched lips; she though at once how marvelous it must be to kiss them. His dark hair was speckled with grey, and when he smiled at her the skin around his eyes wrinkled. It only added to his allure. She knew that if he invited her to come home with him, she would go. She was almost falling in love with him only by looking at him (Anne was always one for good looks). For a split second she wondered if he was married, but she saw no glimmer of gold on his finger.

“Tomas, I am so sorry,” she said and stood abruptly. “I’m not feeling very well, and I think it’s best if I go straight home. It’s been a lovely evening.”

“If you’re not well, I’ll accompany you home,” Tomas said, looking disappointed.

“There is no need. Really - no need at all. I am my own woman, as I like to say. Good night, friend!” She emphasized the word ‘friend’ and hoped he wouldn’t call on her again. On her way out, she smiled at the older gentleman, who finished his drink in a hurry and followed her outside.

“Young girls like you shouldn’t be smiling at strange men in dark rooms,” he advised her in a deep, mellifluous voice.

“And are you a strange man?” she asked. “Give me your name so that we might be friends.”

“Andreas,” he introduced himself.

“You see! A perfectly friendly name, and not strange at all. I’m Anne.”

“What a funny girl you are, Anne!”

“I assure you, I’m quite serious.”

“I hope you don’t think me too forward, Anne, but I’d like it very much if you’d take a glass of wine with me. I’m much older than you, of course, but inside, by candle light, you looked very pretty- You still look very pretty- I’ve said too much. Forgive me.”

“What for? Let’s have some wine!” She looked over her shoulder. “Although I think the man who brought me out tonight is still inside, and I told him I was going home.”
     

The two went to Andreas’s house. It was a fast move, even For Anne, and for a moment she thought that she should be angry with him for being presumptuous; but she couldn’t bring herself to be angry about anything at all. If he wants me, she thought, he can have me, because I want him, too. They sat next to each other on a sofa in Andreas’s luxuriously furnished house, always inching slightly closer to each other, until she could smell the wine on his breath. Both were a little intoxicated. It made them giggle and gave the light in the room a rosy tinge. Their first kiss was tentative, gentle; then he kissed her with an increasing sense of urgency and a growing need to have her.
     

When Andreas’s wife Clara came home, she thought it strange that her husband was not in his chair by the fire like he usually was. She also found it odd that there were two empty glasses on the little table in the front room, but she assumed that he must have had a friend over and that they had gone out for a late meal. With a feeling of great disappointment, she hung her coat in the hall and thought about the homecoming scene she had pictured. All day she had been travelling from the countryside, where her mother lived, so that she could surprise Andreas. Clara wasn’t expected home for another two days, but she had missed her husband terribly, and the thought of the look on his face when she came home early had been enough reason to escape her mother’s grip earlier than planned.
     

She heard a strange, yet familiar, noise. It had come from upstairs. Brow furrowed, Clara listened carefully; there it was again, and animalistic moan, a deep voice calling out in pleasure. It sounded very much like Andreas, but he only ever made that noise when they were-
     

Anne was thinking about how much she loved the sounds men made when they made love to her - deep, throaty groans that reverberated in her chest, spread through her limbs and pleased her entirely - when the bedroom door swung open. Everything then happened very quickly; Andreas clambered out of bed and wrapped the sheets around him; Anne sat up, not understanding why he had left her so suddenly, realized she was naked and had nothing to cover herself with; a woman, who Anne knew with a sudden and sickening clarity was his wife, was shrieking curses at her; Clara dragged Anne, who was doing her best to cover up with only her hands, out of bed and down the stairs.

“Please, madam, I didn’t know he was- he didn’t tell me he was married! If I’d known, I wouldn’t have- I’m every so sorry!” Anne was pleading for forgiveness, but Clara was not listening.

“W***e!” she screamed. “Filthy w***e! Out of my house, you vermin!” She opened the front door.

“Please, Frau-.” She didn’t know their surname. “Please, madam, don’t throw me out like this! Let me get my dress, don’t- some dignity- my father will…” Clara wasn’t interested in what Anne’s father would do; she forced her outside. Anne stumbled down the steps and fell on the ground. She began to violently cry. Showing no sympathy (which, to be frank, isn’t the first thing you’d expect a cheated wife to show her husband’s lover, anyway), Clara spat on her before slamming the door shut.
     

Wilhelm heard the news of what his only daughter - only child, for that matter - had done and accepted it with grim resignation. Sometimes he wished his daughter had been different; maybe he would have been better off with a son. What had he done to make her think that going to bed with a married man was acceptable behavior? He had never wanted to inhibit his daughter in any way, but he was beginning to think he should have enforced stricter rules about where she went and who she went there with. It didn’t matter now. The damage was done, and it was clear to him that Anne could no longer stay in Vienna. Maybe it was just as good that she left now. On the very same day as the scandal had occurred, Chancellor Schnuschnigg had announced there would be a referendum concerning the annexation of Austria to Germany. Thanks to this piece of news, no one was interested in talking about Wilhelm Schmitt’s daughter being thrown out of a house stark naked. If he could get Anne to move away, she might be able to move past this farce somewhat unscathed and make something of herself. Besides, he wasn’t too sure about this German business. The Nazis seemed to stop at nothing to get what they wanted, and he didn’t like where this Anschluss business was headed. Wilhelm was sure that if Herr Hitler didn’t get his way, there would be war, and although his daughter was far from being an innocent little girl, the horrors of war was something he wanted to spare her.
     

So, on 10^th of March 1938, Anne was sent to France, where she boarded a ship to England, and from there travelled on to America. Her ship sailed on 11^th of March, the same day that the Nazis performed a coup d’état in Vienna. On 12^th of March, Austria was declared German territory. On 13^th of March, Wilhelm, who was now convinced he would never see his daughter again, whose wife was long since dead and who didn’t have a country to call his own, shot himself. He left a short note:

Hitler has arrived, and my daughter is gone. I have nothing to live for, and am an old man. Don’t tell Anne this is how I died. Good bye.

In New York, Anne settled into a calmer lifestyle. With her father having passed so suddenly, and the shock of what had happened on her last night in Vienna, she felt that what she needed most was to slow down. During her first year in America, she stayed with her father’s cousin Christoph and his wife Sofia, who had both emigrated from Austria after the Great War. In their Manhattan home, Anne was taught English by a tutor who took her for a fool; her lessons with him seemed to move at a glacial pace. Between sessions, she would indulge in reading. She read anything she could get her hands on: Dickens, although she found him dull; the Brontë sisters, whose female protagonists - especially Jane Eyre - she identified with; she enjoyed Fitzgerald immensely, despite his Great Gatsby having convinced her that the American dream was, in fact, unattainable; she loved poetry of all sorts, and cared especially for Shakespeare’s sonnets. She learned more English from her tireless reading than from her glacial lessons with the tutor. She was afraid of telling Herr Christoph that this was the case, as he might think her ungrateful. The problem solved itself quite neatly one day, when Anne and her tutor argued over Shakespeare’s ‘To be, or not to be’. The tutor claimed it was a monologue, while Anne (quite rightly) said it was a soliloquy. When Anne wouldn’t admit to being wrong, the tutor walked out and refused to take up lessons with her again.
     

I’m sure that you are by now wondering what happened to John Hope, the man of whom this story is supposed to be about. Your patience might be wearing thin, but don’t fret - I’m getting very close now to the arrival of John. In 1940, Anne was quite happy with her new life; during the day she would visit bookshops and read what she had find while sipping coffee in cafés. Her evenings were spent at home or, on occasion, at the pictures with Frau Sofia. The difference between her New York life and her life in Vienna was vast, and it was hard to believe she was even the same girl. In fact, when she told him why she had left Vienna, Scott Hope had laughed. Anne and Scott met quite by chance when, one day, Anne’s favorite bookshop was closed and she had gone to find another.
     

Not much can be said about Scott Hope. He had a remarkably unremarkable childhood in a small town in Connecticut; he had majored in English and American literature in college, but dropped out in his sophomore year for no particular reason, except that he wanted to go to New York. There, he opened a small bookshop that he named ‘Greenwich Books’, despite the fact that the shop was nowhere near Greenwich Village. Like most of the things Scott did, he did it simply because he felt like it. When Anne walked into his bookshop, he felt like asking her out - so he did. He felt like taking her to his favorite café, so he closed the shop for the day (a bad idea, considering his takings were steadily decreasing and he should have been selling as opposed to leaving in the middle of the day) and they walked to the place he had in mind. It was a new experience for Anne. It had been a long time since anyone treated her with respect. She didn’t have a reputation in New York. On the contrary, in New York, she was just another girl.
     

To Scott, she was anything but just another girl. As far as he was concerned, she was the only girl. Every time he saw her he seemed to fall deeper in love, and when she was with him, she began to understand that Shakespeare wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote the things he did about love. They shared a keen interest in literature, although Scott worshipped Dickens and detested Fitzgerald. Anne could forgive him this one fault, as they both disliked Hemingway and agreed that Tolstoy outshone Dostoyevsky. He showed her the works of his favorite philosophers, and she told him about Freud and psychoanalysis, an interest of hers since her days in Vienna. They would talk for hours, covering everything from politics to ice cream flavors. It came as no surprise to anyone when, in July 1940, they announced their engagement.

“Before we marry, I should tell you some things about myself,” Anne said one evening not long after their engagement.
     

She had dreaded this conversation for a while, but she knew it was necessary. Her father had instilled in her the beliefs that, firstly, a person must make something of him- or herself, and secondly, a person must be honest. Telling Scott about her affairs in Vienna was Anne’s way of honoring her father (although Wilhelm would probably have advised her not to mention her past endeavors). She explained, in words carefully chosen, why she had left her hometown so suddenly, and added that if Scott wanted to call off their engagement, she would understand.

“My God!” Scott exclaimed. “Why would I break off our engagement? Because some guy in the throes of a midlife crisis talked you into bed? Don’t be silly.” He chuckled. “I can’t imagine you, of all people, running around Vienna, romancing young men.”

“Why not?” Anne asked in a slightly defensive tone.

“The Anne that I know is a long way away from being the girl with the reputation.” He laughed again.

“Doesn’t it bother you at all?” He shrugged.

“Water under the bridge, isn’t it?”
     

Their wedding was set to take place in August 1941, but by the end of March Anne found out that she was pregnant. John Hope’s conception came down to a stroke of bad luck - or good luck, depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty kind of person. If it wasn’t for a broken condom, John (as I knew him, at least) would never have been born. Scott and Anne married in a haphazard fashion in May instead of August and moved into a two bedroom apartment that was close to Greenwich Books. Anne began helping out in the shop at an increasing rate; in addition to her omnivorous reading habits, which came in handy when customers asked for advice, she had a business acumen that Scott completely lacked. Together they turned the shop from a slowly dying business to a bustling store, and they made enough money to keep up a decent enough lifestyle.
     

The Hopes had it made. With a successful business, a loving marriage and a baby on the way, even Anne was beginning to think that the American dream wasn’t quite so unattainable at all. There was no way she could know about the genetic flaw that was quickly replicating itself in her little baby; to her, her baby was only a bump that prevented her from wearing her usual clothes and that she already loved beyond belief. But when that condom broke and Scott’s genes met Anne’s genes, all of the genetic information that decided what John would look like, what he would sound like and how he would function, had already decided how he would come to die. In his genetic makeup, there was one flaw: a weakness in an artery in his brain. It was something he inherited from his father, and it was a ticking time-bomb. It could at any minute burst and cause a myriad of horrible consequences. For many years to come, they were blissfully ignorant of the existence of the weakness in the artery, but as I pointed out earlier, John’s bad luck started at conception. An artery threatening to burst open was just the first of many unfortunate things to happen in John’s life.
     

At last, reader, I have reached the part of the story where John enters the plot. Notwithstanding his weak artery, John William (a tribute to Wilhelm) Hope was born in the early hours of 9^th of November, 1941. The midwife counted ten fingers and ten toes, and nodded approvingly at John’s spectacular cry. He was, except for his enormous voice, a docile baby, something that Anne and Scott welcomed with relief (what parent wouldn’t?). This calm streak was a quality that would follow John throughout his life, and it was one of the reasons I was drawn to him in the first place. I’m getting ahead of myself again - my own entrance into the story is still a while away. I won’t say much about his first months alive; he did what all babies do: eat, sleep, s**t and cry. That healthy set of lungs of his would come in handy one day, but that’s another tale you will have to wait for.
     

In Europe, World War II had been going on for two years. Wilhelm Schmitt had been right in thinking the Nazis would go to any lengths to get what they wanted. Much like her father, Anne had no interest in political affairs; much like her father, she often gazed anxiously at the horizon and bit her thumb when she sensed trouble was coming. She was constantly worried that America would get pulled into the war. If it was, she was sure Scott would be sent overseas. The two, who usually agreed on almost everything, found themselves at discord over the war - a war that, for the time being, didn’t even involve America. Had this been the 1960s, Anne would have joined the peace loving hippies; Scott, on the other hand, was of the opinion that serving for his country was an honor.

“So when America joins the war-” Anne was never bothered with ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’, “-you’re just going to run off to Europe and get yourself killed?”

“If America joins the war,” Scott corrected her. “It’s not like I have any choice, is it? If I’m drafted, I’m drafted.”

“What about me and John?”

“God, Anne, I don’t know. Maybe I won’t die and everything will work out fine.”

“I can’t believe you would leave me here to raise our child alone.”

“It’s not for me to decide whether I go or not. Anyway, this is all just hypothetical. America isn’t at war with anyone, and the Europeans will probably work it out amongst themselves.”

“Work it out? Hitler doesn’t strike me as the sort of person with whom things can be ‘worked out’. He won’t rest until the whole world bows down to Germany.”

“Do you want me to go to war?”

“Of course not.”

“Then stop assuming that I will. Roosevelt isn’t interested in waging war on anyone.”
     

But America was, rather reluctantly, dragged into the war, and Scott was drafted. As it turned out, he wasn’t a suitable soldier; he had a weak heart. It was never made clear what exactly was wrong with Scott’s heart, mainly because Scott refused to even mention the matter, but whatever it was, it was severe enough to prevent him from doing any military service. He was fuming and, for a few days, brooded over his heart condition and offered only monosyllabic responses to Anne’s probing questions. She was very careful not to show him just how happy she was that he would be staying at home, in the safety of their apartment; infant John cooed contently in his father’s arms. It was John’s cooing that eventually softened Scott’s moody exterior and made him think that staying out of the war wasn’t such a bad thing after all. The sound of his son, his own flesh and blood, cooing was the best sound he had ever heard, and it was undoubtedly better than the sound of bombs dropping.
     

For the first year of John’s life, Anne was the one who stayed home with him, while Scott went to work as usual. However, without Anne’s expertise in books (which outweighed that of Scott’s knowledge of literature, despite his two year stint majoring in literature at college) and her instinct for running a business, the takings soon started to decrease. This worried them both, since they had another person - albeit a tiny one - to provide for now. They decided that Anne should take over the running of Greenwich Books, while Scott stayed home with John. It was an ingenious move; Anne was by no means a natural mother, and although she loved her son as much as any mother loves her child, she was more comfortable around books (something John would spend the greater part of his grown life struggling to understand). Scott, on the other hand, seemed to have done nothing but care for children all his life. It didn’t bother him when other men gave him strange looks when he brought John for walks, or brought him to the grocery store, or talked to mothers in the street about changing diapers, or baking bread, or the development of their children. He loved being a father. The army seemed like a distant memory.
     

Imagine this scene: you are in a New York apartment with small-ish rooms and a cramped kitchen. A young family is in the larger of the rooms. The wife and mother has her nose buried in papers and is scribbling numbers in a bank book; the husband and father is sitting on the floor with his son on his lap. The two are looking at a picture book. The father is reading aloud and the little boy is gazing at the colorful pictures with glee. This was what John’s first years on earth were like, and when he in the future pictured his family, this is the image he painted in his mind. It was a picture that would, over the course of John’s childhood, change dramatically, and it had only very little to do with who he was to become. But, for a while, this scene of a working mother and a doting father had been his life, and as he grew up, it would bring him at least a little comfort to know that for a moment in time, although brief in the grander scope of things, his had been a simple, uncomplicated life.