Duty and Defiance

Spy Story #5: "Tradition is very important to us"

My grandmother, Marjorie, sat at the kitchen table deep in thought. She slowly and repeatedly drummed the fingers of her right hand in succession, as though she was silently counting to an impossibly high number, trying not to lose count, one digit at a time. Though her sight had mostly gone dark due to macular degeneration, she appeared to gaze out the picture window in front of her, across the fields and forests of the large expanse of land below the house. Perhaps against the bright sunlight, the world was more visible, more alive. 

I sat catty-corner to her eating my breakfast in a seat historically occupied by my grandfather, which had sat vacant since his death almost six months before. At 17, I had spent the year away at boarding school where I had weathered a harrowing end-of-year social gauntlet. My grandfather had died unexpectedly while I was away and I had returned home to spend the summer with my grandmother.

Marjorie suddenly snapped out of her reverie and glanced around the room before her gaze landed back in my general direction. 

“What will you get up to today?” she asked, casually, her eyes seeming to look through me rather than at me.

“We’re going to tour Vassar!” I replied, making sure the intended level of enthusiasm was evident in my voice. Later that day, my mother would take me to visit her alma mater, the first tour I would take of a prospective college. 

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “Good.” 

She paused for a moment as though searching for just the right words, letting her fingers continue to keep count as her gaze returned to the picture window before her. 

“Well–” she paused, as though for effect– “Tradition is very important to us,” she said, shifting her gaze in my direction to seek some sign of understanding.

I nodded, hoping she could see the contours of my moving face. “I know,” I said. 

In truth, I wasn’t exactly sure of all the ways this was true. She could have said, “The women of our family go to Vassar,” as my mother had also done so, but she didn’t.

What did she mean by tradition? I’ve pondered this question for years.

Do your duty, she might have said. Make your family proud. Be of service. I learned early how important it was to be dutiful. My mother was an ace critic, and her unmet grievances fueled resentment that pushed my father to infidelity, a revelation my mother met with scorched earth. As I weathered a childhood shaped by my parents’ hostile divorce, I knew it was my responsibility to show everyone I was unaffected by the turmoil they had created in my life. 

I saw my father one weekend a month and alternating holidays and otherwise lived full-time with my mother. She often worked consecutive 12-hour ER shifts, which allowed her multiple days without work to increase the time we spent together. On the nights she worked, I slept over at babysitters’ houses, most of whom were stay-at-home moms, which meant I often just became “one of the kids.” Still, bouncing between babysitters’ couches and home made for a chaotic and disorganized childhood. Without siblings or another parent, my world was my mother and, while she loved me deeply and fiercely, she made her world volatile.

Still, I was diligent in upholding my duty. I was an officious child, obsessed with fairness and control, always checking to make sure juice or dessert was evenly divided among children. While I was loved, fed, and clothed, I learned early that I was responsible for creating and managing the structure of my own life. I packed my own suitcase for my monthly trips to my father’s house, and flew unaccompanied starting at age eight. And I learned that my behavior had consequences. I strived to be the best at everything to show my parents their reckless choices hadn’t damaged me. I dutifully upheld this tradition so passionately that by high school, I was exhausted by it, and easily seduced by new friends who showed me it was possible to live two lives: be the star pupil on weekdays and let loose (and get drunk) on weekends. I got my first fake ID when I was 17, and I wasn’t afraid to use it. I wondered if Marjorie’s experience had been similar. Had she also discovered the exhilaration of living away from home after a childhood spent under her mother’s watchful eye?

It was in this way that I learned how to uphold another family tradition: secret-keeping. By becoming a Communist spy, Marjorie defied the convention expected of women of her time. She would have had any number of secrets to protect, but she must have had prior experience to be so good at it at the tender age of 22. Even after the spy adventure ended, she stalwartly watched over many terrible family secrets, arguably for far too long. My new friends, who got As on Thursday and got hammered on Saturday, taught me the raw delight of keeping secrets, the exhilaration of knowing there is something no one else knows, but you and perhaps a select few. This wouldn’t be the last time I’d succumb to the alluring power of secrets.

I learned the hard way that secrets without trust become ammunition. After more than two years of subservience, I decided to break free of my friend group’s cultish control and make my own way. Specifically, I chose to challenge the “queen bee” of the group and run against her for president of the student body. She rained fury down on me, whispering to anyone who would listen about the horrendously unthinkable things I had done off campus, sharing as much as she could without self-incrimination. It was a harrowing ordeal. I loaded the gun with secrets and she pulled the trigger. 

And here, I had discovered another family tradition: defiance. While duty and defiance might often find themselves at odds, there was no question that the women of my family had made a tradition of both. Never let someone else tell you who you get to be. Don’t surrender control of your life, if you can help it. Make your own way, and chart your own course. Marjorie’s life had been shaped as much by her commitment to fulfill her mother’s dreams for her education as it had her willingness to defy convention and set off on a wild spy adventure in Europe. Ricocheting back and forth between the need to both uphold and defy expectations made for a bouncy ride. Perhaps ironically, defying the friends who had introduced me to the allure of secret misbehaving had sent me back to the straight and narrow path of dutiful striving. 

My life and Marjorie’s sketched a series of parallel lines. While our life paths diverged in some important ways, they also had a great many similarities. Though we rarely spoke to each other in emotional terms, I had affection for Marjorie and a desire to make her proud. Would I do so by upholding the tradition of duty, and become a third-generation Vassarion? Or would I defy her expectations and choose my own way? 

Ultimately, I chose a different path. My Vassar tour was underwhelming. Our tour guide was young and insecure, peppering her speech with “ums,” and “likes,” and sometimes struggling to remember what she was meant to say at each stop. She seemed to lack deep knowledge that comes from experience, often deferring questions she couldn’t answer to the admissions officer back at the office. Having served as a tour guide at my high school for the past two years, I was a harsh critic, and quietly raised my eyebrows at her rookie mistakes. The pastoral country campus was beautiful, but entirely too similar to where I had spent the last three years. I longed for the adventure of the big city. I would ultimately turn down Vassar for Barnard College, another one of the Seven Sisters, which unlike Vassar, still only enrolled women.

It was only while exploring the pages of her high school yearbook as I was writing the essay about her early life that I discovered Marjorie may have faced the same question. Next to her name was printed Barnard, not Vassar, presumably because that was the school closest to home that she planned to attend at the time her yearbook went to print, presumably several months before graduation. Here again were parallel lines. If Marjorie had gone to Barnard, she would have been making the safe choice. By choosing Vassar, she opted for an adventure farther from home. In choosing Barnard, I’d done the same.