Patricia A. Stuart, An essay on being a writer

Scarred and broken railroad car windows, victims of riots and revolution, revealed the world beyond as fractured, blurred, and dirty. Fields and houses wore fault lines, seeming to lie beyond a prism not glass. Blobs of indistinct color turned briefly into cows and carts, their drivers waiting, without urgency, for us to pass. They heard, as did I, the bogie’s steel rims clanking rhythmically over gaps in end-to-end pairs of rails.

It was all too appropriate, fitting the way the day had started—no breakfast, a sip of coffee, then rushing to squeeze into the last bit of space in the vehicle that carried us to the train station, my tall frame and long legs an overlarge addition. And, I hadn’t been too happy trailing my companions of apparent alpine climbers as they bounded up endless flights of stairs to Delhi’s main train station’s pedestrian walkways. When I stopped for needed air at the top, I lost them in the dense mass of people. It took time, then, to sort out the platforms and cars, but “by guess and by golly,” as my mother often said, I ended up beside the right train and the designated bogie.

No one took notice that I’d arrived; no one had missed me. My feet and rolling bag came to a stop on the fringe of the group, my daughter turned the other direction. There I waited unaware that in the coming days and weeks of mother-daughter travel this would become a pattern. I didn’t understand, tended to think each large or small problem was something I’d either done or failed to do, that I was somehow out of sync with her world and what I should be. Here and there, though, incidents reminded me of that first break in the smooth flow of our relationship—the teen sprint toward independence. Were we going through another phase?

The traditional guidelines to mother-daughter relationships seemed mostly irrelevant, and personal experience didn’t help. My mother had trained as an architect, married and had me while in school, then left college to work in the shipyards in World War II—a real Rosey the Riveter. And, like Rosey, at the end of the conflict, she’d accepted tradition, tied on an apron, and bought a sewing machine. Personal satisfaction? That came through quietly and inoffensively sandwiching “projects” into Daddy’s agenda.

My gramma said it, too. “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” That summed up my mother’s relationship with everyone, including me. Women like Gramma and Momma were world class experts at, as they also said, “going along to get along.”

Just my luck! I’d heard the words but never applied them to myself. We, my daughter and I, had learned other lessons, ones that prepared us for the competitive world of the wage earner. So, here we were starting a journey that, in addition to the normal challenges of travel, would include a maze of emotional threads, motivational dead-ends, and behavioral traps. We had no road map to help us and only a vague sense that we might need one. What was wrong? The more miles we traveled the stronger the potential for misunderstanding grew until it seemed we had as little in common with each other as we had with the beggars on Delhi’s street corners.

At that moment in Delhi’s central train station, though, I simply waited as Robyn and her friends traded tickets around to arrange a seating plan that pleased them. She was with her friends. It was like high school all over again. That was fine. All I wanted was what I had thought we had—an easy, companionable relationship based on years of growing together, of mutual respect and tolerance.

The ticket exchanges ended. I drew a window seat and, as the train picked up speed, stared into the gray of a new day, my own mirror-like reflection a blob of indistinct features within an arc of short-cropped, gray hair.

Occasionally, people identify me as Scandinavian, but mostly I’m unmistakably American with my 5’11” height, long stride, short waist, and broad gesticulation. There’s this way of standing back from others, taking space and giving space, of establishing distance through body language that almost shouts, “American!” And an adult life spent traveling has done little to moderate the effect of a youth in Wyoming. The sweep of sagebrush flats and roadless wilderness irremediably imprinted my body language, and that judgement came from someone who should know.

“Forget it,” a disguise expert had said one afternoon. After a day of coaching and costuming at the CIA’s Technical Services unit in Germany, she had given up. This very talented lady had tried to change my walk, padding my bottom, adding bulk to my middle and installing weights in my shoes. I’d cooperated to the best of my ability, mincing my steps, falling over my own feet, and altering my steps one way and another. The results? Pathetic. An actress, I wasn’t, and work-related disguises from then on were unambitious, meant only to help me blend, become as unremarkable as possible.

Judging by the faded face in the train window, though, my thirty-year courtship of anonymity seemed to have finally been capped with success. In this bogey of Americans, in this world of Indians, my presence had no significance. I really was as invisible as I looked.

Robyn, my daughter, also blends into most surroundings but without losing an ounce of her identity. With her average height, her smooth cream complexion, crop of dense dark hair and dark eyes, she belongs in most places. Make a few tweaks to her attire and she becomes a Roman in Rome. Lightly tanned, she’s a Cairene in Cairo. Among Americans, she is just another American.

In that sense, she would’ve made a better spy than I did. But why not? She grew up in the profession, making her a product of her environment, an expatriate American at home in the world. Like many children raised outside their own culture, she gained much from a youth abroad, as is obvious from her professional accomplishments. At thirty-four, she was an engineer, running a cross-border, South Asian energy initiative for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Her resume included a year of reconstruction work in Iraq and projects in places like Lebanon and Afghanistan. She was accomplished and poised, a product of the world.

In this bogie, she was also with her peers—embassies overseas tending to be crammed with interesting people, their identities based on job, rank, and experience. By contrast, even though I spent an entire career in exactly this environment, to these people I was just “Robyn’s mother.” They didn’t know my name, saw no particular reason why they should learn it. I was an appendage, the trailing edge of a skirt, a faceless nurturer.

What could be more traditional? Mothers the world over know the sensation, having experienced it from the first day their child stepped foot through a school door. But not me. This was new. Well, perhaps there had been a time when someone said, “This is Pat Stuart, Robyn’s mother.” But it couldn’t have happened often. Instead, it was, “Let me introduce you to the American Consul, Pat Stuart. Robyn’s her daughter.”

The American Consul (or whatever cover job I had as she was growing up) was a person worth knowing, an evidently useful if also not also an interesting person. Now, “Robyn’s mother” was … well, me. She was the woman in the window, a shadowy face, her features blurred and pale, washed by age to the consistency of pabulum. Was this the inevitable partner of age? Was this my fate? It appeared to be a distinct possibility.

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MARRIED IMMOBILE

At the time, my professional category, according to my employer was “married immobile,” meaning a female officer ineligible for an overseas job. Although the Kennedy Administration and the movement that led to the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 had forced CIA’s Directorate of Operations to hire a few women and my job category called for “spotting, assessing, recruiting, and handling” agents, the all-male culture feared and resented our intrusion. We had taken jobs away from deserving men, they said. We had set bad examples for their wives and secretaries and threatened an ancient culture.

These “facts,” among others, were part of every job interview and were voiced by instructors during classes in our Junior Officer Training Program. We heard them around coffee pots, over conference tables, and in staff meetings. None of our male colleagues felt a need to hide their convictions and sentiments. Besides, they were self-evident. They said that, too. Could a woman service a dead drop in a male restroom? Could she jump out of a plane over denied territory? Do a border crossing? Run a Zodiac up onto a beach? Could she, for God’s sake, recruit an agent? The questions were rhetorical and, at best, came with lots of snorts and mutually supportive laughter.

So, what could we do besides raise babies and wash dishes? Well, someone had to push paper around Langley. The Agency’s clericals, many with four-year college degrees, had been doing it. We, these newly minted female officers, could help.

“Let’s see, we’ll call them desk officers,” some genius must have said because soon after training that’s what I became. One of my four female colleagues from training went to the domestic division; one became a counterintelligence “analyst,” quitting three years later to return to her home in New Jersey. One joined me as a desk officer. She married and resigned after some seven years. The other had long since quit, marrying one of our classmates.

This book, though, isn’t about “how women fought the glass ceiling.” While the subject can’t be completely avoided in that it affected the mother-daughter relationship and our individual developments, it’s relevant here only because being hamstrung professionally gave me lots of energy to expend in other ways. The very fact of having a child was one of them. Teaching horseback riding was another. Keeping horses and a small acreage in upper Montgomery County, Maryland, and breeding and showing Norwegian Elkhounds were yet others.

Robyn’s advent coincided with a hiatus in dog showing caused not by pregnancy but by knee surgery. All in the space of one week, the doctors removed my cast for the delivery, two bitches gave us twenty-one puppies, and a live-in nursemaid arrived on the farm. The uproar in our old two-story, shingled house that these events created caused one of the bitch’s milk to dry up. The other doggy mother followed suit.

The result? While we did shifts pushing feed in one end of each of twenty-one tiny bodies and encouraging excrement out the other, Robyn nested in a carrier on the well-protected lid of the grand piano. It was just the right height to make an excellent a feeding station for puppies. The early connection to a piano didn’t take, but Robyn did learn to crawl by following the young dogs, shutting herself up with them in their crates, and taking naps curled up amidst the thick fur of heavy-coated Elkhounds.

Thus, Robyn’s first major trip away from home was to the Westminster Dog Show in New York. We had two dogs entered, one we were campaigning as a champion. The other was a class dog who had yet to win his championship. Neither had a real chance of getting out of the breed competition, but it was the “experience” we wanted. And experience we got. Our class dog won the classes, meaning we had two dogs in the Best of Breed competition. For maybe five minutes we were high on excitement. We would have two dogs vying for Best of Breed at Westminster. How good could it get! But, then we did the math. Two dogs equal two handlers. Two dogs and one baby equal three people, and all of the professional handlers we knew were committed.

Westminster is a benched show, every entry occupying a place on long raised platforms, giving the public an opportunity to see all of the animals. Owners generally fulfill this obligation by placing a dog crate on the bench and the dog in the crate, thereby protecting the animal from too much stress and from poking fingers. But what is good for an animal can be good for a child. We slipped the sleeping baby and her carrier into a dog crate, locked it, left the key with a handler’s wife who’d already volunteered to stay behind to watch the dogs.

Yvonne Huber. Her name along with a recollection of her generosity drift out of some remote bit of memory, locked there by that kindness. She minded dogs and baby, and we ran our dogs around the ring. We didn’t win, of course, but the uncle of one of our entries did. That was cause for celebration, and everyone went out for drinks and a late dinner—Robyn, too.

While she slept through her one experience in a locked crate, the New York trip was typical and established a pattern. Where we went, Robyn went. After the divorce, this continued. I didn’t know the names of babysitters, because I never hired them. Robyn had a nanny to care for her during working hours of her first two years. Later, she went to day care and school. If I went out in the evening, she went with me or stayed with her father and vice versa.

Thus, moving into her second year, Robyn could say things like, “Winners Dog” and “Winners Bitch.” Her playpen was of the canine variety and usually included puppies. Horses, too, were a part of her life. The latter I loved but recognized as not exactly compatible with young children.

My nightmare scenario came to life on a morning like any other as we mucked out stalls. Robyn always joined me, not helping but playing where I could watch her as I worked. As the smell of fresh straw perfumed the air, and dogs growled in mock fights, wrestling each other in near-by runs, Robyn toddled out with her shovel to dig under a huge catalpa tree that shaded the stable. I could see her. I also saw, muck fork suspended in disbelief, my big jumper mare drift into the picture and Robyn move into the shade under her belly.

“Easy. Easy. No one move.” The mare’s large eyes and Robyn’s small ones watched as I carefully lay the fork in the straw and covered those few feet, probably wondering about my slow steps and crooning voice. “Easy. That’s right. Easy. Don’t move. Stay. That’s right. Stay.”

One last step, and I slid Robyn’s resistant body away from four large steel-shod hooves. That day almost persuaded me to invest in a child harness and leash despite my opposition to restraints. Under some circumstances … . But Robyn had an instinct for animals and a very fast learning curve. She seemed to understand, even at that early age, the need for respect.

While Robyn was getting an early education about animals, one of those sea changes happened that affect women in the workplace. While my status remained “married immobile” and, worse, “married immobile mother,” there was a vague sense—more itch than conviction—among my male colleagues that women in operations might not be an unmitigated disaster. Not always. Under some circumstances, we might actually be useful. Maybe.

“Okay, Pat,” my boss said, “Here’s what we want to try.” Summarized, he instructed me to pose as a temporary secretary at an American embassy in a denied area for a few weeks. Local security would be particularly heavy, he warned, because of a major international conference and the presence of many chiefs of state. By the same token, the Agency wanted timely information on what might be said among these principals, meaning daily debriefs of the agents in the visiting delegations, something the local CIA officers could not safely do.

But a woman? What self-respecting intelligence or security service would waste resources following a female—a clerical at that—around?

As for the agents, they could hardly object to meeting once or twice with a woman. “They understand that it’s a temporary measure for their own security,” a male colleague assured me. “So, none of them should object too much. If you get resistance, though, just remind the asshole that he’ll have to answer to his own case officer.”

“Piece of cake,” I said, having bought into this line of total bullshit. Years of hearing endless repetition by my male colleagues had made a believer out of me, something only personal experience would shake. But, at the time, I added, “It’s perfect.”

In many ways it was perfect. The U.S. Government would pay for three weeks of travel in an exotic locale and provide opportunities for contact with interesting people. Plus, the timing allowed attendance at Westminster and a flight out of the PamAm Terminal at Idlewild. What could be better?

A week later, with New York City almost immobilized by a foot of snow, I waved good-bye to Robyn and my then husband at Pennsylvania Station, seeing them on their way back to D.C.. Bundled into a hooded pink coat with fur lining and a pair of leggings, Robyn looked like a little princess boarding the train in her father’s arms. “Have a good trip,” I called after her, stomping my high-heeled boots on the frozen platform.

“Have a good trip,” she replied using words she knew well. Still stamping, I waited to see her face in the car window.