Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [89]
Even now, my idea of bliss is to arrive in a place about which I know next to nothing and to find my way around it by first getting lost. Or to return to a place where I got lost as a child and lose myself in it again. But I almost never can. The more adult responsibilities I accumulate, the harder it is to go anywhere without a huge amount of plotting and scheming. It’s hard even to get back to Istanbul, despite being able to disguise this pleasure as a “family visit.” So I’m more impressed than ever about the great leap my parents made in 1960. But how had they done it? Why had they done it? Last summer, when I was having a drink with my father in my parents’ house in Rumeli Hisar, I decided to ask.
What possessed them to leave behind everything and everyone they knew to move to a city about which they knew nothing? It was, I knew, a question they had been asked many times by their own families. My father’s parents were Irish. Travel for them was something you undertook to see relatives or find work. No one in the family had ever considered university. They wanted my father to become a fireman. They were appalled when, after returning to Brooklyn from the war, he decided to become a physicist.
My mother’s family, who also lived in Brooklyn, never actually told her what to become. But they were hoping she would marry a nice man and settle down in a nice house within walking distance of their own. They couldn’t understand why she wanted to ruin her eyes reading Proust and Herodotus, or why she was so obsessed with opera. They were apoplectic when they found out she’d been stopping off on her way home from her Manhattan secretarial job to train with Mabel Horsey to be a blues singer.
When my mother met my father at The Welcome Inn in Ridge-way the first thing she did was to make him promise to take her round the world. They later drew up a contract on parchment and signed it in blood. My father had already been round the world during his two years in the navy, and he couldn’t wait to get back. But first he had to finish his education. Then I was born, and then my sister and my brother. My parents ended up spending the first nine years of their marriage in New Jersey.
My father’s first job as a physicist was with the signal corps at Fort Monmouth. After that he moved to a laboratory at Princeton University. Three nights a week he commuted to NYU to do his doctorate. As soon as he got his doctorate, Princeton offered him a tenured research position, and he must have been tempted. My mother had a nice life, too. By this time she had joined hundreds of book clubs and tennis clubs and had thousands of friends. They were all set up, as people say. But that, apparently, was the problem.
They had arrived at a point when they could read the future like a map. “I was doing really exciting work on how to control thermonuclear fusion,” my father told me. “I was publishing papers, so intellectually it was very stimulating. But I could see what the future would bring. We knew we had to get out before it was too late.”
Why Istanbul? “Oh, we were looking into all sorts of possibilities. Australia was appealing, and so was the Fen Country. But then one day I was admiring a flowering cherry tree on the Princeton campus. I was with my dear friend Ed Meservey. He said, ‘Those flowering cherry trees are nothing compared with the judas trees on the Bosphorus.’ I said, ‘Tell me more,’ and he said, ‘Let the Garwoods tell you.’ ” The Garwoods, who had been teaching at Robert College for years, were in Princeton on sabbatical. They invited my parents to supper.
By then my father had read an article in National