What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [58]
Thomas was born on July 31, 1934, in New York, a decade after his mother was widowed with a newborn—Thomas’s brother Seymour—a few years after her arrival in America, when her first husband was run over by a taxi. She was on her way to stay with an aunt when Thomas’s father helped her off a bus in Manhattan and a romance began. Defying the disapproval of Thomas’s father’s family, the two married. Not long after Thomas’s birth, the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island. His childhood grew anxious after his father and brother Seymour enlisted in the navy and went off to fight at sea in World War II. Eventually, his father returned home deaf, his brother with a sniper’s bullet lodged in his groin.
The family’s patriotism did nothing to protect Thomas from prejudice in Providence. His non-Jewish classmates assumed from his name and his looks that he was Irish Catholic, and they freely spat anti-Semitic slurs in his presence. Neighborhood kids pelted him and classmates with rocks and epithets of “Christ killers” when they played in the playground of the Hebrew school he attended in the afternoon. He was equally alienated at the synagogue where he was bar mitzvahed. The older men and the boys snickered and whispered at his looks. “I was treated differently because I was Irish. I found it foul. Eventually, I gave up on Judaism. I didn’t fit in anywhere,” he said.
His confidence was not boosted at home, where his mother, whom Thomas adored, profusely praised Seymour’s intelligence and his father kept order with a heavy hand. Thomas retreated tight-mouthed to his room and grew up awkward and with little self-esteem. “I was the classic ninety-eight-pound weakling. I wasn’t on any teams and I didn’t go to any dances. I didn’t even see any dances,” he said.
When he graduated from high school in 1953, Thomas, in tribute to his father and brother, enlisted in the navy and served as a radioman for four years. On discharge, at age twenty-three, he followed the advice of Patricia, a nurse and one of two sisters, and trained to become an X-ray technician. He got a job at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. He met Doris, another X-ray technician, there in an act of sublime clumsiness. He ran over her foot with an X-ray cart and then romanced her while insisting that she allow him to X-ray her foot. The film was negative for fracture, but his advances were positively received.
Married and with a child on the way, Thomas returned to school to get certified as an electronics technician so that he could pursue a more lucrative career. On the day of his graduation, the Department of Defense offered him a job. He and a pregnant Doris headed to Taipei, Taiwan, for his first assignment and a life of service, sacrifice, and secrecy.
As a telecommunications officer—under the Department of State—he was stationed in far-flung and sometimes dangerous postings, including Kathmandu, Vietnam, Sarajevo, Leningrad, and Vienna. He would not say much about his work, and acknowledged only that he was technically responsible for sending and receiving back-channel intelligence communications from U.S. embassy message centers. Over the years, he would also do a stint at the Department of Defense’s Warrenton Training Center in Virginia, which, according to unofficial documents found on the Internet, served as a high-frequency receiver facility and hosted a variety of satellite communications links to U.S. embassies in Asia from within its giant golf-ball-like structures.
While his fellow dancers enjoy conjecturing that Thomas worked as a spook, he is mum. He says his silence reflects only the habits acquired by a government employee who spent most of his career on assignments abroad. “I wasn’t a diplomat. I didn’t go to diplomatic cocktail parties. And it wasn’t my job to talk with the political attaché, the cultural attaché, or the economic attaché. They had their counterparts. I was just a staff person. When you congregated