Mike OConnor - Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run

I N S EPTEMBER 1998, a year after our mother died, I finally found the courage to look inside my father's battered, taped-together cigar box with the brand tampa nugget in embossed gold lettering on a red border. From the time Dad died, twenty-five years before her, Mom had carried most of the contents through many countries and countless home addresses. She'd left the box on her coffee table, an invitation, in her apartment in San Clemente, California, along with a couple of manila envelopes with more documents and photos. And a diary. I had been too afraid to look at any of it. Then, one day, I could.

The first thing in the box was a black-and-white snapshot of a handsome young army officer at a restaurant. He had a cleft chin, a good mustache, a daring look about him. My father, age thirty-one. On the back Mom had written Rome.

When my parents talked about their past, they had offered no stories from before they met. It was as if their lives began when they fell in love during the Second World War. Mom was from England, working for the British equivalent of the USO. My two sisters and I breathed in her filigreed anecdotes of Roman cafs, Gypsy street musicians, and the view of the Mediterranean from a hilltop above Sorrento. But we learned almost nothing of our relatives, or of where our parents came from.

After the war, Dad became the director of a large refugee camp in Germany, where I was born. Inside one of the envelopes I found my birth certificate, issued by the military government: Michael Fitzgerald O'Connor, Village of Gehrden, Germany, February 8, 1946, Capt. John Jeremiah O'Connor and Jessey O'Connor, parents.

I also found a certificate of identity issued to a thin young woman by the Canadian Embassy in Brussels on June 12, 1946a temporary replacement for her British passport, which had been stolen. Height: five feet, three inches tall. Hair: brown. Eyes: hazel. Occupation: welfare worker. Her photograph was stuck to a cracked, browning sheet of paper with a purple embassy stamp in the lower left corner. She had a hairdo out of a wartime movie, and a strand of pearls. The caution in her eyes undermined her smile. My father was listed as her husband; I was listed, too. All the information was certified by the Canadian consul. Maybe it was accurate, maybe not.

A string of stamps on the back showed that shortly after Mom got the certificate of identity, she had traveled from Brussels to London to Liverpool before arriving in New York, with me and my father, I supposed. There were also stamps for trips I'd never heard ofto Canada four days after arriving in New York, down to Maine fifteen months later. Had we stayed in Canada all that time, and why?

The answers, I thought, might explain the pattern that kept repeating throughout my childhood: sudden, mysterious moves made at a moment's notice, our lives in one place deleted overnight, replaced by lives somewhere brand-new. The reasons given to my two sisters and me never made sense. The cigar box had photos of us from Texas, Mexico, and California, the places where we'd grown up, but it also had pictures of people I did not know.

The diary was bound in two-toned brown leather. Mom had told my sister Fiona that we should read it once she was gone. We'd already heard its stories, written by a woman who was clearly thrilled by the adventure of beginning a life with her American husband and their new child. But the entries stopped abruptly and forever in September 1946, three months after we'd arrived in New York. There was nothing of consequence about the next twenty-one years, nothing to explain why we'd been running. It was as if the life I'd known had not happened.

There was a batch of Dad's letters about the business deals he was trying to promote in one strange new place or another in the late sixties and early seventies. One, postmarked guadalajara, came to Mom in San Jose, in 1967, just before the family fled once more to Mexico. My father had gone down first on a scouting run, and this was his report: Crisis, pursued by disaster, followed closely by catastrophe. He was looking for a score to bring in enough money for a safe getaway, and to atone for all the agony he'd dragged his family through. Once again, his plan was not working. He ended the letter by telling Mom, I love you and I need you and I love you and I need you. Even after the decades of hiding and running and hustling, of hoping and finding hope crushed, he still meant it. She knew that.

I pushed the cigar box aside. It held no nostalgia for me, only the old, twisting confusion leaping back from childhood. I wanted to hide the contents and hope that I'd lose them. I wanted to have a drink and go. That's what my family was good at. We got back on the road, kept moving, especially me. I'd run away from home at fourteen, in part to escape the mystery that hung over us. Later I'd run as a foreign correspondent, from country to country and war to war, looking to expose powerful people who hid the truth. Now, with bits of our past on my desk in Vienna, Austria, I got in my Jeep and drove toward the armed uprising in Kosovo, which I was covering for The New York Times. When I got there and had to switch to my heavily armored Land Rover, I still felt much safer than I had with my mother's memories looking up from that cracked Pandora's box, the one covered in wood-toned paper and red trimming with labels calling out that its cigars were Good as Gold and 2 for 15 cents. Memories of bad times past. I could not run fast enough to escape the smell of my father's cigar smoke.

Y OU WANT to believe your parents. You need to believe them, even more when you love them and they love you. As a small boy, I decided to believe the stories my parents told me, even though I knew they weren't true. I understood that part of our mystery was the Danger, which could crush our family if we ever stopped running and turned to look at it. I learned from the beginning that our safety came only with believing our parents' lies about our family and joining them in refusing to acknowledge the Danger. Still, the Danger was always there, and I could never hope to understand it. I could only make sure that it never got close enough to throw its shadow on me.

When I was still a child and began to doubt my parents' stories, I had pushed the questions away, turned my back to them while they kept vibrating. As a reporter for twenty-five years, I had refused to search for who my parents really were, what our truth really meant.

But for two years after Mom died, Fiona kept challenging me to investigate our mystery: You're the journalist. It's up to you to figure all this out now. Trusting that mysteries can be solved, she only wanted what normal people want. She wanted to learn the truth about her parents, to understand them. And, in that, to understand more about herself.

With time, Fiona's reasonable questions became harder to resist. Now that our mother had passed away and was finally safe from the Danger, I began to feel that I might peek into our past. Since the cigar box was clearly only a beginning, with no answers, I would have to look into the memories of my childhood.

It turned out there were good reasons I had hidden those memories so well.