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Chapter One

HERITAGE

THE peculiar situation of the family into which I had been born was brought home to me when I was very small by a terrifying circumstance. Our brownstone house in New York's East Sixties was saturated with tension. Father, although it was broad daylight, was hidden away in his bedroom behind a closed door through which I was not allowed to pass. I was told that I must be very quiet because Father was very sick. When Mother went in, she came out again in tears. Strange men hurried up the stairs carrying small black bags. They were let into Father's room. They would reappear looking frightened, and cluster in the halls. Mother told me not to be afraid of them: they were doctors come to help.

Different men were clamoring from outside the house. They were lounging on the steps of the high stoop that rose from the street to our front door. They invaded the vestibule, and I could see their silhouettes through the frosted glass. When the doorbell rang, it would sometimes be one of them. The maid would try to block his way as he shouted a question. Mother would appear, her tears changed to rage. The intruder would retreat, but the ominous shadows remained on the frosted glass.

This terrifying assault on my home and my endangered father remained alive in my memory. But only as time passed was I enabled to understand.

I learned that, although a doctor, my father, Simon Flexner, was not like the men who had rushed upstairs with their black bags, or the doctors Father apprehensively called in whenever I had a sore throat. He did not attend on sick individuals, but in what was called alaboratory made discoveries that helped cure diseases for all mankind.

When our house had been besieged, the United States was being ravaged by infantile paralysis, an epidemic that seemed the more horrible because it attacked children and often left its victims, if they survived, crippled. Father had, during a previous epidemic, this one of cerebrospinal meningitis, created the "Flexner serum" which had cured a high proportion of those infected. Now he was seeking a cure for infantile paralysis. In a time of hysteria it is necessary to find something to cling to, and the vision of Dr. Flexner, in his laboratory, surrounded with test tubes, staring into his microscope, seemed across the United States a dawning of hope. And then there appeared on the front pages of the newspapers horrifying news. The savior was himself on the verge of death.

Day after day, the newspapers ran stories reporting what they could discover of his condition. But they could discover little, since he was immured in his own house and no one was available to keep the press informed. Supposing he should die? That would be front-page news. To keep from being scooped, each newspaper and wire service had to take its own precautions, which meant having its own reporter watching the house, twenty-four hours a day, for any indications of tragedy.

Father returned to his laboratory. He was to make several important discoveries, the most significant being that infantile paralysis was caused not by germs, as cerebrospinal meningitis had been, but by a mysterious agent just then emerging into the ken of science. Germs could be caught in the very finest of filters, but the lethal cause of infantile paralysis passed through, being therefore known as a "filterable virus." However, no one knew what viruses were or had any hints of how to deal with them. Years were to pass before Jonas Salk discovered the cure that Simon Flexner so passionately sought in 1911.

*

Fortunately for my education as a future biographer, my father's career had many facets, starting out with a sensational leap from one basic aspect of American life into another.

Simon Flexner was born on March 25, 1863, at Louisville, Kentucky, to German-speaking Jewish parents who had reached the United States some dozen years before. His father, who now called himself Morris Flexner, had arrived almost penniless, had become a peddler first on foot and then with a wagon, and then partner and star salesman in a wholesale hat business. Some prosperity followed, but in I87Z, in one of the periodic depressions, the business went bankrupt. For the rest of Simon's childhood, the family direction was downward, moving to poorer and poorer locations in Louisville. They had joined those anonymous people whom academic historians, scorning biography as "elitist," represent as digits on the tables they wield to write "people's history." But Father's adventures as a boy and young man seemed by no means impersonal people's history as he described them to me in my own younger days.

In a large and energetic family, six boys and two girls, Father was considered the dunce and the misfit. He was miserable in the successive schools which followed the family descent into tougher and tougher districts where Jews were not welcomed.

As an example of the humiliating situations into which he had been placed, Father told me how his mother, who had difficulty in winter keeping her large brood warm, had got hold of a secondhand tail coat which, although it was much too large, she placed over Simon's shoulders. When he appeared in school, he was greeted with cries of derision. Particular attention was paid to the tails drooping down. During recess, the boys formed themselves into two lines, one attaching itself to each tail. They pulled, ripping the coat up to the collar.

Learning almost nothing, Simon suffered from the teachers,continual punishment, often corporal; was made to repeat the seventh grade; and dropped out before he had finished the eighth, bringing his formal schooling forever to an end.

Simon's duty was now to contribute what pittance he could to the family income. The family's mainstay was a brother-in-law, Edward Klauber, who owned a successful photographic studio, and employed the Flexner boys as they came along. Simon was put under an older brother in the developing department, his task being to watch over enlargements lest they become overexposed as they ripened in sunlight. But the boy had somehow got possession of a jigsaw and some wooden cigar-box tops. Paying complete attention to sawing out fascinating designs, he allowed enlargement after enlargement to be ruined. Fired as incompetent by his uncle, Simon was expelled from the family progression. His despairing family hired him out to shopkeepers too unsuccessful to pay more than a few pennies, but even those most lowly and demeaning jobs in the most sordid circumstances Simon could not keep.

Simon was so bad at baseball that he was always, during street games, put in the farthest outfield. But in that isolation he dreamed so intently of being triumphant before cheering multitudes in a great stadium, as a pinch hitter when the bases were loaded, that he forgot he was supposed to be keeping an eye on his younger sister. A voice interrupted from the outer world, "Where's Mary?" She had disappeared. His mother's screams alerted the neighborhood. That Mary was eventually found did not mitigate Father's guilt. It was then that his father took him to the county jail to show him where he would end up.

Father enjoyed telling stories of his early mishaps and indignities, preserving always the comic tone made possible, I suppose, by his eventual triumphs. But tears would sometimes appear in Mother's eyes as she listened beside him.

*

Father's savior proved to be such a germ as he was later to try to eradicate. He came down with typhoid fever, and his life was despaired of. But instead of dying, he was in effect born again.

Resurrected as it were from death, Simon, who had always been regarded as a family liability, became an object of family solicitude, particularly attracting the attention of the mother whom he adored but who had formerly, as she labored heroically to keep the family afloat, pushed him aside. And in his convalescence he for the first time experienced quietude. He had always been pushed around by unsympathetic teachers, hostile classmates, and despicable employers. The family's latest move (the older boys were earning more) had been to a house with a little garden, and there Simon could sit, hour by hour, undisturbed. Louisville having no public library, he had no access to books, which may have been just as well. Other people's thoughts might have interfered with the voyage of exploration he was taking within himself. He found within himself surprising mental strength, increasing self-confidence, a growing conviction of inner potentialities to be realized.

Toward defining these potentialities, he received almost no hints from his parents, backgrounds in Europe. They had come to America to bury their past in a new world. Themselves pursuing Jewish traditions, they made little effort to indoctrinate their children. When they spoke German, their children answered in English. Now, as Simon Flexner dreamed out a future, he determined to understand what was best in American life and, if he could achieve it, make a contribution of his own. No man was ever more devotedly American than the father by whom I was raised.

*

Paying attention at last to their reincarnated son, Simon's family apprenticed him to a highly respectable druggist. The first adult gentile Simon had known treated him with scrupulous fairness. Simon's indentures required sending him to the Louisville College of Pharmacy for two annual three-month sessions. The mind of the former elementary school dropout moved like a race horse, outdistancing all others. To the amazement of his family—his dying father shed tears of joy—Simon brought home the college's gold medal. His mother treasured the medal as a family icon. When Father became engaged, she sent it to his fiancee with a little note, saying that she was sure Helen would treasure it as she had done. The medal now graces my own household as a family icon.

Working now as a registered druggist, Simon gained access to a microscope used for routine studies of specimens. He had found his Aladdin's lamp that fostered an Horatio Alger adventure that became a cornerstone of my existence.

Having started by playing with the microscope as a hobby—he carried it home, working surrounded by his many brothers and sisters on the kitchen table under the one gas jet—Father soon got hold of books and taught himself, before the subjects were even recognized by American medical schools, the rudiments of the sciences, inaugurated in France and Germany, that were the bases of modern medicine: pathology and bacteriology. He published little papers in local medical journals, and planned to found his own laboratory in Louisville serving the local practitioners and making discoveries. But the time came when he found that he could not carry his studies any further all by himself, with his rudimentary equipment and no instruction beyond the few books he could procure. He had never set foot outside the environs of Louisville, but he would have to seek instruction elsewhere.

He quickly set his sights on a just-founded university, the Johns Hopkins, where a teaching laboratory had been established as the first step toward a medical school. But to enroll in what were considered postgraduate courses, he would need a medical degree. His local admirers included the leading practitioner who ran, as an almost private venture, the Medical School of the University of Louisville. They made him a present of an M.D. degree. His brother Abraham, who was running a successful school in Louisville, having lent him $500, he launched out into the great world.

*

It did not take long for Dr. William Henry Welch, who became famous as "the Dean of American Medicine," to realize that a prodigy had emerged from the boondocks into his laboratory. This little man, dressed in crude provincial clothes, speaking in uneducated accents, this self-educated druggist, began almost at once setting up his own experiments and reaching significant results. Flexner stayed at the Hopkins for eight years, becoming a full professor and demonstrating himself, in Welch's words, the most important young pathologist in America.

Despite opposition, a mixture of anti-Semitism, and distrust of the modern scientific medicine being pioneered at the Hopkins, Flexner was called to America's oldest and most venerable medical school, the University of Pennsylvania. The conservatives in the faculty had not altogether got over their feeling that they had condescended when Flexner was to their chagrin called away to such a promising appointment as had never before existed in the United States.

The Rockefellers, John D., Sr. and Jr., had, after soliciting much advice, decided to undertake the revolutionary experiment of founding an independent institution devoted exclusively to medical research. Flexner was offered the directorship. Acceptance was risky, since his professorship at Pennsylvania was a prestigious lifetime appointment, while the Rockefellers, proceeding cautiously, had agreed to support the project for only ten years. No one was sure that enough talent in the new sciences could produce justifying results. In 1901, Flexner took the plunge that brought him to New York City, where I was born seven years later.

By the time I was able to comprehend, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was firmly established as one of the major medical institutions of the world. Since Father got his exercise walking back and forth, we always lived in Manhattan's East Sixties, within walking distance of the augmenting number of buildings which rose fortress-like on the crest of an extensive hillside. The grounds backed on a high bluff dramatically overlooking the East River, and rose in front at a gradual slope over Avenue A (now York Avenue). A stone wall surmounted by a high iron fence ran for several blocks along the avenue. Access was through a high ornamental gate presided over by a watchman with a thick German accent who always greeted me with enthusiastic deference as I grew older and older.(*)

*

As Dr. Welch gradually retired, Father stepped into his shoes as the leader of the American scientific medical establishment. Under successive governors he served as chairman of the Public Health Council of the State of New York, an advisory body to the Board of Health that had administrative powers of its own. For my brother and me, it was particularly delightful that the very low number of our automobile license plate indicated a high state official who it was wise for the police not to tangle with.

The Rockefeller philanthropies reached out widely, not only across the United States but in many other parts of the world. According to Raymond Fosdick, a longtime director of the Rockefeller Foundation, Father became "the accepted dean of the board, not only its chief scientific adviser, but its ,Knowledgeable Man, to whom one looked for the final nod of approval. It was fascinating to watch him in action. His slight build, his soft voice, his gentle manner, were all in striking contrast to the steely precision of his reasoning. His mind was like a searchlight which could be turned at will on any question that came before the trustees."

How widespread were Father's activities and reputation is signaled by his being elected to seven learned bodies in France, five in Germany, three in England, one or more in Italy, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Japan, Russia. He received Japan's highest award, the Order of the Rising Sun, and became a Commander of the Legion of Honor which, we were told, would entitle him to a regiment at his funeral if he were buried in France.

*

Among my mother's attractions for my father was his realization that as inheritor of mature and elevated American traditions she could assist him as a role model. And great as was my pride in Father's leap from humble beginnings, my view of America was broadened because my mother represented another major aspect of our national experience. Her Thomas family had arrived, indirectly from Wales, on the banks of the Chesapeake in 1651. With the other first settlers they had patented the best land to create the aristocracy of Maryland.

The Thomases had come as Puritans, but soon they were converted during a missionary trip by the founder of Quakerism, George Fox. This was so determining an event that almost three hundred years later my mother called an autobiographical book A Quaker Childhood. In 1810, Mother's great-great-grandfather broke the family's prosperity by, as a matter of conscience, freeing his some hundred slaves, thus banning himself from plantation life. The family built a new life in Baltimore. There, my grandfather, James Carey Thomas, although a practicing physician, played important roles in the development of American education. He was a founder of Bryn Mawr College, which my aunt, M. Carey Thomas, was to invigorate into a great force in women's education. Dr. Thomas was also one of the founding trustees who, against the advice of the presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Cornell, revolutionized American education by organizing the Johns Hopkins as a graduate university. And Dr. Thomas was so influential in getting going the Hopkins medical school, which introduced scientific medicine into America, that on hearing of the death of the great scientist, the faculty of the medical school marched into his funeral as a body.

Mother's mother's family, the Whitalls, were outstanding for religious zeal, feminine power, and—by far the most influential on me—literary interest and achievement. They came to America in the seventeenth century, settling in West Jersey, Quaker territory across the Delaware from Philadelphia. Mother's grandfather, John M. Whitall, captained ships in the China trade, founded a glass manufactory that made him rich, and, as a mystic, spoke twice daily to God. His oldest daughter, Hannah Whitall Smith, my mother's aunt, brought with her own children, to whom Mother was very close, concern and achievements that were directly apposite to what was to be my career. Hannah was an internationally successful writer. Her religious books are currently published in multiple editions. Her oldest daughter, Mary, was to become the wife of Bernard Berenson. Her second daughter was to be the first wife of Bertrand Russell, who became my mother's inspiration and friend. Her son, Logan Pearsall Smith, was to be the highly admired precious essayist whose book Trivia is still regarded in some circles as a masterpiece.

Mother herself had passionate literary ambitions. She taught composition at Bryn Mawr. She filled notebooks with eloquent descriptive writing, mostly of nature. After her marriage but before I was born, she finished a novel, somewhat in the manner of Edith Wharton. The one publisher to whom she submitted it was interested enough to make suggestions for changes but they over-discouraged her. She had dreams of a daughter who would fulfill her literary ambitions. But nature presented her with two sons. She tried to indoctrinate my older brother, but his preferences were to make him a mathematician and master statistician. Her efforts with me were so successful that I thought of myself as a writer before I was old enough to learn the alphabet. Only once in my lifetime, as far as I can remember, did I deviate from this ambition.

I was in the cellar of our New York City house, the lair of the coal furnace, where it was against the rules for so small a child to be. From a chute that extended up through a hole to the sidewalk, coal was rushing noisily into a bin beside me. This was in itself worth watching, but my delight came when a man appeared with a shovel to hurry the coal along. He was the dirtiest man I had ever seen, the color of coal from head to foot. My conclusion was instantaneous: he never had to wash! I was perpetually forced by grown-up females to wash. I resolved then and there to be a coal man. Great was my disillusionment when I was told that coal men had women of their own who made them, when they got home, wash. I gave in.

I would have to be a writer after all.

BEYOND THE THRESHOLD
A Life in Opus Dei

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By MARIA DEL CARMEN TAPIA

CONTINUUM PUBLISHING COMPANY

Copyright © 1997 Maria del Carmen Tapia. All rights reserved.
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