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Philips. Anita had no idea that this was a routine inquiry regarding a government employee. All she knew was that “people” were asking questions about her. Anita wrote to her daughter that she was being followed and spied upon. Unaware of the FBI’s investigation, Lisa and Laurence thought Anita was becoming paranoid; to them her fears were incomprehensible. Of course she had been persecuted in Germany, but that was Nazi territory, it could not happen here. Never in America! Terrified and not knowing where to turn, Anita jumped to her death from her apartment window.
    At the time, my mother did not know that her parents were being investigated. And she could not have fathomed the effect of such an investigation on a Jew who had just escaped from the Nazis. Much later, I would discover how deeply my mother blamed herself for having disbelieved her mother’s fears. Long shadows now loomed over Lisa’s universe. The world she had hoped to escape into was suddenly soiled. In 1952, Mama had three children under age ten, a husband with an extremely sensitive government job, and a new baby on the way. For reasons I think I now understand, Lisa chose to silence her sorrows. For the sake of her husband and her children, desperately wanting to give them the future she had hoped for, she suppressed her past and hid her own identity as well as her mother’s.

    Lisa Philip, born in Hamburg, to nonreligious Jewish parents, was raised a German, not a Jew. Her family never attended synagogue and were completely assimilated into the fabric of Germany’s high society. Her father owned a seat on the Hamburg Stock Exchange. The family’s circle of friends was predominately Jewish but the Philips often entertained government dignitaries and luminaries from the world of art and theater. On May 6, 1938, the life and world Lisa loved was wrenched away from her. At the age of twenty-three, in order to escape the Nazis, Lisa bid farewell to her parents and her friends and boarded the S.S. Manhattan for New York.
    It was a hard transition. She was lonely and longed to settle downand attach herself to this new world. In 1939, a year before meeting my father, she wrote to her closest friend in Hamburg, Annelise Schmidt, that she felt worthless and alone. Her friend wrote in response:
You don’t have anywhere to go when you are lonesome, but Lisa, you must not give up the longing for something beautiful … A strong love would be the most cleansing thing for you. The memories of the past are there, and you feel that you have been plucked from your past, but I am sure that you will rebuild your roots. If you have a devil within you, don’t hide him but put him in front of your wagon so that he will use up all his strength by pulling you forward.
    My parents met while my father was in graduate school. Vastly different in every way, they found each other attractive and believed the other’s attributes would help them secure the future of comfort and shelter they both longed for.
    Laurence Layton had no secrets. He was born in Boomer, West Virginia, a poor coal mining town. Almost all of the inhabitants worked deep down, under the earth, but Laurence’s father was different. John Layton was a college-educated engineer. Life for Laurence began a little better than for others in Boomer. His father spent hours with his son discussing ideas and allowing him to help perform experiments. But when Laurence was eight years old, his devoted father died unexpectedly. Within days, his mother was forced to move back in with her father, where she instantly became a servant. Laurence Layton, the child who became a man overnight, resolved that his siblings would never feel his desperation or loss. He assumed the paternal role until his mother remarried. At that point, he was dealt another cruel blow when his new stepfather told him to leave the household. He was determined to rise above his lot in life, but his adolescent perceptions of desertion and betrayal