My mother was. A prodigy of sorts, she had met my father on her first day of law school at the University of Baltimore, when she was only nineteen. He was attending on the GI Bill after trying a stint at the local newspaper, the Beacon. The life of a newspaperman had not suited him. My father hated what he called the faux objectivity of journalism. On the one hand, on the other hand. He wanted to pick a side, the right side, then persuade, argue. He had been hired by the paper because of his undergraduate degree from Yale; the Beacon was snobby that way. But he was not a twenty-two-year-old with nothing but college behind him. He was a thirty-one-year-old Korean War veteran and he thought he should be treated differently from the other young hires. Once he understood that it would be years before he could hope to have a column or a slot on the editorial page, he decided to leave. So after five years of languishing on night cops, he went to law school and met a beautiful young woman named Adele Closter.
“She was like a character in a fairy tale,” my father would say later, when I begged him for stories about my mother. Photos established her dark beauty, but my father insisted it was her mind that impressed him. She had graduated from high school at age sixteen, zipped through Goucher in less than three years, then applied to law school. “Not a lot of women went to law school then, so to be a female law student at age nineteen was more astonishing still. Everyone noticed her. I didn’t have a chance. I was just some older guy and people made fun of my accent. They thought I was a dumb hick.”
My father didn’t have to tell me that his accent, long flattened by the years in Maryland, was quite the opposite of a hick’s. He was from an old Tidewater, Virginia family, one that could trace its roots to the seventeenth century. My mother’s family, while well-to-do, were German Jews, who arrived in the United States more than two hundred years after the Brants. If my father had ever allowed his parents to meet his in-laws, his people would have been appalled. Yet the Closters looked down on my father because he didn’t have money. He had broken with his family—and its considerable wealth—because he found their implacable racism infuriating. The Closters didn’t care that his poverty was principled. It was still poverty.
But he was one of the few men willing to endure my grandparents’ odd ideas about courtship. In a twist worthy of a fairy tale, they kept their daughter under lock and key in a stone house with turrets, twisting staircases, and stained-glass windows. Any man who wanted to date Adele Closter had to pay a call on her parents first. If they approved of the would-be suitor, the dates were chaperoned—by them.
Apparently, this did not appeal to most of the young men Adele met. Only Andrew Jackson Brant was willing to persevere.
And for all her parents’ care and oversight, she managed to get pregnant. AJ was born seven months after my parents’ wedding day, and everyone pretended he was terribly premature. I think this charade was meant not only to dodge the question of his legitimacy, but also to make sense of the fact that the new family chose to live with Adele’s parents. “Just for a year or so,” her father said. “Until everyone is on their feet.” One year turned into seven. There was always a reason to stay a little longer. AJ loves his nursery school, it would be a shame to move him. AJ is going to Gilman, practically in our backyard. I now believe my father steered the family station wagon toward Columbia that day not only out of genuine inquisitiveness, but also desperation. He had to get out of his in-laws’ house. The destination was an accident. Or was it?
Columbia itself was the opposite of an accident. One could argue it was inevitable, that this undeveloped land equidistant from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., was destined to be a suburb, but the developer Jim Rouse had something much grander in mind. Visionary is an overused word, but Rouse probably deserved it. Howard County had slightly more than thirty-five thousand people in 1960, but it was expected to boom before the end of the twentieth century. Rouse’s company began acquiring farmland privately, to avoid having prices shoot up. People knew the land was being purchased, but for what? There were paranoid, Cold War–fed rumors—Russian spies hoping to get close to NSA, a West German VW plant. Then, in June 1967, Columbia was born, a “town” comprising four villages, with each village defined by a set number of neighborhoods. The early neighborhood and street names—Dorsey, Phelps, Owen Brown, Warfield—drew on the county’s history. But the names quickly became more fanciful and literary. Faulkner’s Run, Hobbit’s Glen, Longfellow. Many of the early buildings in the town’s center were designed by Frank Gehry, but the houses themselves were generic split-levels, built to conform to the preferences of buyers at the time. Founder Rouse wanted to challenge a lot of ingrained biases in our culture; taste was not among them. He gave people the ticky-tacky houses they wanted. The only real choices were brick or wood siding, a Baltimore or a D.C. prefix for your phone.
Columbia at the age of two was still raw-looking, with immature trees and unplanted landscapes. According to family legend, my mother hated it on sight.
“It’s too cold. Too modern. I hate modern.”
“It’s the future,” my father said. “Breaking down barriers. Here, people of different classes and races will live side by side.”
“Soulless,” my mother said. “Just because you call something a town doesn’t make it one.”
“I like it,” my father said. “They’re trying new things here. Open space education, for example, where kids go at their own pace.”