1.
Dead Man’s Branch
She had lived with bad dreams for many years, but nothing prepared Marie for the recurrent nightmare that plagued her after she was shot. As she drifted into sleep, her subconscious reran what had happened, the fear and indecision never resolving, like a horror film stuck on a loop, repeating into infinity.
In the dream, she is lying on the ground, seeing the flares, hearing the machine-gun fire and the soldiers’ voices exactly as she heard them that pitch-black night in Sri Lanka before the moon rose over the fields. These are her choices: She can stand up and shout, hoping they will see that she is white and female, obviously a foreigner. She can try to crawl away, knowing they will shoot at anything they see moving. Or she can lie still, awaiting her fate. The decision will determine whether she lives or dies, but nothing will undo what is about to happen. She cannot roll back time, nor can she push it forward. Stand up? Crawl away? Lie still? Stand up? Crawl away? Lie still? The choices repeat and repeat, a drumbeat of fear pounding louder and louder, as she lies paralyzed.
In real life, it was hard to figure out exactly what was happening, although later, she understood that it had been quite simple. The Tamils guiding her from the rebel-held part of Sri Lanka into government territory ran into an army patrol as they crossed the front line. Marie dropped to the ground as the bullets whined past, but her escorts fled into the jungle, back the way they had come. She lay there for about half an hour, alone and petrified, before making her fateful decision.
“Journalist! American journalist!” she shouted as she rose with her hands up. Suddenly her eye and her chest hurt with a pain so acute she could scarcely breathe. One of the soldiers had fired a grenade at her. As she fell, she realized that blood was trickling from her eye and mouth. She felt a profound sadness that she was going to die. Crawling toward them in the desperate hope that they would stop shooting and help her, she shouted, “Doctor!” Maybe they would see that she was a wounded foreign civilian and not a guerrilla fighter. They yelled at her to stand up and remove her jacket. Somehow she managed to stumble forward, hands in the air. Every time she fell, they shouted at her to get up again.
In the nightmare, time freezes before the shot is fired and her life passes before her. Scenes from conflicts she has witnessed flicker across her mind: the old man with rasping breath in the basement in Chechnya, the back of his head blown off by a Russian rocket; the body of a peasant dressed in a worn woollen suit she came across under a bush in Kosovo; the young Palestinian woman she watched die from gunshot wounds in Beirut. The human body, fragile and broken. Her own body. The images rerun until she wakes, unrested, terrified, safe in her own bed but dreading the next night, when she must live through it all again.
Marie Colvin went to Sri Lanka in April 2001 because no foreign journalist had reported from Tamil Tiger territory in six years. In nearly two decades of war, some 83,000 people had been killed. Barred by the government and mistrusted by the fanatical guerrillas fighting for independence, reporters had dared not cross the front line, so the pitiful situation of Tamil civilians, who bore the brunt of the violence, had gone largely unreported. That was why she went. That was why she thought it worth the risk.
She was flown to New York for treatment. The surgeon said he couldn’t save the sight in her left eye, but he would try to save the eye itself. Frantic with worry, her mother insisted Marie come home to Long Island, where she could nurse her, cook her the meat loaf she had loved as a child, ensure that she had everything she needed to recover. Marie’s ex-husband flew in, and he and her mother agreed that this time she would have to submit to their ministrations.
Why did she resist? To be looked after was surely exactly what she needed, but somehow it felt unbearable. As if it weren’t bad enough to lose the sight in one eye, now she would lose her independence, too. She wanted to stay at a fancy hotel in New York, to smoke, to have a cocktail, to spend time with her best friend, Katrina, who would make her laugh. She needed to recover what she could of the self she had become in two decades as a journalist. It was sixteen years since she had left America. She had lived in Paris, London, and Jerusalem and had traveled to conflicts all over the world, taking chances, beating the odds, and earning her reputation as one of the toughest but most compassionate reporters in the world as well as the best and funniest company. That was who she was. She feared the waves closing over her, feared being subsumed by her family, by the cloying parochialism of her hometown, by a promise of safety that would crush her essence. However desperate her situation, she could not let herself be pulled back to where she had started.
* * *
The town of Oyster Bay, on Long Island, where Marie spent her childhood and adolescence, was quintessential suburbia. The families in the Colvins’ neighborhood were America’s new postwar middle class: teachers, small-business owners, government employees. This was the era when mothers stayed at home and fathers came back from work to a cigarette and a highball. They watched Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show, genial TV sitcoms about family life. It was Marie’s father’s claim to fame that his eldest sister, Bette, was a hostess on the quiz show Beat the Clock.
Marie, the Colvins’ first child, was born on January 12, 1956, in Astoria, Queens, a restless baby who soon sprouted a head of thick, dark curls. America was changing fast. Dwight D. Eisenhower, reelected that year, was the last U.S. president born in the nineteenth century. Elvis Presley scandalized the nation with his hip thrusts as he sang “Hound Dog” on The Ed Sullivan Show. The Cold War was escalating: it was the year of the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Marie’s parents had more immediate concerns—Marie’s mother, Rosemarie, struggled to get her and her brother, Billy, born the following year, up and down three flights of stairs in their apartment block. Now she was expecting again. Long Island, with its beaches, fields, and potato farms, looked like a perfect solution. They found a new build in East Norwich, adjoining the more upmarket Oyster Bay. By the time Michael was born, the family was settled in the house where Marie’s parents would have another two children and spend the rest of their lives.
For Rosemarie this was a huge step up in life. She had been raised in the working-class South Bronx in the lean times between the wars. Like many others in the area, her parents, James and Rose Marron, were of Irish descent. After her father died when she was just a few months old, Rosemarie’s mother struggled with three children, becoming ever more religious and unyielding. Rosemarie had to work her way through Fordham Jesuit University, where she trained as a teacher. “I didn’t feel I was ready for a relationship,” she recollects. “I had to educate myself and had no help at home.” But when she met William Colvin (six feet tall, slim, confident, with dark wavy hair), she changed her mind. “He was very kind and accepting of anything or anyone,” she says. “I had grown up in a family that was dogmatic, but I wasn’t that way. It was a great relief to meet someone who felt the same as I did.” This, she thought, was how she would like to bring up her own children: good Catholics, disciplined and studious, but tolerant and open-minded.
The Colvins were what Rosemarie called “lace curtain Irish”: middle class and relatively privileged. Although Bill’s father’s side was descended from Scots, they identified as Irish Catholic, and Bill had attended Saint Augustine’s Catholic High School. Writing for the school newspaper made Bill dream of becoming a journalist, but in 1944, aged seventeen, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was still undergoing training when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Posted to the Chinese port city of Tientsin (now Tianjin), he and his platoon on occasion “tangled with the gooks,” as he put it, when Communist units attacked U.S. forces. After he left China in September 1946 he rarely spoke about his experiences, but years later, Marie would recall marching around, aged six, singing, “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” the Marines’ Hymn, which her father had taught her. It seemed, she said, “very romantic and exciting.” All her life she got along well with military men. Her father had a soldierly bearing and was determined that his children uphold the high standards of behavior he had learned in the marines.
After finishing his military service, Bill started to feel unwell. He had contracted tuberculosis in China and spent two years at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Queens. Journalism was not an easy profession to enter, and upon discharge he went for a safer option, training as a teacher at Fordham. When he met a tall, determined young woman five years his junior with red hair and an open face, one who shared his passion for self-improvement, he felt that at last everything was falling into place. Bill Colvin and Rosemarie Marron were married at St. Luke’s Church in the South Bronx. She wore a long white silk dress with a scalloped neckline and carried a bouquet of lilies. He was in a morning suit and striped cravat, his hair shining with pomade. They went to Bermuda on their honeymoon and started their family immediately.
Bill Colvin was a dedicated and, by all accounts, exemplary English teacher, spending his entire career at Forest Hills High School, in Queens. He led a Boy Scout troop and was active in local politics, but he never lost his youthful passion for writing. Like millions of Americans, he responded to an advertisement in The New York Times Book Review for a correspondence course at the Famous Writers School, in Westport, Connecticut, which promised to “teach you to write successfully at home,” holding out the possibility of “financial success and independence” as a writer. The application form he completed in 1967 reveals a lot about the father against whom Marie would soon rebel. His main ambition, he said, was “to be a good person, lead a full life and create something with beauty and meaning before I die.” Interests: politics and reading. Favorite classroom subjects: English and philosophy. Favorite writers: Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, and Shakespeare. His chosen magazines and newspapers were Good Housekeeping; the Jesuit weekly magazine, America; and the Oyster Bay Guardian. “Maybe I just want to wrestle with eternal conflicts on paper,” he wrote in a piece about why he wanted to write, but more may have been revealed in a story he wrote about a teacher, who just happened to be called Bill. “Society won’t accept a man simply as a teacher,” he wrote. “He must really be something else in order to justify his existence.”
* * *
Marie’s sister Aileen, nicknamed Boo, was born in 1960. Four years later, just before Marie turned nine, Rosemarie gave birth to her fifth and final child, Cathleen, always known as Cat. Marie had taken little interest in the birth of her other siblings, but she was enchanted by the new baby. The feeling never faded, and from the moment she could toddle, Cat was Marie’s shadow. As the eldest, Marie had a small room of her own, on the first floor. Cat remembers lying in Marie’s bed playing “postage stamp kisses,” a game her big sister invented. “She would tell me a story about a place—Brazil, maybe, or China—with parties and dancing women or Amazon queens. Then she would give me as many kisses as hours it took to get there by plane to send me to my dreams.”
Copyright © 2018 by Lindsey Hilsum