City of Strangers (5 page)

In college Frank had studied history and philosophy, while growing increasingly intrigued by his German heritage, a fascination that dated back to the end of the Great War. His own father's emotions then had been mixed: though he loved his adopted country, the humiliation of Germany's defeat sank deep within him. Of his father's complicated emotions Frank had inherited only what his young mind could easily grasp – the disappointment.

His father's thoughts on faith were quite clear. When Paul first took up religion, Frank did not ignore the change in his son – in fact, the derision he showed was the most attentive he'd yet been as a parent. This flare-up of paternal interest declined once Frank grew bored with it, and, as a teenager, Paul put away his piety. With time it came to seem a puerile act of rebellion against a diminished, disinclined father. Faithlessness brightened within him like the lights at the end of a movie. Strangely, Paul began to recall his father's tirades almost with approbation; Frank was cruel, but he gave his son the truth. Paul came to feel slightly uncomfortable toward this younger self, and he even began to feel a sense of common cause with his father, another man who saw through the lie of belief. He would twist with mortification to remember that before going to sleep he often whispered, up into the darkness of his empty room, 'I love you.' In his life he's had little use for the tonics of therapy, but even he can see that he spoke those words to God because he had no one else to speak them to. He finally stopped because he was suffering from what later strengthened into outright embarrassment – he felt silly. As soon as he began to suspect that no one was listening, the prayers turned to salt in his mouth. His own father was miserly with affection and at times his presence barely registered – he seemed less an actual person than a concept, a climate within the house – but at least Paul knew, night after night, which room he slept in. God, it turned out, wasn't there at all.

As Hitler was consolidating his power, Frank fell in with the sons of other German immigrants and, in 1934, was introduced to some members of the German-American Bund. That summer he attended a rally at Madison Square Garden, which concentrated and gave shape to his new avocation. Within a year he was spending weekends at a camp on Long Island devoted to the glorification of the 'New Germany' and the promotion of German-American ties. It was there that he swore an oath to the Führer.

At the funeral parlor in Williamsburg an assistant greets Paul, and as she steers him through a series of corridors he can't help but notice that they avoid any brush with the reminders of mortality that must elsewhere fill the building. The weeping, the embalming, the cremation – those occupy other rooms. What he's allowed to see of the place brings to mind a dentist's office. Walls painted a stark, antiseptic white. Clean, well-lit hallways, plants standing in the corners, filing cabinets lined up and locked.

Frank rose rapidly through the hierarchy of the Bund, thrilled by the sense that he was part of something greater than himself and of something also that made him greater. He set up and ran the organization's official publication. Soon he was involved in the management of funds; one of the Bund's only material efforts in service of the Reich was to funnel American dollars into German coffers. He believed what they all believed. Germany and the United States would become partners, coequals, in a new world order; at rallies they flew the swastika alongside the stars and stripes. Frank stood at an extraordinary vantage. He was awash in the changing waters of history; when he moved, history moved with him. Here his linguistic talents served him well. His fame within the Bund soared. As a speaker of German he was mediocre, but when safely in his native tongue he was eloquent on the subject of greatest importance to those who gathered at Long Island: Germany as the inevitable phoenix, history's definitive and most glorious empire – the Reich of a thousand years.

As Paul enters the main office, the funeral director, whose name is Wolff, extends an arm.

'I am sorry about your father,' he says after the exchange of pleasantries. 'Rest assured, he's in good hands.'

The moment of greatest personal glory came for Frank when he took it upon himself to offer to the Nazis a special delivery of funds – his own. His father had left him a modest inheritance of three thousand dollars, which he took – in cash – to Berlin and donated to the Nazi Party. Inflation continued to erode Germany's economy; dollars were extremely valuable. He had expected a grander reception than the one he received. A bureaucrat accepted the money without emotion and made a note in a register. No handshake, no ceremony, no medal.

The mortician is younger than Paul expected. In his early forties, a widow's peak rising into a swipe of dark black hair above his angular face, Wolff leans back in a high leather chair with the studied ease of an executive. Paul is a tourist in these affairs of mortality. It's his father who will depart the known world, a man Wolff has never laid eyes on, but at the instant Frank Metzger ceases to be a human being and becomes only a body, he becomes Wolff's business. For him death is a practical rather than a philosophical riddle. Wolff is the one who's willing to put his fingers under the skin, the one who knows how to get a dead body into a suit; he's the one who fires up the cremator. One of his palms, Paul notices, lies carelessly open on the table between them, as if waiting for a coin.

'Do you have any siblings?'

'None,' says Paul.

'A wife?'

'No.'

'So it's only you. That's quite a burden for a son.'

Even in the wake of his disappointing reception in Berlin, Frank pursued the Bund's work with the blindness and the happiness of religious devotion. His fame continued to grow – in fact, it began to spill over into the wider world as word spread of the organization. On the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, prosecutors indicted several of the leadership at the Long Island camp. Frank wasn't among them. But because of his notoriety within the party, his was the face the newspapers ran to accompany the articles; at that age he had the kind of severe, slightly fussy handsomeness people expected of a Nazi. Later, in 1944, he was part of a group that was put on trial for sedition. Prosecutors alleged a widespread Nazi conspiracy to overthrow the American government. Newspapers across the country reported it, deriding Frank as little more than a dull pawn of his German handlers. He spent two months in prison, but in the end the charges against him and the others were dropped for lack of evidence.

'On the phone you said he was still in the hospital.'

'Yes. They expect him to—' Paul coughs. 'That is, any day now.' He dislikes euphemism, but others seem to prefer it around death. 'My father doesn't have any friends, that I know of.' Not sure why he has made a point of saying this now, he decides to add, 'He and I aren't especially close.'

The mortician scratches his nose with his ring finger. It's bare. Paul finds it odd that this man isn't married; undertakers, like politicians, should have wives, conventional family arrangements.

'May I ask if you are still able to speak with him, Mr Metzger?'

'Call me Paul.'

'May I ask that, Paul?'

After the trial Frank left New York for Arizona – it meant going west, a new start. For two years he sold topsoil and fertilizer. He sulked, plotted, daydreamed. And he married his first wife, who knew nothing of his past. Then, only three years after departing, he returned to New York with bride and new son in tow. The Nuremberg trials and the continued unearthing of evidence about the death camps and the extent of the Nazis' crimes maintained interest in the villains of the war. Reporters knocked regularly on the door of their small house in Brooklyn. With time the interest died; the knocking stopped. Frank drifted back into the ordinary swim of humanity. Few people still recognized his name. The man whose picture had been splashed across newspapers faded behind history – his infamy wouldn't survive even for a generation.

'He can't speak, no. The doctors say it's possible he understands me when I talk to him, but I don't believe them.' Paul laughs. 'He looks dead. Only the machines believe he's not.'

There is an uneasy silence. Paul coughs again. At last the funeral director speaks.

'So often we look for an easy way through this, but there never is one.'

When Paul was in college the father of a close friend died unexpectedly. They have since lost touch, he and the friend, but he remembers the powerful feeling of watching someone endure that rite of passage. In the days that followed, his friend stood up to it –
like a man
, the words they used – even though he and his father were surely closer than Paul is with his. The event bestowed upon the friend an aura, a masculine gravity. His steadfastness became myth. There's none of that now. Fathers die.

'Is it possible to hold the service here?'

'We have a space, if that's what you wish.'

'My father wasn't a religious man. There's no reason to use a church.' Wolff's uninviting silence stops Paul before he can offer a further explanation. 'I'd like to see it, the room.'

'Of course,' says Wolff, rising.

His past was too much. He lost the wife, the son. She swore never to speak to her husband again, but from time to time, and with his mother's blessing, the boy, called Ben, visited – he was young and carried around a natural curiosity about his father. He arrived at Frank's door for the last time when he was seventeen, and then only to tell him that he had made up his mind to jettison the name Metzger. He wanted nothing to do with Frank's disgrace, a crime so great that, although he was not yet born at the time, he considered it unforgivable. He would make his way in the world as Ben Wald. He then, and ever, considered himself fatherless.

They travel the same channels that brought Paul to the director's office. Wolff turns right and opens a large set of white doors; in the room beyond there are no windows and the lights are off. Paul is the first to enter. For an instant he's alone. The awareness that this room, of all rooms, has hosted so much death, so much grief, puts Paul in a reverent mood: for a different man it might be a religious moment. Faith – the manufacture of certainty in the dark. Behind him, he hears Wolff turn a switch, and then an insectlike hum as electricity pours into the old lamps.

'As you can see, we have everything you'll require,' says Wolff, but Paul only half listens. The room, now lit, is a drab affair. Chairs wait in military lines, their upholstery well-worn by so many mourners; paths of gnarled thread streak the carpet between the rows where the living walk, where restless shoes knead the floor during the recitation of the deceased's life. Everything's old, nothing like the modern style, the lucid precision, elsewhere in the building. Time has ground down the room, and it repulses Paul, the thought not of his father but of anybody spending his last day above-ground here.

'Most of our clients do choose to hold the service in a church,' says Wolff, as if sensing Paul's thoughts.

'This is fine.'

Later Frank remarried, a much younger woman, a secretary at the company where he'd found work. They had a son. But fatherhood was too much for him; marriage, too, was surely difficult, even though, only two years after the birth of their child, she died – in a car accident, with her lover, the first Frank knew of the affair. All the dreams of his earlier days, of poetry and eminence, were gone. He didn't write. Instead he sank into years and years of silence and isolation. After his younger son left for college he did not again share his home with another person.

Paul doesn't normally think of the Frank who swore an oath to Hitler. His own memories are of a man who even in good restaurants fished ice cubes out of the water glass because they hurt his teeth; who spoke little and slept late; who never had the stomach for anything stronger than beer. But those things don't matter, not to anyone else. The existence of a domestic self doesn't exculpate a man from his poor choices. To the wider world it means nothing that he could claim the qualities all fathers, all men, have. Bentham may be right: a book could sell. And it could even make use of such facts as these, but by themselves they aren't enough. Each detail would have to be cased in a thick rime, a reminder that – yes – Frank Metzger was a Nazi, too.

Wolff's voice breaks in. 'Will you desire a viewing of the body?'

'That won't be necessary. He wants to be cremated.'

The pain of his father's past has always been oblique, coming at him crabwise, sneaking in when he least expects it, because there isn't ever a moment when one expects to have such a man for a father. He's never made his peace with it. Most of the time he simply forgets about it. For Paul it doesn't have the piquant sting of lived experience, living memory; it is an inherited shame. It is a story. Even so, when something imposes the facts upon him, as this morning has, he can't stop thinking about it, worrying it, like a kid with fresh stitches.

Coming upon a man selling meat from a cart, he stops, aware that he's been walking quickly and without a destination. Cottony white steam pours from the grill, where heaps of shredded beef and chicken cook, mixed with onions and green peppers and caked in aromatic red spice. Saliva creeps under his tongue. Lately his eating habits have been sporadic, and he is suddenly, violently hungry; he orders a sandwich and then disposes of it in several bites. Wiping the sauce from his fingers with a napkin, he starts again up the street, more deliberately now, passing a gaunt figure hawking newspapers for a quarter. He buys one.

Paul's mouth burns from the strong taste of onions and, while it isn't yet one o'clock, he stops at a bar, orders a dark ale, and gingerly takes a first sip. It is good: it is exactly what he wants. He drinks the rest quickly and orders a second, flipping the pages of the newspaper but finding it difficult to concentrate. He sucks the head off the fresh glass of black beer; already the alcohol packs his brain like crushed ice. Light from the windows comes at him sharply, and the rhythm of drinking slows his thoughts, dials down the anxiety that lingers after the encounters with Bentham and Wolff. He drinks.