Secret Father (2 page)

My own DoD connection was thin, and ran through New York, not Washington. I was chief of the Frankfurt office of the Chase International Investment Corporation, a spinoff of Chase Manhattan Bank, which had begun a decade before as a main funnel for Marshall Plan funds when American investment shifted from governments to businesses. The war had left the Continent starved for consumer goods, and German manufacturers, with the advantage of needing to retool from scratch, had pounced on the market. Those of us at Chase—investing not in the state bureaucracies but in individual entrepreneurs and private companies—embodied the beau ideal of American democracy, what would later come to be called free-market capitalism. So we were frontliners in the Cold War, too, and it did not hurt that returns on our investments were running at thirty or forty percent, which set off a second-stage boom in finance as the industrial recovery of the Bundesrepublik began to fuel itself. We called it the bottom-line blitzkrieg.

People like me, in our recognizably American Brooks Brothers tailor-mades, prided ourselves on having nothing to do with the omnipresent but culturally isolated U.S. military, who, out of uniform, favored Ban-Lons and double-knits. We did not shop in their commissaries, and we did not work out in their gyms. Our chauffeurs drove us in Taunus sedans or Mercedeses, decidedly not Oldsmobiles. And we spoke German—or, as in my case, felt guilty ifwe did not.

If we had school-age children, they boarded at English public schools, Swiss convent schools, or back home at New England prep schools. Rarely would the child of someone in my position have been a candidate for General H. H. Arnold High School at Wiesbaden Air Base, a putative reproduction of a small-town American secondary school. But it seemed the right place for Michael that year, and as for me, I wanted him close.

 

When he was little, Michael was a boy who loved movement above all—if possible, on wheels, so his love of driving was no surprise. The first real change in his life came with his tricycle, a Christmas present when he was four or five. It was a machine on which he could demonstrate his true character—his daring, his restlessness, his bright assumption that the earth was flat so that he could go fast. When I would come home in the evening, nothing would do but that I take him down to the basement of the apartment building where storage cages lined a labyrinthine passageway that Michael regarded as his personal racecourse. I recall chicken wire stretched onto lumber frames, naked light bulbs on the ceiling every twenty feet or so, a succession of right-angle turns. His circuit was quick and, with all that cushiony chicken wire, I thought, safe. But near the doorway to the stairwell, one sharp cinderblock corner jutted into his path, a hazard I had never noticed because he always cut by it easily. Once, however, I made a pretense of giving chase, which made Michael laugh and pour it on. As he barreled through the maze now, pulling away, he tossed triumphant looks back over his shoulder at me. He disappeared around a last turn, I heard his crash, and knew at once he'd hit the cinderblock angle. He took the sharp edge on his face, breaking his nose and opening a gash in his forehead from which blood was gushing, as from a pump, by the time I got to him. The sight of his wrecked face filled me with panic and guilt, but he remained calm. Stunned into calm, I thought, but that wasn't so. Michael was in pain, awash in blood—crimson spray—but he wasn't afraid because he was certain that nothing bad would happen to him if I was there.

But I wasn't there some years later, the day he came home early from school—he was ten years old, it was April of 1954. He was a student at the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, in Morningside Heights. Edie was a volunteer docent—a sort of guide—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she was there when the school nurse called to say she was sending Michael home in a taxi because he had a fever. I was in Washington, preparing to leave for Paris as part of a government delegation. Edie called me that night and described fever, headache, loss of appetite, vomiting. I would have come home, but she said the doctor had labeled it flu and was confident the symptoms would abate in a day or two, and they did. Soon Michael was back to normal and returned to school, and I boarded a plane to Paris. Two days later, Michael's symptoms came raging back, accompanied by the general muscular weakness known as paralysis. I was in a meeting with finance ministers, in a room with extremely high ceilings and Palladian windows overlooking the Tuileries, when an officious clerk interrupted to hand me a telegram: "Come home now. M. has poliomyelitis. E."

I remember being struck by the fact that Edie, not spelling out Michael's name or her own, had spelled out the full Latin name of the disease, preferring it no doubt to the blatantly descriptive "infantile paralysis." I remember also feeling a blast of anger at the injustice of it, since that was the spring of Jonas Salk, and the broad assumption was that the scourge of polio had been defeated. Indeed, Michael would be one of the last American children to succumb.

When I saw him next, it was in a large room at St. Luke's Hospital, also in Morningside Heights. The room contained about a dozen iron lungs, the airtight metal cylinders that encased patients up to their necks, helping the more severely affected children to breathe. By the time I walked into that room, I had done my homework and knew that the virus attacks the motor nerve cells in the spinal cord, an interruption of communication from brain to muscles. Most cases of infection did not rise to the level of diagnosis even, and the virus was shaken off without lasting damage, without ever being identified. Most of those whose symptoms were recognized did not become paralyzed. Most suffered muscle impairment from which the body recovered. Few polio victims were left crippled, and my desperate hope, as I followed the nurse to my son sealed in iron, was that he not be one of those. Let the other children in this room fill out the odds, I prayed with exquisite selfishness. I loved my son with a ferocity that would have exchanged the world for him, to the point of killing it. My son was all there was.

It was nearly midnight, and the room was dark. I had just come from the airport. The hum of mechanized respiration, a dozen unsynchronized motors, filled the room, but the sound registered as a kind ofquiet. The children lay sleeping in their cylinders with their heads protruding like knobs, like magicians' assistants waiting to be sawed in half. Michael, too, was sleeping when we came to him, and the sight of his eyes benignly closed filled me with grief. I only then realized what I had been most dreading, the statement in his blank look as it met mine: "If you had been here, Dad, this would not have happened."

"I'm here now," I meant my eyes to say, but Michael, asleep, had no need to rebuke me. Awake, later, he never did. I bent to kiss his forehead and saw the salty residue of a tear track running from his eye down across his temple to his ear. Dried tracks like that marked each side of his face. A stoic child who goes to sleep weeping, unable to wipe the tears from his eyes. So, naturally, I supplied my own rebuke, and it would be as permanent as his condition.

Michael would not walk at all for a year. And without, first, crutches, then leg braces and a cane, he would never walk again. How could we not assume that this illness would forever mark the defining moment of his life, and we did. But only for six years, when the absolute line dividing before from after—mine as much as his—was drawn.

As the nurse in the polio ward said I would, I found Edie that night in the darkened cathedral a short walk down Amsterdam Avenue from St. Luke's. The nurse told me that Edie had been at Michael's side nearly all the time. Only after he was firmly asleep would she go over to the hulking church, leaving the nurse with the impression that she needed to pray. "Your son will need you, Mr. Montgomery," the nurse presumed to say to me, "but so will your wife."

Edie was a confirmed Episcopalian, but she had never been devout, and I could not imagine her on her knees. She loved the cathedral, but in the way American patricians love Gothic spaces. We had been married there, and her father had been a benefactor and longtime vestryman. One or two Sundays a month, she had found her way to St. John the Divine, but for vespers; she preferred the evening service of chanted psalms to the more showy morning communion. We presumed Michael inherited his religious indifference from me, but what Edie really preferred, I knew, were the soaring shadows of night—the feeling of being in Chartres, in the heart of human genius more than in the presence of some divinity. It was no surprise to me that she would seek rest and refuge there.

But prayer? I found her at a side altar, sitting in front of a shrouded statue of what I took to be the sorrowful mother of God. Approaching from behind, not wanting to startle her, I whispered her name tentatively. In truth, I half expected a rebuke from Edie, too. She could be angry and unforgiving, and in our twelve years of marriage I had had my moments of both resenting her reactions and fearing them.
Why the hell were you in Paris when our son got sick?

But when she realized I was there, she stood and turned to me, her hands clutching at her mouth. She fell into my arms with a desperation I could not have imagined. "Oh, Monty!" she said.

"Monty" was her teasing endearment for me—teasing because she knew that from anyone else I hated it. We were not nickname people—her name was Edie, not Edith—which is why we called our son Michael, and only that. Edie was trying to speak to me, but her sobbing made it impossible. "Monty," she said again, and the only other word that made it through her lips was "Michael." The two names prompted in me the sweet thought that her love for her son and her love for her husband had become the same thing, and I had the further thought, holding her as she shuddered against me, that that was how I felt. What to her was a moment only of unspeakable anguish was to me a revelation of this most basic fact of our condition: one love bound the three of us.

For me, our son's illness, evoking that love, would be an axis around which our otherwise separate lives turned as one life. But for Edie, it would be something else entirely. She abruptly pulled back from me, as if offended by my physical resoluteness. Her eyes were wrecked, bloodshot, foolishly stained with mascara, crazy looking.

"I can't," she said.

"Can't what?" I asked.

"Cope," she said. "Cope with this. I can't."

"Yes you can." I pulled her back into my embrace—not to console her but to avoid having to look into her terrified eyes.

I was right, of course. Edie coped magnificently from then on. She was at Michael's service morning, noon, and night, as his masseuse, his physical therapist, his coach, his tutor enabling him to stay at class level in school. She was his motivation, the soul, ultimately, of his success. Everyone who knew us would admire Edie's stalwart love, and Michael would worship her for it, which he showed by getting steadily better. All of which was more than enough for me.

But in the one thing with which heroic Edie needed help—the thing that nurse had sensed—I was useless. In the cathedral that night she had shown me her terror, and I could not look at it. I could not stand it. Left alone, she coped with it by means of a savage act of will, which left her feeling, I see now, like a woman going through the motions oflove instead of loving. She reproached herself for dutifulness, for the rigid discipline of her care, for doing what she could for Michael because she should. All of which, of course, defines love at its truest. But for Edie the former ease of spirited affection and maternal fondness had suffocated in the fumes of rubbing alcohol and the stink of soiled bandages and pus-stained plaster casts and the dead skin of our son's inert legs, as she worked all the while to bring them back to life.

Something inside Edie, it seemed, had turned to stone. The one acute feeling she would allow herself from then on was that of self-loathing, which I beheld clear as day every time she exploded in anger—never at Michael or in his presence; always, apparently, at me, in mine; but, I realized later, really at herself. Unconsciously, she was recruiting me to punish her, and I was capable of exploding back, alas. But even when, as was mostly true, I maintained a relative equanimity, she took it as a signal of my detachment. She angrily charged me with detachment, not from Michael but from her, which was how little she had come to know of me. This was the emotional impasse at which we had found ourselves when the question arose of my transfer to Germany.

 

As events unfolded, I started the job in Frankfurt at the end of the summer without Edie. The assignment, not a major promotion but the prerequisite to one, had been in the works for months. On the surface, Edie, Michael, and I had all been looking forward to it—the transatlantic passage on the USS
America,
a month's travel across the Continent before settling into the privileged life of postwar American supremacy. But below the surface, our family was in turmoil, stirred by every decision involving Michael. After six arduous years of corrective operations and physical therapy, all organized around his ongoing schoolwork, he was doing well—far better than we'd dared to hope. Walking confidently with his leg braces and elbow cane, working hard to think of himself as other than crippled, our son was, in effect, recovered from polio, and had learned to manage what it had left him with. Edie and I, in our separate ways, had arranged our lives around what he needed from us, but what he needed from us had changed. Edie and I came more slowly to knowing that than he did.

Taking a large clue from him, we had finally settled on a plan that called for Michael's return from Germany to New York in September, so that he could complete his senior year at St. Dunstan's, his prep school in Riverdale, but now as a boarding student. Polio had tempered Michael's exuberant personality, but we were able in the end to see that what others took for shy insecurity was in fact the quiet resolve that had seen him through. We knew that he was ready for life apart from us—knowledge that Edie and I separately resisted.