Secret Father (3 page)

But now he was a senior at Wiesbaden High School, an hour away from me. We had decided together, in the end, that I would take the job in Germany after all and that he would go too. As it turned out, the jovial atmosphere of a self-consciously American high school—cheerleaders! pep rallies!—was far better for him than the faux cloister of an all-male prep school. His boarding five days a week at Wiesbaden seemed about right, and his coming to be with me in Frankfurt on most weekends did move us to a new, if unarticulated, intimacy. Beginning in the fall, we had formed a habit of taking long Saturday drives in our new blue Ford convertible. We explored the winding roads, hillside vineyards, and hock towns of the Rhineland wine country. We visited half-reconstructed river cities from Mainz to Koblenz to Cologne. We went several times to the Roman ruins at Trier, a small city that had been home to the emperor Constantine and, even more remarkable to us, to Karl Marx.

In November, Michael turned seventeen, the permit age in Germany, and after that he took the wheel more often than I did. The pleasure I took in riding beside him in the passenger seat was, I see now, an unconscious return to the games of wheels that had been such a bond years before. I don't recall ever giving him driving lessons as such, and in Germany there was no question of driving school. Even with those leg braces, his body seemed naturally to know what to do, and his right leg on the pedals was his better leg. At the wheel of a car, Michael's physical grace returned. That Michael was relaxed as a driver relieved me, and the routine of those jaunts soothed us. In the car, especially with the top down, we felt no need to force conversation, and a certain self-isolating silence came to seem all right. It was our silence together. By the spring of that year, in other words, we had each found reasons to regard our weekends as the matter of a mutual compact, not something either of us would violate lightly.

Ironically, it was also then that we began, for the first time, to differ about things, first small things, then larger ones. I knew enough to anticipate mundane teenage moodiness, but the weight on Michael was heavier than that, which I understood. But there were things I didn't understand. The gulf that opened between us came as a disheartening surprise. The silence of our rides, I began to sense, carried an undertone of my son's resentment, which mystified me.

Driving through Trier one day, he said offhandedly that Marx had been misunderstood, and that the only trouble with his ideas was they hadn't really been tried. "That's ridiculous," I snapped, and he shot back, "What would a banker know about the real meaning of Karl Marx?" His direct challenge, offered with the pristine self-righteousness of a committed leftist, so shocked me that at first I could not reply.

"
Deutsche
marks," I then deflected, as Edie would have, "not Karl." But I wondered where the hell this was coming from. Soon enough I would know.

In fact, at the beginning of that week we'd had what you'd have to call an outright argument, sparked by his resentment at my first saying no, he could not take the car if it violated school rules. "Don't treat me like a cripple!" he had blurted, as if my mere enforcement of a rule did any such thing. But the statement stunned us both, and, as he hoped, I suppose, his rare open expression of anger forced me to back off. I let him take the car despite myself, but he had still gone off angry, leaving me to fume even more. I recalled that with horror now, because that was how Edie had gone off.

Michael, where are you?

Friday afternoons at Wiesbaden were marked, as I imagined it, by an explosion of pent-up all-American energy—boys heading out to the ball field, girls in the gym putting up crepe-paper streamers for the sock hop, kids in dungarees and pedal pushers going over to the teen club to feed the jukebox and the Coke machine. I pictured it all from my place at the large bowfront window looking across the garden toward Mosbacher Strasse, and the happy images of young people at play undid me. I took in the teeth a blast ofnew self-reproach. So Michael wanted to stay over in Wiesbaden and what, go to the big game the next day? Or take a date to the American movie theater at the base exchange? Or—hell—go to that sock hop, even if he didn't dance? And why not with a car? Why had I let that become an issue? And what was it about me that sparked anger in those I loved? Did his failure to show up now mean he was still angry? Was this my punishment for the real offense, which he had dared to name, that I
did
treat him like a cripple?

Michael, where are you?

 

The clock was striking again, and to my surprise, the half-conscious count I kept brought me to seven. Seven o'clock. It was nearly dark outside. He wasn't here, and he hadn't called. If there'd been a wreck, would the German police have a way of knowing to call here?

The thought of the German police brought me back to the scene in Rhine-Main Hall on the previous Monday, what I had been reading about, what I had witnessed. I replayed it—the intruder coming up behind the tall German, seeming to touch the back of his neck; the hollow crack, the speaker slumping forward on the podium, that red spray. The gunman disappeared through the curtain as quickly as he had come. In short order, the green-uniformed police arrived, the meeting was adjourned, and I returned to my office, where, almost at once, I began to wonder if I had imagined it all.

The dead man had been identified in the program as Markus von Siedelheim, a name that meant nothing to me at the time. The killer had escaped. I gathered from several days' deciphering of the
Neue Presse
and from talk at the office that the police's assumption was that von Siedelheim had been murdered by crackpot revolutionary elements who saw new economic ties between Germany and Liberia as a renewal of imperialist adventurism—or perhaps by rightists who opposed German participation in the recently chartered Common Market, of which the ECSC was a forerunner. The theories made no sense to me at the time, although such acts of political violence would become common in a few years, with the arrival of the Red Brigade and the Bader-Meinhof Gang on the left and various neo-Nazi groups on the right. What jolted me instead was the rank senselessness of the act—it was von Siedelheim's first return to Germany in seven years. In an odd way, the murder epitomized the feeling we all had then of living on the edge of an abyss. That was literally true in Germany, with divisions of Soviet tanks poised to strike at any moment, igniting Armageddon. But the feared violence of the Cold War could be defined by nothing so rational as the later political radicalism, for a kind of moral anarchy had come to undergird the East-West standoff, even if we could not openly see it as such.

If there was a car wreck, I realized, the police would call the school. I went to the foyer, to the telephone, and checking the list that Mandy, my secretary, had typed and taped into cellophane nearly nine months before, I found the number of the hall phone in Michael's dormitory. When the operator came on, I recited it for her in my unornamented German. Numbers I could handle.

The odd, blasting rings went on and on. Finally someone answered, a boy whose accent dropped me back to Mobile, Alabama, where I'd done Navy boot camp as a twenty-year-old, more than twenty years before. I asked for Michael Montgomery. The boy grunted and the phone clattered down. I could picture the handset dropping, slapping the wall at the end of its cord. Bright noises in the echo chamber of the corridor made me see a rough game of keep-away. At last yet another boy—New Jersey?—came on the line to say that Montgomery was a "fiver," as if that explained everything. I knew that about half of the dormitory students—who were themselves a minority in the school—were five-day boarders, routinely going home on Fridays to American posts, bases, and stations within a couple of hours of Wiesbaden. I asked the boy if he was sure Michael Montgomery was not there. He said yes, and was about to hang up. I declared myself a parent, which made him say "sir." He went to check again, leaving the phone to bang against the wall. After another few minutes, he returned to say that Michael was nowhere around, that if he'd stayed over, they would have seen him in the caf at dinner, but nobody had. I asked if there was a dance that night or a big game the next day, and took what I needed from his answer that he didn't know. I hung up before he did.
Where are you?

 

Once, at our place in the Adirondacks, Michael and I stayed up late into the night, sitting on the deck of the boathouse with our feet dangling in the lake. He was around eight years old, two years or so before his polio. What kept us up was a sequence of shooting stars. At irregular intervals they crossed the black sky beyond the even blacker silhouette of Mount Marcy. What made the sight doubly thrilling was the way the night sky was reflected in the cobalt sheen of the water stretched out before us, so we could see the stars by looking down as well as up. Every falling star had its twin—until one or the other of us raised a foot to break the glass of the lake surface, an impulse coming, perhaps, from a need to remember which of the realms before us was real. In the rippling water, the stars danced. "Will we ever do this again, Dad?" Michael asked at one point. His profile emphasized the delicacy of his features, the sharp nose he had from Edie, the small knob of his chin that she always swore was mine. The slight upturn of his upper lip could make it seem at times ready to tremble, and it did now.

"Sure," I said. "It's only a matter of knowing when to look." I joined my gaze to his, facing up. Just then another bright dot of light carved its swift arc in the speckled darkness.

Michael jumped. "Eleven!" he announced. He was gunning for an even dozen. Soon he was leaning into me, half asleep. "That's not what I meant. Not about the shooting stars. I meant about doing this with you."

"Sure," I answered too quickly. "Every August."

"Will I still love it?"

"Yes." I pulled him closer.

When, later, the twelfth star fell, I thought of waking him, but then it was too late, and I let him sleep on against me.

 

I went to the kitchen for more ice. Nicolaus, my white-haired, solemn steward, was sitting on his stool in the corner. He looked up from that week's
Der Stern,
which had Fidel Castro on the cover, with upraised fist.

"I'm sorry, Nicolaus," I said, with a nod toward the oven, where by now the roast would be dried out. "Something kept Michael at school. There's no point in your waiting dinner any longer."

"And you, sir?"

"Why not just prepare a couple of plates and keep them covered. I'll wait to eat with the boy."

"Yes, sir."

"And you can go. No need for you to wait."

"I do not object."

Nicolaus never referred to me by name. To others, as when he answered the phone, I was Herr Direktor, and the point had been quickly made that he and I were strictly ex officio. He had come with the house. He and Frau Marpingen, the
Putzfrau,
and Gerhard, my driver, had been taking care of Chase executives for a decade. A thick scar crossed Nicolaus's right cheek and, rising, disappeared in his hair. He suffered the wound, he'd told me, on the eastern front. Once he spoke of Stalingrad, but vaguely. Every time he turned that side of his face toward me, I felt him making a claim. If what Germans told the occupying Americans—investment bankers included—was true, then every Wehrmacht soldier who'd fought in the West was dead, just as no surviving German had ever really admired Adolf Hitler.

I had no trouble picturing Nicolaus's right arm upraised at the infamous angle. If he and his kind hated Hitler now, it was for having lost the war. But Nicolaus kept his resentment passive. He was efficient, talented in the kitchen, and, for my purposes, thoroughly reliable. His only open show of disapproval toward me was tied to my pouring my own whiskey, which I did out of a habit tracing to my father, who used to say it was a way to remind the servants whose house it was.

He was watching me at the ice tray. I realized he was taking the measure of my concern.

"
Die Jugend
" he said.

My impulse to deceive him surprised me, as if there were secrets to protect. "Just something at school," I said, and all at once the images I was fending off were, first, of a tangled blue highway wreck, and second, of Michael in his iron lung. Then I saw him falling forward, as if he'd been shot from behind.

Nicolaus was staring at me. I turned to leave the kitchen, aware that as I did so, he turned to the oven, to do as he was told before going home.

I went back to my chair in the sitting room, and in the silence, which was total but for the hum of the brazier's fire and the tick of the clock, I sipped my drink. When it was drained, I thought of going for another. Instead, I began a mindless set of rounds, going from vacant room to vacant room, snapping on lights, as if a family lived there and not a man with—what, a missing son?

Missing son. By now I was alternating between open worry and anger, and it was anger that I preferred.
Goddammit, where are you?

I could not pass a front-facing window without stopping to look out, eyeing the moving forms of Mosbacher Strasse, the flow of cars. I remember lighting cigarettes at those windows, watching the flare of the match illuminate my face in the black glass. That your father was a heavy smoker came to define him, but in those days we all were.

I climbed the stairs. Michael and I could each be in the house without the other knowing, it was so large. When my predecessor had proudly showed me around, I demurred at first because of the size, but then he led me into the walnut-paneled game room on the third floor. A stout mahogany pool table was enshrined below a hanging green lamp. On one wall, the cue rack held a dozen elaborately carved sticks, ash and ebony. Along another wall stretched the scoring string, and in the center of the third was a large fireplace. The tan felt of the table's playing surface shimmered under the cone of light. I took the house to have that pool table, because I knew Michael would love it—a game to be played without strong legs. Was that treating him like a cripple?