Secret Father (5 page)

When Michael was an infant, I would be the one to go to him when he cried, but only to bring him back to our bed, to Edie. He was the size of a meatloaf, but since he fit in the crook of my arm, I carried him like a football. Edie was always up against the headboard and ready, baring her breast as I handed him over. He took to her hungrily. I would slide back into bed next to them and dreamily watch. Happiness, someone said, is the wish to be what you are. I wished, exactly, to be his father and her husband. When Michael was sated, his face would fall away from Edie's breast, and he would already be asleep. I would take him back to his crib and then return to bed deeply consoled. Edie would dreamily receive me back, transported by love, and we would fall asleep with our heads together. I would sleep as contentedly as if I were the one who had drained my sweet wife of her precious milk.

But more than once, that bliss was changed instantly into horror, with Edie screeching at the top of her voice while pounding me awake, tearing at the blankets. "You're lying on the baby!" she screamed. "Get up! Get up! You've suffocated the baby!" This happened six, maybe ten times in that half year. And every time, I believed it to be true—I had killed our son by falling asleep on him. "Goddammit, Paul, get up!" she would scream, having been transformed into rage itself.
Right of way! Starboard!
It was a rage I'd learned to dread like nothing I had ever dreaded before. "You've killed him!"

And I would leap back, tearing at the blankets and sheets with her, looking for Michael's body, prepared to hate myself as much as my son's mother clearly hated me now. More than once, between us in our frenzy, we stripped the bed naked of its linen. Another time, I continued the search on my hands and knees, looking for him between the headboard and the wall. Always I was first to realize that it wasn't true, that Edie had simply conscripted me into the dark center of her nightmare. I never once fell asleep without having returned Michael safely to his crib. I never once fell asleep with his body under mine. I never once failed my son in that way, never betrayed that part of my wife's trust. In order to convince her that that was so, I would lead Edie into the alcove where the crib stood, so that she could see for herself, although sometimes our frenzied commotion awakened him and he howled majestically, as if some beloved one of his were dead as well; as if he, too, had been thought capable of some heinous deed.

Of course, the words I dreaded hearing, once my relationship with Michael grew tense that year, were "You killed Mom." He had not quite said it, but I heard the accusation in the rough edge of his voice. It was a charge I could not deny, and now I wondered if, after all, Edie's charge that I killed Michael had come true as well.

 

When I heard the teletype machine begin to whir in my secretary's adjoining office, I turned away from the window, the jagged night-scape of a half-recovered city. I watched as the pink paper rolled out of the machine, and I quickly saw it as an innocuous military personnel file. Then Earl called back to help me read, as he said, what was written between the lines. General David Healy was "Commander of the Joint Intelligence Group—Europe," based at Lindsay Air Station in Wiesbaden, the headquarters of what was called in the argot "J-2." Healy's previous assignments would not seem to have prepared him for such a position. For more than a decade, he had rotated through a series of Air Force operations jobs, most recently as commander of the 3rd Weather Reconnaissance Wing (Provisional) at Wiesbaden Air Base. Gifford told me that when Gary Powers's U-2 was shot down over the Ural Mountains the year before, Healy's phony NASA weather wing had given the glider-like CIA spy plane its cover. Once the weather-plane story collapsed, the NASA wing in Wiesbaden was quietly disbanded—provisional indeed—and Healy had come out of the mundane operations rotation in which he'd buried his intelligence function since not long after the war. Thus, Healy presided over all U.S. military espionage in Europe—everything from photo reconnaissance by air to the dark brutality of secret agents on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

I stopped Gifford in his recitation, alarmed that he was referring to such things over the telephone, but he laughed. "This is from a staffer on the Armed Services Committee, Paul. Senator Javits put in the call for me. If there are classifieds here, they're already out of the corral. Healy was a 'Man in the News' in the
Times
last year, after the U-2 affair." Gifford read on, a summary of a career. London for two years right after the war. Then Berlin for three, Washington for two, Paris for three, and Wiesbaden for nearly five. As theater chief now of military intelligence, reporting to the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, he was openly the man in charge of tracking the Soviet battle order in Eastern Europe, even if the "wet" side of his job would never be referred to. At forty-seven years old, he was five years my senior. He was married, with a grown daughter stateside and an eighteen-year-old son, a senior at the American high school in Wiesbaden.

 

I was in Wiesbaden the next morning by eight o'clock, approaching the main gate of Lindsay Air Station, a satellite military post on the opposite side of the city from the sprawling American air base with its twin runways flanked by dozens of fighter aircraft and midrange bombers. Lindsay, by contrast, was a walled compound of office buildings and residences dating to before the war, when it was a Gestapo headquarters. My driver slowed, approaching the gate. Lindsay was identified in Healy's file as a records processing depot, but Gifford said its main function as a nerve center of U.S. military intelligence was no particular secret. Various buildings housed offices devoted to signals interception, communications security, cryptanalysis, and the management of human intelligence resources—"'humint,' in the jargon," Gifford had said. "What the rest of us call spooks."

"Jesus Christ, Earl. What could my son have to do with spooks?"

"The son of a spook, Paul. Not a spook. It's not the same thing."

I looked over my driver's shoulder to see the compound's buildings looming in the morning drizzle, four and five stories high with steeply pitched roofs and chimneys, all painted the gray-green color one forever associates with the Wehrmacht. The road veered, taking us parallel to a ten-foot wall made of cement blocks painted the same color. Along its top ran a gyre of rusted barbed wire—a wartime vestige, I assumed. The road turned again, bringing us to the gate with its arched entranceway on which was spelled out "H. Lindsay Air Station, the United States Air Force." A flagpole rose above a small guardhouse, the Stars and Stripes drooping in the rain. A figure in an olive poncho stepped out of the guardhouse to halt us with the thrust of a white-gloved hand.

Something in the way the stout black Mercedes slowed to a crawl drew my attention to my driver. Gerhard was a dour German with a deformed right hand, its fingers frozen in a kind of claw that hooked just enough to give him purchase on a steering wheel. A war injury? I never asked. He'd told me once that he had worked as a truck driver for the American military before landing his job as a chauffeur for Chase executives. Thinking of that, I had asked him as we left Frankfurt if he'd ever been to Lindsay. He had said no, but even in the haze of a wet morning, it seemed he'd driven here as if he had, and now he stopped the car on the sentry's dime.

He stared impassively ahead with his window up, so that the American would have no choice but to turn to me in the rear. I was seated on the right side. Gerhard discreetly lowered the left rear window, and the air policeman leaned over to peer in at me. He had an unsmiling black face, but when I saw how young he was, he looked less a sentry than a lost tourist. I reached across to hand him my passport through the window. "I am here to see General Healy."

From under his poncho he pulled a clipboard and matched my passport to it, a futile check for my name. "I am not expected. I assume you'll let him know I am here." I waited for the guard to look at me. "Tell him I'm Michael Montgomery's father."

He turned away, entered his booth, and put a phone to his face. He soon returned and handed me the passport. He began to recite directions to the general's quarters.

"Tell the driver, please," I said.

Only then did Gerhard lower his window.

Moments later, because of the rain, I left the car at a clip, hunched over as I made my way up the neatly bordered chipped-stone path toward Healy's house. As I raised my fist to knock, the door opened ahead of me. An Asian steward—Filipino? His white coat was uniform enough—stood beside the door, ushering me in. I correct myself: not "steward," a Navy word, but "orderly." And probably not Filipino, either. That, too, was Navy.

Without a greeting, he led me across a polished foyer and into a large dining room. Its most striking feature was a gleaming ebony banquet table at which a man in a light blue shirt and dark blue tie was seated, alone, at one end. Coffee, triangles of toast, and a plate of eggs were spread before him, along with a sheaf of loose pages on which I glimpsed, in addition to text, columns of numbers and, on one sheet, a map. Several beats passed between my arrival at the threshold and the moment he looked up at me.

General Healy was a startlingly handsome man. Tyrone Power, I thought, but with a mustache. His dark hair was slickly parted at the crown of his scalp. The fine line of a jaw culminated in a strong chin, which he aimed at me now, quizzically. Instantly, I disliked him.

"Good morning, General. I am Michael Montgomery's father. I am under the impression you can tell me where he is."

General Healy touched the corner of a linen napkin to his mouth with one hand while closing the cover of the file he had been reading with the other. I saw that the jacket was marked "Class II." He rose half out of his chair, indicating a place at the table. "Please join me, Mr. Montgomery." His grace was at the service more of deflection than courtesy. "Will you join me in some breakfast?"

Until that moment, I had not admitted to myself how agitated I'd become through the night, but all at once, faced with his convincing calm, I felt the tension fully—even to note its partly draining away. Whatever else was happening, this man's son was all right. So, therefore, was mine.

I sat in the chair he indicated, recalling from my own time in the service the grave aura the brass seemed always to carry. Admirals and generals say what they want, then wait to get it. We call it giving orders. I had been one of that legion whose job was to obey. But what about when the general is a father confronted by a fellow father? I disliked him, I realized, only because he had somehow taken Michael from me.

"Coffee would be welcome, General," I said coldly, reining in my feelings. "Coffee would be quite enough. Thank you."

The orderly appeared with a place mat, a napkin, and silver, all of which he spread before me with expert flourish. To my right, at the foot of the table, was an untouched place setting, a glass of orange juice already poured. Directly across from me was another setting, a plate with a half-eaten piece of toast, a cup half full of milky coffee. In an ashtray there, a cigarette, half stubbed out, was still emitting its ribbon of smoke.

The general picked up a pack of Camels, popped a cigarette out, and offered the pack to me. We had to reach toward each other for me to take one. The orderly was there with a flaring wooden match—first the general, then me. As I took the light, I saw half-moons in the cuticles of the man's fingernails. I glanced at his face to nod my thanks and thought, Not Filipino but Korean. He left the room.

Smoke billowed in the silence. Finally Healy said, "The boys sprang this on us yesterday. I am sorry you weren't informed. I assumed your son told you. I should have insisted on it."

"Where are they?"

Instead of answering, he put the cigarette to his mouth and slowly drew on it. He exhaled with pursed lips, a thin vapor trail. Only then he answered. "Apparently there's some kind of club trip. That club they have."

"I'm sorry. Club?"

"The sports car business. The Formula One circuit. Juan Fangio. Sterling Moss. Ferraris. Porsche Spyders. They're off on a lark. They've gone to Nürburgring to watch the Grand Prix. I gave Rick permission. It never occurred to me your son hadn't spoken to you if he was supposed to. He's the one with the car. You let him take the car." The general paused, as if underscoring my violation of a rule. But then he shrugged; no violation to him. "It never occurred to me there might be some issue with the dormitory. Chalk it up to mixed signals." Healy tapped the ashtray with his cigarette. "Anyway, they'll be home tomorrow. Nothing to worry about."

My first thought went to the mystery of what defines a father, how different one man can be from another. A club. My son in a club, and I don't know it? Of course, it is the business of adolescents to have lives apart from their parents. There was no reason for me to know it. Mixed signals indeed. My son off on a perfectly normal youthful adventure. Even at worst, I had a son who had deceived me about the car, asking for it with rank premeditation, planning this escapade. Maybe Michael's fight with me—"You treat me like a cripple!"—had also been staged, a ploy to get me to agree. But if so, so what? It would be a shock to be deceived like that, but such manipulation, too, fell within the range of normal when it came to kids. Why do I react as if something terrible is coming? Why does the shock of my ignorance open a wound? And why, when this other boy's father ... And then it hit me: the general is not ignorant, and he's not telling the truth.

"Issue with the dormitory, General? What do you mean?"

"Well, who exactly was giving your son permission?"

"Permission?" I heard myself pronounce the word as if there were an insult in it. "Is permission the issue here?"

"What else would be the issue, Mr. Montgomery?" The general asked his question with a steely edge. I heard the dare in it, and I saw his cold intelligence clear. A formidable man. "If I may ask," he added. "Father to father."

"Simply that my son does not take off for the weekend without telling me."