Secret Father (6 page)

"Well." He paused, but not from uncertainty. The pause was a display of rhetorical authority. "He did this time, didn't he?"

At that moment, as if this delay, too, were controlled by the general, the orderly came through a swinging door behind me. He slid a cup of coffee onto my place mat. I waved away his offer of cream and sugar, yet then I put the spoon into my cup and stirred the black liquid, stalling. How had the general and I become adversaries so soon? Then I realized: he was writing this scene, but I was off the script.

"And who is Sergeant Carson?" I asked.

He shrugged a bit too quickly. "The father of another student. I told you. They have a club."

"So this is an organized trip? Chaperones and so forth? The school involved?"

General Healy pushed back from the table, turning the folder over as he did so, hiding that designation, "Class II." He smiled at me thinly. "I think you know it is not a school-sponsored trip, Mr. Montgomery. I gather you have spoken to Mr. Jones."

"He called you last night, after I called him."

"As a matter of fact, he did."

"As you had instructed him to do. Is Mr. Jones one of your agents?"

"My agents?" The scornful incredulity in his voice—why? The very idea of the physics teacher as an intelligence officer? Or, more simply, that I would be so crass as to make such an open reference?

I pressed him. "A lark, you said. What makes a high school lark a matter of national security?"

Instead of answering me, he let his gaze drift up and to my right. Just as I realized someone was standing in the doorway beyond my line of sight, perfume registered in my nostrils, a subtle but pungent scent.

"Come in, dear," Healy said. "This is Mr. Montgomery, Rick's friend's father."

I started to get up but Healy raised a hand, a gesture that said, Not necessary. I turned nevertheless, half out of my chair. She was tall, very slim—as slim and tall as Edie, whose image ambushed me for an instant. Then I realized why. Mrs. Healy was dressed for riding, in tan jodhpurs and boots that came to her knees. The flair of fabric at her hips emphasized a narrow waist. Her white long-sleeved shirt, like a man's dress shirt, had a column of ruffles to hide its buttons, the top two or three of which were unfastened. Edie, too, had been the sort of rider not to be deterred by a morning's rain.

But Mrs. Healy's translucent white face was very much her own, made all the paler against a downpour of rich auburn hair that rode lightly on her shoulders, still damp from the shower. Was that why she hesitated, a woman unready to be seen by a man not her husband?

But no. Hesitation had nothing to do with her. She had made the doorway into a frame merely by pausing in it. The woman had a lifetime's habit of knowing how to impress. It was unconscious, natural. Once my eyes caught hers for a second, she seemed released to move, as if my being drawn to her was the key to her entrance. She crossed to her chair just ahead of the orderly, who pulled it out for her. They exchanged the barest of nods, a woman accustomed to servants.

"Good morning, darling," General Healy said. The chill in his tone was familiar as one I had struck myself at another breakfast table. The intimate aftermath of lovemaking was not so different, in its complications, from the awkwardness following a particularly painful argument. In my life with Edie, I had become a connoisseur of hurt in the air. Since Edie, I had arranged my life to avoid it, but now, with Michael, had it come back?

"This is Mr. Montgomery," he said again.

But she cut him off, addressing me. "I am very fond of Michael. He is a good boy."

Her simple statement put several things on display. Her accent, most strikingly, a telltale slant in the word "good" toward "goot," the
v
of "very" alliterating with the
f
of "fond." Fewer than a dozen words, yet it was clear that she was German, which in that setting seemed an offense against nature. An American general with a German wife? It seemed impossible. A grown daughter in the States and a son of eighteen. Marriage, therefore, early in the war. Impossible.

Also manifest was my mistake in attributing hurt to her, an assumption of vulnerability at odds with the quick authority she had just claimed. Unlike the general, she knew Michael's name. She had a relationship with him. She asserted the right to judge him and find him good. So why would that cut me?

A more mundane revelation: her timbre carried the gravelly dryness of too many cigarettes. Indeed, she just then opened a silver box on the table in front of her and took one out. The orderly was in the kitchen. Aware of Healy's impassivity, I nevertheless stood and took the two steps toward her, flicking my lighter as she leaned to the flame. Her hair fell onto my wrist. The shower.

That the woman took my gesture for granted, as if I, too, were her servant, made me dislike her as well. How quickly I'd come to be at odds with these strangers. "How do you know Michael?" I asked, back at my place.

"He comes here to dinner with Rick. A special pleasure for us, Mr. Montgomery."

I did not know her son, and it jolted me to realize that I knew none of Michael's friends. What kind of parent never wonders at his son's coming home forever alone? Wonder at it? I welcomed it. Yet now I saw that these friends he'd kept away from me were part of what had gone wrong between us. Karl Marx, misunderstood? What puerile fool had put such a thought in Michael's head? Surely not a general's son.

Mrs. Healy was saying, "Michael seems quite—what is the word—deep."

"Michael is quiet." I let a beat fall, then said, more formally, "He didn't come home last night, Mrs. Healy. He didn't call. That is entirely unlike him. I learned from the dormitory director"—here I shifted to face her husband—"that you know what's going on, General. Your explanation doesn't match what I was told last night. You were about to explain to me what my son could possibly have to do with national security."

"Did I say that? National security?"

"Yes. To Mr.Jones."

The orderly came in again, now with a single egg in its cup and a rack of toast. In the silence that settled over the table, I sensed General Healy's relief to have yet another interruption. The orderly placed the food on the mat before the general's wife, who said, "What will have you, Mr. Montgomery?"

"Nothing, thank you," I answered, although her small mistake in word order made me wonder if these two were putting me on. The orderly left. As he went through the swinging door, I sensed that someone else was in the kitchen, listening. I said, "I simply need to know where Michael is, and then I will leave."

"I told you," General Healy said. "They went to the race, the sports car race." As he said this, he stared at his wife, who had no trouble meeting and holding his eyes, a fierce field of energy between them.

"At Nuremberg, you said."

"No, Nürburgring. A different place."

"But a racetrack."

"Yes."

At that, Mrs. Healy looked down. She picked up a spoon, but only to stare at it.

"And they will be home tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow night at the latest," he answered easily. "Our son is fluent in German, an experienced
Jugendherberger.
"

"What?"

"Youth-hosteler. They're having a blast." He smashed his cigarette in the ashtray.

I turned to Mrs. Healy. "Is that your sense of it as well?"

She continued to stare at her spoon, which was as unmoving as she.

"Of course it is," the general answered. "Isn't it, dear?"

There was command in him now, and she looked up sharply. "Yes," she said quietly. "I suppose it is."

With a concluding air, the general said, "These young people are adults, Mr. Montgomery. I have airmen under my command who are their age. Airmen with real responsibility. Your son is fine. I think you're a little ... overconcerned perhaps?"

Mrs. Healy chose that moment to strike her spoon against the shell of her egg—a punctuating click. The general dropped his napkin onto the table and pushed away. "The kids will be fine," he told me with dismissive condescension. He stood, and to his wife said, "Excuse my not waiting, darling. If I'm going to get on the golf course this afternoon, I have to get to the office now."

Mrs. Healy nodded. Her one hand was tapping the shell of her egg, the other still holding a cigarette. Her hands, I noticed, were chapped, rough-skinned, her fingers blunted.

The general collected the folder from its place on the table, then made a show of waiting for me to stand. "Can I arrange a car for you, Mr. Montgomery?"

"My driver is outside."

"Then I'll show you to the door."

There was no question of my remaining behind, to be alone with his wife. I glanced at her as she wearily put the cigarette to her mouth.

I stood and, following the general's gesture, led the way out of the dining room without a word to Mrs. Healy, who was not going to look at me in any case.

Along the short hallway was a door, slightly ajar. The room behind the door was invisible, but a sharp odor came from it, and I was past before I realized what the odor was—developing fluid. A darkroom. A household with an amateur photographer.

In the broad foyer, sunlight angled through the fanlight above the wide wooden double door, leaving a wash of illumination on the dark parquet floor. Where had the thick weather gone? The buoyant morning light defied the grim weight of what had brought me here without lifting it.

Beside an oval entranceway table—telephone, a woman's kid gloves, a small blue vase with a spray of edelweiss—the orderly was standing with the general's blue tunic ready, holding it open as if it were armor.

Healy turned, and as he did I leaned ever so slightly toward the telephone, the disk with its set of digits.

When I faced the general again, he was slipping his arms into the tunic's sleeves, deftly transferring the file folder from one hand to the other. As he did this, he was watching me closely, working to measure my height and bearing. Physically, we were a match.

A pair of silver stars rode on each of his shoulders, insignia guaranteed to snag the gaze of a man of my time. And as any veteran's would have, my eyes then went to the four rows of banded ribbons on the general's blouse, automatically deciphering. Nestled among theater ribbons were battle honors, including the purple and white of the Purple Heart and the blue of the Distinguished Flying Cross. Despite my visceral dislike, I could not look at General Healy's decorations without admiring him. Whatever else accounted for his marriage to a self-possessed German woman, it was clear, at least, that this man, surviving the chaos ofbattle, had known how to offer survival to others.

Above the ribbons were the silver wings of a command pilot, featuring a star and a laurel wreath. I indicated his wings with a nod. "I gather, as J-2, your flying days are over, General."

He ignored my thrust. "I log my time, Mr. Montgomery. To keep the rating up, for old times' sake." And then he parried, "You served?"

"Yes," I answered, without saying "sir." "Navy. Destroyers. The Pacific."

"And now?"

"Banking."

"Ah, yes. The new Germany."

"With any luck."

As the general looked me over in my gray flannel suit, I wonder now, what did he see? Not, I presume, what Americans think they see in that emblem of faceless conformity. Aware of each other as veterans of the war, Healy and I could assume the same winding of the mind around an absolute past: him at the stick, say, of a B-29 homing in on Düsseldorf, his wingman on fire, his concentration fixed on the cone of target, outside of which all was chaos; me on the pilothouse bridge of the
Stephen Case,
glasses to my face, desperately searching the blue surface for the telltale streak of the second torpedo that had to be coming. We knew it was coming, the skipper waiting for me to tell him where, where, before ordering the rudder over, shifting course to present a shrunken target. I never saw the bloody thing.

The USS
Stephen Case.
Her specifications as permanently imprinted as the address of the house I grew up in. Displacement: 2,200 tons. Length: 376 feet, 6 inches. Beam: 40 feet, 10 inches. Draught: 19 feet, somewhere in the midst of which the unseen second torpedo struck. Crew: 251 men, 23 officers, of whom 197 men and 12 officers died that day when the
Stephen Case
sank in 150 fathoms, 12 miles south-southwest of Vangunu, one of the smaller of the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia. It was February 4,1943, more than three months, the naval historians say, after Admiral Halsey had secured the waters around Guadalcanal. Most of my shipmates were dead, but two weeks later I was on leave in Honolulu, in a hotel room overlooking the beach at Waikiki, sometimes thinking that I, too, had drowned, which alone explained how I could be in bed with Edie, in bed for days. It was the only time in my life when the main sensation, during sex, was of watching myself, as if there were mirrors on the ceiling. I was endlessly fascinated by the sight of my own writhing, naked body, bubbles streaming from my nose as I clawed up, up, up toward the surface of the sea, which, from below,
is
a mirror. I could never reach that surface. A drowning man is his own voyeur.

"What?" Edie had asked, and asked again. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me." When I couldn't, she let me see her disappointment. When we parted at week's end, it seemed we had accomplished nothing, but that was not so. I was assigned to another destroyer in the same battle group, but I never stopped thinking of the
Stephen Case,
never stopped feeling that I had lost her. Edie went back to San Diego, where she worked in the Blood Donor Service. A month later, she wrote to say she was pregnant and heading home to New York, but under Halsey we had pushed all the way through the Solomons to New Guinea. I didn't receive her letter until summer. Michael was born in November.

Somewhere behind us a screen door slammed. Someone leaving the house ahead of us?

With a brusque nod, General Healy turned toward the door, donning his hat. The folder was under his arm.