Secret Father (9 page)

"Katharine. A friend of Rick's, and, I suppose, of Michael's."

"Rick's girlfriend?"

She rotated her hand in a way that said, On and off. "She lives in the dormitory. Her parents are at a base in Turkey. It was her roommate who said they had gone on ahead of the car club to the race at Nürburgring, to see the qualifying heats that began yesterday. Apparently Michael had a car?"

"Yes. I let him take the car to Wiesbaden this week."

"They went in Michael's car," she said without accusation. Still, I heard the implication: Michael's car was the source of the trouble. My allowing a violation of a rule.

"Why didn't you call me?"

"My husband had his reasons. As for me, I honestly thought, as with Kit's parents, that you would not know, or need to."

"And you heard the general tell Mr. Jones not to call me. So you didn't."

"My husband is a man of authority."

"Except where your son is concerned."

"Is that what you propose to do? Calculate a score? One team of parents against the other?"

My silence was not deliberate, yet it served, apparently, to make her hear again what she had said.

She corrected herself. "I did not mean 'team.'"

And that simply, I knew that she knew that Edie was dead.

Any response I could have made would have been insufferably banal—that is how I thought in those days. So I said nothing.

She felt obliged to explain. "Michael has spoken to me. That his mother died not a year ago, I know. That she died in her automobile, I know that."

"There was a collision on a mountain road," I said. And then I surprised myself by adding, "It was an accident," as if Mrs. Healy had wondered, as if I had. In fact, I never had wondered about that. Nothing in Edie wanted to die.

This first explicit reference to her death in—what, four or six months? Is that what drew me into this other woman's aura? I had yet to begin to grasp what Michael's situation might be, yet now, on that chill bench, in damp, blustery air, I found myself examining her face. Again I saw wreckage in her eyes, which, using her cigarette as a prop, she then lowered. Nothing, I sensed, wanting to die in her either.

"I know that Michael's mother was a good woman," she said. "He has told me how close they were, how he misses her. He has told me how she cared for him when he was ill."

"I'm surprised he told you that," I said. "My son is reticent."

"It is a good thing, Mr. Montgomery, to talk about this." She raised her face toward me again, but now with a certain defiance—as if I, an American male,
believed
in reticence. A certain defiance, but also her face seemed unprotected, which made unthinkable any expression of the resentment I felt at her intimacy with my son. Not resentment—jealousy.

"I am sure you are right, Mrs. Healy," I said carefully. "I appreciate your kindness to my son. But I need to know now where he is. What is happening?"

"You are afraid for your son," she said, "but not only because he did not come home this weekend."

"This week was the first time I let him take the car." Now I recognized something else to be afraid of—not that he was hit by a reckless driver, as Edie was, but that he was the reckless kid on the road, hitting someone else.

She went on, "Fear, Mr. Montgomery, can be an expression of grief."

I had to look away. Reticent with
me,
is what I should have said about Michael. How could he have discussed such feelings with this stranger and never with me? Yet look at how I, too, was reacting to her.

The weather had turned dark again, the wind gustier. Clusters of wing-shaped seed pods swirled at our feet. Still looking away, thinking about the war father of her child, I asked, "How do you know that about grief?"

"You ask me that?"

Again I assumed she was rebuking me, the profaning interloper once more. But when I looked at her, to my surprise a faint smile had transformed her face, a resigned expression that asked, below the surface, Where would I start to answer such a question?

Impossible. To change this impossible conversation, I stood up. The winged seeds had been sucked into a whirling funnel between us. "So then," I said, "let's discuss the simpler things. Gross alarm. National security. The danger of my being followed. By your husband's agents? Or some enemy's? My son's disappearance. The breach between you and your husband regarding your son. What the hell is going on?"

She stood, too. She took something out of her pocket, an old-fashioned cloche hat. It had started to rain. She put the hat on without a thought for arranging her hair, then, ducking, she moved past me to dash away, as if the water would hurt her. I went after her, snagging her elbow, the gentleman showing the way. The ridiculousness of such pairing was in the quick authority with which she led me inside the Russian Chapel, pulling the door open, not tentatively, as I had, but as if she had done it dozens of times before. Once more, the relative darkness of the Byzantine interior blinded me.

A flame flared in her hand—her golden lighter. She lit the candle she had shown me and placed it in a cup on the vigil rack in front of the icon. She lit several of the candle stubs. Only now I noticed that the icon showed the face of the sorrowful mother of God—burnished skin, golden braided hair parted in the center, a red robe, eyes cast demurely down toward the lower left corner of the gilded frame. Mrs. Healy stood before the icon with her back to me for a long moment—enough to make me wonder if she was praying.

I thought of Edie. St.John the Divine. Not prayer, but mere refuge.

When Mrs. Healy turned to me, the wavering light was at play on her face, and now her skin, too, was burnished.

The mood cracked as soon as she began to speak. "They found your son's car last night," she said briskly.
You want the answer?
was her tone.
Here it is.

"Where?" I asked. "Are they all right?"

"They found the car. Only the car."

They. Her use and my use of that one word, referring both to our kids and to the shadow figures who pursued them, confused me at first. Then, once more, the refrain:
What could Michael have to do with any of this?

"In an ordinary car park," she was saying. "The car was normal, parked and locked. My husband's flight bag was not there, nor were the young people."

"You have to slow down.
Who
found the car?"

"Military police. American military police. Not German. German police have been told nothing. My husband's men who came to the house last night reported on this. I heard them. Your son's car—a blue convertible. An American car."

"Yes."

"They were looking for it all through the day yesterday on the routes west, toward Nürburg. But the three were not going there at all. The sports car club, yes. But not them. The MPs found the car in a city to the north, which is what..." Pausing, she searched for a word. The flickering light, shadows dancing, underscored the unreality of what was unfolding, made me think of the other chapel, the other nightmare from years before, polio. "...what heightened concern."

"What city?"

"Helmstedt."

I had never heard of it.

"Helmstedt," she explained, "on the border of East and West, at the Allied access corridor that runs through Soviet Germany."

Soviet Germany. As I repeat the phrase she used, I recall that it was a common term for East Germany—the DDR—in those days. To us, that vast continent stretching east beyond the Curtain—Prussia, Silesia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, the entire way to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan—all of it was "Russia," and all of it was Red.

"Helmstedt," she was saying, "is the last place in West Germany where the duty train stops."

"What the hell is that?"

"The American military train into Berlin. It is why my husband is telling you nothing. Telling no one. To avoid alerting authorities in the East. Apparently Rick, Michael, and Kit left the car and boarded the train. Probably in the late afternoon yesterday. A train passed through Helmstedt at four o'clock. Three hours later, having crossed through the DDR"—she pronounced the letters the German way—"they would have arrived in West Berlin."

"West Berlin, Jesus Christ. Three kids can't go to West Berlin on their own." I had traveled there myself around four times in the course of the year, always by airplane, always with a sense of high frontier. Berlin was the pin of the grenade that Khrushchev was waving in Kennedy's face. As if to emphasize that, Communist border guards only the month before had shot and killed a pair of hapless drunks who wandered into a forbidden zone between sectors. There were regular stories of West Germans disappearing during visits to the East. Americans were discouraged from traveling to Berlin without reason, and no Chase employee could go there without authorization from me. "Impossible," I said.

Mrs. Healy nodded at my statement, but it was a contradicting gesture. "If they go by the American Army train, they can. On the autobahn, they would have been stopped by U.S. military police and by Communist
Volkspolizei.
But not on the train, a
military
train. The United States government refuses to let the Communists interfere in any way with its military access to the city. You may have gathered that." The resolve concerning Berlin, the grenade in his face, was Kennedy's way of refusing to blink. "The duty train," she said, "is the main symbol of American will, and so Americans ride it freely."

"But these are kids." What didn't I know about the high noon of geopolitics? What didn't I know about the hijinks of American teenagers set loose in Cold War Europe? What didn't I know about Michael's capacity for deceit and stupidity?

"Each one has an American passport," she was explaining. "And as dependents, each has American military identification. For purposes of the duty train, they are military personnel. Even your son."

Jesus Christ. It was true. I'd had to obtain the military ID for Michael as part of getting him into the high school at Wiesbaden. Officially, he was the son of a Defense Department contractor with the senior civilian rank of GS-19, which was, in fact,
not
true. If there was deceit and stupidity here, it had begun with me.

"Such American identification and a ticket," she said, "are the total of what is required. And the ticket, naturally, like admission to the base theater for the latest films, like bread in the commissary"—she was speaking now with a bitter edge, sounding like a German of the occupation—"costs very little. My husband's colleagues concluded last night that Rick and Michael and Kit are in Berlin, where the search for them goes on."

"But why Berlin?"

"A teenage road trip? What is the new American hero's name? Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac in Europe." She was summarizing her own speculations. "West Berlin, the utopia of pure resistance. The city without
das Heuchler.
The destination of young freedom lovers. German youth are draft exempt if they live in West Berlin. Therefore anarchists, Socialists, cowards come—not for the cabaret, as before, but for the coffeehouses and jazz clubs, like New York. The young have a hundred such reasons to go to Berlin. But my husband has another theory."

"That your son," I ventured, "has his own history there. His own unfinished business involving a family named von Neuhaus." This goddamned family had sucked Michael into this foolishness,
their
unfinished business. I calmed myself to ask, "Wasn't it in Berlin that you were living when you and General Healy met?"

Her looking away from me was an articulate refusal to discuss that past. "One says only 'Neuhaus' if the family is being referred to as such," she instructed in monotone. "The 'von' is a connective, used only as a link with the forename. Americans are always making this mistake, and now ignorant Germans are making it also."

Was this true? How many times had I heard the dead man in Frankfurt referred to as "von Siedelheim" that week? But that had mostly been at the bank. I almost asked her, but her expression stopped me. There was such weariness in her that all at once she seemed an old-world matriarch explaining to a mulish new servant the intricacies of life in the
Schloss.
All Germany was her estate. At that moment, I disliked her intensely.

She said, "My husband's theory concerns the sort of thing that might draw the interest of any young person—a spectacle, an occasion of excitement and adventure."

"What, then?"

"Do you know what day it is?"

"What day?"

"The date today."

I had to stop. The date today? Hell, I hardly knew the month by then, the year.

"May first," she said, as if that explained something. "The first of May, Mr. Montgomery. The great festival day of world communism. This afternoon is the May Day parade in East Berlin, already announced to be a mass display of Soviet power. A display for President Kennedy, the first time ever on television. The Red Army marching up Stalinallee to Alexanderplatz, the tanks, the missiles, the trucks pulling guns, the banners with portraits of Lenin, and the streets lined with a million
waschecht
Berliners.
Waschecht,
a word which is meaning 'washing true.' You say 'colorfast.' Red."

"Tanks, missiles, guns," I repeated, knowing now where the issue lay. Karl Marx, misunderstood! Michael got that bullshit from this other kid, and now he was in danger because of it. But I did not know the half of it.

"Yes," she was saying, "and your son will be there with the son of the man in command of American military intelligence, a boy carrying a bag with silver stars on its tag. My son, a native of Leipzig, now behind the Iron Curtain, yet now with an American name. Your son with identification that is not true. Both of them dressed—how? Blue jeans and tennis shoes. Behaving—how? In a manner to draw immediate attention to themselves, with the Soviets looking for points of complaint. What do you think now, Mr. Montgomery?"

This was thirty years ago, yet I am still capable of reliving the quite physical sensation that came over me then, the weakness in my legs, a near loss of consciousness. Michael at the mercy of the Soviets.
I can't cope with this.
Who had said that to me? Edie, of course. At last I understood what she felt.