Denial (15 page)

W
e all try and we all fail, at least to some degree. My father has tried harder than most. My father and I continue our conversation about fear, the shameful under-current of so much our lives, both his and mine, but about which we never spoke, until now.

“Do you like taking risks?” I ask him. It is still the same day he told me about the Nazis. I know the answer to this—I've been the beneficiary as well as the victim of my father's love of risk. But I'm not sure he knows that he is drawn to danger.

He thinks for a moment. I wonder if he considers risk-seeking behavior irresponsible.

“Calculated risks, yes,” he says. “Professionally, yes,” he adds, electing to stay on safe ground. “My program was to be canceled at Lincoln Lab [MIT's defense lab, where my father worked for
nearly forty years], and I had to pick a new target for the group. I could have followed everyone in the field.

“I would have been following other leaders,” he clarifies. “Instead I picked a very difficult target, and I offered that. My sponsors were very surprised. I was proposing to achieve a thirtyfold increase in the capacity of our technology. And then I worked very hard with my associates, and from that point on we could do no wrong. That was a risk, but it was calculated…. I believed in the physics.”

“Do you like to take risks in other areas of your life?” I ask, naughtily.

“I get curious about how one does things,” he says. “Like going into the mountains in wintertime, because you keep hearing stories of occasionally people dying. And I was curious. I got out a handbook, and I went with a group from the Appalachian Mountain Club. I followed along with them.” Eventually he would become a certified guide.

My father took us into the mountains again and again. He told us that God is in the mountains, not in the synagogue, and I thought—and still think—he might be right. At least he might be right about one path to the divine.

The night before we left for our mountain trips, we would make a pilgrimage to Eastern Mountain Sports, where we bought supplies and rented equipment we might need in case of ice or snow—gaiters, snowshoes, and crampons. Back then, such equipment was a novelty in America. My father could be cheap, but not when it came to equipment that would keep us safe on the mountain. We would be prepared, or so we thought, for any contingency, loading our backpacks into the car the night before in order to be ready to leave before dawn.

During these trips, it was as if we had pressed a refresh button on our father. He was excited and exciting; pleased with his own self-discipline and strength, and pleased, equally, with ours.
Here is what we learned from our father during that period: if you push yourself hard but pace yourself, stopping frequently to “refuel,” you can accomplish nearly whatever you set out to do—a lesson that can take you far in life. My closest childhood friend, who often accompanied us on these trips, became an Olympic rower, eventually winning a bronze medal. She attributed her success as an athlete to the persistence and self-discipline she learned from my father.

I have been wondering whether my father might have pushed us a bit too hard at times. Nonetheless, I am shocked to hear him admit that he was drawn to climbing in winter because he had heard that people died up there.

“When you took us up Mount Washington that time in January, was that the first time you tried climbing it in the winter?” I ask, referring to a trip we took in 1972. I was fourteen years old.

Mount Washington is dangerous to climb in the winter because of the cold and wind, and because of the risk of avalanche. Most hikers stick to trails known to be safe, but we did not. We slid down the snowfields, using our ice axes as rudders.

Mount Washington Observatory warns climbers, “Mount Washington's weather has been called ‘the world's worst,' since the fiercest winter conditions on the mountain rival those of the polar regions and the highest mountains on earth.” The meteorological conditions are sometimes fatally severe.

It was indeed very cold. Icicles formed on our noses, brows, and lashes.

“Very strong winds are quite common in winter on the mountain. Mid-winter sees daily average winds of between 45 and 50 miles per hour. Typically, two days out of three will yield hurricane force gusts (73 miles per hour or greater).” The observatory lists for potential hikers the kinds of emergency equipment they will need, warning those who are not expert climbers to be sure to climb with experienced guides.

“I'd been winter climbing for some time,” he says, “with a group from Lincoln Lab.”

I ask him about the way we descended part of the mountain, sliding down the snowfields. “I read later that you are not supposed to slide down the mountainside like that—that it can create an avalanche,” I point out, trudging into unfamiliar territory, tacitly accusing my father of something. But what? Frightening us?

The observatory admonishes climbers, “Any winter climber should also strive to learn more about avalanche hazard, how to recognize it, how to avoid it, and should also learn basic avalanche rescue procedures. Avalanche is not an idle or theoretical threat.”

“We never went to a place that had avalanches,” my father says.

His statement is patently false, but I don't correct him.

“I was taught how to slide down the mountainside—it's got a technical name,” he says.

Soon after we commenced our climb, we had to cross a frozen stream. The water was wild, and the ice was thin in places. I lost my balance, and my foot fell through the ice. But we kept going. My father likes to meet his goals. We had the right equipment to keep us warm and safe, but not necessarily the right frame of mind. There were some young engineers from Lincoln Lab who came with us, and perhaps my father didn't want to disappoint them by having to turn back because of a girl's clumsy slip. Of course, I would not have dreamed of requesting to turn back: I wanted to finish what we set out to accomplish almost as much as my father did. Not surprisingly, one of the toes on my right foot turned numb and dark from the cold, but I didn't notice until we got home.

My sister and I fell behind for a time. We ran into each other, each of us walking alone, both of us crying, both of us ashamed
to admit to the other that we thought we might die from exhaustion and cold. We were accustomed to our father pushing us to the edge of our physical strength, but this was beyond the edge. Conceding our exhaustion to each other was a shameful admission of failure of will. We trudged on, and soon enough reached the unheated lean-to where we would spend the night. I remember that my father drank cognac from a flask, laughing with his climbing pals. But I was not having fun. I was freezing. I remember wondering how I would get through the night. This was not the most dangerous thing I've ever done, but it was one of the most unpleasant nights I've spent.

The next day, although the temperature was well below zero Fahrenheit, the sun shone brilliantly. If I want to recover a feeling of euphoria, I return in my mind's eye to the sun on that snow, the silence, the sensation of strength in my muscles.

There were many mountain trips, most of them wonderfully fun. We got so strong that we would run up and down the mountain, despite being burdened by old-fashioned heavy equipment and packs. But the winter trip to Mount Washington brings to mind another trip we took, another trip that frightened us.

“How about the time we camped above the tree line in early spring and got caught in a thunderstorm?” I ask him, almost showing my anger now, anger that until now I wasn't aware I felt.

We had camped just above one of the huts that function as rustic inns. When we walked by the hut, which was not yet open, we noticed that workers were in there, getting the place ready for spring. We thought of those huts as serving the wealthy and the weak, people who lacked discipline, people whom—in solidarity with our father—we held in utter disdain. Nonetheless, when it began to storm, my sister and I begged our father to walk down to the hut, where we thought we would be safe.

“When it became clear that the lightning might strike us, I
took the tent down. It had metal poles that could attract lightning,” he explains. Somehow, in this exchange, he has reverted to mountain guide and I to a foolish girl, as if my sister and I had been the ones who resisted taking down our tent rather than the other way around.

“The boys in the hut were demanding that we walk down,” I remind my father. “They were furious at you for disobeying the rules. They said we were foolhardy, that we were risking our lives.”

“It wasn't against the rules,” my father insists. “It became illegal in the 1980s. That was bullshit. It was not illegal then,” he says, truly angry now at the recollection. “I remember those hut boys giving me all kinds of lip. I knew they had to provide us shelter. That is the
AM
C [Appalachian Mountain Club] rule,” he admonishes me, in lieu of those insolent boys, who are not physically present in the room with us now.

“Did you report them?” I ask, wondering how far my father would have been willing to take his rage back then, even though we truly had been foolhardy, as the “hut boys,” as my father referred to them, had said.

“I thought it was trivial,” my father says now, swatting at the recollection of the hut boys' “lip” and his pesky, candy-assed daughter.

Candy-assed
is one of my father's favorite derisive terms.

“Your memory and mine are disparate,” my father concludes, dismissively. “My memory of it was a calculated risk. I didn't think there would be thunderstorms. It was in May. There was no snow and ice at the time.”

But I want to return to my father's childhood experience of fear. I have more important fish to fry here.

“Tell me more about what happened when the Nazis went after your mother with the guns,” I ask. “Was that time the Nazis
came into your house the most frightening incident of your childhood?”

Now that we've dealt with cold and ice, perhaps the Nazis' visitation will be easier.

“I don't know,” he says.

He thinks for a moment.

I cannot look at him. I am nauseated again, with the sensation of floating.

“My father was virtually absent in my life from the time I was six until we emigrated,” he says.

I had never heard this before.

And now, as I read this over, it occurs to me that my father was virtually absent from our lives after our mother died. We lived with our grandparents until my father married Lisa, and I did not even know, until recently, that my father was living with our grandparents, too. He came in late and left early, sometimes staying out all night, somewhere closer to his office.

“Did you feel abandoned when your father kept disappearing like that?” I ask.

“I didn't have any feeling about my father one way or another,” he says matter-of-factly.

He turns to a discussion of the relatives left behind, the ones the Nazis killed.

“I had a strong attachment to my cousin Inge. We did everything together. We made up our own language. She was energetic and full of fun and playful. She was the apple of my maternal grandfather's eye. He favored her very strongly and ignored me completely,” he explains, as if that were the rightful order of things.

“Were you jealous?” I ask.

“Yes. She was a free spirit. Spritelike in my memory. I loved her. She was my only friend,” he says.

“She and my aunt Ella were sent to a work camp. She would have been eleven by then. And they labored in the work camp. ‘Arbeit Macht Frei.' It said that over the gates. Nazis kept very good records. My aunt died in the work camp. But Inge was forced to march to another camp where they exterminated Jews. She was killed in the very last hours of the war,” my father says matter-of-factly.

“Normally you would expect your father to protect you. Didn't you feel badly that your father was in hiding, that he wasn't at home to take care of you?” I ask, returning to our earlier topic.

“I heard that he was strong and protective and stalwart. I never experienced this myself—except before the Nazis. I have a memory of him as a strong and safe person around the household. He loved me during that stage, before the Nazis came. He had me help him in the fields. I would lead horses for him while he plowed. He would take me with him on a sleigh ride. Once, when I was around five years old, when we were at the blacksmith's after the horse was shod, he threw me up on top of the horse—it was a huge workhorse—and said to me, ‘Ride home.'”

“Were you afraid?” I ask.

“I had all these examples from my brothers.”

I have heard this story before, and my father knows it. It is a story with a happy ending, a story about the good effects of pushing children to overcome their fear. Is my father stalling? I wait to see if he will take up my question. Maybe my father reads my silence.

“I didn't feel I was protected,” he concedes. “But I don't think I would have felt protected if my father were home. I felt exposed and afraid, and there was no one who could protect me. But he couldn't have protected me anyway. He was under threat. In retrospect, had my father remained there, he would have been killed.

“For four years I was terrorized,” my father summarizes.

“Did you ever have another period of terror?” I ask.

He doesn't answer.

“Were you afraid when my mother died?” I ask, pushing myself to broach a topic even more off-limits than the Nazis.

“No. My memory of that period was, she would get fearful and I would try to comfort her and reassure her. I was spending a lot of my time imagining how she was feeling. I accepted cancer as a way of the world, a fact that you dealt with as best you could. But it was a heavy weight on my being, it was always in the back of my mind.”

“But you weren't afraid?” I press.

“No,” he says. “There were no Nazis waiting in the wings.”