Secret Father (11 page)

But I accepted his claim totally once I began visiting his family home in the military compound across Wiesbaden—once, that is, I began getting to know his mother. She was "Mrs. Healy" to me. I could see that she was German, but that wasn't all. From her worldly bearing and careful way of speaking English, it was clear that she was no mere housewife, not even of the hunt club set. Ulrich's mother never referred to her prewar social status, but she was as beautiful and kind as a lonely American boy had to imagine a banished princess to be. I was ready, in that year after my mother died, to fall under the spell of someone else's.

Ulrich was tall and thin, with a striking blond beard that might have made him seem a sailor except for his shaggy blond hair, which grew even longer that year, making him seem a sailor shipwrecked on an island. Ulrich was the first boy I knew who had no apparent acquaintance with a barber. In style and attitude, surrounded as we were by bobbysoxers and soda jerks, he was unique. It was unimaginable that within a couple of years Ulrich's would be the style and attitude of a generation.

Like me, he was new to the school, and to the smug culture of American Army brats. He was there after completing all but his last year in the far more rigorous course of a boarding school in Dorset, England. When I told him about St. Dunstan's in New York, where the teachers dreamed of waking up as British schoolmasters, we agreed we had survived the same shipwreck—although it was obvious that we were both better educated than the kids around us. Ulrich explained that he had demanded of his parents the right, as a German, to attend school at least for one year in his native country before going off, according to his parents' plan, to an American university. His father's idea ofsaying yes, he snorted, was a year at H. H. Arnold High.

Ulrich's accent floated between British and German. That, his whiskers, and the embarrassment of his father's rank combined to make him an instant misfit in the chipper high school. Like me. We instantly liked each other. I tried hard to carry myself like a survivor of combat, but most students kept their distance. That was not generally a matter ofill will, I knew. Rather, wanting not to rudely look at my deformed legs, my callow schoolmates simply avoided me, and soon enough it was as if I were not there. I suppose that behind my back the cruel ones called me gimp, or crip, or some such thing, although if they did, I never heard it.

I knew from hearing it, though, that behind Ulrich's back they called him Fritz. And I knew that when we became friends, they called us Katz and Jammer. Ulrich might have found himself on the social margin just because of his readiness to associate with me, but in fact his quasi-pariah status was set less by his accent, appearance, or family status than by his air of condescension. He held in open contempt the athletes and cheerleaders who embodied the character ideal of the school so aptly named for a guy called "Hap."

"Hip Hip High School," Ulrich dubbed it. One day early in the year, standing before the general's oil portrait in the school foyer, he told me who Arnold was—a leader of the American bomber command who saw to the obliteration of the city of Hamburg. In one night's bombing in July of 1943—a few days after he was born, Ulrich said—the Allies killed more German civilians than English civilians were killed in all the Luftwaffe air attacks and blitz raids throughout the war. When I asked him how he knew this, he stared at me coldly, and I knew to believe him. Years later, I would learn that fifty thousand citizens of Hamburg had died that night, and that he was right.

Ulrich was, to my knowledge, the only other student in the senior class who read novels not assigned by Miss Klein, the English teacher. Once I asked him why he was reading
The Brothers Karamazov,
and he replied that Dostoyevsky was unafraid of things as they are, which stumped me. My fears had been tied to the future, not the present. Only then did I begin to recognize things as they are as
the
things to be afraid of.

When, another time, I told Ulrich that my father and I lived in Frankfurt am Main, he held up a book and said joyously, "He is from Frankfurt!" The book was in German, but even I could take in the title as
Eros and Civilization,
the author as Herbert Marcuse, whom I had never heard of. When Ulrich realized that, he set to work on me, launching an open-ended tutorial in the theories and slogans of what would later be dismissed as the faddish New Left. To me the ideas seemed elusive, and I only pretended to grasp their urgency. Eventually, though, I began, as we said, to true-believe.

My reading tastes had set me apart from other kids, too. Rainer Maria Rilke was my idea of a writer to carry around. I took his famous letters as addressed to me alone.
You must think that life holds you in its hand, will not let you fall.
I remember how Ulrich hooted when I recited that line from memory. "Rubbish! Of course it will let you fall. What the bloody hell is polio if not life letting you fall? What is the death of your mother if not that?" Before long, under Ulrich's influence, I began to criticize Rilke as apolitical, but that did not keep me from the consolations of his eloquent sadness. I continued to read Rilke, but without quoting the letters or poems to Ulrich.

Soon Marcuse formed the pulse of our conversation, and I began distinguishing between the language of dispute and of feeling, the one public, the other private. It was an inhibiting dichotomy that took me years to overcome. "Happiness is freedom," Ulrich quoted the philosopher as declaring, and I recall nodding at the grave implications of the statement. We were sitting now in a corner booth of the Zimmertal, a becurtained
Konditorei
down the hill from the American enclave where the high school was, a place our classmates spurned in favor of the snack bar at the base exchange with its molded plastic chairs, ferociously orange. Ulrich and I were smoking our French cigarettes and drinking black coffee, hunched together over the book, dotted with pastry crumbs. Sexual freedom, political freedom, personal freedom, intellectual freedom. There was nothing in the text about freedom from crutches.

I said yes to all of it, but heard myself asking, How do we actually live when we are free? I remember repeating the question, but couldn't make my meaning clear to Ulrich. It was enough to admit to myself that his talk was weightless, which didn't matter. I liked it anyway. The happiness for me wasn't freedom. It was his company.

Ulrich was the first person from whom I heard the word "bourgeois" outside a classroom, and to my horror, that day I realized he could be talking about me. His denunciation of what he called the economic hierarchy, the waste and war it leads to, the slaveries of fascism and Soviet communism alike, but also the stupefactions of materialism, what would later be called consumerism, the hypocrisies of Victorian repression—all of it to be overthrown by the coming generation,
our
generation, the hope of a utopian future. Youth! Ulrich introduced me to the solidarity of the young.

I objected that I felt no solidarity with our ball-tossing classmates up the hill, and weren't they young? He easily turned my assertion into evidence of alienation, which was the only authentic way ofbeing young. That idea seemed tailor-made for me.
I love this guy.
Yes, I said, to all that he was teaching me, while I dared not reveal that my father worked for the Rockefeller family bank, the very counting-house of hierarchy.

Eventually, after he'd begun to confide his secrets in me, I did tell him what my father did. Ulrich lived in a general's house. I lived with a capitalist overlord, and if my mother had been a European, she'd have been a baroness, too. We laughed and laughed at the contradictions we had in common, aware that no one else would have seen what was funny. It was only then I realized that in Ulrich, my first real friend, I had my first real secret from my father. There was no question of bringing Ulrich home to Frankfurt on a weekend, no question even of discussing him there. That recognition was my door to freedom, and changed everything.

Once, the bond I'd felt with my father had been absolute. During my various recoveries, he had carried me places until I became too heavy, and even after that I continued climbing into his lap, and he let me. All the more reason for being appalled now at what, in my rebellion against that intimacy, I did to him.

After my mother's death, he had his sorrow and I had mine, and by then there was no carrying or being carried, holding or being held. Yet for a time the simple fact of my father's presence seemed the only antidote to the pain in my chest that at intervals left me choking in the air-lock vacuum of her absence. Sometimes I would awaken soaked through with sweat, and like during my time in the iron lung, I would be terrified of suffocating. For the lung-clearing vapor of my father's presence, I had come to Germany with him instead of staying in New York and boarding at my old school, where the other boys around me had developed the vague look of statues.

But our time in Germany also coincided with my reaching an age when I simply had to have my distance. He, too, could make me suffocate. I came to admit, for one thing, how little my father and I actually had in common—an experience of which he was ignorant, yet with which I became obsessed. "There is more to life than making money," I declared to him one day that spring, a first expression of disagreement.

"Yes," he shot back. "There is having your own convertible."

A neat parry, that, since I had only moments before asked for the car as my own. We were at a restaurant on the Rhine, one of our Sunday outings.

"But making money
off
money, Dad. What kind of life's work is that?"

I was both satisfied and ashamed to see his face register my question as a blow. I did not know it then, of course, but I was desperate to defy my father because he was making me crazy, using me to plug the gaping wound caused by my mother's death. He had not killed her any more than I had, but for each of us, guilt and grief were bound together. We were companions in that complexity, but we were rivals in it, too, until events of that May Day, my true rebellion, released us from the prison of one loss into another. As if I saw that coming from the vantage of the garden restaurant, a foreshadowing, I stormed away from the table, deflecting my fresh guilt into silently cursing him as a goddamn materialist. That was a word I had from Ulrich. It had begun to matter less whether my new friend held my father in contempt than that I did.

But Ulrich gave me a language with which to define the differences between the world I'd come from and the outlines of a world I'd begun to see in the haze of my future. Except in those jolting exchanges, I could not discuss any of this at the house on Mosbacher Strasse, and thankfully my father seemed hardly to recognize those exchanges as the arguments I knew they were. What he took for my moody adolescent silences during our long drives through the vine-covered hills of the Rhine, I regarded as a dutiful protection of his illusion that his little boy still needed to be kept from harm. What a resentful jerk I was.

 

Later in the year, again at the Zimmertal, Ulrich declared himself to be what he called a neo-Marxist, which was the first time I'd heard that soon-to-be-ubiquitous prefix. It removed little of the bite of "Marxist," and we both knew that his Air Force father would have taken mortal offense at his defining himself that way. There is no conveying now the offense implied by such a label in 1961. In the States, the Red Scare was still on, and Ulrich's declaration meant, in my leaping imagination, that I could be subpoenaed to testify against him. Also, there was a thrilling, slightly salacious naughtiness in the statement. Still, by then I had learned to argue with Ulrich, had learned it from him. "A Marxist?" I challenged. "Like Stalin?"

"No, like Groucho," he cracked. "Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Neo." But he was dead serious, and launched into his case. With Marcuse, Ulrich measured Soviet Marxism against what he called classical Marxism, as if it were music. He measured Lenin and Stalin against a mythical Trotsky, standing sentinel on the road not taken. The problem with Marxism was that it had yet to be tried.

Later in the decade, with the aging Marcuse seduced into the role of senescent pied piper, a legion of glib young radicals would reduce such sentiments to self-serving clichés, but in 1961 a heartfelt simple call for social justice could blow the lid off unexamined assumptions of innocence, both personal and national. I knew enough to take Ulrich's declaration as one of high commitment, and it was a milestone for me as much as for him.

Surely by now the bind is clear. I was a boy born to be good. Brave diligence—first in the face of my disease, then of my disability—was the mode of my triumph, and therefore, eventually, the measure of my character. I am certain that my mother would have loved me anyway, but that I coped so well at her behest, earning an endless litany of accolades from doctors and therapists and also teachers—wasn't that what had compounded her love with pride to make it infinite? I was raised to believe that if I did everything my mother told me to do—as she rubbed my legs with aromatic lotions, manipulating my ankles and knees to quicken the dead muscles, massaging the flaccid skin to firm it up—nothing bad would ever happen to me again. Polio had been my one lightning strike, and for all there was to hate about it, wasn't it behind me?

And then she died. What did brave diligence have to do with that? It took me a long time to figure out that the truck that slammed her off the road and down a ravine was driven by a drunken redneck kid and not by my lost twin, called forth from some mystery zone of fate. My father wanted very much to be the one who enabled me to come to that healing recognition, the knowledge that we are responsible not for the shape of the universe but only for what we do—but he wasn't. Ulrich was.

"The power of negative thinking," he declared, citing Marcuse again, "is a force for human liberation." Disobedience could be a virtue. Everyone in Europe seemed to want to move from East to West, but not Ulrich, and then not me. Recklessness could be a virtue, too. And what the hell, having lost my good legs and my mother, what else was there to lose? I never imagined that there was Ulrich, who also never imagined what his loss would be. Why were both of us so blind to what could happen?