Secret Father (12 page)

It is the advantage of mature adulthood that we can acknowledge, through memory, the complexity of what drove us into the dangerous thickets of youth, which at the time seemed like the wide-open road. If only we could have done so then, seeing, for example, the absolute relevance of the fact that Ulrich, as a small child before memory, had lost his biological father, lost him to the wrong side of an evil war. And it was absolutely relevant, if beyond us at the time, that without his father, he had had for a crucial period the tenderness and protection of his mother entirely to himself. Her attention was the warm bath he never had to leave. From her, just when he needed it most, he had the guarantee that reality is benign, that life is trustworthy, or, as Einstein put it, that the universe is a friend.

That guarantee was betrayed, as he had to have experienced it, when she turned her tender affection toward someone else. Ulrich's mother married General Healy when Ulrich was six, but his life would take its shape from once having had her complete devotion. To subsequently embrace an ideal of "socialism," as it would be called, "with a human face" was to affirm the primordial faith that lovingkindness is at the heart of this cosmos, as he had so firmly been convinced when he had his mother to himself. By the time I knew him, his hedged longing for affection, which on a larger scale we called justice, made Ulrich like every young person. But his unquenchable belief in its possibility made him different. In that, more than in the length of his blond hair or his infatuation with Marcuse, he was my first radical. In that, he was unforgettable.

But Socialist hope goes hand in hand with rage at the cruelties of the present world: starving children, moronic mass media, the sewer of politics, the greed of the elite. Yet what could have been more enraging than the injustice of Ulrich's own life? To be the heir of a Nazi nation he never chose, burdened with its guilt, deprived of a
Volk
to love, and then to be adopted out of it by a tribune, as it had come to seem, of the new empire? The global domination and rank materialism of America could seem to be embodied, to Ulrich
were
embodied, in his father's confusing alternations between the demand for obedience and the bribery of what passed in America for status and affluence. Ulrich's rage at his father, I see now, sprang from the double bind of both resenting him and needing him, of having been rescued by him and orphaned by him, too. For who was General Healy, finally, but the one who took Ulrich's mother away, making Ulrich hate her for what she then became, an American general's dutiful wife? And why should such a boy not have been hurt and angry, with the depth of hurt and anger from which comes every act of true rebellion?

 

Ulrich told me why he had acceded to his parents' expectation that he would attend university in America, and not in Germany as he'd long hoped. General and Mrs. Healy assumed he would be attending Georgetown or the University of Wisconsin, to which they knew he had applied. But in fact he intended to go to a school in Boston called Brandeis. I had never heard of it. Brandeis was where Marcuse was teaching, Ulrich explained, Marcuse having never returned to Frankfurt after fleeing the Nazis. Ulrich had even written to Marcuse, who had yet to answer. He had applied to Brandeis without telling his parents, an act that made no sense to me. I was slated to attend Princeton, where my father and grandfather had gone, and I took the legacy for granted. Despite myself, my frame of reference was still firmly adolescent, assuming as I did that even our acts of rebellion would somehow be parent-sponsored.

Near the end of April, Ulrich received his long-awaited letter from the admissions office at Brandeis, but it informed him only that his application was incomplete. The parents' form was not filled out, nor was the section having to do with financial aid and method of payment. "Parent signature required for validation," read the bold letters that some clerk had underscored. Parent-financed was the point.

But Ulrich could not admit that as the issue. He took the letter from Brandeis as a rejection pure and simple. In effect, it was, since there had never been a chance that his parents would approve a plan to go there, and Ulrich was certain he knew why. "Brandeis is a Jewish university," he told me. "Marcuse is a Jew. He teaches there because he had to reject Germany. Brandeis rejects me now because I am German."

"That's ridiculous," I said. "How would they even know you're German? You go to an American high school." I threw my arm in a half-circle, gesturing at the school building behind us. We were standing on the cinder track, alone, beside the athletic field with its fresh crop of fragrant green grass. Ulrich had waited for me outside my last study hall and led me down here, far from the other kids, to tell me his news. "The people at Brandeis," I said, "would no more think you're German than they would me."

Ulrich laughed dismissively. "Date of birth, 1943. Place of birth, Leipzig."

"But your name is Healy. Rick Healy."

"On this application, my name must be Ulrich von Neuhaus, my name at birth. To call myself Healy is false."

"Your mother's name is Healy now. How can that be false?"

"To call myself Healy is to be a hypocrite, a German in hiding from what we did."

"You didn't do it."

He answered only with that cold stare of his, and for once it chilled me, as if I, too, fell within the range of his negation.
Poof! Cease to exist!

We were on the cusp of a question, a nest of questions that were beyond me then. Corporate responsibility, the moral content of memory, the difference between regret and repentance, sins of the father, guilt of the son—all of it. Ulrich was miles beyond me in knowing how the past, as he put it to me once, paraphrasing Marx, "weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living."

After a long silence, Ulrich restated his conclusion. "Brandeis is Jewish. I am German. Of course, with this technicality they reject me. Of course, Professor Marcuse refuses to reply to me. And I blame them for nothing."

With that, Ulrich turned on his heel and walked rapidly toward the school, his pace making it impossible for me to follow. As he took the news from Brandeis as a personal wound, so I took his striding away—the only time he had ever used his good legs against me.

It was two days later, the last day of April, that he showed up at my door in the dormitory. The time was shortly before reveille, as the Army brats called the shrill bell that sounded each morning at half past six. But on this morning, his low whistle from the threshold of my room was enough to wake me.

"And you are coming with me," he decreed with a flamboyant hush, and as if his sentence had had a beginning. He looked first one way down the corridor, then the other. Apparently satisfied that he was unobserved, he leaned against the doorjamb, grinning. He was wearing a white shirt, a necktie, and a brown corduroy sport coat, way overdressed for a normal day at school, which was my first clue.

He carried a blue canvas bag with a shoulder strap. I knew it was an Air Force bag, which was unusual for him. The kids of Hap Arnold had plenty of government-issue paraphernalia—bomber jackets, overseas caps, knapsacks—and they seemed to take special pleasure in flaunting such symbols of the occupation on German streets, but I had never known Ulrich to do that. He always acted in downtown Wiesbaden like the American half of his identity was the thing to be ashamed of. Among Americans, he acted like his father's rank was the embarrassment. That he was wearing his father's shoulder bag, therefore, I knew to take as a second clue.

His capricious grin was irresistible. His hair was so blond that, had he been a girl, it would have seemed bleached.

"Going with you where?" I asked in a hoarse whisper. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, in my underwear, half asleep. In the bunk above me, my roommate, a clunky boy named Corky Murtaugh, slept soundly. Murtaugh was unwakable, and would be until just before breakfast shut down an hour and a quarter from now.

"Road trip,"Ulrich answered. "
Wandervolk. Wanderschaft.
"

"When?"

"Today. Now."

"We have school. What are you talking about?"

"They let the football team miss school." When Ulrich said "football," he meant soccer. "Why not us? I give you my dispensation, old boy."

I laughed. "And who dispenses you?"

"You do."

"Not a chance, comrade, not a chance. Besides, I have to get back to Frankfurt today. My father let me take the car. I have to drive it home after school. I told you that."

"Indeed, you did." Ulrich's grin broadened.

"You bastard. The car is why you're here. You don't want me, you want my damn car.
Wanderschaft,
my ass. You want me to drive you so you don't have to hitch. You bastard. 'Shaft' is right." I flung one of my two pillows at him.

He caught it and held it back toward me as if it were a tray holding something precious. "Monty, Monty, my good man." Ulrich could mimic his mates from that English boarding school at will. He always feigned Britishness when he called me Monty, as if I were the field marshal. He called me that when he wanted something, perversely mocking me, since he knew I hated it. "Monty," he said. "
Carpe diem.
This is the day the Romans were talking about when they said that."

"He's right, Monty," someone said from behind him. Even before she stuck her head in the doorway, I knew from her voice it was his girlfriend.

Automatically, I pulled my bed sheet forward to cover my left leg. Instead of just being scarred and too thin, like my right, my left leg was a gnarled stick, lacking even the hint of a calf muscle. It humiliated me—I felt the heat come into my face—to think she had seen it. No girl had ever seen my legs.

She was another senior, famously named Kit Carson. No one could blame even a girl for adopting the nickname Kit, with that last name. Each one of us had a pose, and hers required dressing in black—not like a cowboy but a "modern dancer." She wore black tights under her sweater and skirt, which made her look even thinner than she was. Kit was a waif with hollow eyes, evoking Edith Piaf. I had hardly ever spoken to her, though she was also a dormitory resident, living upstairs on the girls' floor. And I understood then that she was how Ulrich had gained entrance to the building, which was off limits to nonresidents. But then, the boys' floor was off limits to girls, and there she was.

"Kit is coming, too," Ulrich said. He put his arm around her shoulder, and the easy way she leaned into him made it seem they'd been intimate, perhaps that very night. Then I recalled Ulrich telling me they had cooled it with each other a few weeks before. But what did I know? The girl thing was not part of what Ulrich and I had in common. This was before the so-called sexual revolution, but that high school had sex in the air, and the openly erotic restlessness between boys and girls was something else that set me apart. Given my physical inhibition, I assumed that sex with a girl was a card I had not been dealt. Feeling bad about it was no more to the point than feeling bad about that other missing card, my calf muscle.

Corky just then rolled over with a grunt, making the bunk rock. Perhaps he somehow sensed the presence of a female. Kit disappeared behind Ulrich, who said, "Meet us at the Zim." He checked his watch. "It opens at seven. That's forty minutes.
Mach schnell!
" And with that, Ulrich hoisted his bag, pulled the door closed, and they were gone.

I had never been in the Zimmertal at that hour, had never seen it crowded with Germans on their way to work, men and women in their various uniforms: the ubiquitous blue smocks of laborers, the black housecoats of
Putzfrauen,
the brown-and-green jackets of municipal employees. They were drinking bowls of
Kaffeeweiss
and eating
Konditorwaren.
These were people whom we Americans rarely saw at ease among themselves, and as I entered the café there was a downshift in their free-spirited talk, a signal that they registered my arrival as an intrusion. But when I jerked my way among the tables to the booth where Ulrich and Kit were already seated, the room's hum adjusted, and the workers stopped looking at me.

Ulrich had a German-language newspaper open on the table in front of him. He was reading intently, ignoring me, which made it seem normal for me to slide onto the same bench with Kit. "Hi, big guy," she said, then raised her eyebrows to indicate that she, too, thought Ulrich rude. Already I sensed her brashness, her readiness to give expression to whatever she thought.

She had a journal-sized notebook open before her, a faint blue tint to the ruled pages. She had been writing in it, and I noticed that her pen was the stiletto-like instrument that draftsmen use. With a glance, I saw that she had printed minute letters, each one inside its square, forming words on the page, lines of prose. "What's that?" I asked.

"Keeping my accounts," she answered, closing the book, letting me see the green cloth cover with its printed word, "Accounts."

Ulrich read through to the end of whatever article had snagged his attention, then muttered something to himself in German as he folded up the newspaper. It was that day's
Frankfurter Neue Presse,
and on the front page was a large photograph of a man in a glass booth wearing earphones. It would become a famous image, but I had never seen it, and assumed the paper was featuring another story about the quiz show scandals in America—the isolation booth, the headset. How Europeans loved those symbols of our decadence.

Ulrich looked up at me. "So you came."

"To breakfast, yes." I grinned. "But I have algebra at nine." I looked at Kit. "You too, right?"

Instead of answering me, she ran the tip of her forefinger along the edge of the powdered sugar on her plate, rectifying it.

A waiter came, and I asked for coffee with milk.

When he was gone, Ulrich said, with a gravity that surprised me, "These days are testing us. Now it is my duty to put the test to you."

Once more I glanced at the girl, and was taken aback when she flashed me another quizzical look, as if Ulrich's cosmic consciousness had made us allies.