Secret Father (8 page)

"I apologize, Mrs. Healy, for putting you in a difficult position."

"Not difficult. Impossible."

"I understand."

"No, you do not understand, because you could not understand. When you came to our quarters this morning, you—what is the word—trespassed on a different realm."

"Trespassed? And so one must be aware of being followed?"

She shrugged. "If you are seen doing business with my husband, you become of interest."

"To whom?"

"Shadows who watch from shadows."

"But there are no shadows on an American air base. Unless American. Who would have seen me coming and going except people under your husband's control?"

She glanced at me, a quick dismissal. Shadows, she had said. Shadows in shadows. Spooks. "They watch you?" I asked.

She snapped her head to the side, no. "I am taken for granted. I am the clock, the chair, the domestic pet, the
Frau.
Nothing to notice if I maintain my routine, which normally I do without thinking. Today I must think about it. That is why I made you wait. I had to take my horse out. The day must be like any other. It is why my husband goes to the office this morning, the golf course this afternoon. A Saturday like any other."

"And your visit here?"

She cast her eyes toward the golden domes. "My
kleine Kapelle.
An ordinary visit. I come often here. I say a prayer. I light a candle. I am alone. The place has the advantage of being too obvious to be observed." Without moving from where she stood, she thrust her gloved hands into the pockets of her coat, a definitive gesture.

She let her gaze come surely to mine. Nothing uncertain in her, yet her eyes skittered away, the domestic pet made to scat. An ambushing qualm, I felt it, too. Strangers, yet from the moments in the dining room of her refusal to second her husband, and of my instinctive memorizing of a telephone number, we had taken a plunge into the surreptitious.

Nothing to do against a climate of deceit but openly declare whatever comes to mind. "I went into the chapel, Mrs. Healy. Candles, you said. No one lights candles in there, not in ages."

With that, she took her hand out of her coat to display a small white candle about two inches thick, four inches high. Stubs of such candles were what I'd glimpsed in the vigil rack before the icon, wrongly taking them for an ancient vestige of devotion. Was it also my mistake to have assumed her readiness, like her husband's, to lie?

As if reading me, she looked away. This rendezvous, all at once, could seem to be aiming at anything. I became more conscious still of her exceptional attractiveness, how life had ushered her, whether gently or not, out of the round lightness of youth into the far edgier gravity of a woman who knows what time it is, knowing what time is doing. It was a trajectory I had tracked once before in watching Edie across twenty years. For a brief while the previous summer every woman had reminded me of Edie. Then none had.

"My husband is afraid that our son has stumbled, how to say, into his arena. That is why my husband is not telling you. He cannot."

"But you can."

"But I know less than he."

"A clock, you said. A chair. Furniture is witness to everything. Your husband confides in you."

"Not as you mean it. But in front of me he takes calls. For meetings in the middle of the night, people come to our house."

"Last night."

"Yes."

"This morning. Someone was at the table just ahead of me at breakfast."

"Yes."

"And you listen?"

She did not answer, but I sensed that this was what she had come to speak of. "You listen," I said quietly. "Because this time it's not the U-2. It's your son."

She gave me a look. "How do you know about my husband and the U-2?"

"General Healy's weather reconnaissance wing? Is that still secret?"

She laughed. "Not from the Russians."

"How long was it secret from you?"

"You should perhaps understand something, Mr. Montgomery. My husband tells me nothing. And I need to know nothing."

"How does that work, if you don't mind my asking? Your husband suddenly is a weather forecaster, and you don't wonder?"

"To the U-2 I never gave a thought. But this is different."

I saw that this was what I'd walked into that morning, the fierce electric air between them. This
was
different, because Rick could not have stumbled into his father's arena without bringing in his mother. To which the general had said, practically in front of me, no.

And then I saw something else, a simple matter of arithmetic that all but an oaf would have calculated at once. An eighteen-year-old boy would have been born in 1943, of an American father or a German mother—not both. "Rick is
your
son, and not the general's."

She shook her head, denying not my point but its unhappy implication. "That has nothing to do with this. In all ways that matter, my husband is Rick's father."

The crisp certitude of her statement reminded me once again of Edie: the antidote to doubt is assertion. If Edie, in her anger at me, took a curve on that mountain road at sixty miles an hour, it was because she knew there would be nothing coming at her from the other side. Surely not a ratty pickup truck being driven by a kid who'd been at his father's moonshine.

"So 'Rick' is short for—?"

"Ulrich. I told you that."

"And his biological father—?"

"Killed in the war," she said with exquisite abstraction.

"And you and General Healy—?"

Now she looked at me sharply, as if my concern had become interrogation. Nevertheless she said, "We met in 1947 and married in 1949."

"In Berlin."

"You know that?" Surprise transformed her face into something youthful, innocent almost.

"I know from having read the general's official file that he was stationed in Berlin in 1949."

She stared at me for a long moment, and I found it possible to meet her hard look. Finally she said, "I did not come here for discussing my husband or my life."

"I understand that, Mrs. Healy. You told me to meet you here because you want me to know what you think is happening to our children."

She nodded.

"So why not tell me?"

She slowly removed her gloves, then stuffed them in her pocket. When she brought her hand out, she held a nearly new pack of cigarettes, blue in color, French—not what she'd smoked in her dining room. While she readied one, I went for my lighter, but by then she had hers out. It was gold, slim, monogrammed. I took it from her, as men did in those days, and offered its flame. The cigarette drew my attention to her fingers and hands, which, I saw now, were more than chapped. They were vaguely twisted, misshapen. The nails were manicured, but there was a thickness in her knuckles, a hide-like quality to the skin that was completely unlike the rest of her. She had the hands of an overworked peasant.

When she'd exhaled, she cast her eyes about, then led me to a bench in the shadowy lee of the chapel.

We sat side by side, out of the wind. I became aware of being cold. My raincoat was in the car with Gerhard, who was—what, resentfully cooling his heels at the station? With my left hand, I stroked my right arm to warm myself, waiting for her to speak.

"Thursday night, Rick and my husband fought." Her rough voice was eerily devoid of affect. "The plan had been for Rick and his friends—although not including Michael, as far as I knew—to leave for Nürburg at the end of school on Friday. Rick suddenly wanted to, you say, skip?"

I nodded.

"Skip his classes, to leave Wiesbaden in the morning.
Friday
morning. A day of school. I had told him no, impossible, which he seemed to accept. But when my husband came home—the general was very late that night, having been away—he said that missing a day of school was forbidden. This is what I had said, what I had thought Rick accepted. But now Rick defied my husband. At times they are very angry with each other, and they were then. My son is very much needing to be—" She stopped, more full of feeling than she had, until then, made evident.

"Himself?" I suggested.

She nodded. "He is a German boy living as an American. Until this year, he was in schools in England. And it is very confusing for him. Ulrich is his name, but everyone calls him Rick. Even I do. And he says that now seems wrong."

"Why England?" I asked.

She ignored the question, which I would remember later.

"On Thursday night he said the name 'Rick' seems wrong to him, but he said it angrily. My husband hardly heard him, and answered that such feelings are irrelevant, but I think not. My husband will not be contradicted in an argument. Meanwhile, Rick—Ulrich—will no longer be commanded into obedience. As if a child."

As she spoke, it was Michael's face I was seeing—
his
mouth twisted with resentment. So this kid Ulrich was the source of Michael's new rebelliousness. I felt the rush of
my
resentment again, happy to have this other family to blame.

"My husband," she was saying, "told Rick that the Nürburg trip was off, and that instead he was confined.
Confined.
As if the boy had been brought before a military court. Confined for the weekend. As soon as school was out on Friday, yesterday, Rick was to be home and in his room. Ridiculous idea. Do you confine your son?"

I shook my head. I couldn't even say no to him about the car this week, when I should have.

"Rick banged into his room, the slam of his door sounded like a gunshot."

"I heard a gunshot recently," I said, not knowing why I brought that up. Deflecting the memory of a slamming door?

She didn't hear me anyway. She went on, "Then I told my husband I thought they had both behaved like children. I went to bed, and by the time David came into our room, I was asleep."

She had finally referred to her husband by name—an unconscious expression, perhaps, of the moment's intimacy, a thwarted intimacy, to be sure. But I knew from life with Edie that the heat of argu-ment was still heat. Mrs. Healy stared at the red tip of her cigarette. Aware of myself as an uninvited witness to this family's complexities, I knew better than to prompt her, but I also knew that the story had just begun.
Where the hell is Michael in this?

"The next morning—yesterday—we woke to find that Rick was gone. He left a note on the kitchen table, addressed to me, in German, saying only that he could no longer go on living like a
Heuchler,
a hypocrite. The purity of youth. He signed it formally, 'Ulrich.'"

"Rejecting his American name," I said.

"Yes. More completely than you think. He signed it 'Ulrich von Neuhaus,' as if he is no longer one of us as Healy. And then he is leaving the note in the kitchen where my husband, too, would read it. Von Neuhaus is Ulrich's name before my husband adopted him as a boy of six, my husband who loves him as I do, but who cannot understand his impossible position."

"Von Neuhaus," I said softly, sensing the blow it would be to Healy. "His biological father's name."

"No," she said a bit too emphatically. "My family name."

"But you said—"

"Von Neuhaus was Ulrich's original name because his father and I never married. His father was the war. That is all."

"I see," I said. But of course I saw so little. The aristocratic "von" would explain her self-assured bearing, although now she seemed ready to forfeit that under the weight of sadness. The barest alteration in color had come over her throat and neck, a pinkish flush that rose from the chute of two slender bones just visible inside the collar of her coat. As she drew on her cigarette, her cheekbones seemed to press out against her skin. Impossible position, she had said. The wave of feeling I saw in her seemed one of simple regret, as if her choices, long made, more than her husband's or her son's, were the ones that had been wrong.

"Rick was gone," she said slowly. "And"—she paused, flagging what she was about to say—"so was my husband's flight bag."

"What?"

"His flight bag. An overnight bag. A government-issue canvas bag with zipper pockets. It was gone. Apparently Rick took it. That seems to be the main problem, Mr. Montgomery. My husband's problem—his flight bag. He had brought it the night before home with him, after being away, supposedly in Brussels, but I do not know. Such things he does not confide in me, as I said to you—nor should he. I know what I know only because I saw his irritation at Rick become a matter of gross alarm when he realized the bag was gone."

"National security."

"I believe so. Yes."

"Why would Rick take his father's bag?"

"He needs a bag. He sees a bag. He takes it." She shrugged, shaking her head. "An expression of anger, perhaps." She smiled wanly. "But also maybe the Air Force bag had its own appeal. This could be near to funny. Our rebellious son who works to be free of his father's shadow, who wants to reclaim a pure German spirit—still, he loves to be the American general's son. In his British school, until last year, it was the nationality. In the American school this year, it is the rank. He hates it. He loves it. If he took my husband's bag, it is, I think, also because of the letters printed on the blue canvas: USAF. Because of the silver stars on the tag, making it a general's bag."

"So what does your husband carry in such a bag? What would alarm him?"

Mrs. Healy shrugged again, definitively this time. She dropped her cigarette distractedly, an indifferent bombardier. Her foot went quickly to snuff it, a firm movement that took me into a vivid memory of Edie's shoes, shoes with heels, straps, buckles, shoes on her feet or sideways on the floor, kicked off in the bored aftermath of an evening, or in eagerness, kicked-off shoes beside satin underwear.

She said, "So both of us went to the high school. There was no question, since this was Rick, of my not going. It was not yet nine in the morning. We learned soon enough, waiting until the attendance roll was taken, that two other students were also absent."

"Michael."

"And Kit."

"The girl."