FOR MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS DAVID PATCHEN SUSPECTED THAT HIS friend Paul Christopher had saved his life in battle. There was no eyewitness proof that this was so, only a few fragments of circumstantial evidence and memories he could not trust. Patchen never mentioned his suspicion to Christopher, though he often had the feeling that Christopher was waiting for him to do so. Christopher was his only friend, and before she was expelled from the Outfit, Maria Rothchild told Patchen that she believed that Christopher was his only link to human emotion. “You’re like a disembodied spirit, following him around, watching him live, wondering what it would be like to have a body and a heart and believe in something,” she said.
This was close to the truth. Even as a child Patchen had been an outcast, and after he was disfigured by his wounds, he might as well have been the last Neanderthal man, living in disguise among Cro-Magnons, for all the connection he felt to other human beings or they to him. The only exception to his loneliness was Christopher. Why? Late in their friendship, after Christopher was captured and imprisoned by the Chinese Communists, Patchen thought about this strange circumstance with new intensity, and came to the conclusion that it was because Christopher knew something about him that he himself did not know, and did not wish to know.
Whatever this was, it happened on Okinawa on the night of Thursday, May 24, 1945, when Patchen was blinded (or so he thought at the time) by a Japanese hand grenade. He was returning from a patrol along the Shuri Line when an enemy soldier leaped out of the darkness and grappled with him. It was like being attacked by a lynx. The Japanese, who seemed to be naked, his skin smeared with some sort of grease, fought with the brainless fury of a cat, clinging to Patchen’s back and raking him with a knife. He was small but almost unbelievably strong. He seized Patchen’s helmet and jerked his head back, trying to cut his throat with the knife. Patchen dropped his rifle and seized the other man’s wrist with both hands. The Japanese continued to pull on the helmet and Patchen heard himself gasping as the chin strap cut into his windpipe.
Patchen, nearly unconscious, whirled in the darkness, trying to dislodge his attacker. Finally he threw him to the ground. The enemy’s knife flew out of his hand. He looked around desperately for his weapon, then scuttled away down the hillside, doubled over like a four-footed creature. He was wearing a white loincloth that bobbed in the darkness like a tail. Patchen drew his pistol and pursued him, bleeding and gasping. He found the Japanese crouching in a foxhole. He had wound a white rag around his head; his right arm, the one Patchen had seized, was broken. He cradled it with the other hand and shrieked in pain or terror in a weird feline voice. Roaring wordlessly in reply, Patchen lifted his pistol. The Japanese stood up and extended his left arm, stiffly. Patchen saw that he was holding a live grenade. For an instant his hand and the muzzle of Patchen’s .45 almost touched. Patchen squeezed the trigger and felt the recoil a fraction of a second before the grenade went off in an eruption of fiery splinters.
Oddly, Patchen did not lose consciousness immediately, but this made him think that he was dead, because all his senses were extinguished by the explosion. He heard nothing except a soughing non-sound like the imitation of surf in a conch shell. His’body was numb. He tasted nothing and smelled nothing even though the mud on which he lay was saturated with the feces and the rotting dead of two armies. He knew that his eyes were open, but he could see nothing, not even the residue of light captured by the pupils just before the lids closed. He stared, but saw only blackness; when he stared harder, the blackness deepened. Then his hand moved and he knew that he was alive. The hand touched his right eye, then his left, and sent a message to Patchen’s brain that what it had encountered was formless slime. “My God!” he cried; these had been his eyes. He felt himself going under. The blackness deepened. He did not think or resist, but his mind, which had retained the last image his retina had captured, projected the grenade onto the screen of his memory, where it detonated again.
After a time Patchen woke up. At first he felt no pain, only a dreamy awareness of his injuries. Then, one by one, all his senses except sight returned. He could hear the stutter and pop of small arms fire and the muffled explosion of shells and the voices of Japanese soldiers shouting insults into the night. Patchen’s throat was parched, but he did not dare reach for the canteen attached to his ammunition belt. What if a Japanese was watching him, bayonet at the ready, for some sign of life? Without warning, very close by, a wounded man screamed in a tremendous howling voice, so close to Patchen that he twitched in fear. He thought, What if the Jap isn’t dead? What if his attacker was waking up, too? What if he was creeping toward him now with one hand blown away and a knife gripped in the other? Alone, defenseless, he waited, trying to feign death in case the Japanese stumbled on him. What if it wasn’t a knife his enemy held in his remaining hand? What if it was another grenade?
The pain in Patchen’s eyes was so intense that it made his body thrash. He could feel the involuntary reaction coming and he tried to control it, but in the end he was unable to do so. His face, his clothes, his whole sweaty body inside the thick cotton drill of his denims, were smeared with congealed blood. He groped under his clothes. To the touch his blood was sticky and scabby, like dried paste, and when he lifted his fingers to his nostrils it smelled like nothing Patchen had ever smelled before.
Each time he lost consciousness, he mistook what happened for death, only to wake up again to realize that it had not yet discovered him. When soldiers died in books they remembered moments of happiness, they saw beloved faces and heard their mother’s voices. In Patchen’s case, none of these things happened. He merely slept and woke and felt unbearable pain, and then slept again. He was awakened time after time by the screams of the wounded man who lay nearby. No matter how hard he listened, he could not tell if the voice belonged to an American or a Japanese.
Then he woke up and realized that he was being carried over the ground by another person. This rescuer, whoever he was, had slung Patchen across his shoulders and he was running in zig-zags over the blasted terrain. The man was very strong and swift. He seemed to be alone; there were no other voices, no other footsteps.
Patchen was wide awake now, but he existed in a bubble of quietude, floating inside the clamor of battle, in which all noises were distinct and separate. He heard his rescuer panting, he heard water sloshing in his canteen, he heard the thud of boots.
A mortar round detonated behind them and Patchen’s rescuer dove forward, spilling Patchen onto the ground. He lost consciousness again. When he woke up, he was alone. His rescuer had vanished. Perhaps, Patchen thought, he had never actually existed; maybe he had imagined it all, maybe this was simply part of the process of dying. Was death itself a rescue? He drifted into unconsciousness again.
When he woke he felt himself being borne across the battlefield by the same running man. This time his rescuer was grunting out numbers in German as he rushed over the mud and slime, counting to four—”Eins! Zwei! Drei! VIER! Eins! Zwei! Drei! VIER!” over and over again. Who was this person?
Shells from American warships offshore moaned overhead and detonated on the Japanese positions. Mortar rounds burst all around them; the snicker of small-caliber Japanese bullets filled the air. Suddenly Patchen’s rescuer grunted and fell to the ground with Patchen on top of him. Patchen reached out convulsively and gripped his leg just above the top of a Marine-issue boot. The man shouted in pain and pried Patchen’s fingers loose.
“Don’t do that again,” he said in a low, barely audible tone, as if he might be overheard above the din. “Can you hear me?” “Are you the corpsman?” Patchen asked.
“No. I was just passing by.”
“Oh,” Patchen said. “Was that German you were speaking?” “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because German is the only language lions understand,” the man replied.
“Lions?” Patchen said.
He lost consciousness again.
PATCHEN’S FRIENDSHIP WITH CHRISTOPHER BEGAN ON THE DAY HE discovered that he was not blind after all. He had spent a week in total darkness, with his entire head swathed in bandages, before a cheerful Navy physician unwound the gauze and let in the light. At first he thought that the indistinct glow filtering through the layers of gauze was an illusion, a trick of the mind, but then his remaining eye, the right one, was completely uncovered and it began registering images—a lamp, a row of surgical instruments laid out on a towel, a poster of a human head with the skin removed so that the muscles and eyeballs were exposed, and the round freckled face of a red-headed man wearing the undersize silver oak leaves of a Navy commander on the collar of his khaki shirt.
“My name is Dick Conaghan,” the doctor said. “I’m a plastic surgeon—in the Navy. In civilian life I was a podiatrist, so I can only do one face. Everyone leaves here looking like Cary Grant. Okay?”
Patchen had not spoken since being evacuated from the battlefield, and he could not speak now. Conaghan shone a penlight in his eye, then examined the left side of his face.
He said, “Do you remember what happened?”
Patchen shook his head.
“That’s okay. Hardly anyone does at first. You were wounded by a grenade. The damage is all on the left side of your body, so you must have reached for it before it went off, or something. It may all come back to you eventually, but then again, it may not. Don’t worry about it.”
Patchen listened in silence, waiting for darkness to descend again. He still believed that he was blind, that he was imagining, rather than actually seeing, the objects in the windowless room. Conaghan seemed to understand this. He gripped Patchen’s unwounded biceps and squeezed it hard.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re not going to be blind. You’ve lost one eye, but the other one is going to be okay. I wouldn’t bullshit anybody about a thing like this.”
Patchen cleared his throat. “I believe you,” he said. “I’m just surprised. I thought I was blind until you took the bandage off.”
Conaghan cursed. “You mean nobody told you you still had one good eye?”
“No. What else is wrong with me?”
Without hesitation, Conaghan told him the details: he had taken the full force of the exploding grenade on the left side of his body. His face, his arm, his leg had been badly damaged. His left hand could be used as a claw, but he would never be able to write with it again.
Conaghan said, “Are you left-handed?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. You were lucky,” he said. “They found you right away and got you to an aid station. Otherwise you would have bled to death.”
Patchen remembered something about this, the sensation of being carried by another man. He closed his eye, trying to recapture the details. Conaghan misunderstood his reaction.
“We can fix you up,” he said. “Not like new, but you should be able to live a normal life. What sports did you play in high school?” “Football, baseball, basketball,” Patchen said.
“What I want you to do is write to your mother and your girlfriend, using your right hand—you might as well get used to it—and ask them to send you all the photographs and snapshots of you that they have—all of them, plus your high school yearbook. Okay?”
Patchen nodded.
“Tell them why you need the pictures, so we can fix your face,” Conaghan said. “Tell them what’s happened to you. It’s better that they know the truth right away. Have you got a girl?”
Patchen nodded.
“She’ll be okay,” Conaghan said. “Believe me, the ladies don’t object to honorable wounds.”
“Is that something else you wouldn’t bullshit me about?” Patchen said.
“That’s the last thing I’d bullshit you about,” Conaghan replied.
He rebandaged Patchen’s head, then clipped holes in the gauze for his eye and mouth. Patchen couldn’t walk so Conaghan himself pushed him in a wheelchair. After a swift passage through a maze of corridors, they arrived in the ward. Patchen noticed immediately that he was the only patient whose head and face were completely covered by bandages. In the bed next to the one with his name on it, a blond man with his leg in a cast was reading a book.
“I lied to you,” Conaghan said. “Not every patient ends up looking like Cary Grant. Sometimes I slip. Leftenant Christopher, here, came out looking like Alexander the Great. Paul Christopher, shake hands with David Patchen.”
Christopher, smiling quietly, put down his book and leaned over and shook hands with Patchen. Under his Navy-issue bathrobe, his chest was heavily bandaged.
“Yeats?” Conaghan asked, craning to read the title on Christopher’s book. “Slip me a stanza.”
Christopher, smiling, read the first eight lines of Sailing to Byzantium aloud. His voice was pleasant, but barely audible. Conaghan held a hand behind his ear, like a deaf man; Christopher spoke in a murmur.
“Beautiful,” Conaghan said. “Christopher’s a mumbler, but he’s the only other intellectual in the Marine Corps besides yourself. He even tells war stories in iambic pentameter. Gotta go.”
After Conaghan left, Patchen said, “Did you really have plastic surgery?”
“No,” Christopher replied. “He just noticed me reading poetry one day.”
Patchen knew this faint voice. But how? He did not recognize Christopher’s face or anything else about him. He asked another question.
“Were you on Okinawa?”
“Yes,” Christopher said.
“What outfit?”
Christopher identified his unit. He spoke so softly that Patchen had to ask him to repeat what he said. They had belonged to adjoining battalions in the same regiment.
Without warning, Patchen began to weep. He did not know why this happened, but he was powerless to stop it. Tears welled up in his single blue eye, wetting the gauze that surrounded it; he uttered a series of brief, muffled sobs. Christopher did not avert his eyes or offer to help. After a few moments Patchen stopped crying.
“Do you play chess?” Christopher asked.
Patchen nodded. Despite the cast on his leg, Christopher swung himself out of bed, easily and smoothly, as if the movement was some sort of pleasurable gymnastic exercise, and sat in a chair facing Patchen’s wheelchair. They played on a tiny portable chess set belonging to Christopher. He was an excellent player, but his moves were almost entirely defensive, as if the outcome did not matter to him.
“Why are you doing that?” Patchen said, after the second game.
“Doing what?”
“Letting me win.”
Christopher smiled. “It won’t happen again.”
Those were his last words until lights out. He won six of the next ten games, but Patchen realized that he was still holding back, still was not playing as well as he knew how, as if his skill was a secret he was unwilling to share.
In the morning, Conaghan came by early to examine Patchen again. Christopher was already awake, reading again. He took the book out of his hand and looked at the title.
“Wilhelm Meister by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe?” he said. “Lieber Gott—enemy literature. Read something.”
“It’s in German.”
“I know that. You can shout.”
Most of the ward was still asleep. In the same murmur as before, Christopher read:
“Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.”
“Gorgeous. What a genius, even if he was a Kraut,” Conaghan said. “What does it mean?”
“ ‘He who never ate his bread with tears, who never sat on his bed weeping through the sad night, knows nothing of Heaven.’ “
“See?” Conaghan said to Patchen. “I told you this guy was an intellectual. How about you, David—are you fluent in a foreign language?”
“I can count to four in German,” Patchen replied.
Christopher gave him a look of interest, but said nothing. “Great,” Conaghan said. “You can be a sergeant in the other army if the Krauts win the war.”
Although Patchen, at that moment, did not even know why he had said what he had said about being able to count in German—he spoke no German, did not remember the words of the man who had saved his life until months afterward—it was at this moment that he began the long process of remembering what had happened to him on Okinawa.
SOON AFTER THE FIRST OPERATION ON PATCHEN’S FACE, HE AND CHRIStopher and a few others were wheeled out to the hospital’s parade ground to be decorated. Patchen received a medal for having wiped out an enemy position in hand-to-hand combat; he had no recollection whatever of the feats described in the citation.
Christopher was given the same medal for having rescued two wounded Marines under heavy fire, at night. According to the citation, read over the crackling loudspeaker system, he had carried the men home in relays, carrying or dragging one inert body twenty yards or so in the direction of the American lines, laying it down, going back for the other, and repeating this process until he brought both wounded men safely inside the perimeter. He had been wounded in the leg by Japanese small arms fire, and then shot in the chest by a U. S. Marine who fired on him when he rose out of the ground in front of the latter’s foxhole with one of the rescued men in his arms.
This man saved Christopher’s life, because most of the eigh .30-caliber rounds fired by the panicky sentry struck his unconscious body instead of Christopher’s. The citation did not mention the circumstances in which the chest wound was inflicted. It was Christopher who supplied this detail later on, in answer to Patchen’s questions.
“Didn’t you give the password?” Patchen asked.
“Yes,” Christopher replied. “But I don’t think he heard me. Nobody ever does.”
“What happened to the guys you brought back?”
“The sentry killed the one I was carrying—he fired a whole clip at us. The other one lived.”
“How do you know?”
“I brought him in first.”
Christopher, limping along beside Patchen’s wheelchair, unpinned the medal from his chest and put it into the pocket of his bathrobe.
Patchen said, “Why did you go out after those guys in the first place?”
“I didn’t,” Christopher said. “I was already out there, coming back from patrol, just like you were. I was carrying one of my own men back when I stumbled onto the other fellow.”
“How did you find him in the dark?” Patchen asked.
“It wasn’t difficult,” Christopher said, giving Patchen a puzzled, sidelong look. “He was making a lot of noise.”
“What kind of noise? The whole island was one big noise. How could you hear him?”
“He was screaming,” Christopher said. “His wounds were pretty bad.”
Something flickered in Patchen’s memory.
“I think I heard him, too,” he said.
PATCHEN UNDERWENT ELEVEN SEPARATE OPERATIONS TO RECONstruct the face that Conaghan saw in Patchen’s high school yearbook. When it was over, his left cheek remained paralyzed, but this was noticeable only when he smiled or displayed emotion. His left arm and leg, which had absorbed the main force of the exploding grenade, were stiff, and his left hand was useless.
Christopher remained in the hospital, in the bed next to Patchen’s, for about a month after the medal ceremony. He made conversation in the way he played chess. He volunteered no information about himself. He listened. He understood. He did not interrupt. He never argued or corrected, even when error was obvious. He behaved as if the lives of others were far more interesting than his own, and a better topic of conversation. In the sense that this reticent behavior concealed the facts of Christopher’s life, even his beliefs, from everyone else, it was a subtle form of deception; Patchen understood this even then, but it only made the other man more interesting. He asked him few questions.
“When did you learn German?”
Looking up from a book: “As a child.”
“Where?”
A smile. “In Germany.”
“Are you German?”
“Half, on my mother’s side. My father’s American.”
Christopher went back to his book; he seemed to live for books. He was always receiving them in the mail, and he read two or three a day; many were in German or French, and these he covered with brown wrapping paper to deflect curiosity. He gave away the ones in English, novels and poetry, as soon as he had finished them.
To distract Patchen from his pain after he came back from surgery, he read to him, not stories or poems, but facts. Holding a whole stack of books in his lap, he would read passages that informed Patchen that the amazing valor of the Japanese soldier had less to do with the code of Bushido than with the law of primogeniture, in which eldest sons inherited everything, and younger sons who had no hope of inheriting anything, or even marrying, went into the infantry. Or that Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation of Henry the Fowler, a tenth-century king of Germany. Or that Squanto, the Indian who taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, had asked for a mug of ale, in English, on his first appearance in the Plymouth Colony; he had traveled to England aboard an English ship sometime before 1620 and developed a taste for the stuff.
Patchen remembered these odd facts for the rest of his life. Christopher’s reluctance to talk made Patchen confessional. After Christopher told him about his mixed parentage, he revealed that he was only half American himself. His father was an Englishman, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps who was shot down over the Western Front in 1918. His father and mother had met at a Nurses’ and Officers’ Ball on July 4, fallen immediately in love, and been married a week later. They had two weeks together in Paris, dining every night at Maxim’s, before he went back to the Front and died.
Every year, on the anniversary of his death, Patchen’s mother had shown him blurry photographs of his father standing beside his Sopwith Camel and documents and souvenirs relating to him—their marriage certificate, written in French in a copperplate hand, a Croix de Guerre with palm, and the letter written by the elder Patchen’s commanding officer after he was killed. Patchen had memorized it. “My dear Mrs Patchen,” it ran, “I am very sorry to tell you that your husband, Captain David Alan St. Clair Patchen, died on the 10th inst. whilst leading a patrol behind enemy lines. His flight was attacked by a larger German force and though he fought gallantly against overwhelming odds his machine was hit by enemy fire. Another officer who was by his side during the whole action reports that Captain Patchen’s wound was instantaneously fatal and he did not suffer; there was no fire. You have my deepest sympathy in your great loss as well as that of every man who served with your husband who was a very gallant and much admired officer. Yours truly, [ILLEGIBLE].”
Patchen’s mother had returned to Ohio to bear her child. He had never met his English relatives; the marriage had been secret.
Christopher’s wounds healed long before Patchen’s, and he left the hospital with orders to report to an infantry unit that was training for the invasion of Japan. Patchen learned this when he woke from an operation and found a goodbye note in Christopher’s peculiar European handwriting. Everyone believed that more Americans would die in the invasion of Japan than had been killed in the whole war so far. Two weeks later the atom bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Patchen was relieved that Christopher would live, but he believed that he would vanish back into whatever world he had emerged from.
He was surprised, therefore, when he met him in Harvard Yard on a balmy Indian summer day a year later. Christopher was walking along by himself, reading a book. His gait was perfectly normal; so normal that he might never have been wounded. Patchen himself was still using a cane. He leaned his weight on it and spoke Christopher’s name.
Christopher looked up from th book and said, “Hello, David.”
He had never seen Patchen’s original face, let alone the new one fabricated by Conaghan, because it had always been swathed in bandages.
“How did you know who I was?” Patchen asked.
“Who else could you possibly be?” Christopher asked, smiling.
PATCHEN HAD COME TO HARVARD BECAUSE HIS FIANCÉE WAS IN HER senior year at Radcliffe College. Her name was Martha Armstrong, and like Patchen she was a birthright Quaker; they came from the same town in Ohio. Patchen, who received a disability pension as well as a monthly allowance under the G. I. Bill of Rights, had plenty of money. Martha, who was at Radcliffe on a scholarship, had none, but she planned to get a job as a teacher as soon as she graduated and save half her salary, together with all of Patchen’s pension, toward the cost of their honeymoon, which they had been planning ever since they decided to get married. “Unless,” she said, “I hear the call. Or David does. If that happens we’ll make other plans.”
She meant, Patchen explained, a call from God to do His work. “She’s a hell of a lot more likely to hear it than I am,” he said to Christopher. “It was hard on her when I joined the Marines. But even after she saw this …” he pointed to his face, the only time Christopher ever saw him draw attention to his injuries … “she never reproached me. She’s a good person, Paul.” In any other man these words would have been meant as an apology for Martha’s plainness, but Patchen was as oblivious to her lack of physical beauty as she seemed to be to his wounds. It was obvious that they loved each other. They went for a walk along the Charles together every morning before classes, studied together in the library every evening, and on Saturdays went into Boston to visit museums or go to a Red Sox game. Christopher often went with them, never taking a girl of his own because he felt that this would violate the couple’s privacy. When the three of them were together, both Patchen and Martha were talkative, even gay; in the presence of strangers they were silent.
Patchen loved baseball. He said that he felt at home in Fenway Park because the Red Sox fans were like Cleveland Indians fans: loyal and passionate but childlike and ignorant. He had a theory that the players on both teams habitually lost the big games out of a subconscious need to punish their fans for their stupidity. “Imagine playing day after day in front of thousands of people who scream hysterically for pop-ups, sing a song that says Dominic DiMaggio is better than his brother Joe, and think that baseball was meant to be played without the bunt, the hit-and-run, or the stolen base, just boom, boom off a tin wall,” he said. “Look at Ted Williams’s face; he’s playing in a state of hopeless disgust.” Martha chided him when he spoke in this way. “Thee must not be so hurtful in your opinions,” she would say. She studied at ballgames and cried in the movies, which were often, in those days just after the war, about sad misunderstandings between wounded veterans and the girls who loved them. She and Patchen seemed to have no misunderstandings. Christopher liked her tremendously, and while she was still in Cambridge she provided him and Patchen with an inexhaustible topic of conversation.
She graduated the following June. In September Patchen and Christopher became roommates; they had met too late the year before to move in together. Christopher’s room contained a great many framed photographs and drawings. Most of these were pictures of the same pretty, fair-haired woman. She appeared in riding clothes, in a white tennis skirt, in a bathing suit, and many times in sailing clothes aboard the same boat.
“Your mother?” Patchen asked.
“Yes.”
Oftentimes the woman held a child in her arms. It was obvious that the child was Christopher; his face resembled hers very closely. Patchen had become interested in art at Harvard, and he had encountered versions of the face Christopher shared with his mother in the engravings of Albrecht Dürer, especially the one called Knight; it was not that Christopher looked like Dürer’s romanticized subject, but that some hint of the knight’s features was present in his own still face. The effect was reinforced by a drawing in which a very young Christopher and his mother were idealized as Madonna and child after the style of the Italian Renaissance artists who had inspired Dürer. In another, larger drawing executed in pre-Raphaelite terms, she faced the artist serenely, feet together, arms hanging easily by her sides, nude and in an early stage of pregnancy. She was very young, with wide intelligent eyes, exquisite breasts, and graceful legs that were somewhat longer than they ought to have been in proportion to the rest of her body. She was smiling a deeply happy smile, as if she alone knew the secret of her condition. This astonishing picture, so perfectly drawn that it was more lifelike than a photograph, and the fact that it was displayed on Christopher’s wall, made Patchen uncomfortable; he did not know what to say about it. Christopher clearly understood this; he even seemed to be amused by Patchen’s embarrassment. But, as usual, he volunteered no explanations.
Patchen learned that Christopher’s father was in Berlin, working for the military government, and that he had relatives named Hubbard who lived in New York City. That Thanksgiving Christopher invited Patchen to spend the holiday weekend in the country with his family.
“Won’t I be in the way?” Patchen asked.
“No,” Christopher said. “There’s lots of room. My father is coming over. He may have someone with him, but there won’t be many people. Two or three cousins.”
The next night they took the midnight train from Boston to Pittsfield, at the other end of Massachusetts, and after stopping at every station along the 150-mile line, arrived at dawn. Two rawboned middle-aged men met them on the platform. From the train window they seemed to be twins, with the same long Yankee faces and the same gestures and voices. Patchen stood by, leaning on his cane, while they greeted Christopher. It was a joyous reunion, with the older men hugging him and ruffling his hair as if he were a boy coming home from school. After a moment they turned to Patchen and he saw that they were not identical: one was fair like Christopher but the other had darker hair. Both were very tall.
“My father, Hubbard Christopher,” Christopher said, introducing the blond man, “and this is our cousin, Elliott Hubbard.”
The Harbor, as the family’s country house was called, lay in a valley between two steep, wooded mountains. There was nothing grand about it—it was an ordinary New England farmhouse, low and rambling, heated by wood stoves. No one else was awake when they arrived.
Elliott Hubbard led Patchen to his room over squeaking floors made of wide boards. “The Harbor was built by the first Aaron Hubbard in the early 1700s, soon after he married a widow named Fanny Christopher,” Elliott said. “The two families have been marrying each other ever since. Hubbard’s father and my mother were Christopher twins. So are Hubbard and I, for all intents and purposes, even though I’m a whole month older than he is.”
Patchen said, “Paul doesn’t resemble you.”
“No,” Elliott said. “He looks just like his mother.”
“I know. Paul has a lot of pictures of her. Will Mrs. Christopher be here, too?”
The smile vanished from Elliott’s face. “No, she won’t,” he said. “Didn’t Paul tell you? Lori was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939. We haven’t seen her since.”
Patchen was unable to speak for a moment. Finally he said, “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
Elliott put a hand on his shoulder. “How could you know? I’m just glad you asked me instead of Hubbard. He thinks she’s still alive.”
“After all these years? What about Paul?”
“He may think so, too. Out of loyalty to his father. They were a very close family.” He opened the door to a bedroom. “Here we are. The bathroom is right across the hall. Why don’t you change into old clothes and come right down to breakfast? I’m on K.P.”
By the time Patchen changed and found his way through the house to the kitchen, the other members of the house party were seated at the table. Christopher introduced them—Elliott’s wife, Alice, and their son Horace, a lanky adolescent who looked like his father and Hubbard Christopher, and a squat, powerful man who obviously was not a member of the family.
“Barney Wolkowicz,” the man said, lifting a hairy hand in greeting but not offering to shake hands.
“Barney works with my father in Berlin,” Christopher said. “For him,” Wolkowicz said.
Breakfast, consisting of lumpy oatmeal porridge with maple sugar and cream, scorched pancakes with maple syrup, eggs and sausage, and thick slices of homemade bread toasted over an open stove lid, was cooked by Hubbard Christopher and Elliott Hubbard. While they worked they drank thirstily from large crockery mugs. It was not yet seven o’clock in the morning.
“Have some,” Elliott said, pouring a glass for Patchen. Patchen stared at the frothy liquid. “Is that beer?”
Hubbard Christopher lifted his mug. “Strong ale.”
Alice Hubbard spoke up. She had an amused face, an amused voice. “The Hubbard idea is that everything you eat on Thanksgiving should be grown on your own land,” she said. “Therefore, no coffee or tea. But if you want some you can have some. I’ll smuggle it to you in a beer mug.”
“Thank you. I’ll try the ale.”
Hubbard Christopher watched Patchen drink to make sure he liked it, then went back to frying pancakes. “All this stuff is storebought, of course,” he said. “But all of it used to be grown here, even in my lifetime. Our grandfather made his own ale. The hops vine his grandfather planted is still alive out by the woodshed. About half the brew would explode all over the pantry walls, but what was left was potent.”
Hubbard’s friend Wolkowicz showed no interest in the stories. In complete silence, he loaded huge mouthfuls of egg, sausage, and pancake onto his fork and washed them down, apparently without chewing, with long drinks of ale.
At the end of the meal, Hubbard caught his eye. “Game for a treasure hunt, Barney?”
Wolkowicz mopped up his plate with a slab of toast. “What kind of a treasure hunt?”
“A real one. For real gold.”
Hubbard produced a faded surveyor’s map, much folded and mended at the creases with Scotch tape, and spread it out on the table. It had been ruled in pencil into squares, and inside each square a year had been written by different hands.
“This is the Harbor farm,” he explained. “Each square is an acre. We search one square a year every Thanksgiving Day, trying to find a treasure that was buried somewhere on this map by our late cousin Eleazer Stickles. The treasure is buried underneath a wild apple tree that had been split by lightning, with the two parts bound together by a heavy chain, thirty-five paces straight north from a ledge on which the letter ‘T’ is carved.”
“ ‘T’ for ‘treasure’?”
“Nobody knows.”
“How do you know about the apple tree and all that?” “Eleazer wrote it all down in his journal in cipher. Our fathers, Hubbard’s and mine, cracked the code a hundred years later, when they were kids, and the treasure hunt has been on ever since.”
“But only on Thanksgiving?”
Hubbard smiled. “Rules of the game.”
He and Elliott led the party up a mountainside to a grove of enormous maple trees. To Patchen, raised in an Ohio village far from any real woods, the Berkshire forest seemed primeval: gnarled limbs etched against the bleached autumn sky; huge gray rocks, barnacled with fungus, rising out of the mat of soggy leaves.
Patchen still used a cane, and Christopher and Horace stayed by his side. Despite their slow progress they did not fall far behind the leaders, who stopped often to take compass sightings and consult the map.
Wolkowicz, apparently oblivious to nature, read a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as he sauntered along behind the group, but after the first half-hour he closed the book and plunged ahead on his own.
“Should I go after him?” Horace asked. “He doesn’t know the woods.”
Hubbard shook his head. “No need to worry about Wolkowicz,” he said.
They watched him as he disappeared among the trees. Although everyone else was dressed for the woods in jeans and flannel shirts, Wolkowicz wore a Tyrolean hat and a peculiar dark suit that seemed to have been cut from an old Wehrmacht uniform: in the strong morning sunlight, the original gray-green color was still visible beneath the black dye.
A few minutes later, as the party crossed a clearing, he appeared on the ridgeline and whistled piercingly.
“I’ve found something,” he said, when they reached him. “Where?” Hubbard asked.
“Down there, on the other side of the brook.”
Elliott consulted the treasure map. “If you crossed the brook you’re in the wrong square,” he said.
“The wrong square?” Wolkowicz said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re outside this year’s boundary on the map, Bar ney,” Hubbard said. “We have to stay inside the square we’re searching. Those are the rules.”
“The rules,” Wolkowicz said, tonelessly. “Okay, I call time out. Come on, kid.”
He threw his arm around Horace’s shoulder and led him away. The others followed them through a grove of paper birches and then down a defile beside a shallow brook. Finally they came to an immense uprooted maple. The tree had uplifted a disk of soil and moss perhaps twenty feet in diameter with it when it fell, and the big smooth prints of Wolkowicz’s city shoes showed where he had walked on the moist earth. They led to a flat rock that lay in the middle of the circle.
Tell me something, Horace,” he said. “Are you going to go to Yale like your old man and your uncles?”
“I hope so,” Horace said.
“Then have a look under that rock,” Wolkowicz said.
Horace slid the rock aside, revealing a round hole in the earth. There was some sort of cavity beneath.
“Reach inside,” Wolkowicz said.
“Here comes the ball of drowsy black snakes,” Hubbard said. Horace lay down and reached inside the cavity. After a moment he sat up.
“It’s full of bones,” he said.
“Bones?” Elliott said. “What kind of bones?”
Wolkowicz fell to the ground beside Horace and thrust his own arm into the hole. He brought out a human skull, dangling from his forefinger by an eye socket.
“Here,” he said to Patchen. “Hold this.”
He flipped it through the air; Patchen trapped it against his chest with his good arm. Wolkowicz groped in the hole again and found another, smaller skull, and then what appeared to be a femur.
“That’s enough,” Elliott said.
Wolkowicz stood up, the femur in his hand. His suit was smeared with the manurish yellow soil. “Dry as chalk,” he said. “These are old bones, maybe a hundred years old.” He opened his hand and displayed a flint arrowhead. “This was in the hole, too. They must be Indians.”
“Mahicans,” Horace said. “It’s a Mahican burial ground.” Wolkowicz took the larger skull out of Patchen’s arm and handed it and the femur to Horace.
“Here, kid,” he said. “Take these to Yale when you get there and add ’em to the collection at Skull and Bones. Maybe you’ll make Reaper, like your Uncle Waddy.”
He strode off through the woods.
Horace knelt by the burial place and replaced the skull and bones Wolkowicz had given him.
Elliott watched Wolkowicz’s stocky figure as it disappeared among the trees. “Funny fellow,” he said. “How did he know Waddy was Reaper in his year? How did he even know the word ‘Reaper’?”
“Barney knows all about skeletons,” Hubbard replied.
DURING THE LONG WALK DOWN THE MOUNTAIN, THE WIND GREW stronger. As they came to a place where they could see the Harbor in the valley below, Hubbard stopped and put his arm around his son’s shoulders. The wind moaning among the trees produced a throaty animal-like sound, so that the mountain itself seemed to be growling.
“Lions,” Hubbard said.
He and Christopher, grinning at each other, linked arms, faced the forest, and shouting in German at the top of their lungs, recited what seemed to be a poem.
They waited, listening intently. After a moment the wind died. The pause was brief, but there was a noticeable interruption.
“It worked,” Hubbard said. “It always works.”
“What was it you were reciting?” Patchen asked.
“Scrambled Blake,” Hubbard replied. “It means,
“Lion, lion, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
“It’s nonsense in German, but it isn’t the words that count, it’s the language. German is the only language lions understand.”
Patchen knew, even though he could not remember when or where, that he had heard this phrase before.
“What is that saying from?” he asked.
“What saying?”
“ ‘German is the only language lions understand.’
“It’s not from anything,” Hubbard replied. “My wife made it up. When Paul was little, he thought the wind in the woods sounded like lions. Someone had told him there were lions in America, waiting to eat him up. One night when the wind was blowing like this, his mother brought him to this spot and told him to recite that verse in German. When he asked why, Paul was always asking why, that’s what she told him.”