Patrick met him at Reagan National on the afternoon of the third. From the airport, he drove to Brookland—the old house, 1236 Kearney Street NE. It was a whim, he told his father. He wanted to see it. That was Patrick, with his obsessions about the past. Marson was tired from the journey but decided to endure it for him. He had not been there since 1963 and was sure it would be unrecognizable. And withal, he felt a thin, nostalgic curiosity about it, like a man courting some sort of dangerous thrill. Surprisingly, it was still there. It had been completely remodeled, of course, and looked brand-new, not much like its old self: the two floors and the gabled roof, the porch, the tall narrowness of it. The street was even more thickly overladen with trees and shrubbery, the lawns perfectly tended; it all looked very exclusive and expensive. “We used to play horseshoes in the side yard,” Marson said almost to himself. “It was a working-class neighborhood.”
“Every house has been redone. It’s an exclusive neighborhood, now.”
There was a white swing on the porch, big oak trees flanking the place, with its bright blue façade. A child’s bike stood in a shaft of sun at the bottom of the porch steps. Everything seemed perfectly still. He looked at the street. “Right there,” he said, pointing. “Your grandfather stood and watched me go off in a taxi to the train station and the war.” He looked at the house again. “Your mother was pregnant with Barbara. She and your aunt Mary and your uncle Jack stood there, waving. From that porch. That very porch. It’s amazing that it’s still there. My God.”
Patrick was silent.
“Your mother’s old place?”
“Torn down a long time ago. I drove over there for a dance recital of a friend of mine. There’s a run-down apartment building there now.”
Marson put the back of his hand to his lips and wiped across. For a moment he felt this street as it was then. The Surround, as he had thought of it. His place in the world. And it was gone, truly, someone else’s now probably far longer than it was ever his. But he had grown up there. He said, “ ’S’a short trip through here.”
His son sighed. “I remember you telling us that.”
“Now you know.”
They were quiet for a time. He was experiencing a heaviness in his chest, the signature of grief for him his whole life. “Nothing here anymore,” he got out, then cleared his throat. “Well, we all have to make room for somebody else. That’s what your mother used to say.”
His son stared at him.
“Glad these folks have it, whoever they are.”
“I remember the long backyard. And the horseshoe pit.”
“You were ten.”
“I remember it.”
“Eight years later we were in Memphis.”
“I hated it at first.”
“I was forty-six and I knew then it was my last house.”
“Maybe on Sunday I could drive you across the river, and you could see my new apartment.”
“Maybe. I’m tired, Son.”
Patrick drove him to the hotel, where Noreen and Monica would meet them the following morning. Patrick, at seventy-one, was unmarried and would stay in the hotel room with him. Since there probably wouldn’t be time to visit the new apartment he’d just bought, a rooftop corner unit with a wraparound window overlooking the street, Patrick took the trouble to describe it. He was clearly excited about this visit, and Marson strove to be up for it all. Then Patrick began talking about all the publicity around his father and the old German. He had never lost the penchant for artless enthusiasms. TV! Radio! And, as was his nature, he voiced the obvious: that the human-interest element of the story was much stronger today because Marson and Eugene Schmidt had both survived so long.
Marson said, “It wasn’t something we accomplished. Was it. It was just chance. Don’t make it more than it is.”
“I think it’s amazing.”
“Well, stop touting it like it’s some kind of circus stunt.”
“I’m not touting it.”
“All right. But it’s not like we deserve any awards.”
“But you wouldn’t be here,” Patrick said. He had seen the original clipping, when he was sixteen years old, in 1961, and had forgotten it, really, until Hans Schmidt called. It had been such a wonderful surprise, finding out his father’s rescuer was alive. “Think of it. You’ve both survived this long.”
“Okay, okay,” Marson said, thinking that it was merely odd, as it was odd to be within months of your hundredth birthday. “Sure. Surviving.”
But there had already been phone interviews and articles about the concurrent personal histories, and some people even suggesting that Congress and the president might get involved. So, Marson thought, perhaps Patrick was right to be enthusiastic. It was true that the old German’s grandson had created a small media storm.
They had dinner in the mezzanine restaurant. They each had lobster, and they drank a beer in honor of Marson’s father, who used to brew his own. He had only lived to be seventy-three. Patrick had searched out the article about the rescue, paying an online archive service for the privilege. He read it aloud over coffee, and the old man let him, though he couldn’t listen fully. It seemed like someone else’s story. There was a blemish on his son’s left wrist, some form of nevus or liver spot that he had not noticed before. The boy, his boy, an old man now, was seventy-one years old. How could it be that he could still feel about him that he was the boy he once was? The sight of the little blemish filled him with a sudden, reasonless sense of mournful shame, as if the imperfection were in some way ominous, and also a violation of the other’s privacy. He looked away, and then took the last of the beer. His legs ached. He determined to be less short with him, yet there it was as he announced that he couldn’t stay up all goddamn night talking; he had to get some sleep now.