9

AS I OPENED THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR IN SEARCH of Max, my wayward grave digger, I glanced back at the moonlit snowdrifts lapping the plowed paths, as if a grudging March still insisted on choking the lovely green of the playing fields

that would come with the spring. Max had been my February thaw, my March madness, and now, just days after his return from suspension, had gone missing on my watch. It was past one o’clock in the morning and he had failed to turn up in our room, and, given his precarious status, this was an expellable offense. Charlie Springfield had told me he could do just so much for Max and, as I left his classroom after our little talk, asked me to “batten down the hatches on our literary lion until I can properly instruct our brother in his calling.”

My teeth began to chatter as the vague heat of the interior engulfed me. I listened for the shambling footsteps of the night watchman but heard only that steady Canadian wind gnawing at the eaves. As I searched the dark study hall, the marble busts that my greatgrandfather had commissioned in Rome stood out like a ghostly jury in their oak-paneled niches, while in the moon-shadowed rear of the hall, imprisoned behind a grid of sashes, Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman, triumvirate captains of the slaves’ liberation, presided over the mess we’d made of things. What would they think, I wondered, of how my contemporaries celebrated hopes of a North Vietnamese Communist liberation of the South?

Then I wandered into the central passageway of the schoolhouse, which was lined with framed letters from U.S. presidents. The letters on White House stationery, beginning with Grant and ending with Wilson, were addressed to my great-grandfather: “My Dear General Alden

. . .” “Well now, General . . .” “Dear John, what a pleasure it is for me to

write to your boys at Winsted. . . .”The letters praised the general’s good work in education, especially his championing of character, leadership, and service to one’s fellow men; the letters were handwritten and contained touching personal asides. As if I hadn’t quite realized it before: what a famous man and what a formidable reputation. Now his school was derided in the press, as were many of its graduates, for leading the nation into a terrible war: blamed on an elitist tradition of noblesse oblige out of touch with the new realities. Who defended him now except the crepuscular Virgil Dabney and the ailing Paul Oakes and the likes of Elliot Goddard, controversial even among his colleagues.

“Oh the benighted multitude!” Virgil moaned at our late-night huddles for jelly doughnuts and coffee. “Don’t they understand that Ho is just a proxy for Brezhnev and Mao, just another murdering criminal ruling by terror: what will the butcher bill look like? . . . Ah-da-dum. . . what horrors when the long-whiskered Ho gets his bloody hands on the rest of Southeast Asia?”

And so I took something of a perverse consolation in Charlie Springfield’s kind words about my father, even if it was only Max he really cared about.

With these glum thoughts, I made my way slowly up the stairs to the second floor, where the music practice rooms occupied the far wing. A huge central corridor stretched from one end of the building to the other, part of which was devoted to the trophy heads of an intrepid president’s African safari; all his sons and grandsons had attended Winsted. It was eerie as could be, what with these wild beasts on the prowl in the intense moonlight pouring from overhead skylights, their glass eyes dreamily aglow like creatures in some anesthetized limbo. Further on was a huge mural salvaged from a WPA project (run by a Winsted graduate) of the nine Muses and three Graces as they danced in a pastoral garden surrounded by ivy-clad walls. Their Art Deco somewhat streamlined eyes of blue outlined in gold seemed to follow me as passed to and fro. Then I detected the telltale notes of a distant piano and, my heart jolted to life, I departed the precincts of these fair maidens and hurried on my way.

When I opened the door of the dark practice room, Max did not even look up, but continued to play, silhouetted by the moonlight from a side window. Pungent smoke further obscured his figure.

I went to him, and he looked up at me with a slow, graceful turn of the head, his eyes a remote glassy white. Jerry Gadsden’s admonition sprang to mind: Look at the eyes, man; friend or foe, always look in the eyes.

The lilting Chopin nocturne lingered beneath his left hand as he held out a glowing joint. I shook my head. “Take it, you silly bastard,” he hissed. I was hurt by his tone. He tried to smile. “Take it, Hawkman . . . it’ll do you some good.”

“What do I do?”

“Just inhale deeply and hold the smoke in your lungs.” He turned back to the keys, digging into the bass line.

“Jesus, Max, you just got back from suspension; you’re on probation. If the night watchman catches you, you’re a goner.”

“Charlie will take care of it; I’m untouchable, man.” “Nobody is—”

“Just do it—time you began to live a bit dangerously . . . walk on the wild side.”

“You know this shit gets you depressed.”

“Do it,” he shouted, as if to bring down the roof.

I took a drag and coughed. A hint of a grin replaced his frown. I tried again, this time keeping the smoke taut inside my lungs. Max picked up the tempo of the music and modulated into a rock-and-roll riff, a hint of the Jefferson Airplane and Haight-Ashbury as if to spur me on. I took another drag and held it deep. The joint had burned nearly to my fingertips and I handed it back to Max, who deftly finished it off. The music shifted again to a haunting rhythmic melody. My chest seemed to expand with painful emotion, my breath tight, as a sublime beauty flowed from the moonlight.

“What is it?” I whispered, less afraid of being heard than of breaking the mood.

“My own transcription,” he said, “the adagio from Rachmaninoff ’s Second Symphony.”

I went over to the window, feeling tears coming to my eyes, and a transforming faintness as the moonlight began to intensify, as if my brain were emptying outward to embrace the infinity of white gathering on the snowbound horizon. Out there, somewhere in the music, I thought I detected snatches of my father’s voice from his letters: singing the praises of white-capped seas and the white geometries of Santorini and the prospect of a golden age. The next moment, as if a switch had been thrown on my impending clairvoyant madness, I was convulsed by claustrophobia, as if trapped in Max’s nightmare. Terrified, I turned from the window and practically jumped out of my skin at the sight of my own distorted shadow bent over Max’s bowed figure. He was a phantom, shrouded in a hazy corona, the ivories of the piano a prancing iridescence beneath his fingers.

And then, as if he knew, he turned to me and smiled. “You’re all right, just relax.”

“I feel a little weird.”

“Not to worry. I’m your wingman—remember?”

I shook my head, trying to free myself from a cacophony of voices. I walked over to him and reached a hand to his shoulder, where his dark curls brushed my fingers. It felt good to make sure of him that way, that he was okay, that we would be okay. I began massaging his neck muscles. I could feel a release of pressure and his skin warming and the radiating sense of safety embodied in my touch.

Something of this careless caress made its way into Like a Forgotten Angel and, with it, intimations that the infatuation of the protagonist’s best friend went beyond mere friendship. On this, the record speaks for itself.

“Can you hear it”—he hummed—“winter, like the dull . . . slap of an oar along the gray canals of Venice—eh, rowman?” His fingers deftly rippled over the keys. “You and I and Palazzo Barberini and the spirit of Henry James.” He bowed his head and then turned to the pale moonlit night beyond our window. “When the spirits of the great masters arise, the choiring angels will usher them onward with this music.”

My massaging fingers came to a halt. His words, the tone, sent a shiver down my spine: images of those orgiastic angels in the Williams Memorial bronze mixing with that of Max curled into a fetal position on our couch, immovable.

“Angels,” I murmured, my head spinning. “A world . . . fanned awake by angels’ wings.”

“Yes . . . angels.”

“Must be cold in a grave,” I offered with a shiver, “especially this time of year.”

I squeezed his shoulders—where the wings grow, as if feeling for the source of his strength, his genius, something of the untrammeled desire that might yet set me free.

“I’m glad you’re still playing,” I told him. Max had sworn off practicing during the rehearsal for Hamlet. “I’d really miss hearing you play.” “Mom’s pretty upset right now. She wasn’t thrilled when I was sent home. So, I promised I’d continue practicing—but just two hours a day.”

His parents had divorced that summer and he told me only late in the fall, when his father stopped showing up in his pink Caddy to take us out to dinner at Durgin Park. The music slowed, then grew quieter, as if moving into the distance to give us some breathing space in that tiny room.

“It’s one of Mom’s favorites. Her father, Oscar, knew Rachmaninoff; he played violin in the first performance of the symphony in Vienna. Oscar thought he was exempt by being”—he segued into his mother’s Viennese accent—“a beloved first violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic.” Max hit a discordant phrase. “But he wasn’t—they murdered him anyway. My mother still pretends that dying of starvation and overwork in a concentration camp is the same as dying of natural causes.”

“Stick with the music Max, even if it’s just to get laid.”

“No, I’m done. I’ve talked to Charlie about it—it’s all or nothing. There’s no halfway in this life, none at all.”

“Well, I like to hear you play.”

“What had lived up to hope?” he sang out. “What had withstood the scourge of growth and memory? Why had the gold become so dim? O death in life that turns our men to stone! Lost, oh lost.” He seemed to pause, as if to await my rejoinder; I returned to massaging his neck in hopes he’d keep playing.

“So that’s it—you were at Charlie Springfield’s tonight.” I tried to cover the hurt in my voice. “Reading his notebooks on Thomas Wolfe. . . again.”

“Yeah, baby-sitting. Actually, I was reading though Charlie’s war diaries.”

“No way. How come you didn’t ask me to come?” “I stuffed myself with Joshua’s Twinkies.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“He’s my mentor, sport. You’ve got that fascist Virgil Dabney on your team and you can keep him.”

“He’s not so bad; actually, he’s pretty damn funny.”

“Charlie doesn’t like him for beans, thinks he’s a bad influence on the boys, worse than Goldwater, which is about as bad as it gets in Charlie’s book.”

“Shit, Charlie fought in France.”

“So tell me, what’s the deal with you, hanging out in the library cage with all the periodicals? What’s up, Hawkman? I thought we were best buddies. Why are you holding something back?”

“Who, me? I’m a fucking cipher, like you always say: dependable and trustworthy and so completely boring.”

“Hey, the flip side is not a bed of roses. Just look at Charlie.” He lit up another joint and let his head roll backward as he stared into my eyes. “There’s something wrong there, a little scary. . . . I just—can’t put my finger on it.”

“Mr. Springfield, Charlie?”

“It’s in the faces of his kids; they adore him, but some part of them is terrified of him, of losing him.”

“Do you have to dramatize everything? He’s just”—and I thought back to our conversation in his classroom of just a week before—“intense . . . like you.”

“Wasn’t he great in class this morning?”

Charlie had put on quite the performance, pacing the classroom, with that unruly lick of dark hair teasing an eyebrow, voice thundering, as if forever on the trail of the fleeting specter—the ineffable burning vitals of life, as he liked to put it, “that ride herd on our lives.”

Max stopped playing. “He frightens me sometimes—really. You see it when he’s with his kids, that look in his eyes, like the kids are all there is in the world, all that is good and sane, and he is so desperately trying to hold on to it—to them.”

“Max.” I could see it in his eyes, the creeping darkness. I shook him. “Don’t make such a big fucking deal out of it, okay?”

“You have no idea.”

“Okay, so I’m not his big buddy, like you.”

“Listen, I’m not being paranoid—I swear. I love the guy. It’s just he’s so incredible, so passionate. He’s taught me so much about literature and writing already. It’s like I can’t imagine what I’d do without him.” He paused. “But his war diaries . . . Terrible things. He’d try to describe the scene of battle, and then there’d be a dash of pencil point: ‘The English language gives up on me.’ That’s what he wrote, ‘My beloved English language gives up on me.’ Can you believe it? Is such a thing possible?”

“Did you ask his permission to read that stuff ?” “He didn’t say I couldn’t.”

“Jesus, Max, you can’t just keep poking into everybody’s shit like that.”

I retreated to the window, as if something inside me knew to leave that particular subject well enough alone. I gazed out over the snowbound sweep of the Circle. Staring intently at the blur of apple trees against the white, I fought back tears, concentrating on their pulsing shapes, like albino amoeba under a microscope. I was shivering, eager to change the subject.

“You know,” I said, “you could give your dad a call, just talk about stuff.”

My heart leapt at the sound of my own voice, as if some part of me—how crazy—longed—how it longed—to do just that.

He turned from me with a snort of disgust and resumed his playing, his forehead brushing the keyboard, as if listening for the faintest pianissimo. Then, reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a postcard and handed it to me. I went to examine it in the moonlight by the window. The photo was of a phalanx of cliff divers in Acapulco riding the air halfway to the water. A few words were scribbled on the back that I couldn’t read. I handed the card back.

“My father, the fucking hypocrite,” he spat. “There he is in Acapulco with some friggin’ whore he’s now planning to marry, and he has the moxie to send me this fuckin’ postcard after kicking my mother out of our apartment—schlemiel.” He slammed down the piano cover and joined me by the window, his face undergoing a transformation in the pale light. “O lost,” he moaned.

I felt like letting him have it: like father like son—huh? A real ladies’ man.

“I hate to say it, but I kinda like your dad, and Durgin Park.” He slugged me in the arm.

“You have done it—right? You’re not still a virgin?” Again I rolled my eyes. “C’mon.”

“Seriously, it’s not enough just to hang out with jocks, with Virgil cooking up conspiracies and bemoaning the past. You’ve got to live, man. I fuck, therefore I am—don’t you get it? This is all we’ve got, time to spend your seed.”

“C’mon, it’s time you took a cold shower and went to bed. Besides, ’tis death and dishonor should they catch us in here at this time of night.”

Max smiled and sauntered past me with a new swagger to his step. “Hah—’tis you they’re really out to get. Beware the council of ten, Hawkman. They’ll pluck you to the last feather.”

Max scowled. “So tell me, is the lugubrious Virgil behaving himself, keeping his hands off his . . . ah-da-dum . . . his young and handsome protégé—that is, when conspiracies against man and nature are not afoot.”

“Fuck off.”

“Listen,” he grabbed my arm in mid-stride, “speaking of lechery, have I got a girl for you. Susan wrote me and said she has this friend— Barbara something or other, intellectual WASP—blue-eyed Athena, just your type. A guaranteed score—dig it—ready to go down on her knees before your lordly member.”

“Know what your problem is: You don’t ever know when to stop.” “No, really. Susan says she’s gorgeous, looks like Julie Christie. . . .

Besides, we gave her the clippings in the paper about your heroics in the Rivers game—all those touchdown passes and shit. Word is, she fantasizes about going out with a Winsted football captain.”

“Jerry ran in three of those touchdowns—get your facts right.” “Football captain,” he sneered, “just like your father.”

“When was the last time you even bothered to come to a game—great wingman you are.”

I shook loose from his grasp and walked away down the corridor. He ran after me and tackled me from behind, rolling on top, holding my arms down.

“Whaddya say?” He stuck out his tongue lasciviously. “Will you, at least, go out with her? Doesn’t mean you have to go muff diving or anything.”

I pushed up with both arms, lifting him bodily, demonstrating my added strength since working out with Jerry all winter.

“You know what happened the last time.” I lowered my arms, bringing him closer. “My blind date almost died of terminal boredom.”

“Are you kidding? She expired of terminal horniness—you never laid a hand on her.” He flicked his tongue again. “Got to get in there boy, to the wetness, all the way to the creamy wetness.”

“Since when are you recommending prospective football captains?” I suddenly flipped him over, pinning him, glaring at him in triumph.

“I might make exceptions,” he huffed, the wind knocked out. “Still haunted by that fair and warlike form . . .”

“Okay, okay, I’m sufficiently impressed with your ability at instant replay.”

“I’m much better at foreplay.”

He reared his head up and tried to kiss me. I dodged his lips. “No doubt.”

He rolled over on one elbow and brought his face close to mine.

“You do like girls, don’t you?”

“You know, I do have a life outside of this place.”

“Really, so, whaddya do when you’re not here?” He blew into my hair. “I have the hardest time imagining you anywhere else—haunting this mausoleum of your ancestors. Except there’s Elysium—right, Berkshires somewhere? Hermitage? So how come you never invite me, your buddy, your best pal? You’ve become so secretive these days; you’re even hiding your notes from the periodical cage, aren’t you?”

“That’s what I mean—it’s private, okay?”

“So what’s with that Laura Williams—your apple blossom queen? How does she fit into this picture?”

“Ah, maybe that’s just going to remain my little secret.”

“I mean, that blind date wasn’t so bad-looking. Didn’t you even kiss her?”

“She . . . I dunno . . . when we said good-bye she kinda did this thing with her tongue.”

“Yes, yes . . .”

“Like down my throat, and I think her braces chipped a tooth.” Max rolled away, hysterically pounding the floor.

“What makes you so goddamn fucking smart—huh? Just because you memorized all of fucking Shakespeare.”

“Please, de Vere to you, seventeenth earl . . . Edward de Vere.” “Stick with fucking Chopin, Max.”

He looked at me a little oddly, as if momentarily confounded, and then waved me off and turned his attention elsewhere.

“O Muses, O lofty genius, now assist me.”

His laughter echoed down the length of the great moonlit corridor. And somehow, I no longer cared. Above, the huge WPA mural of the three Graces and nine Muses glittered with a spectral radiance: goldand-lapis-lazuli eyes watching us.

He burped.

“Ah . . . so I tempt you, do I? Will you choose . . . the nether path of laughter and forgetting? Free of your father’s example and Virgil’s poisonous ministrations. I give you the path of art . . . of life.” Max spread his arms wide, as if to receive an invisible lover, pumping his pelvis. I lay beside him, two swimmers afloat. Above us, the three Graces gazed benevolently from their garden; transformed by celestial light, their streamlined presence was a comfort. “They try to conquer time with his meaningless death,” he whispered to me. “She gives her body in all-bounding love.”

“‘All-bounding love?’” I echoed in a hushed voice, hoping to lower the volume.

To no avail. With a series of howls and catcalls, Max, on his haunches, began braying at the moon. But instead of terror, I found myself convulsed in fits of laughter. A moment later, in yet another protean display, he turned onto all fours and began crawling toward me in his favorite imitation of Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion.

“Courage, Hawkman,” he snarled. “Ya-a-a . . . got to have courage.” With this, he roared in my face and licked my ear.

I was so weak from laughing that I could barely fend him off. Then he rose and stood like a maestro calling for silence. He walked down the hallway to where the ranks of mounted trophy heads gazed like a menagerie at feeding time.

“Hear the words of Ecclesiastes: ‘Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him back to see what shall be after him?’”

“Just think, Pete, how quickly it rushes away from us, and still we fear to choose.”

“Choose?”

“‘Behold!” he wailed. “‘The jaws of darkness do devour it up. So quick bright things come to confusion.’”

And, proud to be his wingman, I hit my mark: “‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains . . . ’” For an instant I was stymied, until he mouthed the next phrase from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.’”

He bowed to me.

“Well done,” he bellowed, patting me on the rear. “Hawkman, there’s hope for you yet.”

“Doceri ac docere.”

He smiled wickedly.

“Right on, brother.” He led me to the wall of trophy heads. “And that is why we must hold the mirror up to nature, Pete; that is the divine task of the poet, the writer—to be the author of our own lives.”

“‘To show virtue her own feature,’” I proudly declaimed, “‘scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. . . .’”

Max put his arm around my neck and planted a wet kiss on my cheek. “And to think when I first knew you, your nose was firmly buried in Thucydides. You’ve come a long way, Hawkman. Don’t slip back now—for Virgil’s pit still looms. ‘For some must watch, while some must sleep.’”

“‘Thus runs the world away.’”

“And how will you remember me, Hawkman, when I’m gone?” “You’re not going anywhere—without me.”

“In ten, fifteen years, what will you-we remember? Maybe you’ll remember a moment or two, but all the time we spend together will fog over to an indistinct cloud of recollection, unless, that is, we take time in our own hands and re-create it, reshape life out of life—make of it something memorable, animate it with genius, give meaning where there is only emptiness. That is the role of the true artist—the writer— our only hope.”

“Max . . .” I sighed, beginning to run out of steam as I slipped back from my high.

He looked at me with ecstatic eyes.

“What must I do to convince you? What must I do to save this night for you—transform and give it special place in the pantheon of our—yours and mine—divine memory?”

With that, he reached to a huge lion head, grasped it in his arms, and, with a horrible creak, wrenched it free from the wall.

“Courage . . . Hawkman,” he cried out. He raised the lion’s head to rub noses, as he had so often done with Yorick’s skull. “This prize trophy shall await our next contestant, Joy-Joy, on his desk come the morning.” I hung my head, knowing I’d failed. Max, after dancing a little jig, turned on his heels and marched down the corridor toward the headmaster’s office, the lion’s head tucked securely under his arm. Then, seeming to forget something, he stopped, turned, and bowed in my direction, his moon-shadowed thespian halving itself, then vanished into the stairwell as brave Achilles had vanished into the kingdom of the shades.

The next morning, I couldn’t get Max out of bed; his depression lasted almost two days, what he called his “gloomy-doomy Viennese melancholia.”

I have gone over it a million times in my mind: where Max’s magic ends and the conniving begins. Because everything he said was true: I remember that night as if it were yesterday; his antics made the moment live. Of course, the lion’s head caper is a set piece in Like a Forgotten Angel. And yet, here he was just back from suspension, Byron Folley and the senior master just the day before had warned him that the slightest infraction would result in instant dismissal, and a day later that lion’s head greeted headmaster Folley on his desk. But not a word—nothing came of it.

I believe Max was already in cahoots. That, or he had so much dirt from his bugging of the headmaster’s study (a page out of J. Edgar’s playbook) that Byron Folley dared not move against him.

Nor did Max’s pleas to the Muses go unanswered.

Out of the blue, early that spring of 1968, Laura Williams began writing me. While helping her father open their cottage, Hermitage (where they lived seven months out of the year when not on Boston’s Beacon Hill), she stumbled on a cache of love letters from my father to her mother. Suzanne Williams had hidden the letters on a high shelf in the back of her closet, where she knew her wheelchair-bound husband could never get at them. The letters changed Laura’s life—both our lives—all our lives. The world she had known, as she put it to me many years later, “evaporated before my eyes in the hand of a man I never knew.” That’s when she began writing me for the first time—not a word about what she had found, but around the edges, her hurt and curiosity began to make their way into my consciousness. I found her oblique asides and inquiries strangely appealing, echoing a yearning in myself. “Yesterday,” she wrote in one of her first letters, “I walked to that lonesome white pine in the old pasture by the lake. Maybe it was just the smell of pine and sweet fern, but I found that the wind over the lake spoke to me as never before—oh, of many things, but not in a language I’ve yet learned.” She knew from the letters that the abandoned pasture—“Pine Meadow” we called it—a twenty-minute walk from Hermitage and Elsinore was where Suzanne and my father rendezvoused for their assignations, where her mother had always walked with her as a young child.

Discovery of those letters further strained her already-difficult relationship with her mother. Where once Laura had only suspected deceit, now she saw it everywhere. As Max wrote of his heroine in his second novel, Gardens of Saturn, “Her youth evaporated in a sun-filled room above the lake while sitting on her mother’s bed reading those erotic letters. The voices translated her out of time . . . and into a world of illicit desire, the like of which, even for a dancer, she never imagined the human body so designed.” Max described the tensile, tough ballet dancer at seventeen: “a woman with a deep intuitive need to foster equilibrium in her surroundings, driven to find a male both steadfast and free of taint, and so provide the launching pad to her own stardom, outside her mother’s sordid orbit.”

So Laura and I began to write to each other. Her letters were chatty, gossipy, flirtatious and daring, and always humorous—probing ever so lightly for insights into the man her ballerina mother had first met in early 1944 in a rehabilitation hospital in Guilford, south of London, where Suzanne, shamed into nursing by her military father, worked as a physical therapist. By that spring of 1968, Laura was an apprentice with the Boston Ballet, and her budding career was chock-full of odd characters and dramatic moments onstage—something she liked to write to me about. We were able to open up in those letters in ways we had been incapable of doing in person.

---

That cruel spring of 1968, bracketed by the bloody violence of the Tet Offensive and then the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April, was a time of bitter wind and icy rain that refused to give up its grip. There was still ice on the river by the start of crew practice. After King’s assassination, Jerry Gadsden just stopped talking to me, as if I had lost all moral standing in his eyes. The black guys huddled at their table in the dining room, displaying a contempt that made us all feel complicit in King’s murder in Memphis. Soon a disparaging cynicism crept into all conversations. The worst for me was Paul Oakes’s personal struggle through that winter, after his return from a second round of cancer surgery and chemo: an unsettling symbol of the frailty of the old order.

He would stagger around the Circle through ice and drifting snow, bulging canvas book bag thrown over his shoulder, his once-huge frame bent like those ancient apple trees on the Circle. His gaunt face had a jaundiced pallor, the fierce twinkle in his eyes extinguished. He always refused my help with his book bag, refused to admit anything was amiss, but seemed glad of my company. By spring crew practice, he could no longer make the walk to the river, but drove himself down in his wine red Ford Thunderbird and parked where he had a view of the boat landing and the comings and goings along the river. Often he waylaid me as I was jogging to the river, warning me of icy patches ahead as he rolled down his window and suggested I hop in. And there he’d be upon my return, sitting in the Thunderbird, gazing over the river, lighting up the occasional Camel, even after his oath of abstinence to his doctor “on a stack of the King James Version.”

Those first days on the river that spring were strangely ominous, and not just because of all the floating ice: Cobra gunships and C-130’s from nearby Fort Devens constantly roared overhead. To read the newspapers, you’d have thought the U.S. Army had been crushed by the Tet Offensive, and yet there seemed to be more activity at Fort Devens than ever. Seeing those mighty machines churn through the chilly spring skies, I found myself curious, emboldened, until I was regularly rowing past the barbed-wire fences and the huge signs posted on the riverbank that warned rowers and canoeists from trespassing on U.S. government property. It was no joke: The Green Berets were said to be conducting live-fire exercises over the sprawling marshes and woodlands of Fort Devens. But I enjoyed tempting fate, slipping from one world into another—from the cocoon of school life, where Max spent every moment huddled in the library writing short stories for Charlie Springfield and Jerry gave me the cold shoulder, into a world of powerful machines and purposeful activity. Feeling somewhat forlorn, one day I just kept going, past the barbed wire and warning signs, full steam ahead. On and on . . . and then, maybe a mile father, there it was—a bizarre Potemkin village of straw and bamboo huts, a perfect mock-up of Vietnamese hooches translated to a barren New England riverbank. The first time I saw it, I just stared, oar blades poised, until the current returned me downstream. This bizarre disjunction of time and space—the thrilling, exotic risk inflamed my imagination from the moment I woke each morning till I hit the sack: that bamboo village along the river a staple, too, of my dreams.

It was on my return from one of these missions that Paul Oakes confided in me the thing that had clearly been on his mind for some time. Sadly, it couldn’t wait.

He put his hand on my shoulder, switched off the purring V-8, and gazed at me through sunken eyes, their blue centers gone a dull gunmetal gray.

“How are you and Virgil getting on?” “Great, I guess.”

“Virgil’s a good man. Just don’t believe everything he tells you.”

I had to smile. “Well, that’s a great deal—a lot to take in.”

“Listen, I know damn well he and your dad . . . well, your dad was something of a protégé.”

A helicopter gunship roared overhead and we both watched through the windshield as it faded off down the river, where the tallest trees patterned the sky with eyelets of green.

“But neglecting the spiritual life . . .” He nodded to himself and stroked the loose folds at his jaw. “Things like that, you see: Sometimes it takes more than just character. It can get pretty lonely without something more to hold on to, something larger than yourself.”

He gestured to the river, where the first buds of spring were creeping forth in the beeches and oaks; and I was almost ready to reply along the lines of how I found rowing offered solace of a kind. But he had something else in mind.

It was the cold spring, he went on, that so reminded him of another April, in 1945, when he’d been division chaplain in Patton’s Third Army. By pure happenstance, he’d crossed paths with my father. “What, nearly a year since I’d seen him when I presided at Bobby Williams’s wedding on a lovely June day in Sussex. Your dad had been best man.” My father was traveling in a jeep with a joint OSS-army intelligence unit, gathering information from prisoners and going through captured documents. I was all ears, figuring that this must have taken place about nine months after he’d seen Charlie Springfield in the field hospital outside Avranches. Paul Oakes joined my father’s jeep brigade so they’d have time to catch up; Charlie Springfield, later to become a protégé of Paul in the Episcopal ministry, was a subject, as was Bobby Williams, who’d been shot down in July of ’44, and Elliot Goddard, who was back in England after being parachuted into Brittany two months after D-day.

Paul Oakes lighted up a Camel and thoughtfully exhaled out his side window.

Their jeep was traveling just behind the tank unit that liberated Buchenwald. They had no idea what they had stumbled upon. The lead tanks had smashed through three barbed-wire fences enclosing the camp; the accompanying infantry had been fully prepared for a fight, carbines and bazookas at the ready. Except the Germans were gone. Slowly, the disoriented and terrified inmates crept out of the cell blocks in their striped uniforms: “walking cadavers, hardly believing we were Americans, hardly believing the Krauts had fled in the night and they were still alive.” The terrible smells of the place forced them to hold cloth over their noses; the crematorium still belched black smoke from tall brick chimneys. The camp guards had abandoned the hellhole only hours before. It was behind the crematorium that they found the perfectly stacked bodies lying crisscrossed at ninety-degree angles; it was the “neatness and thoroughness that had gone into the ghoulish task” that most disturbed Paul. “Son, the black-and-white photographs you see in books never account for the color, the gray-green of the bodies, and the smell . . . and the precision of the stacking, like goods at the end of a production line.”

But that wasn’t what Paul Oakes wanted to talk about. It was something that happened days later, after the Look photographers had covered the horror, after Patton saw to it that the German townsfolk were paraded through the camp as witnesses to the “abomination on their doorstep,” after my father and Paul had had a few days to absorb what Paul called “the hypertrophic fanaticism” behind the genocide. “It’s the enormity of the evil that resists human analysis. It was enough to make me seriously give up my faith; not until I was back home could I begin to find a way to deal with it. It surprised me how much tougher—if that’s the right word—your father turned out to be—coming from such a cushy New York background.” (Paul was born in Portland, Maine, from an old seafaring New England family.) “It troubled me that it didn’t seem to affect him as it did me. I began to wonder if my faith was a weakness, not a strength. I chalked it up to what he’d been through in Greece. I remember how he shook his head.

‘My Greece is gone,’ he said—that’s how he put it. He let on that he’d killed Germans in Greece, and worse: He’d witnessed the indiscriminate murder of civilians. I’d seen a lot of bad things that year, God knows the Falaise Pocket was no picnic for the soul, but I’d never had to pull a trigger. I felt lucky I’d never been put to the test.”

I was struck by his confessional tone: how a man of his power and certainty and toughness of character had no disposition for the dirty work, for the duty his faith might abhor, something, I discovered years later, he shared with Samuel Williams. And to have this perceived “failure of character” highlighted by the conduct of a former student can’t have been easy. But something in his narrative still didn’t fully register with me: What exactly had he expected my father to do in terms of the harm to his spiritual life?

Then Paul got to the heart of the matter. Just hours before they were scheduled to move on, a young overwrought army private ran up to Paul with distressing news. Some of the camp survivors, a few of the stronger ones, had managed to get past the army guards stationed around the gaps the tanks had made in the barbed wire; they had made their way to the nearby village, where they found one of the camp guards in hiding. They had forced the guard to return with them and were questioning him in the crematorium. The PFC wanted Paul Oakes to tell him what he should do. “Of course, he should’ve gone to his sergeant, but instead he came to me—and my curiosity got the better of my common sense.” Paul Oakes and my father followed the private into the crematorium, which by then had been largely cleared of bodies. Even so, the smell was “ungodly.” The camp inmates were standing around a small man in trim civilian clothes, well fed, his frightened eyes streaming tears. They were questioning him, angrily accusing him in a Babel of tongues. Even my father, who spoke perfect German, could barely understand them. Soon it became clear what “mischief ” they had in mind. “I should’ve had the PFC go get the sergeant, but I was afraid that once I sent him off, he might never come back, and we could hear the tanks moving off.”

Someone among the camp survivors produced a thick rope and handed it to the cowering German guard. He dropped it. They told him to pick it up. They told him what he had to do. His resignation growing, he began to follow their instructions, tying a noose, thirteen loops; he fumbled it more than once and had to start over. “They had lived with death and knew its procedures in detail. And on his third or fourth try, he got the noose perfect and they made him put it around his own neck.” By then he’d been so browbeaten, he didn’t need to be told twice. They had him climb up on a table and flip the end of the rope over a steel beam, breaking a light fixture in the process, the broken glass sprinkling his hair like a fall of snow. Someone tightened the end of the rope by fastening it to the steel door handle on one of the ovens—“done so quickly, so deftly that it seemed to have happened all by itself.” Then his hands were tied behind his back. At this point, the American PFC, who carried a Thompson sub-machine gun, turned to Paul Oakes and asked him what to do—shouldn’t they stop this thing? “I was riveted by the scene before me, but it was as if I were a million miles away; I was in a cold sweat in that foul-smelling place and the hounds of hell were yapping in my guts. ‘Where’s your sergeant?’

I asked. The man told me his sergeant was off on the other side of the camp with the departing tank crews. So I turned to John beside me, to my quarterback, a leader among men, an example of the best we produce. He just shook his head. ‘I have no authority here,’ was what he told me, ‘I’m not even attached to your unit.’”

The pressure of Paul Oakes’s hand on my shoulder tightened as he told me this doleful tale, and I had little doubt he was looking to me as he had looked to my father at that moment, waiting for a reaction, but I was speechless.

Standing at the edge of the table, the German guard had tears streaming down his face. “Poor fellow was shivering, pissing his pants.” The camp survivors continued their vituperative chorus of orders, “bobbing their heads and spitting. The poor beggar caught sight of me, I suppose the crosses on my collar, that I wore an American uniform. He said something to me in German. John touched my arm. ‘He’s asking for absolution,’ he said. I could only shake my head; I really didn’t do that kind of thing. The voices of the survivors rose against him. First he tried to leap off the table, but the men surrounding him grabbed him and planted him back on the table and made it clear what they expected. Then without another word or even a whimper, the German guard gingerly stepped off the table into space and the survivors pulled the table away.” Paul’s hand loosened on my arm. “You see, that way he slowly . . . slowly strangled, his face turning one terrible purple-red color after another as his body shook and his legs swam in the air, like a swimmer trying to break the surface.”

Paul took the steering wheel in his hands and leaned his head forward toward the chrome dash. “My stomach couldn’t take it and I walked away before the man’s soul had quite fled his body. Outside in the fresh air, I began vomiting, as did the private; between us, we made quite a mess. Your father patted me on the back and handed me a cigarette, lit from the one he was smoking, as if the whole thing had been . . all in a day’s work.”

I was listening raptly, trying to decipher the tone: all in a day’s work. Paul bent back from the steering wheel with a confused expression on his ravished face. Was he aghast, admiring . . . or just terribly, terribly sad for my father?

Paul Oakes had no more to say on the subject; he grunted and kept his face averted from mine, as if suddenly regretful of an indiscretion. He switched on the ignition, gunning the motor and twirling the radio dial until he’d tuned in some favorite Sinatra. He put the car in drive, “And so, tell me . . . you’ve never said a word about Essays and Prayers.” But here I think I surprised him, for I had dipped into it in my attempt to fathom something of the character of Samuel Williams. And so I mentioned the odd discrepancies in the text, the moving abolitionist passages and soaring bits of Emersonian idealism that he had underlined. For the first and last time, we found a subject on which we could freely engage, that and our days on the river. I hope it made him happy.

I have often wondered if he felt guilty for burdening me with that macabre story about Buchenwald, released from his conscience after more than twenty years. Did the thing disturb his sleep, creep up on him as he surveyed the action on the gridiron or watched his boys row on the river? Had it threatened either his faith or his faith in my father, which I had a sneaking suspicion had come close to being the same thing. Did the story’s telling ease his passing a few months later? Otherwise, he surely would have waited until my graduation or even college. I had a feeling, even then, that his reluctance to tell me had less to do with his own role in such a painful incident than his concern about damaging my feelings about my father. Facing his own end, I think he accepted the moral obligation to articulate the circumstances—that was the New England conscience in him. Perhaps he felt he had failed me in some way. It had not been easy for him to turn me over to his rival, Virgil. Perhaps he felt he owed the telling to my father. Whatever the case, he unburdened his conscience and reballasted mine.

The image of a hanging man, kicking for the surface, remains embedded in my memories of an icy riverbank in April. When people come to me at reunions and tell how terrified they were of Paul Oakes, all I can think of is a man who went to his grave wondering if he had the fortitude to take a life and glad, that in this, he had been spared . . . perhaps a sin of omission and no more.

He was one of the lucky ones.

It turned out, Paul had dropped an unintended clue to the circumstances that had led my father to Checkpoint Charlie. He had mentioned that my father had volunteered for the OSS intelligence unit following the American advance through France and into Germany; that his wounding in Greece and disability had qualified him for duty stateside. “But he wasn’t having any of it; he was like a man still in the hunt.”

As indeed he was, for Karel Hollar.