13
IN THE WEEKS AF TER THE SHOOTING, MAX and I became closer than we’d been before or since, at the very moment we’d grown most apart. Charlie had been the father Max had always longed for. His grief allowed us a short-lived intimacy, whether holding his hand while talking him out of a depressive stupor or rubbing his back while he practiced the Aaron Copeland pieces for Charlie’s memorial service. Max shed the dandy persona of just eight months before and became a sober denizen of the library carrels, where he wrote his first short stories, and where I often discovered him staring at Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Charlie’s personal copy, given to Max shortly before Memorial Day: a peace offering after the cruel bullying during marching practice. It was a thirties edition, with a tattered olive green Art Deco cover, underlined and annotated throughout. “It’s like having something of him alive to me.” And Max imitated Charlie’s cadence perfectly: “A greatly flawed novel . . . but ah-ha-ha, what magnificent flaws.”
Max squeezed my hand. “Charlie wanted me to have it—like he knew, so I wouldn’t forget him.”
He went on a lot like that.
The trustees, in their infinite wisdom, decided to close Winsted for ten days before final exams to let the boys return to the comforting arms of their parents. The board dealt with the publicity fallout, as if anyone except the school community could care less with America’s inner cities on fire, protestors taking over campuses, and Robert Kennedy’s assassination only weeks away. That was when I made a fatal error of judgment. Max was just so down, so devastated at the thought of returning to his mother’s new studio apartment on the Upper West Side, conveniently near her Julliard students; she’d been ousted from her ex-husband’s swanky place on Fifth Avenue, where his twentytwo-year-old playmate ruled the roost.
“Boobs to die for, but the thought of them going at it next to my bedroom makes me want to throw up.”
“Well, I guess, we could go up to Elysium. Peace and quiet to study for our AP exams.”
“Hermitage! Your Impala or my Mustang, Hawkman?”
I picked him up at his mother’s dowdy Riverside Drive apartment. Max threw his bag into the backseat and wrinkled his nose. “It’s like strudel-stinking Vienna in there. She’s packed the place with a menagerie of Biedermeier antiques. And her Viennese dialect gets more unintelligible each day. Worse, she refuses to speak your father’s language.”
We headed up the Hudson for the Taconic Parkway. The early June sunshine in the newly leafed trees was glorious, heralding our escape from the teeming mess on every front page in the country. I tried to warn him about some of the idiosyncrasies of our place at Elysium.
He waved it off, “You think you have issues? A stinking Shylock for a father [ Jack had taken away the Mustang], who glories in his adopted WASPness and now plans to marry one—she’s pregnant, I hear. And a mother who pretends Mauthausen was a holiday camp—who identifies with the monsters that destroyed her people. . . . What’s not to like about my family.”
But my reservations blew away in the green miles we put between ourselves and the city, evaporating in the rising pressure in our ears as we sluiced into the foothills of the Berkshires. With the turn onto the winding gravel road that marked the beginning of our property, we became goofy kids again. A look of anticipation flooded Max’s eyes as the forest began to embrace us, lacing the strip of blue above with pointy hemlock boughs and tawny oaks and the white pines’ soaring urgency. In the overgrown pastures hemmed with toppled fieldstone walls, deer and wild turkeys turned a blithe eye at our passing and held their ground. Max leaned out his window to breathe in the loamy scents of pine, stretching out a hand to ride the inland seas of nodding fern lapping the rotted pilings of jagged stumps.
Back then, his rapture quickly became my own, stirred by his inchoate longings, that the felicities of the woods and a literary life might actually save us from life’s disasters. But now I recognize, as I do in myself, the hungry look of the grave robber who has stumbled upon his heart’s desire: the undisturbed tomb, the fusty air of the inviolate sanctuary, when the first glitters of released time catch the squinty eye of the nimble thief. Yet I was glad for him to be smiling again—that my home made him happy. As we neared our cottage, the fiery dance of leaf-filtered sunlight only intensified our glorious mood as the burning incense rising from the winter-steeped pine needles filled our brimming nostrils. And so we broke into our favorite chorus from those long-ago, careless months at Winsted.
“You-o-u, re my brown-eyed girl . . . Do you remember when we used to sing, Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da . . .”
Emerging from the palisades of pine, the mute glimmer of Eden Lake rose before us, reflecting jade shadows across the sky. Here, my family’s last line of defense against the successes and failures of life, public and private—those dual imposters, as Churchill described them. And for Max, a bountiful harvest of tantalizing themes for his novels yet unborn.
I laughed at his antics as our rustic country house hove into view around the corner of the lake. The spring light, with the leafing oaks and maples still three weeks behind their lowland cousins, glittered on the walls of raw fieldstone, here and there splashed with sandy hues of umber and bluish gray, and this transformed into scintillating pebbled planes of sunlight as we pulled into the drive. The deep-set leaded glass windows in the stonework simmered with a dull, forbidding opacity under the severely angled roofline. Max whistled and jumped out of the car, looking up at the exotic Romanesque turrets and dormer windows that shouldered the steep roof: a raggedy mimic of the European prototypes that had first inveigled my great-grandfather in his engineering classes at Harvard before the Civil War. Beneath a cone-shaped central cupola, crowned with an ice-damaged weather vane, sat a welcoming dovecote of vaguely Chinese design, which, for as long as anyone could remember, had been taken over by bats and barn swallows in the spring.
Grabbing my textbooks from the trunk and hurrying in Max’s wake, I found myself somehow changed, strangely beguiled by the Tiffany windows, which pulsed with reflected tones of green and turquoise and cerulean blue, lending an airy grace to an otherwise-ponderous exterior by Richard Morris Hunt. Having Max buzzing at my elbow was like acquiring an extra set of eyes, a brain transplant: I was placed in the odd position of both defending my family and parrying his genuine enthusiasm with ironic demurrals. I realized, as if for the first time, that my home was hardly lovable, except by those accustomed to its crazy quilt of rooms, off-kilter diamond-patterned windows, and hidden alcoves and chunky Arts and Crafts furniture, much less the sprawl of heirlooms that spoke to the eclectic taste of General Alden, abetted by his wife and then his daughter-in-law, who, decade by decade, had judiciously culled the more offensive and uncomfortable furniture. My grandmother, true to her New England antiquarian genes, had been careful to preserve the essential character of the 1890s, reupholstering when possible or replacing the broken-down “back-breakers” when necessary with period reproductions and strategically inserted foam padding.
For me, it had never been about tradition or antiquarian fidelity; it was simply the world as I found it: my father’s home, a place as integral to the landscape of my youth as the white pines that shadowed the creeping hours, their ambrosial scent on warm dry days when the breeze blew off the lake the very essence of childhood well-being.
Max cased the joint like a second-story man on the prowl. He flattened his nose to the windows and cantered his fingers along the swirls of leaded glass as he hummed Ravel’s “Pavanne for a Dead Princess.” On the lakeside veranda where my grandmother had spent so many of her summer hours, he blew the pollen dust off the back of a wicker rocker, tested the porch swing on its creaking chains, and dipped a finger in a fifteenth-century baptismal font—a crud-filled birdbath—and pronounced himself satisfied with the view.
I dutifully played the cicerone he demanded of me, trying to distance myself by adopting my grandmother’s lecturing tone. I pointed out the family portraits, the shelves of photo albums and scrapbooks, the huge bluestone fireplaces, and mantelpieces festooned with seventeenth-century copperware heirlooms and clunky stopped clocks. With ritual gravitas, I wound the three largest clocks in the cherrywood-paneled living room, each with its rusty key and distinctive and charming chime—the first job handed down to me as a child by grandmother. But Max couldn’t wait, pushing on to the next room, and the next, pausing only a moment lest a first impression escape him, his eyes electric with tinctures of emerald green as he turned guiltily to the sunlight flooding the Tiffany skylights.
“It’s so fucking magnificent—if a tad dark and dowdy,” he blurted.
“It is you; it reeks of the dark prince Hal—you, you mossback antediluvian, you history-encrusted barnacle.”
I made a point of showing Max the paintings in our small gallery, thinking he’d like that, given his infatuation with Isabella Williams’s collection at Palazzo Fenway in Boston. My mother had banished “those gloomy George Innesses” from the apartment in New York, so all thirteen Inness landscapes were now together again in the Inness Gallery, custom-built for the purpose. All were late examples from the 1880s: moody, poetic, contemplative, mostly scenes of abandoned meadows where a few magnificent trees presided at day’s end, the pellucid atmosphere of dusk something you could cut with a knife.
As had been the case with Winsted, General Alden and Samuel Williams split the duties of the Elysium syndicate; Samuel took care of the lake and its swimming beach, the general took charge of the reforesting and conservation of the ten thousand acres of land. He drafted armies of laborers from the docks of New York and Boston to dam an old mill stream and build the lake, christened Eden Lake by Samuel Williams. Paths were hacked out through the underbrush and laurel so their wives, both famous society ladies of the day, could pass unencumbered in their wide skirts. Streams were bridged and bluestone slabs laid down where the footing was precarious. And year by year, the woods, cut by the first settlers, began to slowly return, along with the wildlife. Extraordinary berry patches sprang up, to the delight of children, and became the favored destination of family walks. White pine and hemlock began to reclaim the abandoned fieldstone-walled pastures, along with white, red, and chestnut oaks, and the silver birch that took to the old meadows like a lost love. Within decades, white-tailed deer began to filter back, and with them the black bear and bobcat and even a few nesting bald eagles. By the turn of the century, visitors were remarking in the guestbook about how thrilled they were to see game again in the forest, to feel “the wildness of the land as it once was.” It was no small achievement, a wilderness preserve only a few hours by train from New York and Boston. Spurred on by the conservation ethic of his friends Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, General Alden had been ahead of his time. The annual summer vacation became a pilgrimage to “our woods,” a joyous event dutifully recorded in the guestbook year after year, summer after summer: “We are back! . . . The woods welcome us again! . . . Oh, woods and fields and Eden Lake—our true self !”
“Far-out,” purred Max as we finished going through the first of the photo albums. “So this is your domain, Hawkman, your dark, forbidding castle, your nefarious robber-baron past. You don’t really call it Elsinore, do you?”
It was, in fact, named after my great-grandmother, Elsie Whitney Davenport.
“And your robber barons, by the way, were considered the nouveau riche opportunists by my great-grandfather; he was old Boston.”
“No doubt.”
Max, with a frenzy that seemed to feed on itself, grabbed for the other albums and scrapbooks, eager to stuff his craw with yet another precious load of primary sources. I guided him through the warren of black-and-white Kodaks, most faded to sepia: the garden parties and boating regattas on the lake, the tall, handsome women in billowing silk and taffeta dresses posed with teacups and parasols and sailor-suited children. Max often stayed my hand as I turned the pages, his quivering fingers resting on a photograph of the soaring cupolas and wide verandas of Stanford White’s Hermitage across the lake, where Isabella’s and Amory’s artists and wannabe artists, musicians and playwrights, set the tone with string quartets and later jazz bands by the lakeshore, creating sylvan tableaux in the sprawling rose gardens, where, at the end of Max’s hovering finger, fleets of canoes and rowboats, and a sleek silver-beaked gondola imported from Venice, all hung with Chinese lanterns, drifted like ghostly fireflies over the black water.
“Ah,” intoned Max, “‘to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame.’” And in his echoed aphorism of Pater, a realization came to me of how close our family and the Williams family had once been during those endless undisturbed summers of genteel elegance and carefree pursuits, as memories of the Civil War faded and the mechanized slaughter of the First World War was yet to be.
I led Max to the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the library. Books by the yard in finest morocco bindings exactly as those long-dead idlers had left them. The complete works of Shakespeare, Thackeray, Dickens, Cooper, Longfellow, Trollope, Irving, Sand, Tolstoy, along with the great historians Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Parkman, Motley, Henry Adams, and dozens more. But pride of place went to a long shelf containing signed and inscribed editions of Emerson and Thoreau, along with those of Burroughs, Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and his circle of naturalists.
“They read !” said Max, in a hoarse whisper. Slowly, he ran a fingertip—oh how lovingly—across the ranks of bindings, drawing a dusty trail of gold-stamped titles.
I took down a particularly precious volume that my grandmother had shown me summer after summer from the time I could read. On the frontispiece in a beautiful blue but faded script was an inscription and signature and date: To my young friend—and a most gifted scholar and patriot, John Alden. May these words offer you solace and distraction in the face of the vexing duties you have assumed. Ralph W. Emerson, Concord, June 7, 1861.
“He knew Emerson?”
“Yes—well, and they corresponded until Emerson’s death.” I closed the book of Emerson’s essays and carefully replaced it on the shelf and smiled to myself. “A little too American—n’est-ce pas?”
“Oh,” cried Max as he again reached to those gold-embossed names, “to be numbered with such immortals.”
Max chuckled as he lingered over a scrapbook of postcards and correspondence from summer idylls in Venice, the antique time-lapse photographs of canals and piazzas, where fashionable couples sweltered in crinoline stillness. The last page contained snapshots of my grandmother and grandfather on their honeymoon, standing on the balcony of Isabella Williams’s Palazzo Barberini.
“My grandfather was a child trying to survive the Tsar’s pogroms,” said Max, staring at a snapshot of family members in a gondola by the Gritti. “But on my mother’s side”—his voice rose with pride—“they lived a grand life in Vienna, going to the opera, hanging out with musicians and composers—and honeymooning in Venice.” I heard his mother’s soft Viennese intonation in those words, as if maybe, just maybe, he yearned—if just for a moment—to believe in her Belvedere and St. Stephen’s fantasies.
“Oh, Hawkman, if only you’d been with me that summer in Venice. How we’d have danced the light fantastic till dawn!”
Not a little in love with Max’s fantasies, I threw caution to the wind and conducted Max to a small sunless back room, “the archive room,” my grandmother had always called it, where she had spent her last years sifting through and organizing all the family’s papers and correspondence. When I opened the door and flipped on the light, Max became breathlessly silent. On the highest shelves were boxes of letters and documents relating to my great-grandfather’s Civil War service, and his years out west, and the many veterans groups of which he was a member (for good reason, she had refused all entreaties by Harvard to take on General Alden’s papers). The middle shelves consisted of boxes storing the records of his buildings in New York, the railroad stations he’d designed, and his records and letters detailing the early days of Winsted and Elysium. The lowest shelves contained documents relating to the Great War and my grandfather’s “glory days” at Harvard Medical School.
I pulled out some volumes of my grandmother’s collection of The New York Times war supplements, a weekly magazine section devoted to news and photographs of the Great War in Europe. The supplements consisted mostly of photographs printed, as proudly stated on the masthead, by the new rotogravure process, which graphically detailed the genesis of the horror, beginning with lines of jaunty young soldiers marching off to war, and then, in issue after issue over four long years, the transformation of that quaint postcard Europe into a twentieth-century hell of mud and trenches: blackened muddy seas of shattered trees and breastworks, seeded with the shredded flesh of obliterated lives, flayed bodies enmeshed in the barbed wire like tattered moths in a spider’s web: how many hundreds of thousands cut down by interlocking fields of machine-gun fire?
I could feel Max tense up—he had no stomach for such things. I noticed his trembling fingers as he picked through those fragile pages, acidic paper crumbling at our touch: the unimaginable abomination of it all. I directed his attention to one issue in particular, which had riveted me as a kid, a full-page photo of the ruins of Louvain Cathedral. “Just a pile of rubble,” I said, and shrugged, remembering my early fascination. “I always wondered how God could exist if he allowed such destruction of his holy places.”
Max chuckled nervously.
“Not to mention, dear God, the people—huh?” “I was just a kid.”
“Good instincts, though.”
But what I wanted to make clear to Max was that my grandfather was not a soldier, but an army surgeon. I showed him the collection of exuberant letters he wrote to my grandmother and General Alden on the way to the front, how he took pride only in saving the lives of the wounded. His horror, if that’s what he felt as the wounded and dying arrived at the medical station, was tempered by exhilaration at the technical experience he gained. A lifetime’s work compressed into months. “How strange to be up to my elbows in gore, my eyes strained to the limit, my head reeling with the stink, and yet I get better by the hour, by the day, until I almost believe myself capable of raising the dead—if only it were so and not a case of nervous madness.” He wrote to his father, General Alden, telling him of the medical advances he was pioneering to handle traumatic wounds, knowing well the stories of the general’s agony at Antietam: General Alden had to warn off two surgeons—putting his pistol in the face of one—who were intent on amputating his shattered leg.
General Alden died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, a month after he got the news of his son’s death in France. My grandmother, who nursed him in his final weeks, who grieved for her husband as the general grieved for his son, told me, as she lay in her hospital bed at Lenox Hill, of the General’s one consolation, “that at least his son, my husband, had died saving lives and not taking them.”
None of this found its way into Max’s novel, nor mention of my grandfather’s grizzly medical notebooks, many pages spotted with blood—and perhaps iodine—where he had diagramed and described surgical procedures for dealing with the most traumatic wounds. Such procedures had been considered impossible before the war. The notebook, with commentary by other military surgeons, was published in a facsimile by Harvard Medical School in 1921: the bible on the subject until the Second World War gave another generation of surgeons an opportunity to further refine his pioneering work. Max finally pushed the pages away before he became physically sick. And as he did, I remembered Colonel Fairburn’s words to me, trying to explain my father’s inexplicable detestation of machines. In those medical notebooks was the grisly apogee of a century’s perfection of killing technology. It had cut the heart out of my family and left an exposed nerve—inexpressible in so many words.
If Max was similarly moved, it is not reflected in Like a Forgotten Angel. Not that he was he exempt from ruminations about his own heritage. The First World War had sent his father’s family fleeing from a Ukrainian ghetto to New York’s Lower East Side, while the males on his mother’s side got swept up in the officer ranks of the Austrian army—killing a good number of Italians at Caporetto, ultimately keeping them in Vienna under the illusion of being decorated veterans and patriotic Austrians, thus easy pickings for a later and even more systematic slaughter.
I think we were glad, finally, to get out of that stuffy and depressing little room, my grandmother’s prodigy of organizational genius with a time fuse attached. She never believed in making it easy for me, or my father; she rarely gave it to you whole hog, but delivered her clues in discreet packages—verbal, written, or by dropped hints—letting time and circumstances work their will on the recipient’s capacity to discern the import.
In the master bedroom, I pointed out a photo in a silver frame on the bedside table. It had belonged to my grandmother, a photo she had often noted to me as a child, and which had been with her at Lenox Hill during her last illness. The photo was of my grandfather in 1917, dressed in a medical officer’s khaki uniform on the front lawn of Elsinore the morning he left to go off to France. In the photo, my father, aged three, is standing next to him, a little toddler in a cowboy suit reaching up to the leather holster of his soldier father. The child holds a cricket bat in his other hand. There is a look of rapt fascination in that face, perhaps proud, perhaps attracted to the new uniform, though at three he could scarcely have known what it was all about. His father, for his part, does not seem to acknowledge his son in any way, but stares off with a taciturn smile, his cap placed at a jaunty angle off a widow’s peak.
I often wondered if it even crossed my grandfather’s mind that he might not come back. Did he go down to the lake, as my father had on his last day, for a final look, to linger in the shade of the pines and breathe in their blissful scent? So safe, so infinitely far from those cruel battle lines of hellish mud and bloated flesh, which he, too, must have glimpsed in The New York Times. Maybe like so many in his generation, he was simply thrilled at the chance to serve a noble cause, a war to end all wars, to remake the world in America’s image.
My grandfather’s death really was a freak, and it happened only two weeks before the armistice. My grandmother was changed by the shock: A curtness and reticence, some called it “a remove,” replaced her once-girlish effervescence. She became adept at going through the proper motions of being a war widow. I heard anecdotes around the dinner table from old friends about how she got caught up in the party swirl of the twenties and was considered something of a hard drinker and flirt. But once her grief had subsided and no one else came along “who could hold a candle to your grandfather,” she settled down soberly, taking over the Winsted board in 1927 (when she got Amory Williams fired as headmaster and brought in Jack Crocket), throwing herself into charity work in the Depression, endowing hospitals and professorships at medical schools in memory of her husband, and later scholarships for disadvantaged youths and black students from the Deep South—the very thing that had brought Jerry Gadsden my way, only for him to turn his back on me.
Grandmother also made darn sure her darling son got all the best. My father was raised pretty much at arm’s length, first by nannies and later by the finest tutors money could buy, and, of course, went off to Winsted as soon as he was old enough. She did not cling to him; she did not inflict her grief on him, because that would have been selfish and harmful. When I was growing up and questioned my grandmother about my father, she would list his accomplishments in a very even tone, as if reading them off a CV. “Not to give you ideas” was a favored expression. Her “remove” lingered, as if, so it seemed to me, her son were never quite real to her, as if once burned, her second love could only be a tepid reminder of the first, and possibly as ephemeral. An attitude that could only have been hardened by circumstances, when her son survived the war “by the skin of his teeth,” only to disappear under extremely suspicious circumstances in Berlin, with only a pathetic cover story for explanation. She never displayed grief for her son in my presence and scolded my mother if she did so. “Feeling sorry for yourself,” I heard her say more than once to my mother, “is not only a waste of time, but an unkind imposition on John’s son. What’s past is past; progress in moving forward is the only thing that counts.”
And she never forgave my mother for spreading her son’s ashes on Lake Carnegie at Princeton.
“Just like you,” said Max, replacing the silver-framed photo, “your dad grew up without a father. We are all Prince Hals—huh, Hawkman, Richard the Second and Eddie de Vere—fatherless exiles all.”
“Spare me.”
“‘O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.’”
Max would play on these themes in his novels: that the fatherless child will fill the vacuum in his life with something grander, with an idealized version that will serve as a foundation for an allegiance far stronger than any flesh-and-blood model would have warranted. This bit of pop psychology is, I suppose, why absent fathers suffered such distortion in his pages, as when Max turned his very alive and kicking father—and a doting one at that—into a caricature of a social-climbing Jewish banker, cruelly dispensing with many of Jack Roberts’s endearing and generous traits, all to make him a better foil for his bookish, introverted son. If anything, the caricature of his fictional stepmother is even crueler; after Like a Forgotten Angel ’s publication in 1978, she had to stop going to parties because of the stares and snarky questions invariably put to her.
“So, where’s that room of your dad’s—the one you used to tell me about, the one at the top of the stairs? Remember, you once told me you had a dream about that room.”
Not only had I forgotten the dream; I’d forgotten I’d told Max.
Max had already spotted the spiral staircase with its banister of carved rosewood and twigwork leading to the upper story. He just barged ahead, barely able to conceal his pleasure as he began counting each of the many stairs like a kid with a bad case of OCD.
“Fifty-one,” he announced, running his hands admiringly over the rosewood railing, “fifty-two, fifty-three steps to heaven.”
My father’s childhood room, and his father’s before him, was a kind of purpose-built hideaway under the eaves, showing the angles of the roof in the tongue-and-groove paneled walls and ceiling. A dormer window of leaded glass with a small window seat overlooked the lake. From a child’s perspective, that westward view seemed to be at one with the topmost branches of the tallest white pines that grew in profusion along the lakeshore. By afternoon, the room was transfigured by the luminous plumage of the pine boughs; every breath of air that stirred the needles sent a thousand shimmering tones of green cascading inward, a light transmuted and diced in the leaded glass and then refracted off the shiny oak flooring, until the whole room throbbed like the inside of an emerald. The catbird seat was the swivel chair at my father’s Stickley desk with its inviting pigeonhole compartments. From there, the panorama of the treetop skies unfolded in a never ending display. Who needed dreams when an endless daydream presented itself each time one glanced up from the Underwood typewriter? This had been my father’s retreat from his nannies and tutors and from a very demanding mother, where his boyhood aspirations amidst his father’s books on natural history and medicine had taken first flight.
“Oh my God!” Max exclaimed as he turned from the window and spied the typewriter on the desk. This was the green Underwood on which my father had written all his early journal articles and books. Max bent and tapped the keys and then let himself down in the swivel chair, testing it, tilting forward and back, right and left, moaning as he reached again to the keys, as if to the opening phrases of a Mozart sonata, his words a distorted echo of my own hopes. “It’s a writer’s dream—my dream, not yours—for a novelist, not a knucklehead scholar of everything dead and dying.”
“Well, thanks a fucking lot.”
“Adopt me, graft me . . . just exile me to this room—I’ll do anything.” He sprang up and kissed me on the forehead before busying himself ransacking the place. Attila would have been impressed with his thoroughness.
I drifted over to the window, as if to allow some alter ego of myself to freely rifle my father’s things, some fictitious self that I had sought to embrace for Max’s sake, at great risk of everything I wanted to believe in. I thought of the Green Berets holding hands in prayer at the Bull Run, and how uncomfortable the sight had made me. Watching Max on the prowl, I had the oddest sensation, a kind of otherness, as if I’d stepped out of the loyal circle of the people I loved, whose blood I carried, only to find them returned to me changed, at a remove—as I would years later, in a story not my own and forever out of reach.
I had spent years reassembling my own narrative, pulling together the artifacts of my father’s life, which my mother had carelessly dispersed to the attic and his hideaway at Elysium, including boxes of his books and memorabilia from the house on P Street, his office at Princeton, and what had originally been my grandmother’s apartment on Fifth Avenue, where he grew up. The only way she’d gotten away with this sacrilege was because, in grandmother’s last years, she could no longer manage those fifty-three steps to the top floor. “You go up there and take care of it,” she’d tell me. “Time is on my side—and yours, too, for the truth will always out. You stick to your guns no matter what anybody tells you.” In this, she was a stoic, like Thoreau (she kept a volume of his journal writings on her bedside table), through and through. “Keep your eyes peeled—use your head; don’t let anything slip by.” And she’d laugh as she’d wave a hand in front of my face, as if wondering if there was anything behind my distracted gaze.
Besides my father’s books, the built-in oak shelves contained his collections of flora and fauna pretty much as he’d had them as a boy—I’d taken care of it—neatly labeled with their Linnaean classifications (how he’d taught himself Latin), along with the arrowheads, the rock samples, the albums of coins and stamps. Then there were the athletic trophies and medals from Winsted and Princeton. Max pounced like a relic hunter, fingering the cups and ribbons, weighing them in his hand, as if only by appropriating their concrete reality could he properly describe them in his books yet to be written.
Then he came to the shelf of artifacts from my father’s many digs, most of them shipped from his P Street home in Washington. Max began fingering the terra-cotta votive figures with their pointy breasts, the large painted shards of Late Minoan and Late Mycenaean ware, and a fragment of a fired clay tablet with crudely incised symbols.
“What’s this?” he asked, examining the strange curlicues.
I took the fragile object from him. “It’s part of a Linear B tablet, probably from Pylos.”
“What does it say?”
“Oh, just inventories mostly: chariot axles, perfumed oil, sheepskins—”
“Your hand’s trembling.”
“No it’s not.”
“Your hand’s trembling,” he repeated.
“Time, Max. Just imagine . . . how long ago.”
And I returned this object of deep time to its place on the shelf.
There is a much-commented-upon passage in Max’s novel describing my father’s collection of arrowheads—no mention whatsoever of the Minoan and Mycenaean artifacts—where the narrator lingers in loving detail over the shape of the points, the mere touch conjuring in his mind the excitement of first discovery and the primordial world evoked for the finder.
Saul’s fingers trembled as he caressed the bluestone points, luxuriating in the rich veining and tiny undulations on the chipped surfaces, seeing in the same moment not his hands, but those of this Übermensch reaching into the earth to extract the arrowhead, freeing it from dirt so that the sunlight caught its prismatic surface for the first time in hundreds of years. Saul felt the thrill, the erasure of time, and the enchantments of those first forests and that near-impenetrable wilderness, where the Indian stalked his prey, when cougar and gray wolf roamed at will, before the European diseases ravished and reduced the indigenous peoples to a shadow of what had been, when the land, wild and free, had been their Eden.
Saul quickly dismissed such romantic notions. It was the hunting and killing that would have filled such a man’s imagination. A token of one warrior passed on to another.
Here, in my father’s boyhood room, among his books and collections, Max’s misbegotten notions of a “warrior cast” had its origins. Even then I had heard enough from Elliott Goddard and Charles Fairburn and even the president’s adviser to know otherwise. I watched with a detached fascination as Max began going through my father’s photo albums of Winsted: where a young Elliot Goddard sprinted downfield; where a conspicuously mufti-attired version of the president’s adviser stood with a phalanx of uniformed football players. The later was the team manager and carried a first-aid kit, his steel-rimmed glasses opaque circles in his unassuming face: “a minion among warriors,” as Max would describe him. Except now he directed the fate of tens of thousands of warriors, including the likes of the Green Berets I had ogled at the Bull Run. I couldn’t help wondering, even then, at the cruel ironies of such a happenstance. The back of the album had been pasted with yellowed newspaper cuttings of stunning upsets and victory bonfires: the days when Winsted football made it to the second pages of The Boston Globe and New York Times sports sections. Max passed over these with barely a ripple of interest; since he had already pilfered the school archives, this was old hat.
The album assembled by my grandmother, gold-stamped on the leather cover Elysium Summers, Max found even more compelling. Here was the private world behind the public facade he yearned to master: the novelist’s stock-in-trade. There were photos of my father in the early years with Bobby Williams, canoeing, hiking, standing on the diving board (my father was a superb diver and swimmer—the thing Laura always found most spellbinding about his childhood). As I watched Max turn the pages, an act that oddly took me out of myself, as if viewing things from a distant vantage point, I realized how large of stature my father really was when posed next to his contemporaries in their bathing suits on the beach; his corded muscles stood out even in a relaxed pose, and his ever-present shock of dark hair set off his deepset eyes. In another photo, he was rowing a shell on Eden Lake, oars poised for the next stroke, eyes focused with a kind of nervous pent-up energy. By the last pages, Bobby Williams seemed to have disappeared from these summer sojourns, as if muscled aside by my father’s Winsted teammates. They are all there celebrating their recent graduation in the spring of 1932, including Elliot and the president’s adviser and at least three others I recognized from Winsted Founder’s Days, important players in the CIA. The absence of Bobby Williams, “scion of truth and beauty and a higher calling,” from these photos was duly noted by Max the novelist.
“Ringleader?” Max intoned, pointing to a page of photos so titled by my grandmother. “Of running dog imperialist flunkies, no doubt.”
“Tough as they come, Max.” I dismissed his insouciance and retreated again to the window, opening it for fresh air, happy to again rejoin my aloof self.
The smell of pine and the view made me giddy, full of certainty and happiness of a kind, the home ground that had kept my grandmother going. A lemony orange sun was easing downward through the treetops in a halation of green. I felt a terrible love, and terrible longing—a pang of loss: How could my father have turned his back on all this, and why? A place my grandmother had treasured because her husband and son had loved this place, and that love had become part of their love for one another and so was passed on to me, not in so many words as in the rhythms and habits of her passing days. Even facing death, she did not waver. She was the most unsentimental person I’d ever known, and yet the life of service she led, the steadfast values she adhered to, emanated a love that I felt in every sinew of my body.
That courageous love so absent in my mother.
“One tough banana,” my mother liked to say disparagingly. “Cross your grandmother at my peril, not yours.” But that was because grandmother put loyalty to family above all things, and family was place. She came from old New England stock, as old as ours, if not as prosperous. But once married, she nailed her standard to the Alden masthead and took her stand. She outlived most of her generation and relished doing so because she thought she could amend their mistakes. I came to accept and then admire her gallows humor, especially during her last stay at Lenox Hill Hospital. She lay there in the semidarkness with the muted roar of traffic on Lexington Avenue beyond the window, her mind sweeping back to her childhood and her ancestors, where she drew strength, passing on anecdotes whose full meaning came to me only in retrospect, as they did in that moment as I stared out at the lake while Max rummaged through my father’s books: the truth hiding in plain sight. She was unflinching at the end.
“You are tough for those you love.” It was one of the last things she told me, and she’d gripped my hand. Her blue eyes staring up from the hospital pillow still proclaimed her no-nonsense faith in what can be done. “Let the best of the past live through you,” she’d whispered, “so the lives of those who came before you, those you have loved and who loved you in turn—errors and all—will not perish from this earth.”
And I knew she was defending my father.
Her stoic plea against the dying of the flame—to leave me with the certainties of her life—further confirmed me in the life of an archaeologist. I was reminded of a Greek funeral stele I’d discovered in the classical collections of the Metropolitan Museum, which I visited every day after school on the way to Lenox Hill. Aristocratic families would commission these carved images of their dead, which included a telling epitaph, and erect them in conspicuous places near the family home. Most were for the young who had died of disease or in battle without leaving heirs. In the Met’s classical gallery, I’d stare at the handsome sculpted faces of those young men who had died thousands of years before and wonder about them, as I wondered about my father.
Standing by the window over Eden Lake, carapaced in some vague approximation of my maturing impressionable self, I was stunned by how my grandmother’s words gained resonance juxtaposed with the handsome face of a young man on a Met stele, a slender column crowned by a winged sphinx, which figured like a place of quiet pilgrimage for me during those last weeks of my grandmother’s life. The youth holds a pomegranate in his hand and an aryballos is strapped to his wrist. He must have been quite the confident athlete with his well-formed torso and runner’s legs. But it was the dedication from his mother and father that I found most touching, words that referred to the stele almost as if it were a living thing, as if by erecting such a splendid memorial on home ground, something of the spirit of their lost boy might be forever preserved. I couldn’t help wondering how long it had stood before a rival clan tore it down or the Persians toppled it just for the pleasure of its destruction. And in that moment, just as Max began his own demolition job, thoughts of that toppled stele brought on a wave of despair, of the violent precariousness of all things: how being right was never enough if fate and matters of perception, as Elliot and Virgil put it, could trash your best efforts. Tears welled in my eyes at the vulnerability of our life’s enterprise.
Turning from the lake and the light hovering around us like the purest emanation of a watery starburst, I made a preemptive strike to convince Max and, truth be told, myself of my father’s bona fides. I began by telling him the stories that had been a fixture of my youth, from the lips of our aged caretaker and forest manager—dead five years, Tom Malloy. Tom, a raggedy-assed marine, as he described himself, had been badly wounded in 1918 at Belleau Wood, and my grandfather—they’d practically grown up together at Elysium—had saved his life, removing a machine-gun bullet that had just missed his heart. Tom was probably one of the cases illustrated in my grandfather’s surgical notebook, since Dr. Alden had attended him in the postoperative phase of his recovery, when the drains had to be removed from his chest cavity. Tom had been nearby in a recovery ward when the German shell hit Dr. Alden’s surgery. In my grandmother’s eyes, this coincidence, Tom’s proximity to her son in his last moments, who had stitched him back together—much less the vivid proof of my grandfather’s handiwork, a jagged ten-inch scar across his chest—caused her, so she told me, to hire Tom immediately upon his return to the States as the Elysium caretaker, filling the shoes of his late father, Sean Malloy, whom she’d known from the first years of her marriage. In later years, her gaze would often linger on Tom—“the last man to see my son alive”—as she often put it; little suspecting that his father, Sean Malloy, had been the last in General Alden and Samuel Williams’s circle of conspiracy to see their beloved Pearce Breckenridge alive.
A fine woodsman and crack shot in the marines, Tom had been born and raised in the Berkshires, and before the First World War had been a lumberjack and fishing and hunting guide. He liked nothing better than to regale me with stories of my father’s youth: drawn to the woods “like the Algonquin of yore.” Tom described a boy who saw the woods as a testing ground, pushing himself to the limit and beyond. “Find if there was a breaking point to him,” as Tom put it in his bark of an Irish brogue, an echo of his father, Sean, which he always used when the subject of firearms came up. “A crack shot, too, the best I’d ever laid eyes on.” In the late fall and even in the first days of winter, my father would swim the icy lake, see how long he could endure the cold with furious exercise to maintain body heat—a foolhardy business that had once resulted in a bad case of pneumonia. I caught intimations of a strained relationship with Bobby Williams, how once—they were about twelve at the time—my father harangued Bobby, daring him to dive into the lake after an overnight freeze had left a thin coating of ice on the surface. My father stripped to his shorts and executed a perfect dive off the board with palms flattened against impact, and slipped through. Bobby had been terrified. It was twenty seconds before my father reappeared, surging up through the ice and wading onto the beach, breaking ice all the way. He then gathered up his clothes and made a mad dash for home and a hot tub. “Tried to make a man of the Williams lad, but the material was lacking.”
Years later, these tales of bullying would be confirmed to me by Suzanne Williams, as were the circumstances that led to the eastern diamondback skin in the cigar box.
“One summer, the lad had got it in his head to hike the woods at night by moonlight. No food, no water, no compass. See if he could get himself good and lost. When I asked him why he bothered, he told me it was to see if he could get himself frightened.” Old Tom laughed at my father’s antics but clearly admired his guts and stamina. “He was a hard young’un was Master Johnny. Do whatever it took to steel himself, and then some more for good measure.
“But I’d tell him a little of Belleau Woods and that’d take the steam out of him.” When my father first began studying archaeology in Leipzig over summers, Tom Malloy was fit to be tied: “You see, the machine gunners were the worst. We’d knock out one nest in all that underbrush and the next would open up on your flank, but only when you’d silenced the first—sneaky as hell; and they’d keep killing you until the moment you got into them with your bayonet, and then they’d surrender easy as you please.” Tom had set out photos of the Kaiser on the rifle range when he took me shooting, and he was quick to let me know where I stood in the pecking order. “Master Johnny was almost as good as his grandfather—General Alden, that is—who, I heard tell, was the best shot in the Berkshires. Doc Alden, your granny said, could take it or leave it.”
Relating these tales to Max, hearing Tom Malloy’s voice in mine, feeling my grandmother’s promptings, I began to better appreciate the story of my father’s early adolescence, not just because I’d recently passed through similar way stations but also because the human dimensions of the stories gained a new reality in the very telling—in the resonance of the recurring patterns, which cried out for a narrative structure. I went over to a bookshelf where my father’s copies of Homer were arranged, in Greek and in English and German translations. With renewed curiosity, I slipped these time capsules free, feeling the pollen-dusted pages, opening the eighteenth-century morocco-bound editions of Pope and Chapman and the 1932 T. E. Shaw translation of the Odyssey, inscribed as gifts from his mother in the mid-twenties. Flipping through the pages, spilling the dried flowers secreted there on his rambles, seeing the annotations in his adolescent scrawl, the underlinings of raw, untrammeled human experience that drew his gaze—of hardships endured on storm-tossed seas, of loss and privation and homesickness—I realized that what Max would interpret as a youth hardening himself for a warrior’s life was just the opposite: My father went to the woods, immersed himself in nature, and tested himself as a way of gaining an insight into Homer’s exploration of the human condition. He was trying to connect with Homer’s heroic world, its nobility of purpose, vitality, honesty, adventurous courage—the honor-bound code of an archaic breed of warriors that valued truth telling among equals. By drawing closer to nature, he was steeping himself in the strange and obscure power of Homer’s poetry.
This, too, I had discovered in that moment, because my Greek had improved to the point where I recognized this exotic strangeness, its remoteness and mysterious depths, with hundreds of words that remain untranslatable—even to the ancient Athenians . . . as if ghostly precipitants, echoes of even more ancient stories out of the mists of time. And I couldn’t help wondering, as I still wonder, with whom he identified: the proud, fate-bound godlike Achilles rooted in the ways of an archaic past, or the inventive, all-too-human Odysseus, homeward bound and forever in search of a return to a golden age, and willing to employ any stratagem and all his ingenuity to cheat destiny: the warrior who gained eternal glory in Hades, or the mortal who made it back alive to his wife and son.
Max grunted at me wide-eyed. “You guys shoot guns?”
I couldn’t help laughing at the look of incredulity on his face, which prompted me to an overstatement I’d pay for in spades.
“Yup, we have an arsenal downstairs in the gun room. And a rifle range. I’ll take you shooting tomorrow; it’ll be good for you, put some hair on your chest.”
In Like a Forgotten Angel, our use of firearms and Tom Malloy’s stories, with much dramatic embroidering, are deployed to garnish themes of the “ethos of the warrior cult,” how my father and his CIA cronies were baleful avatars of an imperialist violence that led to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., and even the Diem assassination in Vietnam: the prideful delusions (in Charlie Springfield’s eyes) that fucked up everything about America in those years. Well, as I tried to explain to Max, my grandmother had ancestors at Lexington, a grandfather killed while leading black troops in the battle of the crater at Petersburg. You had to learn to respect a weapon, so she insisted; otherwise, your fear of it would leave you vulnerable.
If she told me once, she told me a hundred times: “You must embrace your fears and the things that frighten you. If you don’t, they will take on larger or distorted proportions in your mind. And your enemy will take full advantage of the fact.”
The reason I even mention these details is that I held none of this back from Max, because I had no idea there was anything to hide. That my father was truly a prepossessing athlete and rugged outdoorsman didn’t dispose him to military solutions—far from it. As I would find out, he truly managed heroic feats in Greece during the war, but as I also know from my own experience, feats of physical courage, even what are thought of as acts of bravery, on and off the field, are often acts of happenstance and emotional exhilaration—the instinct, in the moment, to live to the hilt or survive. One is simply lifted by circumstances, by the life force rather than rising to them.
The real irony is that nearly everything, clues big and small, that would ultimately provide answers to my father’s fate passed through our hands that afternoon, including the manila envelope containing the newspaper clippings from the Natchez Weekly Democrat and the Pinkerton reports. As I had done the previous summer, we glanced through them quickly, then slid the fragile contents back into the envelope without another thought. So did a good part of the tale of Pearce Breckenridge come under Max’s scrutiny, only to remain a fugitive myth for another twenty years. Even the framed postcard of the interior of the Museum of Antiquities in Leipzig was examined by Max, and the archaic verses on the back, and rehung on the wall by the door without so much as a shrug.
I am being unfair, of course. How could anyone, then, have put the pieces together? But for the record, Max had his chances.
Laura never let on to Max about her mother’s cache of love letters from my father, a trove that included the very same postcard, but with different verses copied out in my father’s hand. My mother, too, had been sent one of the three identical postcards, with yet another verse, which she had slipped into one of her favorite Hornblower novels, only to be forgotten.
My grandmother had an innate feel for how the truth will out; her favorite aphorism from Pasteur says it all (the framed quote hung on the wall of her husband’s office at Harvard Medical School): “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
Perhaps Max was too inveigled by Hermitage. Among the framed photographs from the twenties was one of Bobby Williams and my father with their arms around each other on the sprawling piazza of Hermitage. Max inspected it minutely, and as he did, I was reminded of the photos of my grandmother and Amory Williams and his artist wife on the same veranda, bringing instantly to mind my mother’s description of coming through the French doors and finding Kim Philby and Suzanne flirting by the railing, an image so real, it was as if I’d been there myself.
He tapped the glass. “Wow, look at that place . . . Hermitage. So what’s with you and the Williamses?”
“What about them?”
“Founding families and all—once bosom buddies, but I don’t exactly see you guys mixing it up at trustees meetings and stuff. Why so standoffish?”
“My grandmother didn’t like them. I don’t know, goes back to the twenties, when she was put on the Winsted board to get rid of Amory Williams.”
Max shot me an intrigued look. “You’ll take me over there, right—to Hermitage?”
“We’re hardly likely to be invited.”
“Hawkman, you must, must, must wrangle us an invite. What a story: the golden boy’s suicide in the 1890s, that so, so sexy SaintGaudens memorial, and then there’s Palazzo Fenway—I mean, what an unbelievably cool place. All those Vermeers and Titians, and that so, so sexy Spanish dancer by Sargent. Kemosabe, you really need to make powwow with such wonderful people. Me like to meet them.”
“Cool your jets, Max. My grandmother”—I was going to say my grandmother considered them decadent failures—“felt sorry for them.” Max took my arm and squeezed gently, a peculiar smile on his face.
“Remember, Hawkman, art is long and life is short. And I saw you with their daughter. I mean, the granddaughter of Isabella Williams— Queen of Boston’s Back Bay—that’s pretty far-out, man.”
“Laura Williams, and she’s the great-niece; Isabella was Samuel Williams’s daughter, Amory’s sister.”
I should have wised up to his disingenuous blather: Max knew exactly what the relationship was. How many warning signs did I need? I should have had the good sense to march him down the stairs and out the door and have driven back to New York. Or maybe taken him shooting right then and there, which I did the following day, and scared the shit out of him. But instead, my adopted role as cicerone got the better of me.
“The Williamses were . . .” Max said, sidling up to me, purring like a feline in heat, taking my arm. “My God, they were intimates of John Singer Sargent and Henry James; the Williamses knew everyone who was worth knowing. They collected the greatest artists in the world— Titian’s Danaë and the Shower of Gold—do Johnny Holmes proud—”
“Hey, you don’t think George Inness was a pretty great artist? You think you’re so fucking smart, Max, but there’s more to it than just art.” I pulled my arm free. “Let me show you something.”
What I wanted him to see, to register, were the precocious scholarly achievements of my father. In this, I sought a margin of safety.
I had found the mother lode of my father’s early writings the summer before I started at Winsted. It had been there in the sweltering recesses of the attic, smelling of bat shit and mildew and dusty cobwebs. Cardboard boxes of his exiled books, his juvenile writings. My hands must have been shaking, because that detail, too, made it into Max’s novel—when I pulled out things from his adolescence where I had carefully arranged them: histories of Greece and Rome, works of classical literature and philosophy—not in translation, but in the original! And the dates! My grandmother had inscribed them all with the dates when she had bestowed them on her darling prodigy. At seven, he was reading Gibbon; by eight, Homer and Cicero in Greek and Latin. I was intent on laying out the evidence of my father as a world-class scholar. I was in a defensive crouch.
Thumbing through the worn and annotated pages of these old books, Max became very quiet—even he was a little in awe of such scholarly accomplishments, not that it affected his ultimate portrayal of my father in his novel. When I saw him so engaged, my trepidations seemed to float free as minute by minute the sunset glow off the lake began filling the room.
And there was more. I carefully got down the manuscript in the cardboard slipcover I’d made: my father’s life of Alexander the Great, neatly typed, six hundred pages with elaborate footnotes and bibliography. He was still working on it during his first year at Winsted. And this was even before the modern biographies of Tarn, Burn, or Wilcken had been published. He had absorbed all the ancient authorities: Diodorus, Curtius, Plutarch, Justin, Arrian. He had exhausted all the scholarly journals and had done independent research in the Columbia library on recent developments in papryology and numismatics.
“You’ll find your favorite babes inside—some of the hottest history porn ever.”
I watched Max go through the pages until he came upon the first bookmarks in the text, a postcard of Titian’s Venus of Urbino.
“Oh, my”—he smiled in recognition—“where did . . .” He picked up the postcard and flipped it over. “Chef Boyardee—lives!” He laughed and began turning the pages to find more missives of that summer he spent in Venice.
“My dad was clearly inspired by Zeno, with his emphasis on a world of universal brotherhood and harmony, a world state subject to a common law . . . ruled by a philosopher king. He was,” I continued, a little breathless, “the youngest man ever appointed to a full professorship at Princeton. He was a scholar, Max—that was his real calling.”
“A philosopher king, like Charlie said, can just as easily become a tyrant.”
“He was a romantic—maybe we all are, worst luck.”
“Listen, Hawkman, I’m not questioning his bravery, that he was a Nazi-killer, as you like to remind me. But like your pal, Winsted’s very own national security adviser, they’re all spewing self-serving propaganda about Vietnam; they’re lying through their teeth—they lie about everything. You heard Charlie—”
“Charlie, Charlie—fuck what Charlie said.” “Well now, aren’t we getting a little crotchety.”
“Don’t you get it? What I’m dealing with here? Don’t you think I’m desperate to find out what happened to him—what went wrong? Shit, every day, every goddamn day, that’s what I wake up to.” I shook my head in exhaustion. “Enough, let’s get out of here before I lose my mind, while we’ve got some daylight left.”
Max looked a little shell-shocked.
“Know something, you’ve changed.”
“Pot calling the kettle black—you’re fucking protean.”
“Ever since you’ve let Virgil get his claws into you, you’ve been furtive as hell.”
“What’s Virgil got to do with anything?”
“You’re hiding something. You know stuff you’re not letting on about.”
“Stuff—stuff ? Jesus fucking Christ, I invited you up, didn’t I? What do you want me to do, open a vein?”
“Charlie didn’t like Virgil for beans; he said he’s a McCarthyite, a Red-baiter, told me I should keep you out of his clutches.”
“Thanks, I can take care of myself, Max, and it’s none of your damn business.”
“You and Elliot Goddard—remember: Virgil was a guide to a very unpleasant place.”
“And I’m no Dante, and just you remember, Max, what the road to hell is paved with.”
Max smiled and put his arm around me.
“I’m . . . sorry, and I’m your honored guest.” Max moved to the green Underwood typewriter and ran his fingers sensually over the keys, “I’m just—you know how it is.” He glanced up to the window, catching sight across the lake of what he’d really come for. “Lead on, masked man— Hi-ho, Silver, away.”