19
I WALKED FOR HOURS THAT NIGHT, WAITING for the booze to wear off, going down to the river, trying to get things clear in my mind. It was difficult to figure out which was worse, failing to perform or hearing those words about my father from her lips. But where was the evidence? Why should I believe anything she said? Maybe her parents had put her up to it. The only irrefutable evidence was that I had flopped. I tried to think it through—a thought experiment: step back from present emotion and retrofit the possibility of my father’s affair with Suzanne. Did it square with memory? Certainly my mother’s cold ambivalence and reluctance to talk about her marriage made sense in light of Laura’s little bombshell, much less her refrain of delay, echoed by my grandmother at childhood swimming time: “She’s still at the beach.” And that embrace on the moonlit veranda—an ice pick in the belly: Suzanne was all about performance.
And the “worse” part?
It was crushing to think my father betrayed my mother for such a woman, a Soviet spy—was that the implication? KGB—FBI . . . And Bobby, too. It was one thing to be a Communist, another to be a KGB agent. Elliot’s and Virgil’s interest in Suzanne and Bobby made terrifying sense. Was I staring at a pattern of betrayal in my father’s life, as well—a perfidious private life echoing something even worse in his professional life, another nauseating ripple of doubt from that overheard conversation in the gym?
I stood on the bank of the river, staring across the glimmering void at a tall oak that greedily held its cache of shriveled leaves as if never to let go. A harvest moon nudged the downstream horizon of gesticulating branches.
Loyalty was, above all things, what my grandmother had instilled in me. I dismissed my father’s possible betrayal of his country. Besides, both Elliot and Virgil had assured me on that score. But Virgil was gone and Elliot was in faraway Saigon. I picked up a rock and threw it across the river, and another, and another, aiming at the steadfast oak as if to loosen a few of those leaves and let them fall to the river below. . . until I was a little winded. Breathing hard, feeling more myself, I turned from the breasting moon to a wavering glow in the sky upriver and listened. Beyond the gauntlet of pine, oak, and bedraggled maple that fingered the obsidian curve of the river to the west I could just make out the distinctive chuff-chuff-chuff of helicopters from Fort Devens. It made me smile to think how even the night provided no respite for those intrepid warriors. And I thought again of that Green Beret in the mock Vietnamese village saluting me as the drift recalled me with oars raised, and his comrades with heads bowed, saying grace at the Bull Run.
I nodded to myself. Truth be told, some part of me had always wondered what the hell my father had seen in my besotted mother, daughter of a decorated admiral who’d saved his ship in the Battle of the Coral Sea. A jaundiced view I had no doubt absorbed around the edges from my grandmother.
But he’d betrayed me as well, just walked away.
I picked up another stone, but this time spared the ruddy moontinted oak and tossed it in the slow-flowing river, watching the ripples spread to the far bank and elongate downstream toward the far encompassing sea as the stars grew pale and faded from sight. Lo cielo i vostri movimenti inizia . . . maybe yes, Max, maybe no. I despaired at the thought of the long winter only weeks away and the agonizing wait until spring thaw and crew practice.
I finally walked back, racked by these ill-fitting puzzle pieces and my inability to assemble a picture in my mind that offered any kind of certainty. So I forced myself to come to terms with the tangible issue at hand: On reflection, it was simply ridiculous to feel that we had to have sex our first time together, much less that I wanted to have sex with Laura—what, with the daughter of that woman! A realization only confirmed by the evidence of an unfolding Satyricon as I neared campus: discarded women’s shoes, still-warm joints and pint bottles, stockings and a disgusting jockstrap looped on a bare tree branch. “Jesus fucking Christ.” I was relieved that I had not simply let myself get swept away. And it had nothing to do with Laura or me being too proper. It was just too damned soon, too out of the fucking blue. Just because everybody else was doing it didn’t mean we had to. Lucky I’d kept my head.
But the moment I tried to put such thoughts in a letter—we were supposed to write thank-you letters—on the following day, my reasoning sounded absolutely silly, so I wrote something utterly innocuous. And then there were the other guys, who looked at me with new respect, figuring I’d gotten laid—not that I was going to disabuse them of the notion. A knowing smile was all it took. The dance was already the stuff of class legend. Delicious gossip circulated about the fumbling old night watchman who had actually managed to catch two couples in flagrante delicto in the equipment room of the gym. Two boys had been forced to write letters of apology to their dates’ parents for having taken advantage of their daughters! That really put the cat among the pigeons. I couldn’t think of anything more appalling.
In the weeks that followed, I often found myself lying in bed late at night going over it again and again, which got me worrying less about my father’s betrayals and more about my lack of performance. I couldn’t get the details out of my mind. I liked the way she had kissed me. I decided I liked her—in spite of Suzanne and Bobby—and the more I thought about it, I realized I really liked her body. When I awoke at night and remembered the smell of the grass and the apples, and the softness of her breasts, and how the points of her nipples grazed my palm, I felt as if I had been born anew inside, and the warm flush of desire that then came over me was very real—disconcertingly so, especially when I woke to the soaked crotch of my pajamas. That was pretty good evidence of something. I began to dream of Laura and that night under the apple trees and the loveliness of her young body and perky breasts and the smell of her mixed with the earth.
That dream has never left me.
And I understood, in retrospect, that it was not lack of desire—or even the sad history of our families—that had thwarted us, but the lack of memory. We were still babes grasping for desire in a vacuum, without the vital force of memory to guide us. Once that marker had been set, I found my memories were filled with desire, desire that would not have hidden its face one night longer, once memory of the beloved had taken root. Once our past had merged with the deeper past.
I did not write her that, because I didn’t completely understand my feelings and I wasn’t going to make more of a fool of myself trying. But I thought I made it clear that I wanted to see her again, “to talk things over.” In fact, my body ached with desire at the prospect . . . almost as much as the itch to see those love letters in the Harrods biscuit tins.
And perhaps that was the real irony of our sorry affair: Fumbling my way to that desire had brought me closer to the truth about my father than anything I was to find out for another two decades.
Laura hadn’t been kidding about his near-pornographic love letters, and Suzanne’s . . . desire and deceit—and, yes, betrayal—twined so tightly as to be nearly indistinguishable.
The acting headmaster—old-school and some—by demanding that two of my classmates write notes of apology, had brought on yet another disaster.
A week after the dance, he summoned me to his office and told me he was very disappointed in how I’d handled behavior issues at the dance; obviously, I had done nothing to keep things under control. He pointed to a copy of The New York Times on his desk. This time, the article was not about the trustees and Vietnam, but about a civil suit against the school from one of the parents who had received the letter of apology. Their daughter insisted it wasn’t rape, but the parents and their lawyer claimed otherwise, citing the spiked punch and rampant drug use.
“And from you, of all people, I would have expected better. You’re the senior prefect. Your great-grandfather founded this place, for Christ’s sake. And now look at this mess.”
“Sir, I can’t be expected to police the fields and woods—and just so you know: The school chaperones couldn’t even be bothered to leave the faculty lounge during the dance.”
The headmaster—more out of touch than even old Jack Crocket— went on and on about The New York Times, about the falling enrollment, about annual fund-raising, which was going nowhere.
He made me promise to put the fear of God in my classmates. I struggled to keep my mouth shut, because I would have laughed in his face.
He barely lasted the year. The following spring, the trustees announced the appointment of a replacement, a paragon of New England probity who shepherded in coeducation and renewed Winsted’s reputation.
Thoughts of my father’s letters in the Harrods biscuit tins secreted on a shelf in Suzanne’s closet reminded me: The binder of my father’s schoolboy letters for his sixth-form year had not arrived that fall, as his other letters had the previous three years.
I phoned the attorney at Brandt & Harrison who handled the family trusts and business affairs. It turned out the firm still had the binder of letters from my father’s senior year.
“Why weren’t they sent in the fall like before?”
“I have no idea.”
“Have you read them?”
“No, they remain in a sealed binder, as your grandmother turned them over to us.”
“Why can’t I have them?”
There was a long pause as documents were consulted.
“It says here the senior-year letters are to be given you when you inherit.”
“Inherit what?”
“The estate, at which point the letters will belong to you.”
“When will that be?”
“Ah, you know your mother is contesting that.”
“Contesting what?”
“The age you come into your inheritance.”
“Can she do that?”
“She can try.”
“Why is she doing that?”
“Perhaps that is a conversation you need to have with her.”
“What is the age that I come into my inheritance?” “Twenty-one.”
“In four years.”
“That’s correct . . . when you are at Harvard.”
“At Harvard?”
“That’s what’s here.”
“But I’m not going to Harvard, goddamn it. I’m going to Princeton, I think.”
“Well, that should prove interesting.”
“But I’ll be twenty-one, right, so maybe it doesn’t matter where I go to school.”
“Would you like me to put you in touch with a good law firm to contest that point for you?”
“I couldn’t pay them anything.”
“You wouldn’t have to, until settlement.”
“But I’d like to see the letters now.”
“Our hands are tied.”
“What kind of retainer do you guys get handling the family trusts and all that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, why don’t you go to your senior partner and inform him of my request. And if you guys can see your way on the letters, three or four years from now I won’t have to bother looking for a new law firm for the Alden family trusts.”
“That sounds like a fair request.”
“Call me back tomorrow.”
I never did have that conversation with my mother. But it was clear why my grandmother had delayed my father’s letters from senior year, why she didn’t want me to see them until I had assumed wider family responsibilities. My father whined about the onerous duties of being senior prefect in a time of shifting allegiances, when the Depression was inexorably strangling long-held views and values. Even at Winsted, boys were withdrawn because families had lost all their money. Two Wall Street fathers had committed suicide and the ghastly details had been all over the New York papers. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the near scandal of the Black Eagles, when Bobby had informed on the secret society, creature of Virgil Dabney and Elliot Goddard, to which my father had been recruited as figurehead. My grandmother had probably realized that revelations about the secret society in the letters could fall into the wrong hands or might even put me into a perilous position—“deniability”—especially if I hadn’t been picked.
November 3, 1931
Winsted School
You don’t have to believe everything Mr. Crocket tells you; he is far from omnipotent. And contrary to appearances, Mr. Dabney is a damn fine fellow, even if he does dress like a hobo sometimes. He’s got the finest mind for the classics I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of Karel Hollar. And who cares if his teeth are bad, as you say, and he pours catsup over everything. I find him a splendid Falstaffian character—that’s Elliot’s take on Virgil. Mr. Dabney is more Roman than the Romans, as if he just arrived by time capsule from the Capitoline Hill—by way of Nebraska, of all places, via Yale—surely you can’t hold that against him, as well. I find his judgment on issues of the day, like his hero Seneca’s, to be ballasted by a deep commonsense understanding of history and human nature. His brother is a top man in the FBI and so he seems to have access to all the inside Washington gossip. He has developed quite a following among some members of our class— Elliot leans on his every utterance and treats him like a sage. I will see that you have a chance to spend more time with him when you’re up for the next board meeting. I know how you love eccentrics—tickle you to the bone.
December 6, 1931
I’ve had enough—enough. After the incident in the toilets, Mr. Crocket has told me I must take Bobby in hand and keep him out of trouble. I want nothing to do with him anymore—can’t you please talk to your headmaster? It’s difficult enough being senior prefect without being responsible for my cousin, who doesn’t want to have anything more to do with me, either!
January 18, 1932
I am sick of this charade. What would you have me do—inform on him? Yesterday, I found political tracts from the Communist Party of America in Bobby’s desk drawer. Along with copies of the People’s Daily. These people always couch their appeals in admirable goals, citing human justice, international solidarity against fascism, the alleviation of poverty, and the rights of Negro citizens to the ballot. But such ideas for social justice are never discussed in terms other than revolution, or the overthrow of the existing order. To listen to them is to believe we are mere pawns in a blind mechanistic class and economic struggle.
I get enough of this from Karel, but at least he has the fascists to contend with.
I repeat: I am not my brother’s keeper—I don’t care anymore.
February 17, 1932
Bobby continues unabated to couch his overtures to the younger and susceptible boys by an appeal to their vanity and by throwing around the names of family friends, mostly artists and writers of radical repute in his mother’s Parisian circle. He promises his recruits an introduction to these famous personages (someday), inveigling with talk of sumptuous parties and mysterious women to further tempt his unsuspecting partners. And yet he openly describes his father as that “drunken and lecherous fool.” It is almost as if his hatred and disappointment with his family has become a hatred of Winsted, and our country, and everything we stand for. I have little doubt that Bobby would gladly sacrifice Winsted to his embittered revolutionary aims.
And I must tell you, he has nothing good to say about you; he tells the most abominable lies, which I can’t repeat.
Don’t ask me for any more reports.
April 18, 1932
Mr. Crocket and I have now had many talks about Bobby. I tell him that Bobby wants to be expelled, to become a hero to his fraternal brothers in revolution. He agrees with me but advises that we must not be too hard on Bobby, given the family troubles, and fears for the school’s reputation. I gather his father, Amory, is in a bad way. “Bobby is one of us,” so Mr. Crocket advises me. “We need to stick by him as good Christians. We must not make an example of him—the press would have a field day.”
Well, Christian duty is not enough. Virgil Dabney has been filling my ears with reports of famine in the Ukraine and wholesale starvation; he gets this from his brother and colleagues in Italy. Have you heard any of these reports?
April 28, 1932
The hypocrisy of Mr. Crocket is simply breathtaking. First he enlists me to try to help our fallen angel of Winsted, and now suddenly he’s taking Bobby’s word that I am behind the formation of a secret society that goes against the principles of the school.
At least Judas had the decency to hang himself. Cambridge can have him and good riddance.
I can’t graduate too soon. This is all a distraction from my work onLinear B and Homer.
May 6, 1932
I didn’t mean to upset you. Yes, rest assured, I will be here for graduation—if only to thumb my nose at Mr. Crocket.
And, by the way, you’ll be pleased to know for my valedictorian address I will be citing Wordsworth—yes, the Romantic poets class this spring did rub off—and Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as my text. You know the passage: “And, little town, thy streets for evermore/ Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell/ Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.” This just haunts me no end when I look out over the Circle and wonder what the distant future will make of us. As does Wordsworth’s “Like angels stopped upon the wing by sound/ Of harmony from Heaven’s remotest spheres.” Elysium at sunset—your Inness hour? Maybe I can throw in a little Thoreau, if you like. I’m sure you’ll let me know how I do.
Oh, did I mention that Karel’s father has been elected to the new Czech government as head of the ministry of culture? His parents are spending August in Venice. We have been invited! So after Crete, maybe we can do Venice, sans Williams, before Princeton in the fall. What do you say, Mother Nestor? You and I and La Serenissima! The Gritti as a graduation present?
And Karel, I’m sure, has some big ideas to put to you!
Vlada seemed changed after our senior dance—more distant, more anxious, full of moody introspection. Maybe it was due to the end of football season and the chill of an impending New England winter. He disappeared into the depths of the study carrels in the library stacks, where I regularly sought him out; his pale face and high cheekbones and his dark-ringed depthless blue eyes could be mesmerizing.
Letters from his mother were more infrequent, as if the world of his youth and childhood in Prague was going into slow eclipse. All he knew was that his father was still being held incommunicado in a military hospital in the suburbs of Prague. Gustáv Husák’s puppet regime, put in place by Soviet tanks, was slowly turning the screws.
His world had shrunk to books.
Vlada devoured library books until he collapsed with exhaustion in the small hours of the morning. He read books the way a condemned man might pore over Scripture in the hours and days before his execution. His desk carrel was piled with books. Battlements of books rose steadily from the floor around him. He haunted the stacks, drifting up and down the aisles, reading titles, taking out a volume, reading for five or ten minutes, then returning it to its place or adding it to his collection by his desk.
He drove the librarian to distraction.
She was an older spinster from Savannah, Georgia. Her blue-gray hair was exquisitely coifed and she wore a uniform consisting of a starched blouse with a cameo brooch of a young Persephone rising, and a knee-length black skirt, pale stockings, and white Tretorn sneakers. She patrolled the library like a meter maid on speed. The world might be collapsing, but she remained mistress of a scholarly and ordered oasis. Even the school bells rarely penetrated to the sacrosanct stacks of the library. Vlada was at once worshipper in the temple of this high priestess and a barbarian at her gate. He rarely bothered to check out a book, preferring simply to add it to the pile beside his chair or carelessly reshelve it in the wrong place. The librarian was apoplectic. Her patient Georgia accent seemed to harmlessly roll off Vlada, leaving no detectable trace. He would nod at her complaints about his MO and then make the most ridiculous excuses in broken English for his failure to return books. This disingenuousness mystified and intrigued me, since his English was near perfect. I realized that the cold authoritarian mien of the librarian produced a kind of reflex deceit in Vlada: a survival instinct instilled from a young age. She was the keeper of books—and so of ideas—an institutional power, and thus a suspect authority to be sidestepped.
A guerrilla war ensued. The librarian would surreptitiously remove books from his piles during class time and replace them on the shelves; Vlada, on his return, instantly noting the deficit, would go and seek out his missing companions, and again, beaverlike, reconstitute his enclave. The arcane logic behind his organizing principle always eluded me: history, politics, criticism, art history piled one on top of the next with no discernible chronology or theme. He kept it all in his head and in the jottings of his notebooks.
Vlada stayed up half the night. I barely got any sleep because I loathed giving up our vigil for my chilly sheets. I would look up from difficult Greek translations at three in the morning, my vision blurry, and across the aisle in the darkened stacks there he’d be, hunched over in his carrel, furiously taking notes. Endless cups of coffee left constellations of tan rings on his desktop. His pale face got paler, his eyes bleary and red-veined and heavily bagged, like some vampire off his feed. He was determined to devour in his last hours and days all the books he might never find again in Prague, transcribing thousands of passages into notebooks. He was losing weight though gorging his mind, the surfeit of which might have to last a lifetime. Twenty years later in his dingy hovel of an apartment outside Prague, he would show me those well-thumbed notebooks with the Winsted crest on a crimson cover, from which had flowed some of his most important writings. Vlada had decided to be a writer from an early age, like his father: a political calling, a way of navigating the shoals of a “counterfeit life.” He once told me he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t thought of himself as a writer: “Oh, for a few minutes a bluegrass artist, or an international football star—but always, I think, a writer . . . if the truth is to be found.” He was torn between an instinct to return home to his ailing father and the desire to finish out the academic year.
Max, on the other hand, seemed newly charged up after the senior dance; he became more furtive than ever. He began sniffing around Vlada’s piles of books: a fellow traveler in the realm of ideas, a fellow autodidact. Max’s initial hostility to Vlada melted away when he discovered Vlada’s short stories and realized he was in the presence of a writer as dedicated to his craft—if not more so—as he was. They began spending time together discussing books and writers. Impassioned arguments sprang up from the shadowed stacks like flash floods. I’d watch, not a little miffed, as my erstwhile friend, my Caravaggesque Gabriel, butted in on my blond Knight Templar; their noisy whispering illuminated by a single desk lamp, books opened and texts located and voices down the ages enlisted in their contest: Vlada, that the Soviet onslaught on his homeland was part of the same monstrous totalitarian conspiracy as the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam; Max, that the capitalist ruling classes were rotten to the core and losing their grip on the world anyway, and so what did it matter as long as the rising spirit of liberal humanism triumphed and brought about a fundamental change in human consciousness, a new fraternal order of peaceful coexistence led by artists!
Vlada laughed this off with a dismissive wave and drew a finger across his throat, as if to say, You’re next.
Max countered by locating a copy of an obscure English translation of a book of essays that Vlada’s father had written years before, in which the case is made for socialism with a human face—where intellectuals and artists call the shots.
Max gloated at his discovery.
Vlada conceded his father’s stirring words with an ironic twist of the lips. “Yes, sure, but now they are dead or in jail. Without freedom to express ideas, to champion ideas, how will the world change for the better? Ideas alone are worthless . . . without power . . . and then that same power always corrupts even the best ideas.” He made a fist and sheathed it in his other palm to suggest the paradox, and then thrust a daggerlike finger into Max’s chest. “In my country, you would be the first to disappear, without a word, without a trace. For us, art is not a gentle game of the intellectual, but a matter of who lives and who dies.” Then Vlada squinted in the near darkness, as if to make out something beyond the area of illumination provided by his desk lamp. He mumbled a phrase in Czech, cleared his throat and thought again, and then tried to phrase it for Max in English so that he might understand the conundrum. These words appeared in slightly different form in Vlada’s first book, and were later appropriated by Max in the dedication to
Vlada in his second novel.
“The Pope had ideas, Robespierre had ideas, Marx and Lenin, Hitler and Stalin had ideas—and the power to make them a cruel reality. Power and ideas are the unstable elements we juggle like nitroglycerin. The writer who seeks the truth can trust nobody—not even himself. The evil ones will steal his fire, as Prometheus stole from the gods, and butcher humankind.”
At our age, thoughts like that left us giddy.
Max managed to talk Vlada into translating a few of his stories into English for us, helping him with idioms. I could feel the power of his words and images even in translation, and the metaphors he conjured with a supple sarcastic prose. Sometimes he wrote about his childhood, small tales about the odd comings and goings in his Prague neighborhood, where everybody had a secret to hide and everyone sidestepped the truth—how the actual physical landscape could be warped by the imbecilities of a culture built on lies and half-truths. He wrote fantasy stories and poetry. One of those stories, which he read to us in a first draft, was published years later in his first book of short stories. It begins with a little boy wheeling his toy wagon down cobblestone streets, where he picks up broken toys and bits of furniture from garbage cans; each passerby sees some lost object from his childhood in the boy’s wagon, invoking daydreams of carefree youth and the sheer inconsequence of daily life; the lost objects become the only reality that matters. Upon the publication of these stories some years later by a press in Vienna, he was compared with Kafka, Kundera, and Havel.
I weighed in occasionally in these debates, but I dared not say what I really wanted to say: Stay, Vlada, stay with me until the summer and then see how things are. I tried to tempt him with descriptions of Elysium and our well-stocked library and about my great-grandfather’s paintings, and the tall pines . . . how he could have the place to himself and the peace to write. I even fantasized that maybe we’d go on to college together—why not? The Princeton football coach (Yale, too, prompted by Elliot Goddard) recruited him as field goal kicker and offered him a full academic scholarship and stipend.
“Think about it, playing before thousands of people . . . and think about the library—you’ll have a field day. And the girls—you’ll be a fucking star!”
He was tempted; I could tell he was tempted. . . .
And then in early December, he received a long letter from his mother. His father had finally been released, but only because he had suffered a second and more serious heart attack in prison. After a week in the hospital, he was allowed to return to their apartment. He was in a weakened condition, with no job, no telephone, no pension, and was warned against communicating with anyone in his former circle around Dubček.
“They take his job . . . his reason for living,” Vlada said, tossing the letter onto the desk. “Then his dignity is finished; there is no purpose for anything . . . and no friends and no money.”
His face was a jaundiced yellow in the dim lamplight, eyes hollow and tired.
“Isn’t there something that can be done?”
I realized the instant I’d spoken how little conception I had of a world where nothing could be done, where there was no redress. His smile showed no bitterness, only a certain incredulity that I could be so naïve. He bent closer, as if to make sure I got the message, making a show of chopping with the edge of his flattened palm.
“They kill very, very slowly, by first corrupting our language, and with this they destroy the spirit, then the body. In Prague, even a heart attack is part of the calculation.”
I wanted to hug him, how I just wanted to hug him.
On one of our last nights together, I noticed that Vlada seemed more agitated than usual, as if he was having a hard time concentrating. When I walked over to his desk late that evening, I thought I saw him wiping away tears as he quickly folded a letter and replaced it in his pocket. I figured it was from his mother and more bad news about his father. But he seemed to have had enough of that subject and shoved back his chair and walked me over to my study carrel. He picked up the English lit anthology I’d been reading and examined the page of underlining from Charlie Springfield’s AP class of the year before. Vlada ran a hand through his ratty blond hair, by then down to his shoulders (he’d vowed not to have it cut until he returned home), and murmured his approval as he flipped through my underlined pages, stopping to read notes I’d scribbled in the margins from Charlie’s lectures. He lingered over the section on John Milton, bending to the page to make out my hurried handwriting.
“Brilliant,” he said, stabbing at a passage with his finger, “your most noble poet, the most heroic voice in the English language; it is the voice of freedom, of human dignity in face of oppression—yes?”
I nodded gamely; there was a kind of desperation in his voice.
It seemed a terrible injustice that he had never had a chance to be taught by Charlie Springfield, and I told him so.
“Max has told me everything about this great man.” That took me down a notch.
Ever eager to curry favor, I told Vlada he could have my English lit anthology once the AP exams were over. Where he was going, he needed it more than I did.
“But these are your notes? You had these ideas from your teacher—precious things, yes?”
“You know, he was wounded in France fighting the Nazis.”
“Really . . .” Max hadn’t mentioned that, nor that Charlie had been against the war in Vietnam. “The same as your father—yes?”
“He was CIA station chief in Athens, fighting the Communists in the Greek Civil War.”
“He was a great man. I have seen the medals in the gym.” “Yes, the medals . . . they’re quite something, I guess.”
He caught my uncertain tone, as if I didn’t know my own mind, and he made a fist, touching it to my shoulder as if anointing me.
Then he cocked his head, touched his ear. We were quiet and listened. Very faintly, I thought I could hear the noise of engines and then some distant muffled thuds, nearly inaudible unless you were listening for them. I thought for a second and then told him that the sounds must be coming from Fort Devens, about two miles distant. Night training exercises, I suggested. Special Forces . . . Green Berets.
“The Green Berets!” he exclaimed, slamming a fist into his palm.
“Freedom fighters . . .”
Vlada’s face lit up, keen, intense, like a bird dog that had caught the scent. He gave a comical salute and announced that we were going to see those Green Berets. I laughed because I thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t. Some point of equilibrium had shifted inside him and the decision had been made. He was going with or without me. I was dumbfounded. I told him we could get kicked out of school just for leaving the grounds at night, especially given the crackdown since the infamous dance—much less illegally entering a U.S. army base! Vlada snorted at my excuses and then looked me hard in the face, his slate blue eyes boring deeply into mine. He gave me a friendly slug in the arm. “A man must be a doer of deeds, not just a speaker of words,” he told me in his Slavic-toned English. “Words without action—it is impossible.” That was how he put it. The paraphrase was uncanny: “. . . life is nothing and words are empty if a man is not prepared to put his life in danger.” It was the ancient Homeric injunction! After our long football season, Vlada knew just the right buttons to push.
And for this little walk on the wild side, he had chosen me and not Max.
Passing the portrait of General Alden as we left the library, he gestured to the dim uniformed figure above the mantelpiece.
“You have his face,” said Vlada. “It is, I think, the face of a liberator.” As I said, the right buttons.
The night had a slight chill to it, as that long, warm fall finally gave way to the inevitable. I began to walk the road to Fort Devens. Vlada grabbed my arm. “Are you crazy?” He directed me into a cornfield and a stealthy cross-country slog—a lesson in how differently we saw the world. Vlada led me through harvested pumpkin fields, shallow copses, backyards, and garden plots. I didn’t even bother to protest that we were trespassing, it was so beside the point. He was guided by the distant sounds of war games, stopping every now and then to relish the growing whine of rotors and the crackle of automatic weapons. A hazy mottled gray moon, lapped by mauve clouds, lighted our way, but only just, and I was thrilled to have Vlada’s powerful shoulders, bent to the near darkness, guiding me, to be on his team. We passed through some fruit orchards and skirted a pheasant farm. Vlada laughed as the caged pheasants dashed to the far corner of their enclosure at our approach. Then he got down on all fours and howled like a wolf as the poor gorgeously attired creatures stumbled over one another in retreat. When we came to a fence, he’d vaunt it with the ease of a champion gymnast, which was exactly what he’d been back in Czechoslovakia as a boy. He’d laugh as I carefully climbed over. Twenty minutes later, we came to Route 211, just down from the Bull Run restaurant, and, with no headlights showing in either direction, we dashed across the road and into the high marshy grass on the far side.
A sturdy chain-link fence, ten feet high, with menacing barbed wire at the top, confronted us about fifty yards farther on. Every ten yards, there were very official U.S. government signs warning about trespass, with graphic skull and crossbones in case the illiterate or foolish didn’t get the message. One sign warned of an active firing range. I don’t think Vlada even bothered to read the signs, easily visible as the scattered clouds lifted and the moonlight intensified. I was all set to call it a night; we’d had our little adventure. But Vlada just stood there in the knee-high grass as if mesmerized by the sounds of those Hueys, a sound I would come to know like the voice of a first love. The noise was louder now and more distinct, the rhythmic chug of props dicing the air, punctuated by the staccato report of automatic weapons. There were flashes of red and green in the distant treetops and traces of rising smoke.
When I looked at Vlada, I found him staring at me as if amused. “You okay?” he asked.
I tried to make light of it all.
“It’s ridiculous”—I shrugged—“you can’t turn a New England landscape into Vietnam.”
“So, we find out just how well they do it.”
I figured we were done. Maybe grab a pizza in the nearby town and head back. But before I’d even formed the thought, Vlada grabbed onto the chain-link fence and was pulling himself up as if to recklessly skewer himself on the taunt strands of wicked barbed wire at the top. My attempt at protest was drowned out by his sharp commands. He gestured to my right. There were some broken bits of lumber half covered in the grass. He told me to hand him a piece. I pulled out a length of rotted two-by-four and passed it up to him. With what seemed practiced skill, he shoved the length of lumber between the strands of barbed wire and twisted them in such a way as to produce a gap wide enough for an agile person to slip through. In another second, he was under the wire and waiting for me on the far side of the fence.
“Now you,” he shouted, an impatient scowl scribbled on his forehead.
It was like a jolt of paternal judgment, the thrust of a white jaw, the gleaming teeth and glittering eyes . . . and the sweater: Vlada was wearing the sweater that my grandmother had knit for my father and then given me when he disappeared. I’d passed it on to Vlada a week before. I was suddenly frightened, as if I’d just awakened from a bad dream.
“What, you have a problem?”
Vlada reached into his crotch and grabbed himself and made a lewd face. The look of sarcastic disdain mortified me. I leaped for the fence in a kind of angry panic. When I got to the two-by-four jammed between the barbed wire and began to squeeze through, I felt a prick and my ankle caught. And with the pain came a flashing image of Vlada at his desk an hour before, quickly folding up a letter and returning it to his pocket . . . as if I’d missed something. Something about his furtiveness. . . I froze. Then Vlada was right there on the opposite side of the fence, pulling my pant leg free, making good my trespass.
As soon as we hit the deck, Vlada was off again, leading the way through the high grass, moist and chilly to the touch. There were no paths or markings, and the place had been left to grow in a wild state. We reached a heavily wooded area, marshy and thick with creepers and rotting trunks. Bereft of most leaves, the remaining scrub oaks and ground cover were thick enough so that the forest floor remained in near darkness and only the briefest glimmerings of moonlight gave us any sense of what the next footstep might bring. Even Vlada managed an undignified pratfall every few minutes, and soon we were both soaked and muddy from head to foot.
As we drew nearer to the whine of choppers, Vlada stopped and pulled me to his side, pointing to his nose and repeating, “Benzene— yes, can you smell the benzene?” I could hear the excitement in his voice, and I nodded my head, thinking he was truly mad, and wondering what the other smell was that was drifting through the woods, blending with the stench of stagnant water and rotting vegetation. It was cordite.
Up ahead, there were flashes of dancing light through the trees. My heart was slamming away in my chest, so hard that I could barely breathe.
Suddenly, the dark wood split wide open with a terrific angry roar of hovering choppers. I saw Vlada sprint forward to a patch of light where the woods gave way to a small thicket and an open space beyond. As I drew near him, crouching and cringing at the terrible noise above me, I saw him motion me to get down and be quiet, as if anybody was likely to hear us above that din. And then I was snug beside him and we were kneeling behind thick undergrowth. Before us spread a kind of grassy plain, silver and misty in the moonlight; and into this clearing, the sleek hornet-faced Hueys were nosing downward to hover above the rotor-flattened grass and disgorge uniformed figures, who spread out, crouching and firing off brief bursts from their weapons toward the woods to our right. Red and yellow flares burning in the grass sent upward-cascading columns of acrid smoke. Splayed, writhing shadows danced in all directions. The shrieking engines and small-arms fire, the smell of exhaust and cordite, made for a hellish, if thrilling, vision.
We watched spellbound from our hiding place as dark junglefatigued figures streamed from the choppers with a precision that, even then, my untrained eye could appreciate. The teamwork and supreme sense of willful mastery those men epitomized brought a lump to my throat. I wondered if I was going to run out of air or my heart was going to explode. Vlada knelt there beside me, arm across my shoulder, his jaw shot forward like a rifle bolt, eyes keen and unblinking: a prophet beholding the holy of holies.
And then a new flight of choppers charged over the treetops and into the clearing as the first flight lifted off and away, and the soldiers who jumped from these came right toward us. It was as if we had been watching a movie, in a dream of relative remove and safety—instants later to find ourselves sitting ducks. For the first time in my life, I knew I was going to die and told Vlada as much. He turned to me and his whole face lit up, as if I’d told the greatest joke. A tremendous belly laugh exploded from his lips, loud enough that the sound seemed to clear a space for itself above the terrific blast of the rotors. He pulled my ear close to his mouth and yelled that they were not using real bullets, just blanks. How did he know that?
No tracers—obvious. (He’d done his military training at seventeen: Warsaw Pact–style with live ammunition.)
We curled ourselves down into the bushes and waited for the onslaught.
Bodies hurtled past us, coming within inches of where we lay. I got glimpses of their blackened faces beneath their helmets. Determined and sweating, they cursed and yelled to one another with a show of bravado from long months of training together—perfunctory stuff in the controlled chaos of field exercises . . . when nobody was firing back.
And then they were past us, merging into the thick woods. The choppers spun off with a world-weary whine to vanish into the night sky. An eerie silence descended and we got up and looked carefully around like shipwreck survivors, the mists churning and settling, the dying flares sending ungainly pink shadows scudding over the grass to slink away. I was amazed to still be alive. In the soft light, I could just make out a triumphant gleam in Vlada’s eyes. He brought his sweat-slick golliwog face close to mine and yelled with a kind of insane joy, “You are all that stands between us and slavery; you are the last hope of liberation; your country is the last hope for freedom.”