Jailbird (7 page)

This was the song:

And on and on.

Ruth, one of millions of Europe’s Ophelias after the Second World War, fainted in my motorcar.

I took her to a twenty-bed hospital in the
Kaiserburg
, the imperial castle, which wasn’t even officially operating yet. It was being set up exclusively for persons associated with the War Crimes Trials. The head of it was a Harvard classmate of mine, Dr. Ben Shapiro, who had also been a communist in student days. He was now a lieutenant colonel in the Army Medical Corps. Jews were not numerous at Harvard in my day. There was a strict quota, and a low one, as to how many Jews were let in each year.

“What have we here, Walter?” he said to me in Nuremberg. I was carrying the unconscious Ruth in my arms. She weighed no more than a handkerchief. “It’s a girl,” I said. “She’s breathing. She speaks many languages. She fainted. That’s all I know.”

He had an idle staff of nurses, cooks, technicians, and so on, and the finest food and medicines that the Army could give him, since he was likely to have high-ranking persons for patients by and by. So Ruth received, and for nothing, the finest care available on the planet. Why? Mostly because, I think, Shapiro and I were both Harvard men.

One year later, more or less, on October fifteenth of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six, Ruth would become my wife. The War Crimes Trials were over. On the day we were married, and probably conceived our only child as well,
Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide.

It was vitamins and minerals and protein and, of course, tender, loving care, that made all the difference to Ruth. After only three weeks in the hospital she was a sane and witty Viennese intellectual. I hired her as my personal interpreter and took her everywhere with me. Through another Harvard acquaintance, a shady colonel in the Quartermaster Corps in Wiesbaden—a black marketeer, I’m sure—I was able to get her a suitable wardrobe, for which, mysteriously, I was never asked to pay anyone. The woolens were from Scotland, the cottons from Egypt—the silks from China, I suppose. The shoes were French—and prewar. One pair, I remember, was alligator, and came with a bag to match. The goods were priceless, since no store in Europe, or in North America, for that matter, had offered anything like them for years. The sizes, moreover, were exactly right for Ruth. These blackmarket treasures were delivered to my office in cartons claiming to contain mimeograph paper belonging to the Royal Canadian Air Force. Two taciturn young male citizens delivered them in what had once been a
Wehrmacht
ambulance. Ruth guessed that one was Belgian and the other, like my mother, Lithuanian.

My accepting those goods was surely my most corrupt
act as a public servant, and my
only
corrupt act—until Watergate. I did it for love.

I began to speak to Ruth of love almost as soon as she got out of the hospital and went to work for me. Her replies were kind of funny and perceptive—but above all pessimistic. She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. They could only create meaningless tragedies, she said, since they weren’t nearly intelligent enough to accomplish all the good they meant to do. We were a disease, she said, which had evolved on one tiny cinder in the universe, but could spread and spread.

“How can you speak of love to a woman,” she asked me early in our courtship, “who feels that it would be just as well if nobody had babies anymore, if the human race did not go on?”

“Because I know you don’t really believe that,” I replied. “Ruth—look at how full of
life
you are!” It was true. There was no movement or sound she made that was not at least accidentally flirtatious—and what is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

What a charmer she was! Oh, I got the credit for how smoothly things ran. My own country gave me a Distinguished Service Medal, and France made me a
chevalier
in the Légion d’honneur, and Great Britain and the Soviet Union sent me letters of commendation and thanks. But it was Ruth who worked all the miracles, who kept each guest in a state of delighted forgivingness, no matter what went wrong.

“How can you dislike life and still be so lively?” I asked her.

“I couldn’t have a child, even if I wanted to,” she said. “That’s how lively I am.”

She was wrong about that, of course. She was only guessing. She
would
give birth to a son by and by, a very unpleasant person, who, as I have already said, is now a book reviewer for
The New York Times
.

That conversation with Ruth in Nuremberg went on. We were in Saint Martha’s Church, close to where fate had first brought us together. It was not yet operating as a church again. The roof had been put back on—but there was a canvas flap where the rose window used to be. The window and the altar, an old custodian told us, had been demolished by a single cannon shell from a British fighter plane. To him, judging from his solemnity, this was yet another religious miracle. And I must say that I seldom met a male German who was saddened by all the destruction in his own country. It was always the ballistics of whatever had done the wrecking that he wished to talk about.

“There is more to life than having babies, Ruth,” I said.

“If I had one, it would be a monster,” she said. And it came to pass.

“Never mind babies,” I said. “Think of the new era that is being born. The world has learned its lesson at last, at last. The closing chapter to ten thousand years of madness and greed is being written right here and now—in Nuremberg. Books will be written about it. Movies will be made
about it. It’s the most important turning point in history.” I believed it.

“Walter,” she said, “sometimes I think you are only eight years old.”

“It’s the only age to be,” I said, “when a new era is being born.”

Clocks struck six all over town. A new voice joined the chorus of public chimes and bells. It was in fact an old voice in Nuremberg, but Ruth and I had never heard it before. It was the deep
bonging
of the
Männleinlaufen
, the bizarre clock of the distant
Frauenkirche
. That clock was built more than four hundred years ago. My ancestors, both Lithuanian and Polish, would have been fighting Ivan the Terrible back then.

The visible part of the clock consisted of seven robots, which represented seven fourteenth-century electors. They were designed to circle an eighth robot, which represented the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fourth, and to celebrate his exclusion, in Thirteen-hundred and Fifty-six, of the Papacy from the selection of German rulers. The clock had been knocked out by bombing. American soldiers who were clever with machinery had begun on their own time to tinker with it as soon as they occupied the city. Most Germans I had talked to were so demoralized that they did not care if the
Männleinlaufen
never ran again. But it was running again, anyway. Thanks to American ingenuity, the electors were circling Charles the Fourth again.

“Well,” said Ruth, when the sounds of the bells had
died away, “when you eight-year-olds kill Evil here in Nuremberg, be sure to bury it at a crossroads and drive a stake through its heart—or you just might see it again at the next full moooooooooooooooooon.”

B
UT MY UNFLAGGING
optimism prevailed. Ruth consented at last to marry me, to let me try to make her the happiest of women, despite all the ghastly things that had happened to her so far. She was a virgin, and so very nearly was I, although I was thirty-three—although, roughly speaking, half my life was over.

Oh, to be sure, I had, while in Washington, “made love,” as they say, to this woman or that one from time to time. There was a WAC. There was a Navy nurse. There was a stenographer in the Department of Commerce typing pool. But I was fundamentally a fanatical monk in the service of war, war, war. There were many like me. Nothing else in life is nearly so obsessive as war, war, war.

My wedding gift to Ruth was a wood carving commissioned by me. It depicted hands of an old person pressed together in prayer. It was a three-dimensional rendering of a drawing by Albrecht Dürer, a sixteenth-century artist, whose house Ruth and I had visited many times in Nuremberg, during our courting days. That was my invention, so far as I know, having those famous hands on paper rendered in the round. Such hands have since been manufactured by
the millions and are staples of dim-witted piety in gift shops everywhere.

Soon after our marriage I was transferred to Wiesbaden, Germany, outside of Frankfurt am Main, where I was placed in charge of a team of civilian engineers, which was winnowing mountains of captured German technical documents for inventions and manufacturing methods and trade secrets American industry might use. It did not matter that I knew no math or chemistry or physics—any more than it had mattered when I went to work for the Department of Agriculture that I had never been near a farm, that I had not even tended a pot of African violets on a windowsill. There was nothing that a humanist could not supervise—or so it was widely believed at the time.

Our son was born by cesarean section in Wiesbaden. Ben Shapiro, who had been my best man, and who had also been transferred to Wiesbaden, delivered the child. He had just been promoted to full colonel. In a few years Senator Joseph R. McCarthy would find that promotion to have been sinister, since it was well known that Shapiro had been a communist before the war. “Who promoted Shapiro to Wiesbaden?” he would want to know.

We named our son Walter F. Starbuck, Jr. Little did we dream that the name would become as onerous as Judas Iscariot, Jr., to the boy. He would seek legal remedy when he turned twenty-one, would have his name changed to Walter F. Stankiewicz, the name that appears over his columns in
The New York Times
. Stankiewicz, of course, was our discarded family name. And I must laugh now, remembering
something my father once told me about his arrival at Ellis Island as an immigrant. He was advised that Stankiewicz had unpleasant connotations to American ears, that people would think he smelled bad, even if he sat in a bathtub all day long.

I returned to the United States with my little human family, to Washington, D.C., again, in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. My optimism became bricks and mortar and wood and nails. We bought the only house we would ever own, which was the little bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Ruth put on the mantelpiece the woodcarving of the praying hands by Albrecht Dürer. There were two things that had made her want to buy that house and no other, she said. One was that it had a perfect resting place for the hands. The other was a gnarled old tree that shaded the walk to our doorstep. It was a flowering crab apple tree.

Was she religious? No. She was from a family that was skeptical about all formal forms of worship, which was classified as Jewish by the Nazis. Its members would not have so classified themselves. I asked her once if she had ever sought the consolations of religion in the concentration camp.

“No,” she said. “I knew God would never come near such a place. So did the Nazis. That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis,” she said. “They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.”

I still ponder a toast Ruth gave one Christmas Eve, in
Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-four or so. I was the only person to hear it—the only other person in the bungalow. Our son had not sent us so much as a Christmas card. The toast was this, and I suppose she might just as logically have given it on the day I met her in Nuremberg: “Here’s to God Almighty, the laziest man in town.”

Strong stuff.

Yes—and my speckled old hands were like the Albrecht Dürer hands atop my folded bedding, as I sat on my prison cot in Georgia, waiting for freedom to begin again.

I was a pauper.

I had emptied my savings account and cashed in my life-insurance policies and sold my Volkswagen and my brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in order to pay for my futile defense.

My lawyers said that I still owed them one hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars. Maybe so. Anything was possible.

Nor did I have glamor to sell. I was the oldest and least celebrated of all the Watergate coconspirators. What made me so uninteresting, I suppose, was that I had so little power and wealth to lose. Other coconspirators had taken belly-whoppers from the tops of church steeples, so to speak. When I was arrested, I was a man sitting on a three-legged stool in the bottom of a well. All they could do to me was to saw off the legs of my little stool.

Not even I cared. My wife had died two weeks before they took me away, and my son no longer spoke to me.
Still—they had to put handcuffs on me. It was the custom.

“Your name?” the police sergeant who booked me had asked.

I was impudent with him. Why not? “Harry Houdini,” I replied.

A fighter plane leaped up from the tip of a nearby runway, tore the sky to shreds. It happened all the time.

“At least I don’t smoke anymore,” I thought.

President Nixon himself commented one time on how much I smoked. It was soon after I came to work for him—in the spring of Nineteen-hundred and Seventy. I was summoned to an emergency meeting about the shooting to death of four antiwar protesters at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard. There were about forty other people at the meeting. President Nixon was at the head of the huge oval table, and I was at the foot. This was the first time I had seen him in person since he was a mere congressman—twenty years before. Until now he had no wish to see his special advisor on youth affairs. As things turned out, he would never want to see me again.