Secret Father (4 page)

Now I racked up as if he were here. I chalked, broke, shot, chalked, shot—running the table once, then again. The noise of the ceramic spheres, one against the others, with the faintly erotic punctuation of the pocket thunks, defied the stone silence of the empty house. The stick gliding through my fingers and the kick in my right elbow at each stroke kept my mind tethered to physical sensation.

Nicolaus had set the fire roaring in the ornate hearth before he'd departed for the evening, as he always did on the Fridays we expected Michael, but it was down to embers before I noticed. I remember consciously deciding not to add a log.
Where are you?

But by then the question had moved away from Michael. The raw particularity of eight-ball solitaire had failed me. My mind had cut loose from one snapping sequence of sounds to drift, with no leave from me, back to that other: the slamming of the screen door that took her from the summer kitchen out into the breezeway, then into the garage, and another slam. My God, she could get angry! And then into the car—slam!—the rev of which I heard so clearly because I'd followed her for once, this time to apologize.

That memory brought me back to the fight that had taken Michael away on Sunday—"You can't treat me like this!"—and my knees became weak. Have I done it again? The very question made me tack.

I saw her across a narrow gap of the churning water of Long Island Sound. With her hair hidden by her long-billed cap, she was skipper of her father's Lightning, bearing down on mine as we both drove in on the last mark in the last heat of the Manhasset Memorial Day Regatta, a class race that drew boats from all over the Northeast. I took her for a boy as she was shrilly screaming, "Starboard tack! Right of way! Right of way! Starboard! Starboard!"

I refused to head up, exactly as she later charged. At the last second, she fell off, and I took the mark ahead of her, to come in sixth out of more than fifty. She came in eighth, and lodged a protest with the race committee. Her protest was promptly overruled. Where was the collision?

Only at the hearing did I discover that my deadly rival was a girl. I went up to her and apologized, saying that had I known, I would certainly have given way—and she nearly spit at me. Later, at the commodore's ball, I asked her to dance. After blatantly looking me over and tossing the raven hair I had not seen before, she accepted. When she came down to the beach with me, after the band had packed its instruments, I teased her that she clearly wanted to be with a man to whom she could yield, but while feeling superior. She did not find my remark funny in the least, because to her, she said, the inability to rightfully ram another boat broadside was no virtue. She regretted falling off. So where was superiority? It was a point I conceded in all sincerity, realizing that this girl was something new.

We talked for hours, sitting on the sand, staring at the stars. When I said good night, we kissed, and kissed again. Much later, she told me that I knew nothing of a woman's readiness to yield, since she had already chosen to be with me for life, and would have made love right then on the beach had I only pressed. How she took delight, after that, in teasing that I was more timid on sand than on water. All I knew was that with this fierce girl I felt complete for the first time in my life, and I was not about to risk losing that.

Although we had made our home together in the apartment on Central Park West, and though we continued to spend weekends at her family compound on the North Shore of Long Island, most of my memories are of our place at the lake. Not the lake as it is, a deep blue finger pointing through the north woods toward Canada, but the lake in my mind, which broke free of the good times—Michael and me sitting on the dock at night; taking the cliff walk hand in hand with Edie after the boy was in bed—to become the hazy emblem of what went wrong.

Even the clacking of billiard balls, evoking slams, could take me there. Now the date was May 31, 1960, nearly twenty years after Edie and I met, and nearly one year before the start of this story. We had gone up to the lake for the Memorial Day weekend—me, Edie, Michael, and one of his chums from St. Dunstan's. It was Monday, and the boys had gone out in one of the boats. Michael was a crack sailor, another sport for which one does not need legs. Edie had intended to finish laying out her summer garden, but instead we fell to arguing over God knows what. And the next thing I knew she was hurling at me my having admitted the day before that I dreaded Michael's being an ocean away once we moved to Germany in the fall.

Edie had had her own trouble in coming to terms with that, I knew, but now, with perverse unfairness, she accused me of needing our son too much; "an unnatural dependency," she said, speaking of perverse. I fired back that perhaps now that he was whole, she needed him too little, as if only his infirmity could interest her. It was an unforgivable retort, and I regretted it before the words had cleared my tongue, but it must have plucked the nerve of her self-loathing because it was then that she stormed out of the room and beyond, slamming doors along the way.

Bang!
I thought of that sound in Rhine-Main Hall, then put the thought away.

I usually let Edie go when she flipped out like that, but recognizing my own cruelty for once, I went after her—a mistake, because to get away from me, she left the house in her rage, which she had never done before.

By the time I reached the threshold of the garage, Edie had already backed her car out and was swinging it around, kicking up pebbles and gunning away, leaving me staring at the road long after she had disappeared.

I stood there until at last I realized she wasn't coming back. I didn't know yet what would happen, but I already knew for sure it would be my fault.

In the Frankfurt version of that awful scene, Michael did not slam doors at me, but, while driving off, he refused to look back, to return my regretful wave.

Where are you?

A
T ELEVEN O'CLOCK
, from my study, I called the dormitory again, and when a student answered, I asked for the number of Mr. Jones, the residence hall director, a man I had never met but whose name was on the previous fall's welcome letter that I found in my desk. The student did not know the private number, nor if there was one. He said he'd find out, and once again the phone dropped into the oceanic limbo of sounds—harsh laughter, throbbing music, a shout. At last a rough voice grunted its hello, a brusque impatience that made me realize both that this was Mr. Jones and that he had just been woken from sleep.

"I am the father of one of your students, Mr. Jones, and I am looking for him."

"Who is that?"

"Michael Montgomery."

At once the stark silence of his nonreply registered in the knob at the base of my spine. I knew somehow to take his hesitation as the main revelation.

"Michael Montgomery," I repeated, only now with the inflection of demand.

"And you are?"

"Paul Montgomery. His father. I am calling you from Frankfurt."

"Michael is a five-day boarder, Mr. Montgomery. It
is
Mister, isn't it?"

Most Wiesbaden fathers would have been addressed by rank, and I sensed Jones's relief to be up against another mere civilian.

"I expected my son home tonight, and he did not come."

"Well, as a five-day boarder, sir..." Jones hesitated, I realized, to summon his nerve. "...he wouldn't actually be our responsibility after 1700 hours of a Friday. Not actually."

It was easy to picture him as a short, bespectacled physics teacher, one whose utter lack of physical assurance would prompt such curial devotion to the rubrics of the actual. Rules as a barrier to hide behind.

"I am not concerned with actual responsibility, Mr. Jones. Not at this point. I am concerned with the whereabouts of my son."

Again his silence was a declaration, but of what?

"Mr. Jones?"

"Yes?"

"I am asking for your help here. I expected my son home at six o'clock this evening—1800 hours, if you prefer. He did not come. He did not call. My son would never not come home without calling me."

"Your son is a high school senior, Mr. Montgomery. They do these things."

"What things?"

"Not come. Not call."

"I get the distinct impression you are not telling me something."

"No, sir. That's not it."

"What is it, then?"

Again his silence.

"Mr. Jones."

"Maybe you'd better talk to someone else. I'd like to help you, Mr. Montgomery, but I'm not—"

I forced myself to wait. Now my mind went to the sound of a bulkhead slamming. I heard it through the bones of my feet, a sound from well below decks. A sensation from sixteen years before, just after our bucket, the
Stephen Case,
took a hit well below the waterline. As exec on the bridge, my job was to keep the glasses at my face, scanning for the telltale trails of more torpedoes, but what I was most aware of were the bulkhead hatches banging shut below against the inrushing sea, as now I worked to seal off the flood of feeling this strange bastard had opened in me. And then
bang!
A gunshot.

"Not what?" I asked.

"Supposed to."

"You're not supposed to? Let me understand. You are not supposed to discuss what you know of a student's whereabouts with the student's father?"

"That is right."

"Look, Jones, I can be over there in an hour. Do I have to come over there so that you can explain to me what is going on?"

"You'd better talk to General Healy."

"What?"

"General Healy. That's all I am going to say. I've said too much already."

"Who is General Healy?"

"National security, Mr. Montgomery. They said it is a matter of national security." Jones's inflection as he uttered that phrase was its exclamation point.

By now, at the dawn of the century's last decade, as I am writing this, the words "national security" seem to have been reduced to weightless souvenirs from another time, like small bits of the Berlin Wall that hawkers have been selling around the world. In the era of the amiable and feckless Mikhail Gorbachev, it is impossible to use the phrase with anything like the punch it carried when Joseph Stalin had emerged in the American nightmare as Adolf Hitler with the bomb, or when Nikita Khrushchev then arrived as a kind of Mussolini, only madder. "National security" had, in fact, been brought into the lexicon by a man named James Forrestal, whom my father knew well from their time together at Princeton. Forrestal was famous as the first American secretary of defense in the late 1940s, although he had been secretary of the Navy during the war, near the top of my own chain of command when I was in uniform. Before that, he had been head of Dillon, Read, a Wall Street investment firm. But Forrestal's own fate—he jumped from a sixteenth-floor window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1949—reveals "national security" as code for a state of mind that is anything but secure. I believed in it as much as anyone at the time, but now see how it was always invoked, whether by the greatest statesmen of the era or by bureaucratic nobodies like Jones, for the same ends, which were to silence, to hide, and to intimidate.

Apparently, my silence could intimidate, too. Jones's voice shook as he added, "They said it was their responsibility to deal with you and Sergeant Carson, not mine."

"Who is Sergeant Carson?"

"I've said too much already. Talk to the general. He's handling the whole thing. He's the one who told me."

"General Healy?"

"Major General David Healy, here in Wiesbaden. I don't think you should worry, because it involves his son, too."

 

I was unable to get General Healy's home telephone number, which spiked my irritation but soon forced me to stop and think. Instead of caroming like a billiard ball from room to room in the empty house in Dahlberg, I went downtown to my office in Frankfurt's Bundesbank building, a glittering new skyscraper that was a monument to the German boom. Even at that hour of the night, it seemed half the offices of the forty-story tower were lit, with restless German bankers doing business across time zones to the east.

I was there, thinking west, to place phone calls to the States. In those pre-touch-tone days, most transatlantic calls involved two or three operators, often requiring multiple prearranged appointments at both ends, a cumbersome process compared to that made possible by the direct trunk lines that had been put in place for the Pentagon, and that companies like Chase were happy to buy into.

My office was on the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth floor, I don't remember which. It was furnished in Bauhaus chrome and leather, with the austerely elegant furniture set off by a vast Bijari carpet. At my desk I placed a call to Earl Gifford, expecting he would be just arriving at his Park Avenue apartment, home from a day's work. Gifford was number two at Dillon, Read by then. Perhaps that fleeting thought of Forrestal had put me in mind of him—or was that fleeting thought from now, not then? Either way, the old firm was still a player in Washington. C. Douglas Dillon himself, son of the founder, was Kennedy's secretary of the treasury in 1961, and had the kind of first-order clout that Gifford would not actually have to invoke to wield.

We had served together on the
Stephen Case
in the Pacific. It was Gifford who'd brought me into Chase Manhattan in 1950, before he'd decamped to the Treasury Department in '52. Although he'd come back to Wall Street after Eisenhower's first term—to Dillon, Read, not Chase, because there were no Rockefellers blocking the way to the top—Gifford's Midas touch in New York depended on the gold threads tying him to the alchemists in the Federal Triangle, the chiefs of whom would return his calls themselves. When he answered the phone, all I had to say was "Earl, it's Paul. I need some information."

For the next couple of hours, I sat in the corner of the long sofa staring out the floor-to-ceiling window, the dark sky a screen onto which were projected unbidden images of what I'd lost and what I feared to lose yet. Random scenes of auto accidents and assassinations punctuated my free association, but my mind was tied, as always in such brooding rumination, to the lake; to Michael with his feet dangling; to Edie in her sheer peignoir, lounging under that starry sky in a hammock strung between the pair of giant white pines behind the house. Edie could make that hammock softly sway without any perceptible exertion, her right arm drifting in the air below the perfect curve of her hip. That hammock holding her would swing even without a breeze, even when she was asleep, as if just the earthward pressure of her willowy body were enough to set things moving, which I knew from my own experience to be the case.