He was an Englishman.
Eventually he said, “You wouldn’t recognize the City of London now—and did you ever go to Coventry when you were in England before the war?” But when I said I could understand that he must hate the Germans, he just laughed and said, “No, the English hate the French. We’ve had hundreds of years of experience in perfecting that particular art, but we’re still novices at hating the Germans.”
It was hard to tell how serious he was, for he was very drunk and the English have such a curious sense of humor, but I was very drunk myself, so I just said, “I’ve now reached the point where I don’t hate anyone. Hatred makes things worse. Hatred stops one coming to terms with all the horror and grief. And one must come to terms with it. Somehow.”
“Ah, the horror, the horror, the horror!” said the Englishman rapidly, and now I could detect the understated black humor he was using to soften the starkness of our conversation. “Let me tell you about the horror I found when I went sightseeing today. Thought I’d get out of Munich for a quiet day in the country. Found myself at a little place called Dachau. Of course they don’t advertise it as a tourist attraction, but the G.I.s on duty there will show you around.”
I said, “Don’t tell me about it. I don’t want to know.”
But as soon as the words were spoken, I knew I had to know every detail.
The young man I had been before the war had danced to a German tune but had been forced to leave the dance floor before the music ended. The older man I had become had studied the music in manuscript and knew in theory how the tune was finished, but he still had to hear those final bars. He had to have no doubt whatsoever in his mind what tune he would have danced to if he had been permitted to remain on the dance floor till the party’s end.
I went to Dachau.
There are some things which cannot be spoken about. I once met a man who told me he had spent three years as a prisoner of war, but when I found out that his captors had been the Japanese, the conversation ended because I knew there was nothing else that could be said. If someone had asked me after my return to America, “What place in Germany made the deepest impression on you?” and I had answered, “Dachau,” that admission too would have precluded further conversation. I could not have spoken of it. Perhaps I might have said it was a mild springlike day when I went there and everywhere was very quiet and peaceful, but I could not have spoken of the photographs of the piles of bodies being moved by bulldozers; I could not have spoken of the fingernail marks raking the ceilings of the gas ovens; and I could never have spoken of how I felt afterward when I walked back across the polluted earth to the gates, and the G.I. at my side whistled those last lingering bars of “Lili Marlene.”
V
Mary Martin was singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” and the audience was loving it. I looked around at the happy, rapt faces of those who had survived the war to live in a country untouched by destruction, and although I was one of them, I felt cut off, isolated by my survivor’s guilt. It was then I knew that if Cornelius continued to refuse me a leave of absence I would resign from Van Zale’s, because no man, not even Cornelius, was going to stop me from following my conscience and wiping out the guilt I could no longer endure.
Mary Martin had finished washing her hair onstage and the audience was shouting for an encore.
I thought again of my unique opportunity to wash away my guilt by working for the ECA. By working for both America and Germany simultaneously, I could make amends to Germany for the killings of the American soldiers and yet also make amends to America for my refusal to fight the Nazis. It was the one valid solution to my dilemma, my one chance to escape forever from the painful conflicts of my past, and suddenly as I sat in that Broadway theater my position seemed clearer than ever before; I felt as if I had been marked for survival in order that I might make my own special contribution to the postwar world, and although I was not a superstitious man I was convinced then that if I ignored this role which had been assigned to me I would not long survive in the empty world I had built for myself in New York.
Mary Martin was singing an encore. The little girl at my side was watching with shining eyes. The show went on … and on … and on. …
VI
“Wasn’t that a great show, Uncle Sam?” said Vicky with enthusiasm.
Her pale blue evening frock had a full skirt, a high neckline, and no sleeves, while her hair, coiled in a knot, was pinned on top of her head to make her look grown-up. She was wearing the minimum of makeup, and her fair delicate skin had the bloom of a peach which some gifted master gardener had been tending with infinite care.
“Of course musicals are very low-brow,” she was saying brightly, “but I guess even composers like Wagner enjoyed a beer-garden singsong in between writing episodes of the Ring. Do you like Wagner, Uncle Sam?”
“Who?” I said, teasing her, and we both laughed.
“I thought you might have enjoyed the Teutonic ambience! Of course he had a lot in common with Nietzsche.”
We were at the Copacabana, and the band, taking a break from the new craze for the rumba, was playing a waltz. A passing waiter refilled our champagne glasses.
“Oh. I feel so much better!” Vicky exclaimed. “I wish life was always like this—the theater, the Copa, waltzes, and champagne! I can’t thank you enough for taking me out, Uncle Sam—it’s just such a wonderful change from everything that’s been happening lately.”
Unexpectedly I remembered Emily saying in a rush: “Cornelius was such a dear little boy and so sweet-natured!” I smiled at her. “I’m grateful to you for accepting my invitation,” I said readily. “It would have been a real waste of a ticket if you’d stayed home.”
I started to think of Teresa again. Was she really ill or was she in such a state of depression over her work that she had been unable to face a night out on the town? I resolved to call her as soon as I returned home.
“Do you have any records of this band, Uncle Sam? Tell me more about your record collection.”
I began to talk about my records, but as I spoke of the music of Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and Miff Mole, I could think only of that other music, the rustle of discarded clothes, the creak of the bed, the harmony of sighs, the polyphony of pleasure. I drank my champagne and murmured to Vicky about nothing, but all the while in my mind I was with Teresa, my beautiful Teresa, and in my mind’s eye I could see her lying naked among the tangled sheets, the little gold cross slipping out of sight between the curves of her breasts.
“… Uncle Sam?” said Vicky.
“I’m sorry, honey—what did you say?”
“Can we dance, please?”
“Why, sure!” I said, feeling guilty that I hadn’t issued the invitation myself, and escorted her at once onto the dance floor.
Her hand touched my shoulder. Her body brushed mine. I was with Teresa yet not with Teresa, in bed yet out of bed, in heaven yet down on earth at one and the same time.
I felt the instinctive reflex in my groin and recoiled from her. My voice said, “Excuse me just one second …” and then I was moving fast, edging past the other couples on the floor, and heading blindly for the men’s room. The privacy came as a sickening relief.
Later, after I had washed my hands, I wiped the sweat carefully from my forehead with a handkerchief and polished my glasses. My vision cleared. Looking in the mirror, I saw with relief that my face was empty of tension, and making a great effort, I summoned the energy to return to the dance floor.
I found Vicky sitting stiffly at our table while she watched the dancing. The band was playing a fox-trot.
“Hi!” I said smoothly with my easiest smile. “Sorry about that! I ate something for lunch which …” I stopped. I had noticed how pale she was, and now I saw that she was unable to look at me. I had stepped back quickly on the dance floor, but evidently not quickly enough, and in one disastrous moment a lighthearted evening had been transformed into the stickiest of social morasses.
I knew at once that some sort of acknowledgment would have to be made if we were to meet in the future without embarrassment, so I sat down, forcing myself to remain casual, and said in my most relaxed voice, “Why, you must be so tired of all males exhibiting the same unoriginal behavior on the dance floor! And to think I wanted to be different from the average kid in a tuxedo out on his first date! Say, I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you possibly find it in your heart to treat my unbelievably juvenile reflex as a compliment? I assure you I’m not usually so overcome whenever I ask a lady for a dance!”
She looked at me with great searching gray eyes. I waited, holding my breath, but evidently she found what she needed to find in my expression, for she was able to say without difficulty, “Okay. Thanks for the compliment.”
We made no effort to dance again, but we had some coffee while I told her about a recent business trip to Los Angeles, and there was no awkwardness between us. It was only when we left the building that she said shyly, “It’s just as well you’re not really my uncle, isn’t it, or your compliment would have been kind of awkward.”
“You bet!” I agreed, striving to maintain my relaxed tone of voice, but the Western slang sounded unpleasantly strained in my ears.
She said nothing else. As my chauffeur opened the door, she slipped into the back of the Mercedes while I, taking great care not to touch her, followed her inside.
“It was a lovely evening,” she said politely as we drove through the gates of her father’s house. “Thanks again.”
“My pleasure—it was fun.” That sounded much too smooth. My casual manner was being shredded by the razor edge of my tension. “Well, so long,” I said rapidly as I helped her out of the car and gave her hand the briefest of clasps. “Have a wonderful time in Europe, and don’t forget to send me a postcard!”
She stared down at her gloved hands.
“Vicky?” I said sharply.
“I … I feel all confused … upside down. I don’t even know if I want to go to Europe anymore.”
Above us the front door opened and Alicia, immaculate in an unadorned black dress, swept down the steps to the driveway.
“Hello, dear, did you have a nice time? Good, I’m so glad. Thanks so much for being kind enough to give her a treat, Sam. I’m sure we all appreciate your generosity. Do you want to come in for a drink? We had to cancel going to the dinner party—Cornelius had an emergency meeting of one of the foundation subcommittees, and in fact he’s still out, but of course if you’d like a quick Scotch …”
Evidently she was doing her best to restore normal diplomatic relations after her harsh words to me the previous Wednesday, and I smiled to show her I was equally anxious for a truce. “Thanks, Alicia, but I have to be getting home,” I said, taking care to sound regretful, and then I glanced once more at Vicky. “Europe’s the best place for you now, believe me,” I said. “Once you’re there, you’ll get a fresh perspective and then you’ll be able to sort out everything far more easily than if you’d stayed in New York.”
“I … guess so.”
“I know so. ’Bye, Vicky. Bon voyage.”
“Thanks.” She did not move, and although I looked back at her over my shoulder, the light from the hall was behind her and I could not see her expression. It was only when she spoke again that I knew our relationship had entered a new and irreversible phase.
“Good-bye, Sam,” she said.
Chapter Six
I
AS SOON AS I reached home, I dialed the number of the house in Greenwich Village.
“Tom?” said Kevin, pouncing on the phone. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry, Kevin, this is Sam.”
“Who?” said Kevin blankly.
“Sam, you crazy guy! Sam Keller! Say, how’s Teresa? Is she feeling better?”
There was a pause. Then: “Just let me focus for a minute,” said Kevin. “God, what a relief to forget about my private life and concentrate on someone else’s! Teresa? She’s still locked up in the attic with the aspirin bottle, Sam. She asked not to be disturbed.”
Now I was the one who hesitated. “She is there, isn’t she?” I said suddenly. “You’re sure she’s there?”
“Christ, yes! Don’t be ridiculous! Sam …” He stopped.
“Yes?”
“I’m just emerging on the wrong side of a hideous love affair. If you’re at a loose end, why don’t you come out and get drunk with me?”
Kevin and I weren’t drinking companions. For a second our different worlds bumped together awkwardly and were still.
“For God’s sake, Sam, I’m not trying to proposition you! What filthy minds you heterosexuals have!”
“Well, I didn’t for one moment suppose …”
“I’ll meet you at your apartment in twenty minutes,” said Kevin, “and we can go and hit the bottle someplace midtown.”
He hung up. I sat exactly where I was for ten seconds. Then I blundered downstairs into the damp dark April night and grabbed a cab downtown to the Village.
II
There were two entrances to Kevin’s house, the front door and the basement door, which had once been the servants’ entrance. I had often wondered why Kevin had not set the basement level aside for his caretakers, but supposed the attic’s north light would be more attractive to artists than the gloom below street level.
Like Teresa, I had the key to the servants’ entrance. The back stairs began in the basement and coiled upward to the attic past the doors which opened into the first- and second-floor hallways.
Above the basement I opened the first of these doors and looked out. The lights were on but everywhere was silent. “Kevin?” I called in a low voice.
There was no answer. Checking his study at the front of the house, I found he had abandoned his work not merely in the middle of a scene but in the middle of a sentence. I went to the kitchen. Amidst the debris on the crowded kitchen table I found two dirty plates, two empty wineglasses, and a half-finished bottle of California red, while on the stove the remains of filé gumbo, one of Teresa’s favorite creole dishes, clung pungently to a large pot.
I remembered Teresa was supposed to be too ill to cook. I remembered Kevin had been waiting for a friend and had probably planned on being out that evening. The next moment I was back on the attic stairs.
On the second floor I had to stop to get my breath. The stairs were lit below me, but above my head the last flight of stairs remained in darkness, and I made no attempt to turn on the light. Leaning against the wall, I listened to my heart thumping against my chest and wondered if I were on the verge of making some disastrous mistake, but I knew that even if I were, there was nothing I could do to avoid it. I could not now walk away. I had to go on.
I had just put my foot on the first step of the final flight when I heard Teresa cry out. The cry appalled me. I knew exactly what it meant, and as the blood rushed to my face I clawed my way up the remaining steps in a haze of rage and pain.
In those last seconds I saw it all and remembered everything, the casual arrogant conversation between Jake and Cornelius the previous Wednesday, Teresa gazing fascinated into their rich privileged world, Jake taking notice of her and idly asking for a date. Violence welled up in me. Of course Jake would have got a kick out of taking my girl. I was still a Nazi in his eyes, and the Jews were never going to forgive the Nazis, never, never, never. …
I flung open the door of the attic, punched on the light, and stopped dead in my tracks.
There was a flurry from the bed, but I paid no attention because all I saw were the paintings. The canvases were lined up neatly along the wall like pictures in a street exhibition, and even the cloth was gone from the half-finished work on the easel.
No one said anything. The bed was in shadow in the corner behind me, and because I knew what I would find there, I felt no curiosity, only an instinctive urge to postpone the pain of that final confrontation for as long as possible. The paintings gave me th
e excuse I needed, and mesmerized I moved closer to the canvases.
I saw pictures, neat, bright, and obsessively detailed, of small-town American life. I saw the little white frame houses, the row of stores, and the corner bar all clustered beneath the shadow of an enormous slag heap, and in the distance were the mountains and a little white Polish church on a hill. Exquisite care had been lavished on every detail of that scene, and as I understood the intense yearning which lay behind that representation of a past recaptured, my throat ached, for I saw that Teresa in her art had achieved the impossible. She could move freely between one world and another. The looking glass was no barrier to her. By drawing on the vital living entity of her past, she had conquered the rootlessness of the present and triumphed over the American dilemma which had defeated me.
“He’ll never understand,” I said to her. “Never.” There was no answer. I turned slowly to face them, and saw with a shock that wiped my mind clean of all emotion that the scene was even more appalling than I had imagined. The man with Teresa wasn’t Jake. It was Cornelius.
III
Teresa was rigid with fright. Her fingers clutched the sheet tightly across her breasts, as if she had forgotten I was accustomed to her nakedness, and her eyes, reflecting the horror of my presence, were wide and dark. She tried to speak, but of course there were no words which could adequately have expressed how she felt.
I was still looking at her when he slipped softly from between the sheets and stooped to recover his clothes from the floor. They were casual clothes, a rich man’s clothes for bumming around, white pants, open-necked checked shirt, loafers, a corduroy jacket. He looked so young, but young and tough, not young and vulnerable, his hard mouth set in its firmest line, his fine eyes downcast, his movements rapid and economical. When he was dressed, he turned his back on her to look at me, but I still felt nothing, no violence, no pain, no rage. I felt lobotomized by the shock. I just stood there dumbly, and as I stared, he walked right up to me and said with his familiar iron nerve, “It was wrong. I’m sorry.”
Sins of the Fathers Page 13
