The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told

by Dikkon Eberhart

  Nearly everyone had war work to do. As Dad pointed out to me, even someone who refuses a war must do war work. Uncle Charlie was a conscientious objector and as a result imprisoned, yet even Uncle Charlie had war work to do. First he needed to work to convince those who needed to be convinced that he was a conscientious objector. And then he worked a southern chain gang on roadsides, swinging a stunted scythe. Dad himself taught thousands of young men how to bring down the Zero, a Japanese fighter plane.

  There were jobs aplenty, and while some of the work was stupid, and of course some of it deadly, any man or woman who could see beyond the screen of his or her personal interest had a welcome opportunity to do so.

  Dad did classroom work, and there was the flying with his students so they could gain a feel of the gun positions and of the mechanics, but the most dramatic of his pedagogies was as follows. Dad stood behind a berm and flew eight-foot-tall kites with controllable rudders high in the air, while his students blasted live rounds into the image of the Zero silhouetted on them. Dad could control the kites intricately and make them jig and jag as real Zeros do, trying to avoid the lethal hail. So there was Eberhart—that supposedly tender, poetical soul whom his friends predicted might lose his muse in the war—there was Eberhart reveling in the heart-pounding clatter of the machine guns, the rain of hot brass, and the success of another Zero crashing into the sea!

  Was this activity the end of Dad’s muse? In later years, I’d hear Allen Ginsberg opine that the single greatest English language poem ever to come out of World War II is Dad’s “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment.” Probably Dad wrote its first three stanzas in his heart while he jigged and jagged the kite, and the bullets howled over his head. What makes that poem great is the sharp transition to its fourth and last stanza. Dad told me that he waited several days before he added those precise, stark words of the fourth stanza that name the dead and leave us readers with that shiver of awe . . . and of truth.

  No, the call of the muse upon my father was always strong.

  By 1946, my father was busy demobilizing navy airmen as they streamed home through the Golden Gate, away from places whose names are seared into the American soul—from Midway, from Guadalcanal, from Leyte Gulf, from Iwo Jima, from Okinawa—and most especially away from the buildup for the final invasion of the Japanese home islands. Thank God, as Dad used to remark to me—but sotto voce, because after the late 1960s it was incorrect to say this sort of thing out loud—thank God for Little Boy. Little Boy was the name of the atomic bomb that we dropped on Hiroshima, thus forcing five years of slaughter to come to an end.

  While my father was busy on the base, my mother was busy noticing something else. Babies!

  There were lots of sailors back home from the sea, and everywhere Mom looked there were babies. My mother told me that she and Dad had never done anything to prevent babies, but for four years of war no baby had occurred. So there they were in the spring of 1946, and the war was over, and soon enough my father himself would be demobilized, and there would be ordinary life to pursue. (He was due to be promoted to captain, but in the end, he left the navy two months before he achieved that rank.)

  Of course, as I have said, Dad was a poet even when he was a machine-gun trainer, and he struck up friendships with poets wherever he went. One San Francisco friendship was with Kenneth and Marie Rexroth. Kenneth was to become a central figure after the war in what has been called the “San Francisco Renaissance,” which helped to launch, among other things, the Beat poets.

  One day, Dad and Mom were invited to a party at the Rexroths’ apartment. The two couples had not met. Dad dressed formally, in a white uniform, resplendent with gold braid. He and Mom knocked and were bidden to enter.

  Gasps.

  Stricken silence.

  Who were these . . . military people?

  This couldn’t be Eberhart.

  Not Eberhart of “The Groundhog.” Not the Eberhart who wrote “If I Could Only Live at the Pitch That Is Near Madness.”

  But of course it was that Eberhart, and the crowd was charmed, and Dad and Mom remained close friends with Kenneth and Marie from then on, even after the Rexroths’ 1948 split, with equal affection for them both.

  A little more than twenty years later, I was part of a reunion between Dad, Mom, and Marie at her forest-shaded, very California house on a slope north of San Francisco Bay. “So this is the very boy,” Marie said when I was introduced. “Ha-ha!”

  I didn’t get her meaning until later, though I enjoyed her company.

  The point of this Rexroth story, though, is that sometime in February 1946, Kenneth and Marie, and Dad and Mom, went off for a weekend drive north of San Francisco to the tiny town of Inverness, which is located on a spit of water that nearly separates the mainland from the wonderful wildness (or so it was then) of Point Reyes.

  During the drive, Marie happened to spot some newly born lambs in a pasture, and she and my mother begged the men to stop the car so they could enjoy a brief time gamboling with—or maybe just looking at—the lambs. Back in the car, the two couples proceeded to Inverness and there took rooms for the night at a local inn. My mother liked to tell me it must have been the lambs. Or if she were in less febrile a mood, she’d surmise that maybe they were all just relaxed at the end of the war. Maybe it was the good company and some wonderful conversation, she said. But anyway, next morning, there was something different going on in the Eberhart household, and that difference was me.

  Most days of my life began with Dad rubbing my head to wake me from sleep and ended with him removing his pipe to kiss me good night. Mine was, in truth, a blessed life.

  But I was angry, ten or fifteen years after my initial appearance on the scene. I loved my parents, and I loved my sister, Gretchen, when she came along about five years after I did. I loved art, too. But art, I soon discovered, can eat you for lunch.

  PART TWO

  I walked through the church’s door and sat in the rearmost pew. Shortly, the pastor asked us to stand and to sing a hymn.

  There I stood, a Jew, in the back pew of Small Point Baptist Church, surrounded by strangers. We had finished two hymns, and instead of asking us to sit down and to listen to his sermon, Pastor Dan Coffin had instructed us to turn around and to greet one another . . . particularly, he continued, “If you see someone you don’t know, greet that person.”

  Oh, darn.

  Dutifully, I stepped from my pew and held out my hand to the man in the pew before me. He took my hand in two of his, looked me deeply in the eye, and said, “How nice it is to have you here.”

  I was confused. He didn’t know me.

  All around me, people had debouched from their pews and jammed the aisles, hugging one another, shaking hands, kissing, laughing.

  It went on and on. By the time Pastor Dan waved us back to attention, seven or eight minutes had passed, and I was ten pews away from my seat. I’d been greeted, truly hailed, by twenty people, each equally delighted to have me here at church with them. I’d begun to respond with my own greeting back, as though I knew them—though I did not. This was cordiality of a quality I had never experienced before in a holy setting. It was beyond mere amiability. Something else was active here; something else was walking in these aisles.

  Next in the service came prayer requests. This person had decided finally to have the operation, and it was scheduled for next week. That person was traveling to see grandchildren. One man, tearfully, thanked the congregation for its prayers for his son, an army rifleman deployed in Iraq. For ten minutes, we discussed the medical and emotional urgencies of the congregation.

  This, too, was new to me. Who were these people that they should so commonly share these intimate details?

  Pastor Dan then delivered a thirty-minute message that was intelligent, direct, biblical, and plain, before ending the service with the exhortation, “Have a great week in the Lord!”

  Before the service began, Pastor Dan had invited any visitors to fill out a card. This
I never do. However, after the service, I got one of the cards and filled it out. Then, instead of slinking out the door—this I always do—I approached him, handed him my visitor card, and introduced myself. We had a vigorous conversation of ten minutes before I hurried home with an excited report for Channa.

  She and I were thrilled. So I called the pastor, feeling diffident to interrupt his Sunday afternoon, yet urgent to hear more from him. We made a date for him to visit our home.

  I assumed it would be a visit of half an hour, for a cup of tea and a cookie, and I assumed it would have a cool New England austerity about it. Not so. Three hours after Pastor Dan sat down on our couch, he had elicited the details of both Channa’s and my spiritual journeys. And he had offered a first answer to my plaint.

  “But still I don’t get it about Jesus.”

  “Jesus,” he said, “is the love in the fellowship.”

  “Oh!”

  I said no more. But I made what was the beginning of a connection. That’s who had been passing among the pews.

  Goodness.

  What a predicament.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “But you said!”

  “I said what?”

  “You said she’d be here.”

  “She is here, you rude boy. Now come downstairs this minute and be polite.”

  “It’s not her.”

  “Of course it’s she, Dikkon. Who else could she be?”

  “She’s just a woman,” I wailed, a six-year-old deprived of his dream.

  Mom sat down on my bed and laughed. “Oh, you poor boy. I’m so sorry. I understand what you must have thought. But she’s a nice woman, and she’s a friend of mine, and I want you to come downstairs right now and politely say hello, and then I’ll ask her to laugh like the Wicked Witch of the West, and then you’ll see.”

  So I did go downstairs, and Margaret Hamilton did laugh like the Wicked Witch of the West, and she was a nice woman, but whenever I saw her later I understood her to be another of those people who flocked to my parents’ cordiality and who were not quite what they seemed. I had become accustomed to people who were not quite what they seemed. I assumed that not-quite-seeming should be my own stance too, when I grew bigger and when I, too, should need to seem.

  But as a six-year-old, I was still disappointed that the Wicked Witch of the West had not been in her expected costume when she knocked on our door.

  We were living in Cambridge then, on Hilliard Place, and Dad and Mom were having a whirl of a time of it. Dad was selling floor wax for his father-in-law and was covering much of New England. This was great for him because it gave him an excuse to go off and meet other poets.

  For example, Dad’s friendship with the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Wallace Stevens began when Dad called on the Hartford and tried to persuade that insurance company to switch to Butcher’s wax. Wallace Stevens, ultimately a Hartford vice president, was the man he had to convince. Dad, the younger businessman-poet, may have closed a wax deal with the older businessman-poet’s company—I don’t know—but Dad always said that their friendship grew because they had two languages to speak to one another, not just one, as each of them tangled all day with corporate policy and quotas and wrote hard at night to restore their souls.

  Dad’s increasing fame provided him with endless opportunities to mingle with East Coast artists and writers. Art was bursting out all over, now that the war was done, and Dad and Mom were in the thick of it.

  My fame was bursting out all over too. Everything about my life seemed important to me, and I had many tales to tell my small classmates at Shady Hill School. One of the best of my tales was the one about my mother and Hitler. You already know what actually happened at their meeting, but here’s how I had heard of it from Mom—I swear. I swear that Mom told me that when she was young in Germany before the war, she and Hitler had danced together.

  And why not? Wasn’t my mother beautiful? And wasn’t Hitler’s a famous name—for some reason or other that I did not know? Indeed, it was quite easy for me to see my beautiful mother dancing finely with the elegant Hitler. In my head, theirs was a Rogers-and-Astaire moment, both of them stylishly slim, with “The Blue Danube” playing in the background and my mother following every move of the graceful Hitler, only backwards—as the real Ginger Rogers pointed out that she must do—and in high heels.

  So that’s how I told the tale to my pals. It worked, just as I planned. I basked in the fame of my mother. The tale impressed them to no end. The tale also impressed the school administration and the parents of all the other children to no end, when they heard about it. Then erupted the sort of brouhaha that appealed to my mother’s sense of humor very much. Just imagine what those other people had been thinking of her! And just imagine what a great laugh they were all to have when it was finally straightened out!

  In Cambridge, I used to sit halfway down the stairs (that was the rule: no farther) and listen intently to the grown-up talk in the living room. All the writers passing to and fro, talking, talking, talking. The smoke was thick; the air was alive with words. There were shouts of laughter; there was the clink of ice.

  These were the people, it seemed to me—though of course I had not yet read “Prufrock” as a six-year-old and would not have used such a metaphor as this—these were the people who dared to eat all the peaches.

  Eventually, Jeanie, our upstairs boarder—part of whose rent was babysitting for me—would come up from the party and shoo me to bed. Even in bed I could still hear it sometimes—the talk, the endless, striving, and important talk. Mom would come and kiss me. Now and then, one of the poets would put his or her head in the door and wish me well. We were connected, they and I. There were some of them—Richard “Dick” Wilbur especially, and his wife, Charlotte, and also Dylan Thomas—who made time for me.

  Dylan used to read bedtime stories to me. I realize now that he was probably drunk, but there were times when he wanted to escape from the party, and he would come and sit by my bed and read to me. I remember him as having a chubby face and wild hair, and I believe I remember his amusing accent, though that memory could be influenced by later hearings of his recorded voice doing A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

  Later I learned that quite often when Dylan came upstairs he had just made a pass at my mother. Mom rejected him enough that eventually he stopped. But she told me that she took his attentions mostly as braggadocio. If she’d said, “Okay, Dylan, this is a good time, let’s go upstairs right now,” she believed he would have backed out. Dylan had his image as the brash bohemian to maintain, and of course, Caitlin, his wife, was safely tucked away back in Ireland. Mom believed Dylan liked to give himself credit for affronting traditional principles when he propositioned her, yet he could do so safely because she always said no.

  On the many party nights, if I were lonely up in my bed, I could desire a glass of water. That was permissible. The best water in our house, of course, came from downstairs, from the kitchen tap. I drank a lot of downstairs water on party nights.

  If I should call down to Mom and say that I was really, really thirsty, I’d be allowed to come downstairs for a few minutes. Then, cunningly, I would linger, glass in hand. Usually I could make one last ceremonial round of the habitués, and I would be patted and toasted. I learned from my father to hold my glass up high and to clink. Always on the center of the table was the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club, which my father had been awarded, and from whose petals, or so it seemed to me, rays of light spangled the laughing crowd, reflecting off their eyes and their highballs and their wits. I raised my water glass to be one of them—hurrah!

  Actually what I was quaffing was the liquid I truly desired: the wine of poetic vintage that intoxicated me then and makes me merry still.

  Dad knew almost all of the writers and poets on the East Coast, and his ability to connect with people made him a natural choice when the New York Times wanted to send someone to the West Coast to scope out the poetry scene there. After al
l, Dad already knew most of the Beats out west from his war years.

  During the war years, many Beats established their leftist chops. To leftist critics then, after the war the Beats were honeypots: their antiestablishment rhetoric was nectar. Many of the Beats clustered around San Francisco—Kenneth Rexroth (though I’ve heard him argue that he was not himself a Beat) and many others who experimented with the artistic ecstasy and the artistic possibility of drunkenness, or of madness. They steeped themselves in esoteric symbolism, Eastern religion, automatic writing, and dream sequence. They explored the outer fringes of sex, of marriage, of family relationships.

  So here came my bright-eyed dad—himself a leader of the eastern literary establishment, now a poet who wore a suit to work, who sat on corporate boards, who married only one woman and stayed married to her for fifty-two years—here came my dad to hang with the crowd that would later establish City Lights Books in 1953 and to report back to easterners what that crowd had to say for itself.

  City Lights was the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States, and it was also a publisher. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti started the store—and later, when I was in college, took the time to instruct me how to use a stage microphone, at which he was masterful—and the store was the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s breakout poem “Howl.” Dad thought that “Howl” was “a magnificent new Leaves of Grass” with which to shock the stiff attitudes of his newspaper readers back in Manhattan.