The American Ambassador

by Ward Just

  That afternoon, so long ago. In fact it would have been the portentous and impressive autumn of 1955. They had been talking about Washington, the Presbyterians, and the meritocracy. Bill had said that the center of the nation was shifting from Wall Street to the Federal Triangle. This was obvious, anyone could see it.

  The old man had said, And this is a good thing?

  Bill remembered gesturing with his hand, brushing the comment aside. This was not something you could observe from Marlborough Street. Good or bad, he said, it’s what’s going to happen.

  It might not be so good, his father said.

  One more example of the old man’s hopeless provincialism. Boston had always been a backwater, a distinguished past, no future. In that way it was identical with central Europe, a regional museum. He remembered his excitement, describing the surely imminent demise of the old Establishment. You could hear the death rattle. The government was filled with old, tired men, mired in the past, obsessed by it. The country yearned for a new beginning, for freshness and change, and action. The country was falling behind.

  There wouldn’t be any room anymore for anti-Semitism.

  The old man moved, the chair creaking. He lifted his head, his eyes focused on a far corner of the dark room. He said, “What do you know about Jews?”

  In the dizzy silence that followed, he suppressed an urge to cry out. He felt his face grow hot. The dark room, with its residue of absolute authority, discouraged any challenge. He could have been standing in the Oval Office of the White House.

  He’d said, “I know enough. I’m your son.”

  The old man looked at him oddly, up and down, but did not speak.

  He thought, Perhaps that doesn’t count. To a man imprisoned in the past, obsessed with texts, with the history of a tribe, their relations with God; perhaps, to such a man, paternity was only a detail, an accident. It was not the fact of birth, it was the experience of life; once a Jew always a Jew, except it did not mean that you automatically knew the territory. To know the territory you had to work the territory, understand the terrain, survey the various battlefields and holy places (sometimes they were the same). But he was not interested. Let the North family silver stay buried. He remembered bending down close to his father and saying quietly, “There’s more to the world than this house and Back Bay. More to humanity than the Jews. More to us than just us. We’re cosmopolitan people, isn’t that true? We’ve been cast out, isn’t that true? We’re wanderers and we have a conscience and we know there’s justice to be done. We know that better than anyone. Who would know it better than we? And aren’t we under an obligation?”

  “An obligation?” the old man said dully, turning again, his hard glittering eyes fixed on a far corner of the room. He was looking at his texts, the wisdom of the Jews, which covered, the wall, floor to ceiling. When he turned back he seemed to look straight through his son, though his eyes were moving up and down, appraising the wrapping—polished loafers, gray flannel trousers, nubby sweater over a blue buttoned-down shirt, a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. He had always thought he had a New England face, a stranger might think his forebears were seafaring men and the stubborn women who saw them off at the docks and waited ardently for their return. A coastal face, windblown, not a face of the interior; a well-made face, and at odds with the soft flannel and tweed—

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you mean an obligation to God?”

  “From God,” he said, then stepped back, surprised; the words had popped out. The room, so familiar in the dark afternoon, seemed to beckon him. It seemed to pull him into the ambiguous darkness at the edges of the light. Surely there was a loyalty higher than a family, or a tribe, or history. He thought his father wanted to bind him to a dead European culture, a culture of the discredited past; an odious past; a holocaust, in fact. Sometimes it was necessary to banish memory, as a government sent an agent provocateur into exile. He waited, trying to find voice, wanting to speak of America’s position in the world, the importance of a vigorous and rational foreign policy, the necessity of exposing the brutishness of the Soviet system without rocket rattling. . . . Well, he didn’t want to talk about Jews. All this time his father remained motionless.

  In the light of the reading lamp he was as conspicuous as an actor on stage. A vein pulsed in his temple. He said, “We cannot always remain apart, our bags packed, ready to move on.”

  “We are apart,” the old man said. “It is a fact of history.”

  “It is a state of mind.”

  He looked at his son, but did not speak; his expression was one of infinite weariness. He did not have to speak, for his son could sense the names forming in his mind: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and all the others. And there was no answer to that; there never is. It is as conclusive as the final sentence of the Old Testament, the Book of Malachi: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to the fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

  The old man said, “William.”

  He said, “I’m sorry, but it is what I believe.”

  The other nodded, his eyes far away.

  “Daddy, we must move on.”

  After a moment’s pause, gesturing at his texts, the old man began to speak of his early life, his childhood and young manhood in Germany, his residence in Berlin, where he had gone in 1925, believing the family safe, so excited by the ferment in the most cultivated city in Europe. . . . Then he stopped and lifted his eyes. He stared at the ceiling, clasping and unclasping his heavy hands. At last he said, “I want to tell you a story. You won’t like it. It concerns your great-uncle, my father’s brother. You met him once, many years ago. Perhaps you will not want to claim him, so if you want you can think of him as one of our tribe. He was in the camps. He survived his camp, four years, and made his way to Chicago. I wanted him to come to Boston, but his wife’s family was in Chicago. His wife had not survived her camp, and he wanted to go to Chicago. A year ago he was walking to work when a car sideswiped him, knocked him down, hurt him. A cab driver, a Negro as it happened, stopped to give assistance and stayed with him until the police arrived. Whereupon my uncle accused the cab driver of being his assailant, the driver of the car that ran him down. The police took the cab driver away, and my uncle was satisfied, very happy with what he had done. Now there was someone to sue.”

  He had glared at his father, the anger rising. “That is an evil story.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It is slanderous. Why would you tell such a story? Such an ugly story.”

  “It is not slanderous. It is true. And it has a moral.”

  “Does it?” He was disgusted.

  “And the moral is this. Life in the camps does not make a kind, loving, generous, forgiving soul. It does not make virtue. Good does not arise from evil. It is not a romance.” He paused, breathing heavily, then spoke loudly. “It terrifies a man for life, and in the case of my uncle a man who wanted two things only: security and revenge. Can you understand that?” He paused again, the silence lengthening. They stared at each other a very long time, and when his father spoke his voice was almost a whisper. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about it. You must read and read and read, and listen. You must study. You must think. You must know everything, and you must never forget. You cannot move on.” He snapped his fingers, the noise loud in the dark room. “Like that.”

  He turned away, as one would turn away from a blow. He was appalled. How had this begun? They had been talking about Washington and the Presbyterians, and what he wanted to do with his adult life, and in the bat of an eyelash God and Auschwitz were in the room.

  And the old man was not finished. “I worry about your loyalties, William. You speak of change, but I don’t know what change you have in mind. I mean the specifics, you who want to involve yourself with the government. You who don’t want to be on the inside with your own people. What is it? Do you think we have fallen behin
d, that we are irrelevant in America? Do you think we have nothing to offer? Do you want to join their clubs?”

  He remembered looking at him and deciding not to argue about who was inside and who was outside; who was where, us and them. Who was exclusive and who wasn’t. Refusing to argue was itself a statement. They were like two hostile nations, and it was necessary for the son to see the father in a certain light in order to rally his own forces.

  “So tell me,” the old man said. “What are you, then? Where does your heart lie?”

  He wanted to say “With Lincoln.” But he did not. Lincoln would have no meaning. And he wanted a contemporary word, a newly minted coin, a word not found in the Old Testament. He said, “I am a pragmatist.”

  “A pragmatist!” the old man said, shuddering, then laughing out loud. “A prag-ma-tist!” He looked away to his bookshelves, and his texts, and the volumes of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Freud. Still laughing: “Is that what you get from your mother?”

  “What do you want me to do?” he shouted, angry now. The old man’s sarcasm was humiliating, but he thought he knew what the trouble was and went straight to its heart. “Do you want me to hang a sign around my neck, Half Jew?”

  The old man shook his head. Staring up at him, he looked more than ever like a medieval woodcut, a Dürer masterpiece. He cleared his throat before he spoke, ending the conversation. “But that is right. You are.”

  He moved to the door, his feet silent on the thick carpet. He had never until that moment been able to judge the depth of his father’s bitterness and disillusion, and infinite sorrow; he atoned in his own way. He knew absolutely that they were of different, and competing, nationalities. His father was a German, in all but passport. He was a German of the nineteenth century and a Jew of the twentieth. He thought then that his father wanted to destroy him, as a symbol of the assimilation he loathed; the father saw the son as a monstrous rebuke. Standing at the door to the study, he said, “I am going to join the Foreign Service, and I am going to become an American ambassador.” He remembered hesitating, waiting; he thought that his father might respond after all, and offer his blessing. The old man was staring off to one side, his face as hard as oak. He could have been dozing, except for his eyes. The younger man thought he had an advantage, and pressed it: “I am going to Africa, and the Middle East, if I can figure a way to do it, and I know I can. And then, some time in the future, I am going to serve in Germany. I am going to know Munich, Heidelberg, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin. Especially Berlin.”

  But the old man continued to stare off to one side, and he knew he was in another realm. When he opened the door, he heard the old man rustle, and finally speak, his voice dry as dust. He spoke in German. “Those are only names. The cities are dead. They have been dead for a long time.”

  He remembered the conversation as if it were only the other day, yet it was thirty years ago. He thought of his father as very old, but he was only ten years older than Bill was now. He remembered closing the door behind him and hurrying down the stairs and through the front door into the open air. It was dusk and the lamps along Marlborough Street winked on. Such a handsome street, one of the great city streets in America, though he did not think so then. He walked quickly to Clarendon and then turned left to Commonwealth. People were walking their dogs. He recognized most of them, older people with small, bad-tempered dogs. It was the neighborhood where he had played as a child, though he had few friends; and his parents had none. He remembered pausing, the silence drawing away from him. He was standing below the heroic statue of William Lloyd Garrison, the thrilling message chiseled boldly on the plinth.

  I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse

  I will not retreat a single inch—And I will be heard!

  He stood in front of the statue, worrying the scene with his father. And he recalled standing in the snow and telling the old man about Garrison. He was in the fifth grade and his civics class had spent an inspiring hour on Garrison, great Boston abolitionist, pamphleteer, conscience of free men. The civics teacher admired Garrison and for several years after he harbored a desire to become an influential newspaperman. Paine, Garrison, Marx. He remembered talking excitedly to his father about Garrison and his father nodding politely, listening, and finally smiling and seeming to agree. And muttering under his breath, “Shlenter.” His fifth-grade self took this to be a compliment. His father often used Yiddish words as compliments (this was before he discovered that few such words exist in Yiddish, it being largely a tongue of insult and invective). Until one day he asked someone—in fact a friend of his father’s, who had used the word in what seemed another context altogether—and the friend had laughed and laughed and said it meant con man. “A fast talker, William. A bullshit artist.”

  He stood a long time in the dusk, looking at Garrison’s statue. It began to snow, large soft flakes. He decided to return to Marlborough Street, to apologize to his father, so gravely offended. He would apologize for his arrogance, his zeal, and for his brutal remarks about the old country. But he would not retreat from his decision to join the Foreign Service. He trudged back to Marlborough Street, but when he got in sight of the house, he began to run; he had a premonition that the old man was dead. A heart attack brought on by his only son’s disrespect. The study door was closed, and he could hear the sound of Beethoven inside; of course he would die to Beethoven. He raised his hand to knock, fearful, terrified as the Hindu son obliged to light the funeral pyre of his father—and heard the murmur of voices, and laughter; it was his mother’s soft, ghostly laughter. Then the rumble of his father’s voice, and her laughter again. He had the fantastic idea that they were making love. He backed away from the door, his hand still raised, like a character in a comic. He remembered thinking that there was a part of their life that would always be concealed, beyond the reach of his eyesight or hearing, beyond the reach of his heart, and that he was an outsider. They lived in some self-created Shangri-la. He waited an hour in the living room, a room so formal it might have been the chamber of an Old World grandee, and he a subject come to request an audience. Then he went to his own room and packed to return to school. He thought about leaving a note, then decided against it. What would he say?

  She watched her husband turn his face to the window; and the nicest smile lit his face. He looked years younger, and she wondered what occasion he had recalled; well, he was thinking about sex. He might say it was Back Bay, but it was sex.

  Downstairs again, she poured fresh drinks, and handed one to Kleust. The German said nothing and she knew he was embarrassed for them. She so slow to get the point, Bill so blunt, then giddy as exhaustion overcame him. Poor Kurt, he had found himself in the middle of their private life. She, Bill, Bill Jr., and Kleust, a man of heavy black lines, so angular. He could have been a portrait by Max Beckmann, a Selbstbildnis. At any event, it was not the family group she would have imagined.

  She wondered if, really, the girl had made contact. The way Bill behaved, she must have done.

  Kleust turned to her then, clearing his throat. “Do you know anything that might help me?”

  She said, “I can’t help you.”

  “It’s very dangerous for you,” Kleust said.

  “For Bill,” she corrected. “But it’s the same thing.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might be?” He waited, allowing the silence to gather. “We know so little about him, actually. We know our own, not yours. I have been allowed to read everything we have on your son, and we have more than you might expect. But. It’s one piece of paper after another. Herr Duer has been thorough, conducted the necessary interviews, discovered the relevant documents. You’d be surprised, how easy it is, to gather it. Bill Jr.’s school transcript was particularly helpful, to the degree that anything was helpful. He was not well liked at school, you know, though he performed beyond expectations, and was never in trouble except for the incident in his last year. The assault on the teacher. He and the other boy.”

&n
bsp; “I wonder what happened to him,” she said.

  “Yes, of course. That is what we are wondering.”

  “Not Bill Jr.,” she said. “The other boy.”

  “He is in the penitentiary,” Kleust said.

  “You found that out?”

  “Yes,” Kleust said. “He killed a man.”

  “My God,” she said.

  “We tried to talk with him, but . . .”

  She looked at him. “But what?”

  “He refused to see us. It was his right, under your law. They made it difficult for him, and still he refused to see us.”

  “I don’t understand. How can the West German government—”

  “We were working with your people, of course. It was a strange incident, the one with the teacher.”

  “Yes, I suppose it was,” she said. And refused to say more on that subject.

  “We have some of his stories from that period, the instructor is still at the school. He was able to find them in his files, and was happy, more than happy, to give them to us. Happy to do anything to help us. They are strange stories, though quite artful. The instructor said that in his class the boys would typically write stories about young children, and the girls about young adults; the girls seemed to want to go forward, and the boys backward. Bill Jr.’s stories were always about middle-aged men whose lives ended badly. Of course, at that age. One always believes the lives of middle-aged people end badly.”

  “Don’t they usually?”

  “Always in Bill Jr.’s stories there would be a compromise of some kind. He was quite politically aware, you know. So there would be a compromise, and consequences. And the hero of his story would end badly. Except the hero was never a hero, but a villain. His stories were without heroes.”