“We’re going to eat here, and don’t contradict me. Anyway it’s too late. I turned on the oven two hours ago.”
“Darling, I’ll do anything you say. I’ll even pretend I like your cooking. But I could have taken you out. Still, I suppose it’s easier here to tell you about all my exciting architectural discoveries in London.”
He thus teased her about her scientific illiteracy, and her adamant disinclination to correct it. “Then, after that, you can tell me about Chaucer. And how if Chaucer were alive, he would be campaigning for Adlai Stevenson. Without a backward glance.”
A scotch in his hand, he hovered about her as she tinkered with the salad and the duck and the orange gook she ruined it with, he opened the two wine bottles and the deep-frozen cake, and they talked through the dinner hour, and impulsively he asked if she wanted to drive to Zeta Psi for a nightcap, and she said yes, and ten minutes later they stopped in the driveway between the Yale Daily News and the fraternity house. Blackford made rather a point of asking Sally to stand outside to direct him as he slid the Volkswagen backward into the crack between two squalid American cars—“because I can’t see through Adlai. Nor can most Democrats,” he chortled. “Hey, you know what I just committed?” he said, twisting the wheel as she instructed.
“What?” she shouted, to overcome the motor noise.
“I said, ‘Do you know what I just committed in that sentence,’ cause if you don’t, I’ll report you to your English teachers, and you won’t get your degree!”
“Ass. You mean the see-through-Adlai bit? You ‘committed,’ as you put it, a zeugma—or more properly, a syllepsis. Should we suspend operations so I can congratulate you?”
Black was chagrined, completed the parking, and took Sally by the arm, wondering vaguely for the first time what rights alumni had to use their old fraternities: he could not remember if he had received a bill of any sort for postgraduate membership.
But it was most of the old crowd, and he was welcomed warmly by the bartender, and gravitated to the corner, where he had first taken Sally when she came as his date to the Junior Prom two years ago. A thousand years ago.
She sipped at a menthe frappé, he at a bottle of beer, and she said to him, “Blacky, what are you up to?”
“Well, the foundation is winding up the business I went to England for—I gave them six books full of drawings, notes, ideas—and now there’s some talk of getting me involved in a restoration.”
“A restoration of what?”
“I won’t have the details until after I go to New York. It’s a Marshall Plan project, some devastated cathedral or something in Germany.”
“Why do you want to take it on?”
“I don’t know. I’ve flown over Germany shooting at other airplanes, but I’ve never been in Germany. It kind of intrigues me. I don’t feel like going back to graduate school. Not right now, anyway.”
“Do you feel like being a whole continent away from me?”
“Darling, obviously I don’t feel like being a whole continent away from you. Or continent with you. But don’t give me those feminizations. They don’t become you.” He looked at her. She was cocking her head ever so slightly, as she had always done, looking in the dim light as desirable as he had ever seen her. “You know that. But you’re totally absorbed, and you have one more year to go. Meanwhile, I’m picking up some useful experience. Besides, there isn’t anything here to reconstruct. I mean, unless you count the town of New Haven.”
“I see.” And in fact she did see, Blackford knew, which was one reason why he loved her so dearly. She saw, even, that his epistolary neglect didn’t mean anything.
“In return for your understanding, I’ll listen to you talk about Adlai Stevenson.”
Which she did. She talked about hearing him give a speech at Princeton, about its startling literacy, about the allusions to great diplomatic and historical figures, and, above all, about the necessity always to read books. “It was the most stunning speech by a political figure I ever heard.”
“I can believe it,” Blackford said. “He’ll stun the majority of the American people right into the Republican camp.”
“That,” her voice rose a bit, “is sheer cynicism. I predict he will win. If he does, I shall propose to him that you be made general-in-chief of the Corps of Engineers. Is that what they call him?”
“Something like that. Let’s go, darling.” And they drove home, talking to each other happily, tilting their vats of stored knowledge, jokes, reminiscences, experiences steeper and steeper, in their anxiety to catch up. And so it was through the evening, with only the absolutely necessary interruptions. Blackford resolved there and then to agitate to take his training in Boston, and settle down to commuting to New Haven.
He succeeded.
CHAPTER 4
Blackford Oakes had been advised that he was expected at the Palace of St. Anselm at five to take tea with the Countess Wintergrin and her son Axel. The letter, hand-delivered to his quarters at the local inn, two kilometers up the road at St. Anselm’s village, indicated that following the refreshment he would go off to the library and discuss with Count Wintergrin the plans for the reconstruction of the celebrated chapel.
It had been designed by Meister Gerard, the great architect who had also done the renowned cathedral at Cologne, a hundred kilometers west of St. Anselm. “Count Wintergrin takes this opportunity, on behalf of the people of St. Anselm’s, and of the international community who venerate the small masterwork of Meister Gerard, to thank the people of the United States who, through the instrument of Marshall Aid, have undertaken to finance the reconstruction of a chapel which, although damaged by American artillery, is properly the concern of the Germans who were responsible for the outbreak of hostilities between our peoples. Upon completion of the work, the people of St. Anselm’s will send a token of their appreciation to the President of the United States as a permanent reminder of their gratitude.” The communication was not signed by Wintergrin, but, on his behalf, by “R. Himmelfarb, Sekretär.”
The evening before, Oakes dined at the Westfalenkrug, the restaurant across the street from their inn, the Rittensgasthof, with Jimmy Overstreet, on loan from the Corps of Engineers for the St. Anselm project. The corps was engaged in rebuilding a number of monuments destroyed during the war. St. Anselm’s, being small and privately owned, was off the beaten path. But it had been approved by a committee of Congress with considerable dispatch at the discreet urging of Mr. Acheson, who when apprised of the unwonted speed with which his request had been honored, remarked acidly to an aide that if the rebuilding of gutted churches was all he had to do as Secretary of State, he would be getting on better with the Congress. Blackford Oakes, a young graduate of Yale University with honors in engineering, highly recommended for the post by a powerful senator on the Appropriations Committee, was given the job of chief engineer. His assistant James Overstreet, age forty, had been building things since, at age fourteen, he apprenticed as a bricklayer in Austin, Texas. Jimmy Overstreet contrived to get a job in a construction unit during the Depression by volunteering to work in the Panama Canal Zone. It was remarkable that with a background in construction, he had actually been used for construction projects by the army when the war came—“After Pearl Harbor,” he chatted to Blackford, sounding like every cynical G.I., “they were using engineers to teach Japanese, and Japanese linguists to sit in concentration camps in Nevada making sand castles.” Accompanying an American technical mission to the Soviet Union, Overstreet visited Leningrad and saw there the painstaking work the Russians were doing to restore the devastated palaces and museums in the area. He was impressed, and determined now to use his ingenuity to make St. Anselm’s whole. “Anything that can be built, we can reproduce,” he said, appropriately affecting the Texas drawl he had all but lost since childhood.
Oakes’s other principal assistant was an Italian-American, Arturo Conditti, borrowed from the fine arts department of the University of Rochester. Conditt
i’s father was an Italian-Jewish professor of Renaissance art, student of Bernard Berenson, who came to New York with his family in 1937 and worked as a waiter at Mamma Leone’s. Arturo was eighteen the day the Japanese surrendered, and so was unmolested by the draft. He took his doctorate in 1950. His dissertation, on the construction techniques of the baroque masters of the thirteenth century, had been accepted for publication, and he was excited at the prospect of getting practical experience. Overstreet and Conditti both accepted Oakes’s authority without surprise, taking him to be a political appointment, which in ways neither of them knew was exactly the case. On meeting him when, coming in from different parts of the United States, they converged on St. Anselm’s, both were agreeably surprised.
“Come to think of it,” Overstreet said to Conditti, “I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to learn something about engineering at Yale University.”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Conditti replied. “He’s bright. I don’t know yet whether he has a good eye. He’s definitely not a bureaucrat. Whoever his patron in government is, he might have made a mistake, selecting Oakes. Seems like the kind of guy who gets things done. But I wonder how patient he’ll be with me when I get around to telling him it might take me six months just to get the right mix in the stained glass.”
“As a matter of fact,” Overstreet said, “that count fella may turn out to be the real boss. The agreement says he’s got to approve everything. I wonder why he goes to all the trouble. The way they tell it, if he becomes Germany’s boss there’ll be another war. Then they’ll bomb the church all over again.” He smiled at Conditti. “Oh well … I guess that’s one way of providing employment. For your kids.”
The Schloss St. Anselm is a walled compound, four acres in all, surrounded by what was once a functioning moat. At the western end, looking haughtily over the Westphalian plains, the castle itself stands, two turrets, built in different centuries, with a third piggybacking on the first two and reaching a height of one hundred and twenty-five feet above the Schlosshof, the courtyard. The living quarters elbow out from the collection of turrets, dark cold rooms, some crowded with medieval artifacts, others decorated by mural paintings stretching right around, doorknob to doorknob, and one huge banquet room, with the usual regimental standards, and iron battle dress surrounding a heavy oak table around which fifty people can sit, and often did before the death of Axel’s father, who was gregarious, and something of a gourmand. “I say if you’ve got to live in a museum, live it up!” he had told his wife Eva after she had accidentally espied his food and wine bill for the preceding month.
But there was an austere side to his character. Abutting the banquet hall in the second story was an extensive library. It was there—not in the banquet hall—that the eighteenth Count Wintergrin was found dead at age thirty-eight, the cause of death a swollen blood vessel, not a swollen liver. They found, among his papers, a complete history of Schloss St. Anselm, pronounced by university scholars a work of art as well as of scholarship. It was published with extensive illustrations in 1936. Axel read it when he was seventeen years old, and wept at his misperception of his father. He had loved him even as he was, but the studious, serious young Axel would carefully desist, during his holidays from Greyburn, from talking with his father about anything more exacting than horses, hounds, partridges, and weather, for fear of having to condescend to him. To think that while at Greyburn he was reading schoolboys’ histories of the Middle Ages, his own father was composing a book on the period that would turn out to be something of a classic in the field. Axel’s determination to reconstruct the chapel perfectly was partly a private act of homage to his underappreciated father.
Across the courtyard, along the southern end, were converted stables. By the account in the history, one hundred and twenty horses were once kept there. There were still horses, but only the four used by the family. The space had long since been given over for use by a half-dozen little shopkeepers who resided in the apartments upstairs. There were larger stores down the hill, and up the road at St. Anselm’s village. But at “the courtyard,” as the natives referred to the cobblestoned Schlosshof, one could find an all-purpose grocery store, a small restaurant and bar—the Anselmsklaus—an apothecary, and a little hardware store.
And then, at the eastern end, a hundred meters from the castle, the chapel. It was the Catholic church for the whole village, the churchgoing members of which came the two and one-half kilometers on foot, by bicycle, and increasingly by car and bus to attend Sunday services, weddings, funerals, and baptisms. During the final western offensive, the Nazis had installed a heavy mortar unit on the northern wall of the courtyard. On the first of April 1945, this outpost was manned by three remaining soldiers—the rest of the squad, seeing the end only a few days away, had deserted. The Americans, misreckoning it a massive resistance point, ordered up heavy artillery. The very first shell perforated the seven-hundred-year-old roof of the chapel and passed through a wooden trapdoor to the crypt, exploding beneath the level of the stone floor. The church was in one sense devastated: the eye could not travel a foot in any direction without coming on the fingerprints of the explosive. Yet its ghostly silhouette was unaltered. And after six weeks spent removing rubble—and segregating lovingly anything that might prove useful if ever the good Lord, having attended to more urgent matters such as Berlin and the cathedral of Cologne, got around to the painstaking job of piecing back together their beloved St. Anselm’s chapel—the parishioners were attending divine services there again, sitting on makeshift benches, and using a borrowed table from the castle as an altar. They did not know (it was Overstreet who made the analysis for Blackford) that two critical timbers in the roof scaffolding had been pierced by the shrapnel. They stood in place “only by the grace of God and inertia,” as Overstreet reported it. “One substantial vibe, coming in from any of a dozen parts of the wall, and that roof would come right down,” killing, or wounding, potentially, the entire congregation of St. Anselm’s. Mostly older men, women of all ages, and children.
Half the younger men had died in the war, yet no one was heard to express resentment when it transpired that their very own dashing count, young Axel, had—for all they knew—shot at their own sons, shot at his fellow villagers. The war (and indeed life itself) was so complicated. And since one wasn’t any longer sure what to believe, wasn’t it really safer to start all over again, and to believe in the transcendent wisdom and loyalty of their own count, whose ancestors had fought for their village, and for the rights of the people of their village since the beginning of history, or at any rate as much of history as the people of St. Anselm’s were concerned with?
Blackford left his car in the courtyard, and as he walked into the huge archway, the small door embedded in the gate swung open, releasing a shaft of yellow light into the late-summer dusk. Someone had been waiting for him. He followed a creaky old man wearing a green vest over a white shirt, and an apron over his pants, through a cold hallway into a warm, chintzy living room, the fireplace crackling, over which a single crystal chandelier, its dozen candles lit, hung, illuminating the eight painted panels depicting the Borghese Gardens in midsummer. The countess was there in her drawing room and rose to greet him, a warm but formal smile on her high-boned face. Did he mind if she spoke to him in German? It had been so long since she had practiced the English she had learned as a girl, and in any case she had reports that Mr. Oakes’s German was—she raised her hand, thumb and forefinger touching—“perfect.” Blackford smiled, and replied in a German that paid tribute to what he called the sadistic Huns who had taught him the language—after the first grueling day he had looked the two words up in his dictionary, and ever after so referred to the he-she German team retained by the agency to torment him five hours a day for five months in Boston. “My Axel will be here presently,” she said, lifting her hand to signal the butler to bring in the tea. “Dear Axel, he is so busy these days. But he attaches such a high priority to th
e rebuilding of our little church. Do you have churches in America, Mr. Oakes? I mean, Mr. Oakes, do you have beautiful churches in America? I mean, Mr. Oakes, do you have …”
“Do we have any churches in America built during the thirteenth century? No, Countess, we don’t. But we do have the Grand Canyon, and that was built even earlier.” He smiled.
“Ah, yes, I have heard about it. Master craftsmen, those Indians. Tell me, Mr. Oakes—my, but you are handsome. What did you do during the war?”
“I fought on the same side as your son, Countess,” he replied cautiously.
“Yes, of course, how silly. I mean, what did you do in the war? Really, it is so ironic. It would be ironic perfection if it happened that you were the artillery officer who fired on our chapel! But I suppose that would be just too much? But really, talking about the war is so depressing. And now some of my friends tell me there will be another war if Axel has his way, but I don’t believe it, not for a minute. I tell them all the same thing: Axel is a peaceful young man. Even as a child he did not like to quarrel. But he does know his mind. Always did. When he was eleven he told us—came right to our bedroom, and told the count and me—that he could not put up one more day with his governess, Mlle. Lachaise, that we would be forced”—she laughed with evident pleasure at the recollection—“he told us that we would be forced to choose between him, our son, and her, his governess! Caspar told him to go to bed, to say his prayers, and to wait another ten years or so before undertaking to superintend his own education.
“Well, Mr. Oakes, the next morning at breakfast-time Mlle. Lachaise reported that Axel was gone. No trace of him! Not even the groom knew where he was! It was two days before the police stopped him, all the way south at Eisenfeld. His father dealt most severely with him. But after Axel’s tears had dried, he returned to his father—would you believe it, Mr. Oakes?—and said to him: ‘Father, unless you get rid of Mlle. Lachaise, I shall have to run away again tomorrow.’ That night the count and I conferred, and the next morning we dispatched Mlle. Lachaise. The alternative was to put Axel in the palace dungeon.
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