Schroder: A Novel

by Amity Gaige

  But what about this affair with the communist? Was he the villain? How could he be if, in the end, with his intervention, we did not have to hijack a bus or a train or dig a tunnel or swim across the Spree in wet suits in order to get to West Berlin, which was my father’s enduring dream? Instead, we were granted two exit visas and exactly one hour to get to Friedrichstrasse station. My father had been trying to get visas for us for years. Our suitcases—three of them—had long gathered dust in the pantry. Finally, after years of being rejected, his application dragged out, his career stagnant, our family ostracized by neighbors, here was a bureaucratic change of heart. A miracle. And a mystery.13

  Whatever the case, it was a nagging thought of mine that I didn’t have the whole story on my mother. Seeing as I was five the last time I saw her, too young for explanations even if she had wanted to offer them, I had never heard her speak of my going away. But she knew about it. I mean, she was there. She walked me to the nursery school, at the door of which we were intercepted by my father, who traded me for an envelope. I do not know what was in that envelope. Money for the bribe? Her own exit visa, to use when it was safe? For as long as we were in West Berlin, I kept expecting her to follow, but she never did. I think Dad expected her too. We were granted residency in West Berlin but did not qualify for financial benefits, and so we lived in a state of disorientation and near poverty above the garage of my father’s wonderfully unstable sister.

  West Berlin was crowded, full of artists, gays, old people, and anyone trying to escape the draft. My father, essentially a conservative man, was shocked. How irritating it must have been to recall the propaganda from the other side, warnings that the Wall existed to keep out saboteurs, enemies of the people. But I remember life in West Berlin at that time as intimate, surreal, and a little dangerous. Dad was either working or scouring for work, a hard thing to find in such a place and time, while my aunt was at home burnishing her idiosyncrasies.14 My aunt had three sons. I played with these baby saboteurs day and night. I recall a vacuum of supervision. Jumping out of the window onto a pile of mattresses. The sight of an old wooden cask rolling toward me in a game with rotating victims. By then, the Wall, which stood there in silence at the dead end of certain streets, had become the largest public art surface in the world.15

  We waited four years.

  By the end of that time, I guess he couldn’t stand it. He’d begun to send off sheets of correspondence to prospective sponsors in the U.S. and Australia. It was 1979, and if you had said to any German on the street, Just you wait, that Wall will come down in ten years, he would have laughed in your face. The occasional scientist or prima ballerina on tour would defect, bringing the world news of the deprivations of material and human rights that existed behind the Iron Curtain. Plus, they needed electricians in Boston. So we left. I pulled on my windbreaker and the stiff imitation jeans we called “Texas pants,” stacked up my comics, and said good-bye to my cousins.

  Among all the surprises that were in store for me—because I was living in the sort of childhood where nobody explained things to children—was the mind-blowing sensation of lift-off, leaving Tegel Airport with Dad via airplane, 1979. Until the plane tilted back, as if in prostration to the sun, I did not with my whole mind understand that we were going to actually ascend. As the forward thrust pressed me back against my seat, I nearly passed out from confusion and a sudden sense of betrayal. The yolk of my heart came loose. I could feel this yolk at my center become unmoored in my chest, too slippery to catch, too delicate to clutch. I said nothing to my father, who was staring out the portal window in silence. The plane seared the sky. We went up. “Lift,” said my father, for some reason. I said nothing, hoping he would not turn his head from the portal window and see my stricken face. Lift. And as he said this, one wing of the plane tilted precipitously earthward, causing my father and me to hang there over the suddenly exposed realm of a disappearing Germany. Below us, a civilization of cities, timberland, and autobahns, clearly of a piece, indiscriminate, utterly undivided. Then the vision was gone, hidden by clouds. My father did not speak. I could feel the ascending plane penetrating the clouds with minimal resistance, like the ripping free of webbing or a weak embrace. Up, up, up we went, until the plane seemed to relax and take a seat in the air, coasting within some great corridor of migratory birds across the North Sea, and I knew we would never, ever return.

  For the first year or two of our new lives in Boston, I developed a renewed interest in my mother. Maybe the plan was that she’d meet us here. I used to study every woman her age on the streets of Savin Hill. I studied mothers with young children. I watched the mothers and I watched the children. I waited for understanding. I tried to jog my own fading memory. But study of these people yielded nothing. The women seemed busy and irritable. They rarely laughed or talked to anybody. They dragged their children so fast they looked like tippling monkeys. I watched them all, and I loved them all, and I wanted them all, until finally I hated them all and was relieved to side with my father. And I held my breath, and I hid deep down inside myself, and soon enough, I got out of Dorchester. I moved to Albany and returned to Boston exactly twice—once, soon after graduating from Mune to pack away my things so Dad could inhabit the bedroom, and again when I was twenty-six and my father needed cataract surgery. I still called him. I touched base. But Dad rarely called me and never demanded more from me. Namely, he never demanded an explanation about why I’d fled. It was almost as if he knew I was hiding something, and he sympathized.

  And then I met a beautiful girl in Washington Park and a complete break was necessary. There was no other choice. Because there was no way I was going to jeopardize the thing I had going—a serious relationship with a serious American girl, one so smart she required graduate school to tame her mind, one who liked to bake her bare feet on the dashboard when we drove, one who gave me, several years later, a beautiful child with a perfect, four-chambered heart. And although I often thought of getting back in touch with my father, there was no clear way to do it. Even if I could sit with him in the old way, at the card table overlooking Savin Hill Road, then what? There would be an expectation that we see one another again, and another conspiracy would be conceived and aborted, followed by another long silence.

  All this was very much on my mind when Meadow and I boarded the bus at Conway. The night before, I had promised her that we had one final stop to make before returning home. We were Boston bound. There, I told her, she would at long last meet someone very special to me. Someone I loved and, because of my own bad choices, had kept her from knowing. And if there was one last thing I wanted to do, it was to correct this error, if she would just bear with me a little longer. I wanted her to meet my father.

  Maybe she believed me and saw herself back in the arms of her mother within a day or two. Or maybe she did not believe me at all, and it was merely that her patience had been stretched to the point of breaking, and she had simply snapped free of all survivalist anxieties. I don’t know, but we held hands. We held hands when we were picked up on the road near Mount Ragged by a handyman on his way to Conway. We held hands when we stood at the ticket window in an overcast New England town. And when the southbound bus pulled up that afternoon, we held hands as we climbed the rubber-coated steps into the cool tunnel of the bus. We carried nothing. We moved instinctively to the back, Meadow stroking the black velvet of the seatbacks as she walked. We settled in with a half dozen other wayfarers heading south, and soon the bus started forward. I think she sensed the difficulty ahead for me, personally. The difficulty of the things I had to say to her.

  Before we’d even left Conway, I felt her eyes trained on me.

  Ha, I thought, the kid’s got the mind of a trap.

  “Tell me,” she said. “You said you’d tell me things.”

  “Did I?”

  “You did. You did. Don’t tease, Daddy.”

  “OK,” I said. “My Life Story. You ready?”

  She nodded and did not look away
.

  “So I’ve been thinking of how to begin this story, and because it’s such a long story, I think it needs an invocation.” I raised my hands. “Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy, New York!”

  Meadow did not smile.

  “Ha,” I said. “I’ll be here all night.”

  “Tell me.”

  “All right. Listen. Jesus, Meadow. I’ve never been more nervous in my life.”

  “Don’t be nervous, Daddy.” She took my hand. “You’re my dad.”

  Tears bit my eyes. I can’t explain how it felt to prepare myself to utter words that I had never really spoken—not in English—names, places, truths that I had really never forced into sound. Would they even come out as words? If I spoke certain truths, wouldn’t time freeze, and nightmare soldiers board the bus and drag me away, back to the past for some ritual in which I would die, die or be sacrificed? I knew I was no match for my own lies. Why in the world, then, would I take my chances against them?

  Because of a little girl.

  I looked at my daughter.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “I have not, as you once noted, always told the truth.”

  Meadow waited.

  “I have told stories, in fact, that were elaborate—you could say—fictions, and although these fictions were not meant to defraud or to injure, I always knew—I knew in fact—that they would. Which is an admission that I—even now—can’t put straight to you, because I think it might be possible—it’s possible that if I made it explicit, if I took the blame, I would be singled out, struck down, and die.”

  Her eyes widened. “Don’t do that.”

  “No, it’s fear. It’s my fear. I don’t think saying certain things out loud will really kill me. Maybe I’m worried that you will reject me, and that would feel like a death. You’re sort of all I’ve got.” My eyes slid subtly in her direction. Look at you, I thought, trying to secure amnesty from a child.

  But she—gifted she—only shrugged. “I guess you just have to try your best.”

  I smiled. “Right you are.

  OK,” I said. “Let me put it to you this way. Do you remember how for a while you wanted a baby sister? You wanted one so badly, and you thought about it so much, that sometimes it felt to you like you really did have a baby sister? And how sometimes you would even talk about your baby sister to other people, perfect strangers, and you would kind of forget to tell them that you were pretending? And they would believe that you really did have a baby sister and would ask you questions about her, like how old she was or what her name was? And you realized that you knew the answers? Because when other people believed you, even though you knew she was make-believe, she seemed realer—that is, realer to you. Do you know what I mean?”

  She nodded.

  “Great,” I said, wiping my brow. “Great. You comfy? Nice bus.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, a couple things. Firstly. I used to tell you about Twelve Hills, where I grew up. I didn’t exactly grow up in Twelve Hills. I wished I had grown up in a place like Twelve Hills. But instead, I grew up not too far away, in a place called Dorchester, which you will see soon. And before that, long before that”—I cleared my throat—“I was born, in Germany.”

  “Oh.” She looked confused. “So you never lived on Cape Cod?”

  “No. But hell, I visited it once or twice. I loved the names out there. Cotuit. Barnstable. Wellfleet. Do you know much about the Kennedy family, your sort-of namesake? They had a compound in Hyannis Port. A very important family. John F. Kennedy was the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Germans love Kennedy. When there were bad men ruling Germany, he went to Germany’s great city, and he said, I am from here! Everyone is from here! We are all slaves until we are all free! President Kennedy was a real German hero.”

  “So President Kennedy was German too?”

  “No.” I looked at my hands. “Uh, yes and no. You know what? That’s a great theoretical question. Listen. I don’t want to confuse you with geopolitics. The person I want to tell you about is your grandfather. Not Pop-Pop, and not the gentleman from Twelve Hills. Your other grandfather. He’s the German. His name—his name—is Otto Schroder. That’s who I’d like you to meet.”

  “Otto Schroder,” she said, screwing up her eyes. “He’s my grandfather?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then how many grandfathers do I have?”

  “Well, two. Or three. It depends on how important Grandpa Kennedy is to you. The point is—the problem is—you’ve never met either of them but Pop-Pop. And I owe you—I owe you an apology.”

  I stopped to compose myself, staring over her shoulder at the receding foothills of the White Mountains.

  “I owe you an apology because I kept you from information that’s your birthright. I kept you from information that helps you know who you are. For you not to have this—for me to take this from you—well, I hope someday you’ll forgive me. You’re only six. Hopefully you’ll forget some of the stuff I said and did?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What about Grandma?”

  “Grandma?” I winced. “You mean Mom-Mom?”

  “No.”

  “You mean Grandma Kennedy? Buried in Twelve Hills?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. You mean Otto’s wife.”

  And while I had thought that the worst part of this conversation would be beginning it, I realized suddenly that hers was the name I could not say. I shut my eyes. In the darkness of my mind, I heard the sound of her company, that rhythmic sound of her walking beside me amidst the cheerful, unoppressed birdsong in Treptower Park, and I knew that the most excruciating pain of my life was the fact that I did not even know if this woman was alive or dead. I didn’t know if I wanted her to be alive or dead. All I knew was that for as long as I was Eric Kennedy, she was neither living nor dead. When I was Eric Kennedy, she did not exist at all.

  Meadow touched my arm. “Daddy?”

  My eyes opened. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I can’t tell that part yet. I have to begin—elsewhere.”

  Silence.

  Meadow turned to me with a smile. “So, did you have any pets in Germany?”

  “Pets!” I laughed. “I did. When I lived with cousins in West Berlin, they had a little rat terrier named Brutus.”

  “Brutus!”

  “Brutus could walk across the room on his hind legs.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “And when I was a boy in Dorchester, my father let me keep a snake. Ha! Haven’t thought of him in years. He ate crickets. But I loved him. Snakes are very good pets, actually.”

  “So are mice and frogs.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “And what about your school? Your real school, Daddy, not your pretend one.”

  “I wasn’t very happy at school. I wasn’t happy in Dorchester.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody liked me. I was a stranger.”

  “Were you sad all the time?”

  “I—I—” A shrieking laugh came out of me. “Sorry. This is even harder than I thought.”

  I remember how the shades were drawn on the Works Progress–era school building on the corner of Tuttle and Savin Hill Road at the end of each day, as if signaling the end of that day’s guardianship, and how the pretty teachers would all leave the building afterward, while I would remain standing there, awaiting something, some hugely unmet need. After a long time, I would cross the pedestrian bridge over the oceanic traffic of the expressway, winding my way down to the waterfront of Dorchester Bay. Funny to call it a bay. It was more like a tidal pool ringed by the expressway and a beach of hard-packed sand. When I was a teenager, they cleaned up the area, adding a long white stretch of pavement intended for strolling and decorated with benches and heavy, maritime chains strung through small concrete abutments. Even though I was often a
lone, well into my adolescence, being alone didn’t matter at the waterfront. You could walk around anonymously and root for whatever team you wanted at McConnell Park. Maybe you’d see someone you knew.

  I opened my eyes and smiled at my daughter. “No. I wasn’t sad all the time.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “When it snowed, you couldn’t even tell whose house was whose. We all lived really close together. Snowball fights were epic. Whole armies of kids. Catapults. Forts. There was always something going on.”

  “I like school,” Meadow said, pulling a swath of scorched blond hair over her shoulder.

  “You do?”

  “I do. I do like school. But I don’t always tell the truth either.”

  I let my head fall back against the seat, grateful to let her talk, grateful that she was speaking to me at all. “What do you mean?”

  “I pretend I don’t know things, like how to read. If I read things out loud, they say I’m a know-it-all.”

  I said nothing.

  “I don’t want them to say mean things about me. So I pretend I don’t read the words or know what the big words mean. I pretend I can’t see. Then they call me Four Eyes.”