Secret Father - Hardcover

James Carroll is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on its Committee for International Security Studies.

1
For Isaiah Neuhaus
If one day can mark a person forever, what of two days? Those two days,
when I knew your father, when he was young, have marked me since. I can
tell you what I know of his story only by telling you the marked part of mine.
Your father. His mother. My son. Each life altered, or ended, by events that
for you can be a source of indelible pride, your patrimony, a legacy from
which to take the measure of all that honors the memory of your father. But
these are events that had a different meaning for me, the measure of which,
I tell you at the start, is the sadness you may already sense in the space
between these words. I have never told this story to anyone. Because your
father asked me to, I am telling it to you.
People of my generation, ahead of his, saw so little as it actually
was then, as if the Manichean division of the world into East and West, bad
and good, gave shape also to our most intimate relationships. An iron
curtain ran not just, as Churchill put it, from the Balkans to Trieste, but
between those of us who claimed to be grown and in charge and those, like
your father and my son, who seemed still so unfinished and, as I thought of
them, vulnerable. When Michael was away from me, I often feared that he
would get lost, which was my way of fearing, I suppose, that I would lose
him. It was a fear I could not acknowledge as being more for myself than for
him, because I had yet to reckon with what I had already lost.
What characterized our personal East-West division — broadly
dubbed in America a few years later as the generation gap — was that
Michael was the wounded one. That was presumptively a function of his
longtime status as a handicapped child, but then it also became a matter of
my efficient pretense that the loss we"d undergone together the year before
was more his than mine, as if what I did was for him, never for myself. Thus,
if the world we"d inherited was to be a jungle, I would be Michael"s brush
cutter, leading the way through impassable thickets with my machete,
hacking out a path for him, calling over my shoulder, "This way, son. This
way." Not noticing until too late that he had stopped following. That he had
disappeared.
This story, which I"ve told myself a thousand times, always begins
with the sixth stroke of the clock, the grandfather clock with the elaborately
carved oaken case that I hear ticking now, not far from where I sit writing in
my old house in New York City. In our German days, the clock was in the
sitting room of the big house the bank had leased — not for me, since five
nights out of seven I was there alone, but for the holders of my position. I"d
found the clock in a warehouse near the Rhine: all Europe could still seem
a flea market in those years, with the fine things of a lost world for sale
cheap. I bought the clock, I think, to stake a claim to the timbered mansion
assigned to me, and the sonorous Westminster gong wafted through those
lonely rooms like the regular greeting of a friendly ghost.
If any house had the right to be haunted, it was that one. It was
built after the First World War in Dahlberg, a near suburb on the opposite
side of Frankfurt from the factory and rail yard district, which was why it had
not been bombed in the Second. After those two wars, Germany was a
nation of ghosts, an infelicitous place for a man and a boy yoked together
by blood and affection, of course, but also by that knot of loss. We never
asked it of each other, but our question was, If she can vanish from our lives,
why then can"t you from mine?
Five, beat, six. I remember looking up from that day"s Frankfurter
Neue Presse, a newspaper I felt obliged to look at as a way of improving my
German. "Improving" overstates it perhaps. In my months in the country, I
had come up against a linguistic mental block, and German had so far
remained impenetrable to me, a blow more to my pride than my professional
performance, since everyone in banking spoke English. All that week,
however, I had been especially motivated to decipher the local news. As I
lumpishly tracked through the text of a particular story, the clock had
struck six. Without being aware of it, I had kept the count, and it was exactly
then that the question first rang in my head: Where is Michael?
It was late in April 1961,a Friday evening. I looked up from the
paper fully expecting to see Michael"s shyly grinning face in the archway
that marked the entrance foyer off from the sitting room. I saw the tall green
ceramic-tiled brazier on the near side of the arch, and through the arch, the
mahogany bench onto which Michael would have dropped his bag and his
stick. In a trick of a mind ready to worry, his absence supplied a vivid
sensation: an image in the vacant air of his lanky, thin frame at a slouching
angle, the loose posture of a young man with leg braces.
"Hey, Dad."
Is he grinning? Has he left behind his anger at me? Our first awful
fight.
"Hay is for horses," I would have said, a daring echo of what had
been his mother"s good-humored correction. Humor as a ladder out of the
pit of hurt.

But where is he?
April 1961. The newspapers had been full of what came to be
called the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the first shocking failure of the young
Kennedy administration. There is no way to convey now the palpable sense
of danger with which we all lived in those years. Kennedy and Khrushchev
were like the cowboy gunfighters then dominating movies and television, men
forever on the verge of drawing weapons, but weapons that would kill us all.
Political fear was entirely personal, but personal fear, for that reason, could
seem nuclear, too. Worry that something had happened to my son, or, if I
was lucky, that he was only angry at me, was as deeply unsettling as my
fear of what I read in our awful newspapers.
But the news story I had been trying to follow that week was
about an event that had taken place right in front of me, as if to warn that
even a life like mine could be dangerous. On the previous Monday, I had
attended a conference of Germany"s major steel producers at Rhine-Main
Hall, a new convention center in the reborn heart of Frankfurt. The meeting
had been called by the Bonn Ministry for Economic Cooperation. Gathered
in a function room were about two hundred dark-suited men, mostly German
but also including European Coal and Steel Community delegates and a
smattering of financiers from various countries, of whom I was one. At
meetings like this, the language spoken was always English, which was a
main reason my German never improved. The purpose was to lay the
groundwork for the creation of an ECSC consortium to develop iron imports
from Africa.
The third of a number of speakers in the afternoon session
approached the podium, a distinguished-looking man who — thin, tall, well
tailored, and bald — reminded me of Britain"s Prince Philip. I had actually
been thinking of slipping out, but the agenda notes identified him as having
lived in Moravia for a decade as the representative of Rheinstahl, one of the
great German steel companies. He had no doubt been acquiring options on
Liberia"s inland iron mines, and his on-the-ground experience in Africa set
him apart from the other speakers, and I decided to hear what he had to
say. At the podium, he opened the folder that held his notes, took a sip of
water, and was about to speak when a man appeared from behind a curtain
at the edge of the stage. He crossed quickly to the speaker, approaching
from the rear, and before the speaker noticed him, the man extended his
arm, seeming to touch the speaker in the back of the neck. Then the shot,
the first such sound I had heard since the war. It was a tinny noise I did not
recognize, since my experience of gunfire had always been outdoors. Then
the man fell forward, and an image of the crimson spray had remained with
me all week.
Michael, where are you? I am sure it was a Friday, and I am sure
of the time, because on Fridays Michael always caught the 4:07 from
Wiesbaden to Frankfurt, then the 5:20 from the Hauptbahnhof to the
Dahlberg station, and then it was a ten-minute walk to our house, even for
Michael, whose gait was awkward but steady. This distance he insisted on
covering by foot, a point of valiant stubbornness to which I relented because I
knew how he hated being taken for disabled when, as he put it once, he was
only slow. I knew also that his doctors in New York had encouraged him to
walk as much as he could. On that one day of the week, I made it a habit to
be home by 5:30 so that I would be there when he came through the door
with his sack und pack and stick at 5:50.
But quickly I remembered that this Friday was to be different.
Michael was to be home at the usual hour, but he was coming back to
Frankfurt not by train but by car, my car, which he was driving. That
realization made me sit up, the trite reaction of every parent who"d ever
overcome a qualm to let a teenager take the car. At the end of the previous
weekend, he had made a rare request, asking if he could drive back to
school instead of taking the train. He knew I didn"t need the car during the
week, since my job brought with it a car and driver. And he knew, I think, how
pleased I was that he had taken so naturally to driving, despite his
handicap. It was the beauty of the then new automatic gearshift — in truth,
he"d have had trouble with a clutch — and I"d bought the snappy Fairlane
convertible the summer before thinking of him as its eventual driver. The
pleasure I"d seen him taking at the wheel since obtaining his license was my
pleasure, too. All of this went into his clear assumption that I would say yes.
"But boarders are forbidden to have cars," I said.
"Just to and from Wiesbaden," he offered. "I"ll leave it parked for
the week. The dorm director will never know."
I saw how he had allowed himself to count on it, which,
perversely, may be what prompted my initial no, as if the boy needed a
lesson against presumption. Michael was seventeen years old, a senior at
the American high school in the charming spa city near the Rhine, fifty
miles away. Eisenhower had made Wiesbaden his headquarters after
crossing the Rhine, and by our time it served as headquarters for the U.S. Air
Force in Europe — "U-Safe," in the argot. The sons and daughters of NCOs
and officers who lived in Wiesbaden"s several American enclaves attended
the school, but not only them. A three-story dormitory also accommodated
the teenage children of U.S. servicemen stationed across Europe. And some
additional students, like Michael, were children of American civilians with
Defense Department connections — NATO-attached tech reps for
Lockheed or Martin-Marietta, say, or cigarette wholesalers charged with
supplying the vast PX system of the occupation army.
My own DoD connection was thin, and ran through New York, not
Washington. I was chief of the Frankfurt office of the Chase International
Investment Corporation, a spinoff of Chase Manhattan Bank, which had
begun a decade before as a main funnel for Marshall Plan funds when
American investment shifted from governments to businesses. The war had
left the Continent starved for consumer goods, and German manufacturers,
with the advantage of needing to retool from scratch, had pounced on the
market. Those of us at Chase — investing not in the state bureaucracies
but in individual entrepreneurs and private companies — embodied the beau
ideal of American democracy, what would later come to be called free-market
capitalism. So we were front-liners in the Cold War, too, and it did not hurt
that returns on our investments were running at thirty or forty percent, which
set off a second-stage boom in finance as the industrial recovery of the
Bundes republik began to fuel itself. We called it the bottom-line blitzkrieg.
People like me, in our recognizably American Brooks Brothers
tailor-mades, prided ourselves on having nothing to do with the omnipresent
but culturally isolated U.S. military, who, out of uniform, favored Ban-Lons
and double-knits. We did not shop in their commissaries, and we did not
work out in their gyms. Our chauffeurs drove us in Taunus sedans or
Mercedeses, decidedly not Oldsmobiles. And we spoke German — or, as
in my case, felt guilty if we did not.
If we had school-age children, they boarded at English public
schools, Swiss convent schools, or back home at New England prep
schools. Rarely would the child of someone in my position have been a
candidate for General H. H. Arnold High School at Wiesbaden Air Base, a
putative reproduction of a small-town American secondary school. But it
seemed the right place for Michael that year, and as for me, I wanted him
close.

When he was little, Michael was a boy who loved movement above all — if
possible, on wheels, so his love of driving was no surprise. The first real
change in his life came with his tricycle, a Christmas present when he was
four or five. It was a machine on which he could demonstrate his true
character — his daring, his restlessness, his bright assumption that the
earth was flat so that he could go fast. When I would come home in the
evening, nothing would do but that I take him down to the basement of the
apartment building where storage cages lined a labyrinthine passageway
that Michael regarded as his personal racecourse. I recall chicken wire
stretched onto lumber frames, naked light bulbs on the ceiling every twenty
feet or so, a succession of right-angle turns. His circuit was quick and, with
all that cushiony chicken wire, I thought, safe. But near the doorway to the
stairwell, one sharp cinderblock corner jutted into his path, a hazard I had
never noticed because he always cut by it easily. Once, however, I made a
pretense of giving chase, which made Michael laugh and pour it on. As he
barreled through the maze now, pulling away, he tossed triumphant looks
back over his shoulder at me. He disappeared around a last turn, I heard his
crash, and knew at once he"d hit the cinderblock angle. He took the sharp
edge on his face, breaking his nose and opening a gash in his forehead
from which blood was gushing, as from a pump, by the time I got to him. The
sight of his wrecked face filled me with panic and guilt, but he remained
calm. Stunned into calm, I thought, but that wasn"t so. Michael was in pain,
awash in blood — crimson spray — but he wasn"t afraid because he was
certain that nothing bad would happen to him if I was there.
But I wasn"t there some years later, the day he came home early
from school — he was ten years old, it was April of 1954. He was a student
at the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, in Morningside Heights. Edie
was a volunteer docent — a sort of guide — at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, and she was there when the school nurse called to say she was
sending Michael home in a taxi because he had a fever. I was in Washington,
preparing to leave for Paris as part of a government delegation. Edie called
me that night and described fever, headache, loss of appetite, vomiting. I
would have come home, but she said the doctor had labeled it flu and was...