Chapter One
STEWART: ALL PARENTS KEEP SECRETS
All parents keep secrets from their children. My father,
it seemed, kept more than most.
The first clue came when Dad passed away in February 2003
at the age of eighty-eight, after sailing into a Bermuda
Triangle of illness-heart disease, lung cancer, and
emphysema-all more or less attributable to sixty years of
cigarettes. Characteristically, my mother refused to leave
the burial details to my sister and me and met the funeral
director with us. She chose a casket big enough to require
a hood ornament, then pondered each word as the mortician
read out the proposed death announcement.
"Was David a veteran?" he asked. The undertaker was the
cleanest-looking man I'd ever seen, with lacquered nails,
shaped eyebrows, and a face so smooth I suspected
electrolysis.
"World War II," barked Sarah, who at the age of fifty-two
still raced to answer before me.
The funeral director showed us the tiny black rendering of
the Stars and Stripes that would appear in the paper
beside Dad's name, but my mother was already agitating her
thinning gray curls.
"No," she said. "No war. Not for this David Dubin." When
she was upset, Mom's English tended to fail her. And my
sister and I both knew enough to keep quiet when she was
in those moods. The war, except for the bare details of
how my father, an American officer, and my mother, an
inmate in a German concentration camp, had fallen in love,
virtually at first sight, had been an unpleasantness too
great for discussion throughout our lives. But I had
always assumed the silence was for her sake, not his.
By the end of the mourning visitation, Mom was ready to
face sorting through Dad's belongings. Sarah announced she
was too pressed to lend a hand and headed back to her
accounting practice in Oakland, no doubt relishing the
contrast with my unemployment. Mom assigned me to my
father's closet on Monday morning, insisting that I
consider taking much of his clothing. It was nearly all
disastrously out of fashion, and only my mother could
envision me, a longtime fatso, ever shrinking enough to
squeeze into any of it. I selected a few ties to make her
happy and began boxing the rest of his old shirts and
suits for donation to the Haven, the Jewish relief agency
my mother had helped found decades ago and which she
almost single-handedly propelled for nearly twenty years
as its Executive Director.
But I was unprepared for the emotion that overtook me. I
knew my father as a remote, circumspect man, very orderly
in almost everything, brilliant, studious, always civil.
He preferred work to social engagements, although he had
his own polite charm. Still, his great success came within
the mighty fortress of the law. Elsewhere, he was less at
ease. He let my mother hold sway at home, making the same
weary joke for more than fifty years-he would never, he
said, have enough skill as a lawyer to win an argument
with Mom.
The Talmud says that a father should draw a son close with
one hand and push him away with the other. Dad basically
failed on both accounts. I felt a steady interest from him
which I took for affection. Compared to many other dads,
he was a champ, especially in a generation whose principal
ideal of fathering was being a 'good provider.' But he was
elusive at the core, almost as if he were wary of letting
me know him too well. To the typical challenges I threw
out as a kid, he generally responded by retreating, or
turning me over to my mother. I have a perpetual memory of
the times I was alone with him in the house as a child,
infuriated by the silence. Did he know I was there? Or
even goddamn care?
Now that Dad was gone, I was intensely aware of everything
I'd never settled with him-in many cases, not even started
on. Was he sorry I was not a lawyer like he was? What did
he make of my daughters? Did he think the world was a good
place or bad, and how could he explain the fact that the
Trappers, for whom he maintained a resilient passion, had
never won the World Series in his lifetime? Children and
parents can't get it all sorted out. But it was painful to
find that even in death he remained so enigmatic.
And so this business of touching the things my father
touched, of smelling his Mennen talcum powder and Canoe
aftershave, left me periodically swamped by feelings of
absence and longing. Handling his personal effects was an
intimacy I would never have dared if he were alive. I was
in pain but deeply moved every minute and wept freely,
burbling in the rear corner of the closet in hopes my
mother wouldn't hear me. She herself was yet to shed a
tear and undoubtedly thought that kind of iron stoicism
was more appropriate to a man of fifty-six.
With the clothing packed, I began looking through the
pillar of cardboard boxes I'd discovered in a dim corner.
There was a remarkable collection of things there, many
marked by a sentimentality I always thought Dad locked.
He'd kept the schmaltzy valentines Sarah and I had made
for him as grade-school art projects, and the Kindle
County championship medal he'd won in high school in the
backstroke. Dozens of packets of darkening Kodachromes
reflected the life of his young family. In the bottom box,
I found memorabilia of World War II, a sheaf of brittle
papers, several red Nazi armbands taken, I imagined, as
war trophies, and a curled stack of two-by-two snaps, good
little black-and-white photos that must have been shot by
someone else since my father was often the subject,
looking thin and taciturn. Finally, I came upon a bundle
of letters packed in an old candy tin to which a note was
tied with a piece of green yarn dulled by time. It was
written in a precise hand and dated May 14, 1945.
Dear David,
I am returning to your family the letters you have sent
while you have been overseas. I suppose they may have some
significance to you in the future. Inasmuch as you are
determined to no longer be a part of my life, I have to
accept that once time passes and my hurt diminishes, they
will not mean anything to me. I'm sure your father has let
you know that I brought your ring back to him last month.
For all of this, David, I can't make myself be angry at
you for ending our engagement. When I saw your father, he
said that you were now being court-martialed and actually
face prison. I can hardly believe that about someone like
you, but I would never have believed that you would desert
me either. My father says men are known to go crazy during
wartime. But I can't wait any longer for you to come back
to your senses.
When I cry at night, David-and I won't pretend for your
sake that I don't-one thing bothers me the most. I spent
so many hours praying to God for Him to deliver you
safely; I begged Him to allow you to live, and if He was
especially kind, to let you come back whole. Now that the
fighting there is over, I cannot believe that my prayers
were answered and that I was too foolish to ask that when
you returned, you would be coming home to me.
I wish you the best of luck in your present troubles.
Grace
This letter knocked me flat. Court-martialed! The last
thing I could imagine of my tirelessly proper father was
being charged with a serious crime. And a heartbreaker as
well. I had never heard a word about any of these events.
But more even than surprise, across the arc of time, like
light emitted by distant stars decades ago, I felt pierced
by this woman's pain. Somehow her incomprehension alloyed
itself with my own confusion and disappointment and
frustrated love, and instantly inspired a ferocious
curiosity to find out what had happened.
* * *
Dad's death had come while I was already gasping in one of
life's waterfalls. Late the year before, after reaching
fifty-five, I had retired early from the Kindle County
Tribune, my sole employer as an adult. It was time. I
think I was regarded as an excellent reporter-I had the
prizes on the wall to prove it-but nobody pretended, me
least of all, that I had the focus or the way with people
to become an editor. By then, I'd been on the courthouse
beat for close to two decades. Given the eternal nature of
human failings, I felt like a TV critic assigned to watch
nothing but reruns. After thirty-three years at the Trib,
my pension, combined with a generous buyout, was close to
my salary, and my collegiate cynicism about capitalism had
somehow fed an uncanny knack in the stock market. With our
modest tastes, Nona and I wouldn't have to worry about
money. While I still had the energy, I wanted to indulge
every journalist's fantasy: I was going to write a book.
It did not work out. For one thing, I lacked a subject.
Who the hell really cared about the decades-old murder
trial of the Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney that I'd
once thought was such a nifty topic? Instead, three times
a day, I found myself staring across the table at Nona, my
high-school sweetheart, where it swiftly became apparent
that neither of us especially liked what we were seeing. I
wish I could cite some melodrama like an affair or death
threats to explain what had gone wrong. But the truth is
that the handwriting had been on the wall so long, we'd
just regarded it as part of the decorating. After thirty
years, we had drifted into one of those marriages that
never recovered its motive once our daughters were grown.
Nine weeks before Dad's passing, Nona and I had separated.
We had dinner once each week, where we discussed our
business amiably, frustrated one another in the ways we
always had, and exhibited no signs of longing or second
thoughts. Our daughters were devastated, but I figured we
both deserved some credit for having the guts to hope for
better at this late date.
Nevertheless, I was already feeling battered before Dad
died. By the time we buried him, I was half inclined to
jump into the hole beside him. Sooner or later, I knew I'd
pick myself up and go on. I'd been offered freelance gigs
at two magazines, one local, one national. At five foot
nine and 215 pounds, I am not exactly a catch, but the
expectations of middle age are much kinder to men than
women, and there were already signs that I'd find
companionship, if and when I was ready.
For the moment, though, out of work and out of love, I was
far more interested in taking stock. My life was like
everybody else's. Some things had gone well, some hadn't.
But right now I was focused on the failures, and they
seemed to have started with my father.
And so that Monday, while my mother thought I was
struggling into Dad's trousers, I remained in his closet
and read through dozens of his wartime letters, most of
them typed Army V-mails, which had been microfilmed
overseas and printed out by the post office at home. I
stopped only when Mom called from the kitchen, suggesting
I take a break. I found her at the oval drop-leaf table,
which still bore the marks of the thousands of family
meals eaten there during the 1950s.
"Did you know Dad was engaged before he met you?" I asked
from the doorway.
She revolved slowly. She had been drinking tea, sipping it
through a sugar cube she clenched between her gapped front
teeth, a custom still retained from the shtetl. The brown
morsel that remained was set on the corner of her saucer.
"Who told you that?"
I described Grace's letter. Proprietary of everything, Mom
demanded to see it at once. At the age of eighty, my
mother remained a pretty woman, paled by age, but still
with even features and skin that was notably unwithered.
She was a shrimp-I always held her to blame that I had not
ended up as tall as my father-but people seldom saw her
that way because of the aggressive force of her
intelligence, like someone greeting you in sword and
armor. Now, Mom studied Grace Morton's letter with an
intensity that seemed as if it could, at any instant, set
the page aflame. Her expression, when she put it down,
might have shown the faintest influence of a smile.
"Poor girl," she said.
"Did you know about her?"
"'Know'? I suppose. It was long over by the time I met
your father, Stewart. This was wartime. Couples were
separated for years. Girls met other fellows. Or vice
versa. You've heard, no, of Dear John letters?"
"But what about the rest of this? A court-martial? Did you
know Dad was court-martialed?"
"Stewart, I was in a concentration camp. I barely spoke
English. There had been some legal problem at one point, I
think. It was a misunderstanding."
"'Misunderstanding'? This says they wanted to send him to
prison."
"Stewart, I met your father, I married your father, I came
here with him in 1946. From this you can see that he did
not go to prison."
"But why didn't he mention this to me? I covered every
major criminal case in Kindle County for twenty years,
Mom. I talked to him about half of those trials. Wouldn't
you think at some point he'd have let on that he was once
a criminal defendant himself?"
"I imagine he was embarrassed, Stewart. A father wants his
son's admiration."
For some reason this response was more frustrating than
anything yet. If my father was ever concerned about my
opinion of him, it had eluded me. Pushed again toward
tears, I sputtered out my enduring lament. He was such a
goddamn crypt of a human being! How could Dad have lived
and died without letting me really know him?
There was never a second in my life when I have doubted my
mother's sympathies. I know she wished I'd grown up a bit
more like my father, with a better damper on my emotions,
but I could see her absorb my feelings in a mom's way, as
if soaked up from the root. She emitted a freighted Old
World sigh.
"Your father," she said, stopping to pick a speck of sugar
off her tongue and to reconsider her words. Then, she
granted the only acknowledgment she ever has of what I
faced with him. "Stewart," she said, "your father
sometimes had a difficult relationship with himself."