My alluring image of war had been mainly formed by a book we had with a gray cloth cover on which the title was printed in dignified black letters and which had a dedication so stirring that I knew it by heart: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the archtestament, with its stark ordeal, of the First World War. I was unprepared to see real acts, even as part of an obscure overture.
There was a shot. The sound stood apart. I was sickened by it, as if by the impact of a plummeting body. The mule lay there, without existence, with no name. After a few minutes we were able to drive on.
My father, though he wore the insignia of a major, did not seem authentic. Perhaps it was because he was not in command of men, something he was probably ill suited for. In a matter of months he was transferred to Washington, and for three years my mother lived there while he was eventually sent on, to India and England. For some of these years no one knew what the outcome of the war would be, and printed orders to go overseas and join this unit or that, carrying with them the weight of the unknown, were of greatest importance. Some might be death warrants, though usually not for staff officers.
He became a colonel and began to imagine he might go higher, but that turned out to be the good fortune, as he saw it, of lesser men. He had the admiration, even love of subordinates but it is those above who are important.
The war ruined him. When it was over he was never able to fit in again. Everything had changed, he said. The vice presidents of banks were no longer able to turn pieces of property over to you to work on, and there were no old widows who owned hotels and wanted the sale of them arranged. He went to work for large companies in New York and Chicago but things never were right. It was the grandiose that attracted him. He was operatic. He lived on praise and its stimulus and performed best, only performed, when the full rays were shining on him.
The bald-headed friend and builder, Secoles was his name, had urged my mother to get a divorce and marry him. My father was a nice guy, he confided, but he would never amount to anything. He, Secoles, would.
It was a prophecy my father never heard, but gradually — it was also bad luck, two or three big hands, so to speak, that he failed to win; promises that were broken — his belief in himself faltered. He was given to grand predictions. “Mr. Brady, I believe in destiny. I told you we’d build a town together down here and, by God, we will.” To make it ring true takes aplomb, and slowly that drained away. Money went with it. Contrary to the advice of Mr. Micawber, it seems to me that those in life who spend freely are better for it, and those who are tightfisted are worse. There is at least one exception: my father.
In the fall of 1957 the bank called his loan on some airline bonds. He had bought them at 120—they were at 62. He’d lost seventy thousand dollars in the market. He had nothing left. He’d have to give up the apartment, he said, he couldn’t pay the rent. He had a close friend, a successful lawyer with a Phi Beta Kappa key and confident tone. “Could you tell him what your situation is and ask for help?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He’d have nothing more to do with me.”
He was lucky, my father said, not to own a gun. If he had, he’d shoot himself.
Finally, ashamed to be seen, he would lie in bed for hours, unable to summon the energy to go to work. His expensive shoes, all polished, were lined up in the closet, his many suits. The contents of his pockets were on top of the bureau beside his exhausted checkbook, his gold wristwatch, money, a few cigars. His hair was white, his jawline slack. He was finished.
Herman Melville’s father, his import business having failed, became a bankrupt. He gave up the struggle, became mentally ill and died. Melville was thirteen years old. I was thirty-one when my father performed the same unforgettable act. He was like a spent horse. We tried to urge him on. He was just lying down for half an hour, he said. We sat in the living room, my mother and I, crushed by finality while he lay in bed in the city he had meant to triumph in, in the afternoon, traffic blaring in the street, the tall buildings shining their dead windows, gulls sitting on the water.
I remember that during those days he said two things in sad summation: “They’ll never forget me” and “I’m dead.” Both were true.
Soon he was in the hospital. As a final blow, two days before he died the buyer of an apartment complex the sale of which he had negotiated was killed flying in to New York to sign the contract.
This happened at La Guardia Airport. The icy waters — it was January — covered everything.
—
Decades, ages, later I wake at night with a strange feeling in my chest on the fateful side — can it be my heart? It is a feeling I have had before, a commonplace feeling, like a cramped muscle, which will probably go away as it always has, except this is four in the morning and my thoughts somehow turn to my father. We could not encourage him, we could not make him go on. It was cruel to keep trying. He wanted it to end. “In this world there are few enough people who ever care what becomes of you,” he said. My mother long after said that the marriage had been wrong, that she had known it early but had been without the courage to act. She remained loyal to the end.
I think of the hopeless visits to psychiatrists, the shock treatments and aimless drives in the country to somehow get away. I think of him walking along the street, preoccupied, the pale wake of cigar smoke following, the blind strolls while his mind sorted through impossibilities, over and over.
—
Ethel Reiner, in her forties, decided upon the theater. She had a brief, exciting apprenticeship under a veteran producer named Saint Subber and then set out to produce on her own. After a few voyages in shallow water, as it were, she boldly took command of a ship of the line in the form of a huge musical production of Candide with Leonard Bernstein as its composer and the book, as it is curiously called, by another formidable figure, Lillian Hellman, with whom it was inevitable she would clash.
Candide was a triumph and a catastrophe, in that order. Its out-of-town tryouts, before it came to New York, were dazzling. To bring it to perfection there were final little changes, and something unidentifiable went wrong. The spring had been wound one turn too many. There was the party at Sardi’s, a transistor radio pressed to someone’s ear to hear the eleven-thirty flash report. It was disastrous, and the millions that had been invested were lost.
In her apartment that night the distraught producer had hysterics and some months later — the humiliation was too great — she retreated to England, temporarily, until the time was right to return.
She had lost confidence and whatever reputation she had built up, but not her style. At the crowded reception following her son’s second marriage she was regal in black and as eye-catching as the seductive Dutch girl, an airline stewardess, who was the bride. “My dear,” Ethel said to her, not unkindly, “I’ll probably see very little of you during this life, but tell me”—she was holding a small velvet box that contained a pair of diamond earrings, each one a single brilliant stone the size of a tooth—“are your ears pierced?” The earrings were her gift. To her credit, the untested daughter-in-law the following day wrote a note of appreciation which read, in its entirety, Dear Ethel, Thank you for the earrings. Barbara.