Old men are strange creatures. My father is ninety-three years old. When I begin to question him about his past, he answers readily, without suspicion. It is a little shocking how willingly he offers up his most heavily guarded secret, the locus of his shame, after a lifetime of keeping it locked away so deeply within himself. Perhaps, as a person ages, he cares less and less what others think of him. Only monsters are predisposed with their legacies, anyway. He never even asks why I want to know.
All the same, it doesn’t arrive on a silver platter. He has to tunnel his way to the story at his core when I ask, with no preamble, whether he ever made his confession to Albert Caldwell, as part of their pact. In the book, I say, you just leave it hanging. You never say.
Oh, I couldn’t have told him about Poland even if I’d wanted to, he said, much less write about it. In those days, it was all still classified. Make no mistake, I was far from ready to tell anyone—I didn’t need any motivation to keep it to myself.
What about now? I say.
Oh, all activities have been declassified. I suppose I could tell anyone I wanted.
Have you ever?
No, he says. After a moment he says, Ah, I see.
He waves the remote at the TV until it mutes, and he tips his head back and breathes at the ceiling for a while. He is moving into a dream state; when we’re talking, it’s not unusual for him to sit there for minutes on end, examining the beams above his head, massaging the arm of his chair. We’ll sit with the house creaking around us until he finds his way. And so I wait.
Finally he begins. After the war, he says, I went back to Princeton. This was the fall of ’46. The dorm at night was like an asylum. Boys weeping in the showers, screaming in their sleep. Christopher Stanwyck stabbed his roommate with a fountain pen in the middle of the night, raving about the Japs. None of us were in our right minds that first year back, but we adjusted. Most of us did. The astonishing power of focus and intellectual engagement. And the elastic nature of youth. We’d argue about Sartre and Popper in the eating clubs with real vehemence—there’d be fistfights! Brawling over philosophy, can you imagine? But you have to understand, arguing about No Exit with boys who’d been POWs, boys who’d seen firsthand the worst impulses of humanity become manifest—they understood that these works were necessary to the survival of the species.
You didn’t bring your own experiences into the discussion, that was poor form. But what happened was always there behind the curtain, whispering at us. Maybe it was a form of therapy, all the not talking about what we’d seen. And then there were those who hadn’t come back, of course. Conspicuously absent at the beginning of the semester. You’d ask after someone’s old roommate and he’d tell you. Okay, sorry to hear that. What branch, what theater? What a shame.
We were pretty well practiced in burying our memories of the dead.
On my freshman hall there had been twenty-four boys. In September 1946, eight of us were back at school. Numbers don’t mean much, that’s always the trouble with body counts. The empathetic drive does not engage with a number. Stories are the antidote. Everyone must have his story told.
I wrote letters to my mother for an hour every morning. There was a little oak-paneled common room, and in the winter, the caretaker, an old man named Pharaoh, lit the fire at five, so I’d be in there in my robe and slippers at six, scribbling away in a mohair club chair at the hearth. Supposedly I’d muscled all my problems into a cage while I was locked up at Casa Del Rey. But those letters. Mother kept them. You can see them if you’d like. You’d have thought I was at sleepaway camp. I’d write things like, I didn’t go out Saturday night because there were reports that the James Gang was going to hold up the Dinky! Jokey foolishness. I told her I avoided public places because the Junior Birdmen had warned against enemy activity. I thought that if I pretended to be a child I could shield her from what I’d become. I was really only deceiving myself, of course, believing that there could be anything childlike left in me. A new letter every day. I was a murderer in a clown suit.
So she sent Ben to check up on me. Of course, who was checking on Ben? He was only a few months out of the Navy himself and had his own terrors to contend with. Those poor boys on their floating bull’s-eyes. At sea, everything signifies death—you’re surrounded by it, the gray, depthless water that’s ready to swallow you up, and the monotony is a form of death, too, weeks of routine as you steam across oceans, weeks of flat horizon, and then the enemy appears and it’s as though the fabric of the world is ripped open right before your eyes. It must be almost impossible to believe. You must think at first that the enemy is an apparition. And the battles, like two prizefighters squared off toe to toe and slugging away until one goes down in a cloud of blood. My god, the fires, all the munitions aboard erupting like volcanoes. I’ve heard stories, though never from Ben. Never one word. He was at Midway, so he saw plenty, but he never said a thing about it. My own sea travels, thank god, were considerably less dramatic. A week to Liverpool, a week back.
Never uttered a word about what he’d seen. Of course, neither did I. He’d wait all day for me to get out of class, and we’d go directly to a bar and drink ourselves blind, stagger back to the dorm, and in the morning I’d get up and go to class. I suppose he slept most of the day or wandered around campus. No idea what we talked about. The first round of Nuremberg verdicts had come down, and we must have talked about that, about those numbers, which no one had believed during the war, even though Rabbi Wise and the Jewish press had been putting them out since ’42 or ’43. We must have talked about that. But I can’t remember.
What I can remember is Ben’s face at nineteen or twenty, clear as day—an odd thing. Marvelous black hair that he swept back like a singer, and no matter who was talking, his eyebrow was always cocked. A skeptic from the day he was born. Do you remember him? You were so little when he died. But of course you’ve seen pictures. Women loved him. Even when we were kids it was obvious that girls wanted to be around him. Right from the beginning, he had a natural ease, something that drew people in. Just the opposite of me. I do remember his face so well. I was in a fog for years after I got back but his face was always clear. I never would have said it, but I loved him. We were thick as thieves but it never crossed our minds to say that we loved each other. You understand how it was? You loved your mother or your girl.
And then Ben went back home. I believe he worked at a warehouse until he started school himself. We wrote sporadically. Once we’d left home we never lived in the same city again, you know. We visited at first, but in retrospect it’s clear I made decisions that kept us apart. At the time—for decades, in fact—I blamed the demands of work and I blamed geography and I blamed timing. It’s rarely the case that anything stands between you and family but that you choose it. When I finally admitted this to myself, I could have made an effort, but even then I thought, The ruts in the road have frozen hard, there’s no changing now. God, the stories I told myself. The very mechanism which makes us unique as a species is the very thing that makes us impenetrable to ourselves. The ability to weave a story from only a few threads of detail, to make those connections, to invent actions that have not yet occurred—it can be a great hindrance to discovering truth, can’t it?
I could only imagine painful outcomes were I to broach the subject with Ben—his eyebrow cocked, mocking. So many times I imagined the futile arguments about my good intentions, his dismissive responses, my own anger swelling, and it was as though I had lived it. What was I angry about? He’d done nothing to me. He’d said nothing. But I was angry that he’d not been a better inquisitor. I’d needed to tell him I was falling apart but I couldn’t muster the strength to do it on my own, so I blamed him for being the gentle, unassuming fellow that he was. And I imagined giving him hell for it. Imagine an argument a thousand times and it rivals reality. Write it down and it becomes reality.