The Last Supper (6 page)

An exact duplicate of Hubbard’s grin lit up Elliott’s long bony face. Lori rang for the new maid and ordered midmorning coffee. The servant, a red-faced cheerful fat girl from
Rügen, burst into laughter and clapped her hand over her mouth when she saw Hubbard and Elliott, side by side.

This time Paulus took coffee when it was offered, and ate a plum tart. When he had finished, he addressed Elliott, speaking English as swiftly as he had chewed his pastry.

“Any special reason for your journey?”

“You didn’t know? I’ve come to be best man at the wedding of my cousin and your niece.”

“Excellent,” said Paulus. “It looks as if you’ll have a chance to be a godfather as well.”

— 2 —

In the event, both Elliott and Paulus von Buecheler were godfathers to the son of Hubbard and Lori Christopher. The child was born at Berwick on June 14, 1924, a date celebrated
in the United States as Flag Day. The midwife who, nineteen years earlier, had delivered Lori was in attendance, and the birth took place in the same room in which Lori’s father, uncle, and
more remote ancestors had been born.

“All those spirits will be with me,” Lori said, “but I want Hubbard here, by my bed, in the flesh.”

“A
man
, in the birth chamber?” barked the midwife.

Lori insisted. The labor lasted for hours. Hubbard sat through the night beside Lori, timing her contractions. These became stronger and more rhythmic.

“Think of the sea,” the midwife said. “Row, row for the shore.”

“My God,” Lori said, “it’s worse than the sea. This is taking away my will. It’s taken over my body. It’s doing what it wants to me.”

The crown of the baby’s head appeared, then his flattened ears and his glistening unawakened face. Lori’s body opened to release him and the petals of her flesh and the baby’s
skin were the same hues of pink, as if Hubbard’s child were undoubling from a rose.

“Here is the prow of the little ship,” the midwife said.

“I have no control over this, Hubbard!” Lori said. “No one
told
me!”

Hubbard gripped her hands. Lori seized his huge curved thumbs in her tiny fists and dislocated them both. The baby slid free. The midwife turned him over and squeezed his penis. The baby opened
his eyes and turned his head. He had his mother’s deep gray eyes.

“A little baron!” the midwife cried.

Paul Christopher was a quiet child. Born into a family of talkers, he was a listener. Even as a very young child he never interrupted. Years afterward, he might ask a question about a story he
had heard at the age of four; he seemed never to forget anything.

“He is writing,” Lori would say, watching his alert face as he sat on the floor at coffee time, listening to adults, puzzling over jokes. She wanted him to be a poet, but she feared
that his genes would compel him to be a soldier.

In the morning, Paul would stand beside his parents’ bed in his nightclothes, watching and waiting until one of them woke. Lori opened her eyes morning after morning to find herself gazing
into the eyes of her son that were so much like her own eyes. As soon as she woke, he told her what he had dreamed the night before. He dreamed about Massachusetts long before he ever went there:
Hubbard’s stories about their family, about the woods and the American animals, so truly wild, gripped his imagination. Paul had his mother’s face as well as her eyes, but an American
body, strong and loose and made for sport. He had inherited his father’s temperament, joyful and forgiving. He walked at ten months and his first connected words were in English, though Lori
always spoke to him in German.

For three seasons of the year, in Berlin, Hubbard wrote every day from six in the morning until noon. He published his books, novels and poems, in the United States, and as they were never
translated into German he was unknown to the Berlin intelligentsia. He was little better known to most of his own countrymen. “They tell me you’re a writer, Mr. Christopher?”
American women would say to Hubbard at the Fourth of July party at the Embassy. “How interesting. What sort of things do you write?” With his instinctive good manners, Hubbard would
begin to reply. Lori would interrupt. “Not the sort of things you read, obviously,” she would say in withering tones. She never stopped believing that Hubbard was a genius.

The Christophers spent summers at Berwick. Exercise and conversation were the family pastimes. By the time he was six, Paul could climb any cliff on Rügen. He was a strong swimmer who knew
the treacherous island tides. He woke every morning at five-thirty, drank a cup of hot milk and ate a piece of black bread, and went for a two-mile walk through the beech forest with Paulus. Before
the boy learned to read, Paulus told him about Rügen, its flora and fauna and history.

Others had told him about Paulus, heroic tales. Paulus had commanded a regiment of lancers at the Battle of Tannenberg. When the Russian center broke, at about six in the evening on August 28,
1914, Paulus had pursued the flying rabble of the Russian 15th Corps through the forest of Grünfliess, putting two hundred enemy to the spear in a brisk skirmish on the shores of a lake and
setting their bivouac on fire. During a saber fight with a Russian officer, conducted from the backs of heaving chargers, Paulus had severed the right hand of his enemy. Incredibly, the maimed
Russian had turned his horse and galloped into the lake, shouting to rally his routed troops. Paulus, seeing his wounded foe fall from the saddle, spurred into the water and rescued him. Dragging
the unconscious Russian into the burning camp, he thrust the spurting stump of his wrist into a fire, cauterizing the wound. The Russian, treated by Paulus’s regimental surgeon, survived.

“Did Uncle Paulus meet the Russian again, after the war?” Paul asked Hilde.

“He invited him to Berwick, but he never came. He must have been slaughtered by the Bolsheviks, like your grandfather.”

Paul received little Christian instruction from Paulus, his German godfather. “Bismarck was a Christian, he was very vocal about it,” Paulus said, “and a greater bastard never
lived. Memorize the Sermon on the Mount; I advise you to live by it even if you don’t have a single spark of religious faith.”

Conversation was an addiction of the Buechelers. During their long banishment under Bismarck, the family learned to get along without outsiders. To avoid turning into a family of bores, they had
kept their minds fresh by learning new facts, new languages, new skills. Even now, guests were a rarity at Berwick. Anecdotes were forbidden. Stories withered the mind, Paulus said; new talk had to
be invented every day. This required a great deal of reading, and there were hundreds of books in the house. The hours between lunch and dinner were set aside for reading; at the beginning of June,
twenty books were placed in Paul’s room, and he was expected to read them all by the end of August.

“Admirable,” said Hubbard, “but Paul ought to get in more sailing.”

Hubbard was a great believer in sailing. With the meager royalties from his writings, he bought a white-hulled yawl and named it
Mahican
, after the tribe of Indians that had lived on his
family’s land in the Berkshires. In this vessel, Paul and his parents sailed in all weathers in the shallow, heaving Baltic. Lori packed delicious lunches in a wicker picnic basket that
Paul’s American godfather, Elliott Hubbard, had bought at Abercrombie & Fitch. This hamper glistened with varnish and its broad riveted straps smelled of good leather. Thermos bottles,
food boxes, plates, glasses, and cutlery fitted inside, also fastened by leather straps. All his life, Paul remembered the picnic basket as the most beautiful object of his childhood.

It was a nine-hour sail to their favorite destination, a Danish island called Falster. They would cast off in the dark, on the tide, arriving at Falster at midmorning, then sail back to
Rügen the following midnight. Falster was a windy, peaceful island of low grassy dunes, with a wooded cliff along the northeastern shore. They would anchor under the cliff, load the picnic
basket and a blanket into the dinghy, and row ashore. Here, the rules of Berwick did not apply, and Hubbard would tell stories.

The stories always had to do with Paul’s paternal ancestors. Fifty years before the American Revolution, a twenty-year-old youth named Aaron Hubbard (always called “the first
Aaron” by the Hubbards) drove a herd of spotted pigs up the Housatonic Valley from Connecticut into the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, to fatten them on beech nuts. In the eighteenth
century, the Berkshires were still a Mohawk hunting ground—wild, stony, mountainous country. No one lived there except for a few Mahican Indians who had been driven out of the Hudson Valley,
farther to the west beyond the mountains, by the fiercer Mohawks. Aaron did not run into any Indians. He spent the summer alone with his pigs, wandering through the woods, sleeping in the open,
falling in love with the country.

“There was an October blizzard that year,” said Hubbard Christopher, telling the story on the beach at Falster, “and Aaron and his pigs were caught in it. He was driving them
through the woods, trying to find a cave or something for shelter, when he saw, of all things, a light among the trees. It was a Mahican encampment. The Indians took Aaron in. He stayed all winter
as there was no way to get out through the snow, slaughtering the pigs one by one and sharing them with the Mahicans. The Indians took a fancy to pork. Aaron had already taken a fancy to the
land.

“In the spring, Aaron made an agreement with the Mahicans. In return for one pound sterling, a barrel of molasses, and ten spotted pigs, the Hubbards could have all the land they could
fence in a single day. Aaron went back to Connecticut and fetched his nine brothers. Between sunup and sundown, the Hubbard boys nailed rails to trees and fenced twenty square miles.

“On the highest hill at the western edge of their land, the Hubbards put up a house. At first it was just one room, a kitchen with a sleeping loft above it, made out of whipsawed planks
and hand-hewn maple beams, fastened together with wooden pegs. When the wind blew, it creaked like a sailing ship; it still does. They were the first Hubbards to own land and that gave them the
feeling that they’d come into port after a tremendous stormy voyage. They called the house the Harbor.

“A family of Mahicans lived on the place until one summer when they died of measles, all but one. The survivor was a ten-year-old boy named Joe. He came to live at the Harbor. The second
Aaron, your great-great-grandfather, was about the same age as Joe. He and Joe had always been inseparable friends. In the family they were called Damon and Pythias. Outsiders called the Mahican
boy Indian Joe, but to the Hubbards, he was—well, I’ve always imagined that he was pretty much what
I
was, growing up at the Harbor two hundred years later: not exactly a son,
but more than a nephew.

“One day, when Joe and Aaron were about eighteen years old,” Hubbard continued, “Joe went out hunting by himself. It was early December. The ground was frozen but there was no
snow. Joe was a great hunter. He always got something. But this time he came back empty-handed. He told the family he’d fired his shotgun at two crows and brought them down with a single
charge of buckshot. He’d looked for the dead crows but couldn’t find them. It was almost dark when Joe got back.

“Just as he was finishing his supper and getting ready to clean his gun, the town constable came to the door with some terrible news. A young man named John Parker, a schoolmate of Aaron
and Joe, had been found lying in the woods, shot dead. A farmer, an older man called Eleazer Stickles, had seen Joe follow the victim into the woods, and shortly afterward, he’d heard a shot.
The constable smelled Joe’s gun barrel. ‘Recently fired,’ he said. ‘What load were you using?’ Joe said he’d been using buckshot. ‘To hunt crows?’
the constable said. Joe said he’d been hunting deer; he’d just happened to shoot the crows after it became obvious to him that he wasn’t going to see any deer; conditions were
wrong. ‘Where are the crows?’ asked the constable. Joe said he hadn’t been able to find them. ‘John Parker had buckshot in his heart,’ the constable said. He arrested
Joe and charged him with murder.

“John Parker had been a popular young fellow, good-looking and from a prosperous family. The town was convinced that Indian Joe had killed John Parker. Nobody would believe the story about
the crows. They put Joe in chains. Aaron protested, but the constable said Joe might escape before they could hang him. Aaron went into the woods, looking for the dead crows. Joe had described the
spot where he’d shot the crows, but Aaron could never find them. It was below zero for twenty straight days. Aaron went out at first light and came back after dark on every one of those days.
He caught pneumonia, went into a delirium, and when he woke up a week later, they told him that they’d hanged Joe.

“The Hubbards buried Joe in the family graveyard, with a boulder for a headstone. Aaron, when he got better, went up there in the snow and carved Joe’s name on the stone and the word
Misjudged
. Aaron refused to go to church. He said the people praying in the church had murdered Joe. That remark was not easily forgiven, and it was never forgotten.

“In April, it began to thaw during the day while it froze at night, so they could sugar. They were setting the buckets—drilling holes in the trees so that they could pound in spouts
and hang the buckets to collect the dripping sap. And as Aaron turned the drill stalk into one old double maple tree, he looked up and saw something black in the fork where the tree grew apart. He
climbed up, and there, lying together, caught in a grapevine growing on the maple, were Joe’s two crows, full of buckshot. Aaron took them to the constable.

“The constable wouldn’t look at the crows. ‘First Joe had such fine eyesight that he could shoot two crows on the wing,’ he said. ‘But then he couldn’t find
them. Now you bring me these carcasses and tell me that both birds fell out of the sky into the same maple tree, lodged in the same grapevine, and stayed there all winter without an owl or a
wildcat or a raccoon touching them. Aaron, I know that you and Joe were friends. But go on back to your own house and stop bothering me.’