The Wind Chill Factor (47 page)

I got dressed and went outside and ran my hands over the Lincoln. The false spring made the air balmy and wet, good to breathe. There was heavy, deep snow ahead, there always was, but it was lovely and youthful just then, a hint of the annual rebirth. What snow was left was thin, sinking into the moist earth.

I went back inside, rinsed out my cup, screwed the lid back on the jam, rinsed the spoon, put everything away. I went into the bedroom and straightened the covers on the bed, made sure that the coals from the fire I’d apparently made before retiring were contained in the grate. Method equals sanity so I was being as methodical and orderly as possible.

Slowly, admiring the morning, I drove into town. The courthouse was a wet black ruin, snow clinging in patches like moss. It was cordoned off with sawhorses and slat fencing which buckled every few feet from the kids in town hanging on it. I parked the Lincoln and went to Doctor Bradlee’s office.

He was alone, bending over an appointment book. He looked up and saw me over the top of his glasses.

“Well, John,” he exclaimed, straightening up, tall and stoop-shouldered in a four-hundred-dollar blue suit. “What a surprise! When did you get back?” He was glad to see me and I was glad to be back.

“Last night,” I said.

“Olaf back too, eh?” He motioned me into his private office and followed me in, leaving the door to the reception room open.

“Why, no,” I said. “He had some business in Washington.”

“Washington,” Bradlee said, nodding sagely. “We haven’t seen those fellows for awhile but when they were here they were here in force. FBI men, security officers, heaven help us—when the courthouse went all the town records went with it.” He shrugged, frowned. “Then they were gone and everything was back to normal, the smoking ruins, that was all we had to remind us. It was quiet and calm, like a demon had been exorcised.” He smiled again. “And how’s your poor head? Have you had any headaches?”

I reassured him and when he asked me what in the world we’d been doing I didn’t know what to say.

“Traipsing around Europe,” I said, “getting nowhere.”

“Do you know who murdered Cyril?”

I shook my head, wondering what to say. How do you tell someone about
Die Spinne,
giant submarines, a man like Ivor Steynes, and a man like Brendel … a man like my grandfather? And what would he have said if I’d told him about my father? It all spun out like filament from an enormous, ever-moving, always-twitching spider. The web was infinite and infinity has never been easy to describe.

“A senseless killing—” he began, then blinked. “But of course it wasn’t senseless. I don’t know what to make of it and I don’t suppose it amounts to a hill of beans if I can, one way or the other.” He unwrapped a piece of Christmas candy, a round disk with red and white spokes. “Keep these around for lads,” he said, crumpling up the cellophane wrapper. “But there aren’t many kids in Cooper’s Falls anymore. Time flies, John.”

“Look, Doctor Bradlee, what I wanted to see you about—how’s Arthur? Can I see him?”

Bradlee folded his hands across his vest and tilted back in the leather swivel chair behind his massive desk. He put his size 13 wingtips on the edge of the blotter and moved the candy into his cheek.

“It’s funny about Arthur. A man his size and age has a heart attack and it’s not good—too much weight, arteries wearing out, the oldest story. He collapsed at the hotel one day in the middle of his lunch, just fell forward into his cheddar omelet. I’d told him to lay off the eggs, but he had to have his omelets, his big cigars, and you can’t blame him, I guess. Anyway, we got him to the hospital and I did all the usual things. On top of it all we found out he had pneumonia—walking around in the cold, you get pneumonia.”

“But how is he? Is he alive?”

“Well, yes, he’s all right now, as all right as he can be—he was a long time coming around. He was in a deep sleep for days but his life signs kept coming back. He was resting up, you might say. Lots of stamina, what people like to think of as the will to live. He just lay there fighting it and one day he woke up.” Bradlee’s eyebrows went up and he shrugged. “First thing he said was—you’ll be amused by this—the first thing he said to his nurse was, ‘Where’s John? Is John all right?’ Came out of it and asked how the hell you were. …”

“I wonder why that was on his mind?”

“Well, I suppose he’d been thinking about you when it happened—you know, thinking about all the goings-on around here before you and Peterson went your separate ways. He woke up thinking about whatever he’d been thinking about when he fell into his omelet. Nothing surprises me anymore, John, not a thing. …” He peeled off his glasses and plucked a Kleenex from a container on his desk. He carefully folded it and breathed on the lenses and began to polish.

“He went home yesterday, took him home myself. Seems fit enough. He’s on borrowed time now, of course. He knows that. But with reasonable discretion, he could live for years.” He hooked his glasses back over his ears. “He’ll be glad to see you, John.”

“I’ll be glad to see him,” I said. “There’s not much left to believe in. Arthur’s something.”

Bradlee looked at his watch.

“I’ve got a fellow coming in with a bad arm, John. Said he could use a painkiller. At least I think that’s what he said—while I’m dispensing medications can I give you something? Some Valium, anything for your head?” He stood up and I got up and walked into the outer room.

“Valium,” I said.

He went back to his office, returned with a plastic bottle.

“Directions are on it,” he said. “Say, are you going to see Arthur? Now?”

“I thought I would.”

“Let me call him. The fewer shocks the better.”

I was sitting in the car when I saw the man come around the corner. His arm was in a sling. There was something vaguely familiar about him but he was in the door before I could place him. Someone I’d once known, someone from out of the past. Cooper’s Falls was full of people who looked vaguely familiar, who somehow bore the last traces of their childhood after all the years.

I was thinking about my father while I drove out to Brenner’s house. What would Arthur have thought about the truth of my father’s life? But it was immaterial. There was certainly no point in telling him at this late date, was there?

There was solace and contentment that afternoon, a rest for the weary spirit and body. Arthur Brenner met me at the door, thinner and strained about his eyes, but warm and reassuring, enveloped my hand in his.

I told him the story while we walked in the warm afternoon, the country lanes and matted grass wet underfoot, the earth fragrant, ice melting. We walked in the woods among the tall, barren trees which flourished on Arthur’s estate and we stood watching the fragile, thin shields of ice on the ponds and low spots where the weeds and cattails poked up through. It reminded me of hikes I’d taken long ago with Cyril, of high-topped boots with knife pockets on the sides, of the roar and the rush of Cooper’s Falls tumbling down white and choppy. …

Arthur s mood of quiet support was such that I went ahead and told him of my father’s treachery, his devotion to the philosophy which had made my grandfather a pariah. I tried to apologize to him for the abuse of his trust, his help, but he marched impassively on in his great brown overcoat which flapped low near his ankles. He wore a brown cap pulled low on his broad forehead, looked older and more tired than I had ever seen him. His age was against him. He tightened the muffler at his throat.

As I’d talked, I hadn’t been aware of the course we’d taken, and then I heard it, the falls, and we stood at the precipice on the flat slippery rock looking down at the water rushing over the ledge, white frothy plumes increased by the melting snow. It roared as it tumbled and crashed and spray crystallized in a cloud hanging above it. The hills rose up around it, the firs pointed and dark green. The sun was an orange-pink glow rolling on the horizon.

“When I wonder what it all means,” Brenner said, his voice giving the he to his frail-seeming appearance, “I come here and watch the falls and remember that it was here long before me and will be here long after I’m gone, that the sound of the falling water has never ceased in all the years. We’re all one with nature. All of us. …” He turned his back on the falls and looked off across the fields toward the setting sun. We were at peace and I wasn’t haunted by any ghosts. It was lonely, as if Arthur and I were the last two men on earth. Finally, he hooked his arm through mine and we set off together on the path winding back toward the house.

“Don’t apologize for your father,” he said as we made our slow way through the gathering gloom. “Never apologize for any of the Coopers, John. It’s a strong line, stronger than you may be thinking just now.”

“Nazis, Arthur,” I said. “A nest of them.”

“It may not be what it seems,” he said, his voice still strong and rich from the great chest. “The Orientals may have something in the worship of their ancestors. Continuity, John. We’re all in this together and nobody has ever gotten out of it alive. Belonging to a line, being part of the great whole. In the end, it may be everything.”

It was as if the rocks and the ages were speaking to me, telling me of the immutability of time and how everything goes on and friends and enemies finally become one in the infinite past.

“There is an old belief,” I said, “that on some distant shore far from despair and grief, old friends shall meet once more.”

Arthur looked at me and from deep in his eyes, sunken with his illness, he smiled.

We were both tired when we got back to the house. We ate a light meal, eggs and bacon and tea, and he prevailed on me to stay the night. I agreed, as much for him as for myself: I was worried about him in a vague, undefined way.

Before we went upstairs to bed he took me down to his workroom, where he did his porcelain.

Flowerdieu’s Charge was finished, fired, painted, gleaming. It shone in the light, a complete and perfect thing. Flowerdieu’s Charge, a last hopeless, doomed gallantry.

In the morning we settled in the bright, cheerful sitting room. He had prepared trays of breakfast, scrambled eggs and muffins with butter and honey and steaming cups of tea. The sunlight drenched the green and white flowered chintz chairs and couch, flowers winked brightly in vases, and a fire burned in the grate. Bach was playing in another room. I thought of the distant shore.

“You presented me with a difficult choice, John,” he said, “after I had some time to reflect on what you told me yesterday. I couldn’t sleep for a long time last night. I was thinking. …”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” I said. I stared into the steam, stirred my pale tea while watching stray leaves swirl up to the surface, then sink.

“No, no, you didn’t upset me. You presented me with a problem, a choice, and I wondered what to do. I could lie there in my bed listening to my heart beating and I thought, how many more times will it beat? How long before I slip quietly into the past? And I also considered how much you’d found out on your travels, how many lives had been lost. And I thought how much despair there was in your voice and your eyes. I’m old now, John, I know that despair is a waste and a joke, I know that politics and war and the struggles we engage in are nothing more really than something to keep us busy while we’re here. …”

“What are you saying, Arthur?”

“I haven’t seen God suddenly at the end of my life, I have no evidence of the existence of Satan, or evil or good. I sometimes doubt even right and wrong. God is so often a justification for the worst of what we want to do. God is always on our side—and what matters in the end?” He sipped the scalding tea; sunshine played on the craggy side of his massive head, with its well-combed white hair. He smelled of Yardley. “Personal worth, your integrity, character—no matter what your cause. Decency, a vision of the greater good whatever the greater good may be, the eradication of pain. …”

“I know,” I said, but I wasn’t sure.

“All of the reason why Nazism as we once knew it came to such failure,” he said. “The lack of decency and integrity and reason and the scales tipping out of control toward pain. Fighting a war is one thing, losing a war is yet another, but the Nazis under Hitler redefined bad judgment.” He sighed and gave me a tired smile. “It is best they lost,” he said softly.

“Yes, its best,” I said. My mind fluttered like wings, brushed at Lee, and I saw the curtains on the third floor parting, parting. … I was tired of Nazis. They could have the world as far as I was concerned.

“But I was thinking about your father, John. I was remembering what a man your father was. A great man, John, a man of very considerable honor. I lay there in my bed and I was bothered by the immense amount of information you had discovered about him, about all of them. You knew almost all of it—”

“What do you mean, Arthur? Almost all of it? You mean you know … more?”

“Of course. I know more than anyone else.” He kept chewing on muffin while I stared at him. I was having a fear reaction, like a shellshock victim.

“So I decided,” he said quietly, “that perhaps, before it’s too late and I’m gone, you’d better hear all of it, the entire story. You have so much to live with now, such a great burden and so much of what you know is off-center, so wrong. If you’re going to bear the burden, I asked myself, why not the truth?”

He looked at me benevolently, with the calm of a man no longer a participant. He was going to die soon. He knew it. And I didn’t want to hear the truth: I’d been told so many lies and so many versions of the truth that I didn’t want to hear Arthur Brenner’s. He went right on talking and I didn’t know how to stop him.

“Your father was a Nazi, as you know, but that’s only a very small fragment of the picture, John, a startling corner but far from the center, far from the truth. Yes, he was a Nazi—but he was also an American patriot, a very real American hero—the kind who must wait, perhaps for generations, for their proper role to be defined by history.”

“What are you trying to tell me? He was a Nazi. And a patriot. …”

He clasped his hands across his broad chest and settled into the chintz chair. “Many of us in this country saw the strengths and even the virtues of Nazism in the thirties and were dismayed by the manner of its misuse by Hitler’s people. And, of course, by Hitler himself. Your grandfather was one, of course, and since he was in an independent position, he could state his feelings openly. Others were not able to do so openly. But, believe me, the strong feelings were there in the thirties and in some rather surprising places.