Jailbird Page 5

  I was Ruth's inferior, you might say.

  When things started to go really badly for me in the fifties and sixties, when I was unable to get a decent job anywhere, despite all the high posts I had held in government, despite all the important people I knew, it was Ruth who rescued our unpopular little family out in Chevy Chase. She began with two failures, which depressed her at first, but which would later make her laugh so hard that tears streamed from her eyes. Her first failure was as a piano player in a cocktail lounge. The proprietor, when he fired her, told her that she was too good, that his particular clientele "... didn't appreciate the finer things in life." Her second failure was as a wedding photographer. There was always an air of prewar doom about her photographs, which no retoucher would eradicate. It was as though the entire wedding party would wind up in the trenches or the gas chambers by and by.

  But then she became an interior decorator, beguiling prospective clients with watercolors of rooms she would like to do for them. And I was her clumsy assistant, hanging draperies, holding wallpaper samples against a wall, taking telephone messages from clients, running errands, picking up swatches of this and that--and on and on. I set fire to eleven hundred dollars' worth of blue velvet draperies one time. No wonder my son never respected me.

  When did he ever have a chance to?

  My God--there his mother was, trying to support the family, and scrimping and saving to get by. And there his unemployed father was, always in the way and helpless, and finally setting fire to a fortune in draperies with a cigarette!

  Hooray for a Harvard education! Oh, to be the proud son of a Harvard man!

  Ruth was a tiny woman, incidentally--with coppery skin and straight black hair and high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. The first time I laid eyes on her, which was in Nuremberg, Germany, in late August of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-five, she was wearing voluminous army fatigues, and I mistook her for a Gypsy boy. I was a civilian employee of the Defense Department, thirty-two years old. I had never married. I had been a civilian all through the war, often exercising more real power than generals or admirals. Now I was in Nuremberg, ogling the wreckage of war for the first time. I had been sent over to oversee the feeding and housing of the American, British, French, and Russian delegations to the War Crimes Trials. I had previously set up recuperation centers for American soldiers in various resort areas in the United States, so I knew a little something about the hotel trade.

  I was to be a dictator to the Germans as far as food and drink and beds were considered. My official vehicle was a white Mercedes touring car, a four-door convertible with a windshield for the backseat as well as the front. It had a siren. It had little sockets on its front fenders for flags. I of course flew American flags. This dreamboat, as young people might call it, had been an anniversary present from Heinrich Himmler, the creator of concentration camps, to his wife in the good old days. Wherever I went, I had an armed chauffeur. My father, remember, had been a millionaire's armed chauffeur.

  And I was being driven down the main street, the Konigstrasse, one August afternoon. The War Crimes Tribunal was meeting in Berlin but was going to move to Nuremberg as soon as I could get things ready there. The street was still blocked by rubble here and there. It was being cleared away by German prisoners of war, who labored, as it happened, under the smoldering gazes of black American military policemen. The American Army was still segregated in those days. Every unit was all black or all white, except for the officers, who were usually white in any case. I do not recall having felt that there was anything odd in this scheme. I knew nothing about black people. There had been no black people on the household staff of the McCone mansion in Cleveland, no black people in my schools. Not even when I was a communist had I had a black person for a friend.

  Near Saint Martha's Church on the Konigstrasse, which had had its roof burned off by a firebomb, my Mercedes was halted at a security checkpoint. It was manned by white American Military Police. They were looking for people who were not where they were supposed to be, now that civilization was being started up again. They were seeking deserters from every imaginable army, including the American one, and war criminals not yet apprehended, and lunatics and common criminals, who had simply sauntered from the approaching front lines, and citizens of the Soviet Union, who had defected to the Germans or been captured by them, who would be imprisoned or killed, if they went back home. Russians were supposed, no matter what, to go back to Russia; Poles were supposed to go back to Poland; Hungarians to Hungary; Estonians to Estonia; and on and on. Everybody, no matter what, was supposed to go home.

  I was curious as to what sort of interpreters the M.P.'s were using, since I was having trouble finding good ones for my own operations. I particularly needed people who were tri-lingual, who were fluent in both German and English, and in either French or Russian as well. They also had to be trustworthy, polite, and presentable. So I got out of my car to have a closer look at the interrogations. I discovered that they were being conducted, surprisingly, by a seeming Gypsy boy. It was my Ruth, of course. Her hair had all been cut off at a de-lousing station. She was wearing Army fatigues without any badges of unit or rank. She was beautiful to watch as she tried to elicit a glimmer of understanding from a ragbag of a man, whom the M.P.'s held before her. She must have tried seven or eight languages on him, slipping from one to another as easily as a musician changing tempos and keys. Not only that, but she altered her gestures, too, so that her hands were always doing appropriate dances to each language.

  Suddenly, the man's hands were dancing as hers were, and the sounds coming from his mouth were like those she was making. As Ruth would tell me later, he was a Macedonian peasant from southern Yugoslavia. The language they had found in common was Bulgarian. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans, even though he had never been a soldier, and had been sent as a slave laborer to strengthen the forts of the Siegfried Line. He had never learned German. Now he wanted to go to America, he told Ruth, to become a very rich man. He was shipped back to Macedonia, I presume.

  Ruth was then twenty-six years old--but she had eaten so bad for seven years, mostly potatoes and turnips, that she was an asexual stick. She herself, it turned out, had come to the roadblock only an hour before I had, and had been pressed into service by the M.P.'s, because of all the languages she knew. I asked an M.P. sergeant how old he thought she was, and he guessed, "Fifteen." He thought she was a boy whose voice had yet to change.

  I coaxed her into the backseat of my Mercedes and I questioned her there. I learned that she had been freed from a concentration camp in springtime, about four months before--and had since eluded every agency that might have liked to help her. She should by now have been in a hospital for displaced persons. She was uninterested in ever trusting anybody with her destiny anymore. Her plan was to roam alone and out-of-doors forever, from nowhere to nowhere in a demented sort of religious ecstasy. "No one ever touches me," she said, "and I never touch anyone. I am like a bird in flight. It is so beautiful. There is only God--and me."

  I thought this of her: that she resembled gentle Ophelia in Hamlet, who became fey and lyrical when life was too cruel to bear. I have a copy of Hamlet at hand, and refresh my memory as to the nonsense Ophelia sang when she would no longer respond intelligently to those who asked how she was.

  This was the song:

  How should I your true love know

  From another one?

  By his cockle hat and staff,

  And his sandal shoon.

  He is dead and gone, lady,

  He is dead and gone;

  At his head a grass-green turf,

  At his heels a stone--

  And on and on.

  Ruth, one of millions of Europe's Ophelias after the Second World War, fainted in my motorcar.

  I took her to a twenty-bed hospital in the Kaiserburg, the imperial castle, which wasn't even officially operating yet. It was being set up exclusively for persons associated with the War Crimes Trials. The
head of it was a Harvard classmate of mine, Dr. Ben Shapiro, who had also been a communist in student days. He was now a lieutenant colonel in the Army Medical Corps. Jews were not numerous at Harvard in my day. There was a strict quota, and a low one, as to how many Jews were let in each year.

  "What have we here, Walter?" he said to me in Nuremberg. I was carrying the unconscious Ruth in my arms. She weighed no more than a handkerchief. "It's a girl," I said. "She's breathing. She speaks many languages. She fainted. That's all I know."

  He had an idle staff of nurses, cooks, technicians, and so on, and the finest food and medicines that the Army could give him, since he was likely to have high-ranking persons for patients by and by. So Ruth received, and for nothing, the finest care available on the planet. Why? Mostly because, I think, Shapiro and I were both Harvard men.

  One year later, more or less, on October fifteenth of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six, Ruth would become my wife. The War Crimes Trials were over. On the day we were married, and probably conceived our only child as well, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide.

  It was vitamins and minerals and protein and, of course, tender, loving care, that made all the difference to Ruth. After only three weeks in the hospital she was a sane and witty Viennese intellectual. I hired her as my personal interpreter and took her everywhere with me. Through another Harvard acquaintance, a shady colonel in the Quartermaster Corps in Wiesbaden--a black marketeer, I'm sure--I was able to get her a suitable wardrobe, for which, mysteriously, I was never asked to pay anyone. The woolens were from Scotland, the cottons from Egypt--the silks from China, I suppose. The shoes were French--and prewar. One pair, I remember, was alligator, and came with a bag to match. The goods were priceless, since no store in Europe, or in North America, for that matter, had offered anything like them for years. The sizes, moreover, were exactly right for Ruth. These blackmarket treasures were delivered to my office in cartons claiming to contain mimeograph paper belonging to the Royal Canadian Air Force. Two taciturn young male citizens delivered them in what had once been a Wehrmacht ambulance. Ruth guessed that one was Belgian and the other, like my mother, Lithuanian.

  My accepting those goods was surely my most corrupt act as a public servant, and my only corrupt act--until Watergate. I did it for love.

  I began to speak to Ruth of love almost as soon as she got out of the hospital and went to work for me. Her replies were kind of funny and perceptive--but above all pessimistic. She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. They could only create meaningless tragedies, she said, since they weren't nearly intelligent enough to accomplish all the good they meant to do. We were a disease, she said, which had evolved on one tiny cinder in the universe, but could spread and spread.

  "How can you speak of love to a woman," she asked me early in our courtship, "who feels that it would be just as well if nobody had babies anymore, if the human race did not go on?"

  "Because I know you don't really believe that," I replied. "Ruth--look at how full of life you are!" It was true. There was no movement or sound she made that was not at least accidentally flirtatious--and what is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

  What a charmer she was! Oh, I got the credit for how smoothly things ran. My own country gave me a Distinguished Service Medal, and France made me a chevalier in the Legion d'honneur, and Great Britain and the Soviet Union sent me letters of commendation and thanks. But it was Ruth who worked all the miracles, who kept each guest in a state of delighted forgivingness, no matter what went wrong.

  "How can you dislike life and still be so lively?" I asked her.

  "I couldn't have a child, even if I wanted to," she said. "That's how lively I am."

  She was wrong about that, of course. She was only guessing. She would give birth to a son by and by, a very unpleasant person, who, as I have already said, is now a book reviewer for The New York Times.

  That conversation with Ruth in Nuremberg went on. We were in Saint Martha's Church, close to where fate had first brought us together. It was not yet operating as a church again. The roof had been put back on--but there was a canvas flap where the rose window used to be. The window and the altar, an old custodian told us, had been demolished by a single cannon shell from a British fighter plane. To him, judging from his solemnity, this was yet another religious miracle. And I must say that I seldom met a male German who was saddened by all the destruction in his own country. It was always the ballistics of whatever had done the wrecking that he wished to talk about.

  "There is more to life than having babies, Ruth," I said.

  "If I had one, it would be a monster," she said. And it came to pass.

  "Never mind babies," I said. "Think of the new era that is being born. The world has learned its lesson at last, at last. The closing chapter to ten thousand years of madness and greed is being written right here and now--in Nuremberg. Books will be written about it. Movies will be made about it. It's the most important turning point in history." I believed it.

  "Walter," she said, "sometimes I think you are only eight years old."

  "It's the only age to be," I said, "when a new era is being born."

  Clocks struck six all over town. A new voice joined the chorus of public chimes and bells. It was in fact an old voice in Nuremberg, but Ruth and I had never heard it before. It was the deep bonging of the Mannleinlaufen, the bizarre clock of the distant Frauenkirche. That clock was built more than four hundred years ago. My ancestors, both Lithuanian and Polish, would have been fighting Ivan the Terrible back then.

  The visible part of the clock consisted of seven robots, which represented seven fourteenth-century electors. They were designed to circle an eighth robot, which represented the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fourth, and to celebrate his exclusion, in Thirteen-hundred and Fifty-six, of the Papacy from the selection of German rulers. The clock had been knocked out by bombing. American soldiers who were clever with machinery had begun on their own time to tinker with it as soon as they occupied the city. Most Germans I had talked to were so demoralized that they did not care if the Mannleinlaufen never ran again. But it was running again, anyway. Thanks to American ingenuity, the electors were circling Charles the Fourth again.

  "Well," said Ruth, when the sounds of the bells had died away, "when you eight-year-olds kill Evil here in Nuremberg, be sure to bury it at a crossroads and drive a stake through its heart--or you just might see it again at the next full moooooooooooooooooon."

  3

  BUT MY UNFLAGGING optimism prevailed. Ruth consented at last to marry me, to let me try to make her the happiest of women, despite all the ghastly things that had happened to her so far. She was a virgin, and so very nearly was I, although I was thirty-three--although, roughly speaking, half my life was over.

  Oh, to be sure, I had, while in Washington, "made love," as they say, to this woman or that one from time to time. There was a WAC. There was a Navy nurse. There was a stenographer in the Department of Commerce typing pool. But I was fundamentally a fanatical monk in the service of war, war, war. There were many like me. Nothing else in life is nearly so obsessive as war, war, war.

  My wedding gift to Ruth was a wood carving commissioned by me. It depicted hands of an old person pressed together in prayer. It was a three-dimensional rendering of a drawing by Albrecht Durer, a sixteenth-century artist, whose house Ruth and I had visited many times in Nuremberg, during our courting days. That was my invention, so far as I know, having those famous hands on paper rendered in the round. Such hands have since been manufactured by the millions and are staples of dim-witted piety in gift shops everywhere.

  Soon after our marriage I was transferred to Wiesbaden, Germany, outside of Frankfurt am Main, where I was placed in charge of a team of civilian engineers, which was winnowing mountains of captured German technical documents for inventions and manufac
turing methods and trade secrets American industry might use. It did not matter that I knew no math or chemistry or physics--any more than it had mattered when I went to work for the Department of Agriculture that I had never been near a farm, that I had not even tended a pot of African violets on a windowsill. There was nothing that a humanist could not supervise--or so it was widely believed at the time.

  Our son was born by cesarean section in Wiesbaden. Ben Shapiro, who had been my best man, and who had also been transferred to Wiesbaden, delivered the child. He had just been promoted to full colonel. In a few years Senator Joseph R. McCarthy would find that promotion to have been sinister, since it was well known that Shapiro had been a communist before the war. "Who promoted Shapiro to Wiesbaden?" he would want to know.

  We named our son Walter F. Starbuck, Jr. Little did we dream that the name would become as onerous as Judas Iscariot, Jr., to the boy. He would seek legal remedy when he turned twenty-one, would have his name changed to Walter F. Stankiewicz, the name that appears over his columns in The New York Times. Stankiewicz, of course, was our discarded family name. And I must laugh now, remembering something my father once told me about his arrival at Ellis Island as an immigrant. He was advised that Stankiewicz had unpleasant connotations to American ears, that people would think he smelled bad, even if he sat in a bathtub all day long.

  I returned to the United States with my little human family, to Washington, D.C., again, in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. My optimism became bricks and mortar and wood and nails. We bought the only house we would ever own, which was the little bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Ruth put on the mantelpiece the woodcarving of the praying hands by Albrecht Durer. There were two things that had made her want to buy that house and no other, she said. One was that it had a perfect resting place for the hands. The other was a gnarled old tree that shaded the walk to our doorstep. It was a flowering crab apple tree.