Ordinary Heroes (21 page)

"A quoi penses-tu, Doo-bean?" What are you thinking?

"Many things. Mostly of myself."

"Tell me some."

"You can imagine. There is a woman at home." "You are here, Dubin."

For the moment that would have to be answer enough.

"And I wonder, too, about you," I said.

"Vas-y. What do you wonder?"

"I wonder if I have met another woman like you." "Does that mean you have met such men?"

I laughed aloud and she clapped her small han
d o
ver my mouth.

"That is your only question?" she asked.

"Hardly."

"Continue."

"The truth?"

"Bien silts."

"I wonder if you sleep with all the men you fight with."

"Does this matter to you, Dubin?"

"I suppose it must, since I ask."

"I am not in love with you. Do not worry, Dubin. You have no responsibilities. Nor do I."

"And Martin? What truly goes on between Martin and you? You are like an old married couple."

"I have told you, Dubin. I owe much to Robert. But we are not a couple."

"Would he say the same thing?"

"Say? Who can ever tell what Martin might say? But he knows the truth. We each do as we please."

I did not quite understand, but made a face at what I took to be the meaning.

"You do not approve?" she asked.

"I have told you before. I am bourgeois." "Forgive me, but that cannot be my concern." "But Martin is mine. And you intend to stay with
Martin."

"I am not with him now, Dubin. I am with you."

"But I will go and you will stay with Martin. Yes?"

"For now. For now, I stay with Martin. He says he dreads the day I go. But I stay with Martin to fight, Dubin. Will the Americans allow me to join their Army?"

"I doubt it."

She sat up and looked down at me. Even in the dark, I could see she was narrow and lovely. I ran my hand from her shoulder to her waist, which did nothing to diminish the intensity with which she watched me.

"How many women, Dubin. For you? Many?"

I was shy of this subject, not the doing, but th
e t
alking. At twenty-nine, my sexual history remained abbreviated. Some love for sale, some drunken grappling. It was best summarized by the phrase a college friend had applied to himself that fit me equally: I had never gotten laid with my shoes off. Tonight was another example.

"Not so many," I said.

"No? You forgive me, but I think not. Not from the act, Dubin, but from how you are now And how is it with this woman of yours at home?"

I recoiled at that, then realized the question was not all that different from the ones I'd been asking her.

"It has not occurred, as yet."

"Truly?"

"She is my fiancee, not my wife."

This was her choice?"

It was mutual, I supposed. Not that there had ever been much discussion. Grace and I had the same assumptions, that there was special meaning in the union of man and woman.

"I worship Grace," I said to Gita. That was the perfect word. 'Worship.' It had not dawned on me until this moment that I could not say in the same way that I craved her.

"She should have insisted, Dubin. She had no idea what she was sending you to."

I could see that much myself.

Gita went down to the barn to attend to herself.

A pump handle squealed. Most single men I knew talked a tough game about the women they slept with. But my experience had always been the opposite. In the wake of sex, I inevitably felt a bounty of tenderness, even when I paid a local lunatic called Mary Quick Legs $4 for my first encounter. Now that Gita had left my side, I longed to have her back there. I lay there wondering if I had ever known people like Martin and Gita who had so quickly altered my understanding of myself.

Her small tread squeaked up the stairs and she crept in, standing near the bunk. Seeing her dressed, I reached down and drew up my trousers.

"I must go, Dubin," she whispered. "They will be looking for me shortly. Au revoir." She peered at me, albeit with some softness. "Doo-bean, I believe we shall have other moments together."

"Do you?" I had no idea if I wanted that, but I told her that I would probably return one more time to give Martin the final papers on my investigation.

"Well, then," she answered. She hesitated but bent and pressed her lips to mine lightly. It was more of a concession than an embrace. She said au revoir again.

I had been so raddled by emotion all day that I would have thought my nerves would be too unsettled for sleep, but as with every other expectation of late, I was wrong. I had purposely not drawn the wooden shutters outside and woke at 7:30, as I intended, with the livid sunrise firing through the clouds. Coming to, I recognized my knee as the discomfort, which, like a leash, had seemed to drag me up from sleep periodically throughout the night. The leg was swollen and stiff and I eased myself up slowly, then put on my uniform, refastening the insignia. As I went back toward the house to rouse Bidwell and to see about Martin, I could hear mortars pounding. The 26th Infantry Division, as it turned out, was about to seize Bezange-la-Petite. I was standing there, trying to make out the direction of the booming guns, when Bettjer, still with a cognac bottle in his hand, stumbled into the courtyard.

I asked if he knew where Bidwell was. Peter answered in perfect English.

"Inside. Just now awake. The rest are gone for several hours."

who?"

"Martin. Antonio. The girl. Packed and gone for good. They have left me behind. After all of that, they have left me behind."

"Gone?"

"They went in darkness. Hours ago. They tried to creep away, but the Comtesse wept terribly. You must have slept soundly not to hear her."

"Gone?" I said again.

Bettjer, the very image of a sot, whiskered and disheveled in his brown Belgian uniform with half
a s
hirttail out, lifted his bottle to me. He had fallen during the night and bloodied his nose and now when he smiled, I could see he had lost half a tooth as well, from that stumble or from one before. Still, he was having a fine time at my expense.

"I see," he said. "I see."

"What do you see, Peter?"

"Why, they have left you behind, too."

Chapter
13.

SWIMMING

My father had learned to swim as a child in Lake Ellyn, a man-made lake that was actually a large retaining pond in the South
End, dug to keep the Kindle River from overflowing its banks in wet seasons. His parents apparently liked the water, too, because there are many photos of the whole family in the ridiculously full bathing costumes of that era, cavorting at the lake, or in the Garfield Baths, a giant teeming indoor swimming pool which was a favorite diversion for Kindle County's working families until the baths' role as a polio breeding ground led them to be closed in the 1950s.

Watching my father swim was always mesmerizing to me. His grace in the water, and the carefre
e w
ay he splashed around, was inconsistent with the guy who existed on dry land. And so was the physique revealed in his bathing suit. He was a fair-sized person, five foot eleven, and while not exactly Charles Atlas, pretty muscular. Whenever I saw the solid body concealed beneath the shirt and tie he wore until he went to bed each night, I was amazed. So this was who was here. I felt simultaneously reassured and baffled.

Eventually, when I was around fourteen, my father, never much for boasting, admitted in response to my questions that he had been the Tri-Cities high-school champion in the hundred-yard backstroke. Even then, I was hungry for any morsel about who he was, and so one day when my duties on The Argonaut, the high-school paper, required me to visit the U High Athletic Association, I decided to look in the archives to see if I could find my father's name.

I did. Sort of. The backstroke champion of 1933 had been called not 'David Dubin,' but 'David Dubinsky.' I knew, of course, that immigrants of all kinds had Americanized their names. Cohens had become Coles. Wawzenskis had become Walters. But it did not sit well with me that he had made this alteration just before starting on his scholarship at Easton College, that gentile bastion. It was a bitter hypocrisy to disown your past and, worse, a capitulation to the happy American melting pot that ha
d m
arginalized many citizens, especially those with darker skin, whom it could not fit into the blender. When I discovered that Dad had talked his parents into following this example, so he wouldn't be undermined in his new identity, I couldn't keep myself from confronting him.

He defended himself in his usual fashion, with few words. "It seemed simpler then," he said.

"I am not hiding my heritage," I told my father. "However you felt, I'm not ashamed." This was a fairly cheap shot. In our home, my mother had insisted on Jewish ritual and Jewish education. There was a Sabbath meal on Friday night, Hebrew school, and even a quaint form of kosher in her kitchen, in which traife of all kinds; including the ham sandwiches she loved, could be consumed, but only if they were served on paper plates and stored on a single, designated shelf in the Frigidaire. Dad had never seemed adept with any of that, probably because he had absolutely no religious training in his own home, but on the other hand, I never doubted that my mother had his full support. Nonetheless, in my final year of college, in 1970, I did my father one better and legally changed my name back. I have been known as Stewart Dubinsky ever since.

Nature, of course, has this way of getting even. Daughter Number 1, since the age of six, has told me she hates Dubinsky (which first-grade meanies turned into Toop-insky') and has vowed to take th
e l
ast name of whomever she marries, even if it's Bozo A. Clown. And I didn't do my father much worse than he'd done his own dad. My grandfather, the cobbler, was in his last years when I made the change, and actually seemed pleased. But as I labored throughout 2003 to recover what my father had never seen fit to share, there was always a little sore spot in my heart whenever I recalled how I had shunned the one thing of my father's I'd had.

This, then, was the story I told Bear Leach immediately after first meeting him in the front sitting room of Northumberland Manor. Bear extracted the complete tale with adroit questioning and accepted my rueful second thoughts about the change with a sage smile.

"Well, Stewart," he said, "I sometimes think that's everything that goes wrong between parents and children. What's rejected. And what's withheld."

In the latter column I could count my father's manuscript, which I eventually thought to ask Leach about. At that point, I assumed Dad had carried through on his threat to burn it. When I said as much, Leach struggled to his left and right, muttering until he located a Redweld he'd rested against the chrome spokes of his wheelchair. Inside the expandable folder he handed over was at least an inch and a half of jumbled papers, but thumbing through them I instantly recognized my father's lovely cursive hand on several interlineations. Big goof that I
am, I sat there on the little love seat where I was perched and cried.

I'd read every line by the time I returned home, finishing by spending three hours in the Tri-Cities Airport after stepping off my plane, unable to endure even the thirty-minute drive to my town house before reaching the culmination. I was a sight, I'm sure, an economy-size fiftysomething guy bawling his eyes out in an empty passenger lounge, while travelers on the concourse cast worried glances, even while they went on hustling toward their gates.

The day Bear had given the typescript to me, I eventually asked how he had ended up with it.

"I have to say, Stewart, that I've always regarded my possession of this do
. C
ument as the product of ambiguous intentions. As I told you, your father said he was intent on burning it after my reading, and once I finished, I felt strongly that would be a terrible loss. I held on to the manuscript for that reason, claiming that I needed it in order to clarify little matters connected to his appeals. Then in late July 1945 your father was released quite unexpectedly and left Regensburg in haste, with other things on his mind. I expected to hear from him about the document eventually, but I never did, not in Europe, and not when we returned to the U
. S
. I thought of looking him up from time to time over the years, especially as I moved the manuscript from office to office, but I concluded that your father had made
a c
hoice he deemed best for all of us, and certainly for himself, that he go on with his life without the complications and memories our renewed contact would raise. The typescript has been in storage at the Connecticut Supreme Court among my papers for several years now, with a note informing my executors to locate David Dubin or his heirs for instructions on what to do with it. I was quite pleased to hear from you, naturally, since it saved my grandchildren from making that hunt."