Ordinary Heroes (41 page)

"So," I answered, and drew her close again. One craves peace.

The next day, late in the afternoon while I was on the wards visiting, a private from the signal office found me with a telegram. Teedle had finally replied.

Seventh Armored Division captured Oflag XII-D outside Saint-Vith yesterday a
. M
. STOP Confirms Major Martin alive in prison hospital STOP Proceed at once STOP Arrest

I had been with Corporal Harzer, the soldier who had lost his foot, when the messenger put the yellow envelope in my hand.

"Captain, you don't look good," he said.

"No, Harzer. I've seen the proverbial ghost."

I located Bidwell. We'd head out first thing tomorrow. Then I walked around Bastogne, up and down the snowy streets and passageways. I knew I would tell Gita. How could I not? But I wanted to contend with myself beforehand. I had no doubt about her loyalties. She would desert me. If she did, she did, I told myself again and again, but I was already reeling at the prospect. I concentrated for some time on how to put this to her, but in the event, I found I had worked myself into one of those anxious states in which my only goal was to get it over with. I waited for her to emerge from the ward on which she was working and simply showed her the telegram.

I watched her study it. She had left the ward smoking, and as the hand that held the cigarette threshed again and again through her curls, I wondered briefly if she would set fire to the nurse's bonnet on her head. Her lips moved as she struggled with the English. But she understood enough. Those coffee-dark eyes of hers, when they found me, held a hint of alarm.

"II est vivant?"

I nodded.

"These are your orders?"

I nodded again.

"We talk tonight," she whispered.

And I nodded once more.

It was well past midnight before I realized she was not coming, and then I lay there with the light on overhead, trying to cope. My hurt was immeasurable. With Martin alive, she could not bring herself to be with me. That was transparent. Their bond, whatever the truth of their relationship, was more powerful than ours.

In the morning, as Bidwell packed the jeep, I sought her out to say goodbye. I had no idea whether I could contain my bitterness, or if I would break down and beg her to take me instead.

"Gita?" asked Soeur Marie, the nun in charge, when I inquired of her whereabouts. "Elle est partie."

How long had she been gone, I asked. Since dark yesterday, the Sister told me.

It took nine hours to reach Saint-Vith and I realized well in advance what we would find. The MP at
Oflag XII-D said that a Red Cross nurse, accompanied by two French attendants, had come hours ago to transport Major Martin to a local hospital. We followed his directions there, where, as I had anticipated, no one knew a thing about the nurse, the attendants, or Robert Martin.

Chapter
25.

WRONG DISH

When I was a senior in high school, I was desperately in love with Nona Katz, the woman I finally married six years later.

The mere thought of parting from her for college left me desolate. I had been admitted to the Honors Program at the U., here in Kindle County. Nona, on the other hand, was never much of a student. She had been lucky to get into State, originally called. State Agricultural College, which was not an institution in the same circle of heaven as the more famous university to the north. Not to be overlooked either was the fact that my admission to the U. Honors Program included a tuition waiver and a $1,500 stipend for room and board. My parents used endless ploys to get me to go there. From Kindle
County, it was no more than a five-hour drive to State, they said, even in winter weather. They promised to help me buy a used car and pay my phone bills.

"You don't understand," I told them. "You don't understand what this feels like."

"Of course not," said my mother. "How could we understand? Ours must have been an arranged marriage.

"Ma, don't be sarcastic."

"It is you, Stewart, who does not understand. I met your father at perhaps the darkest time humanity has ever known. We fully comprehend the wonder of these feelings. That is not, however, all there is to consider."

"Ma, what else matters? What's more important than love?"

My father cleared his throat and took a rare part in our debates.

"Love in the form you are talking about, Stewart, does not remain unchanged forever. You cannot lead your life as if you will never have other concerns."

I was thunderstruck by this remark. First, because my mother looked on approvingly. And second, by the sheer notion that Dad was asserting so coolly. Nona--the discovery that there was some complementary principle in the world--had lifted the stinking fog from my morbid adolescence. My father's blase assertion that love would somehow evaporate was like telling me I was going to be thrown back into a dungeon.

"You're wrong," I said to him.

"Well, consider that I may be right. Please, Stewart. Love in time takes a form more solid but less consuming. And thank the Lord! No one would ever leave the bedroom. There is work to do, families to raise. It changes, Stewart, and you have to be prepared for what happens next in life."

I did not hear much after that. It was the "thank the Lord" that always stuck with me, evidencing my father's frank relief that he had been able to escape from something as messy and demanding as passion.

And yet it was that selfsame guy I had to contemplate in the arms of Gita Lodz, so nuts with lust that he was rutting in a barn with the farm animals, and then, even more sensationally, getting it on in the bed of a nun. Yet I didn't feel as much discomfort with these scenes as I might have expected. For one thing, when you're big enough to think, on bad days, of replacing your bathroom scale with the ones they use at highway weigh stations, you accept one of life's most cheerful truths. Everybody fucks. Or at least they want to. Notwithstanding American advertisers, it's a universal franchise. The bald truth was that after several months of separation, Gita Lodz struck me as a pretty hot dish. Like my father, I've always been attracted to small women--Nona is barely five feet.

More to the point, I knew the end of the story. Mademoiselle Lodz was just a pit stop on Dad's voyage from Grace Morton to my mother. Irony being the theme song of life, middle-aged Stewart sat in the passenger lounge of the Tri-Counties Airport reading the end of Dad's account and warning young David to think twice. It was only going to turn out badly, I told him. Anticipating a train wreck, I was not surprised to see one at the end.

When I made my second visit to Bear Leach in November 2003, five weeks after our first meeting at Northumberland Manor, I wanted to know the aftermath of all the characters in my father's story. This led into the region where Bear had told me he might not be free to go, and at moments he chose his words carefully. As it turned out, there was plenty he could say about the fate of Robert Martin, and even a little about General Teedle. But asking what had happened to Gita Lodz stopped him cold. I'd brought Dad's manuscript along to illustrate my questions and Bear actually thumbed through the pages in his lap briefly, as if trying to refresh his memory when I mentioned her name.

"Well," he said finally, "perhaps it's most helpful if I give you the sequence, Stewart. I initially made an effort to locate Miss Lodz, believing she could be an important witness to mitigate your father's punishment. That was to be the principal issue at trial, o
f c
ourse, in light of David's intended guilty plea. Your father's service near Bastogne remained my ace. in the hole; it was amply documented in his service record, especially in the papers recommending him for the Silver Star, which was approved, by the way, in the War Department, but never awarded as a result of the court-martial. However, I also wanted to show, if I could, that David had fought beside Martin. It would not excuse letting Martin go, but any soldier worth his salt who sat on the court-martial panel would understand an act of mercy toward a comrade-in-arms.

"Accordingly, I hoped to offer a first-person account of the incident in which your father had helped destroy the ammunition dump at the Royal Saltworks, which I learned of when I interviewed Agnes de Lemolland. I pressed the Army for the whereabouts of all the persons who had worked on that operation.

"When I informed your father about that, he became extremely agitated. 'Not the girl,' he said. Since he still refused to tell me anything about what had actually transpired, this frustrated me to no end and I said so.

"It's beyond discussion,' he said. 'It would be a complete disaster.'

"For your case?' I asked.

"Certainly for my case. And personally as well.'

"And what is the personal stake?' I asked.

"He yielded slightly in his usual adamantine silence and said simply, 'My fiancee."'

I interrupted Bear. "Grace Morton?"

"Surely not. That was long over by then." "My mother?"

Leach took his time before finding his way to a dry smile.

"Well, Stewart, I wasn't present when you were born, but you say your mother was an inmate at the Balingen camp and that was certainly the residence of the woman whom your father by then intended to marry."

He studied me with his perpetual generous look to see how I assembled this information.

"So he said, my dad said, it would be a disaster if Mom met Gita Lodz? Or found out about her?"

In a typically aged gesture, Bear's mouth moved around loosely for quite some time as if he was attempting to get the taste of the right words.

"David said no more than what I have stated. I drew my own conclusions at the time. Naturally, I had a far fuller picture when I eventually read what your father had written, which you now have done, too. The personal aspects, I ultimately decided, were best left without further inquiry. But, as a lawyer, I was relieved that your father had prevailed on this point. As I have said, his judgment as a trial attorne
y w
as first-rate. Calling Miss Lodz to testify and subjecting her to cross-examination would have been very damaging for his cause."

Having read the whole story by then, I understood. Had Mademoiselle Lodz told her story, Dad's decision to let Martin go could not have been made to look like an act of charity toward a buddy from combat, not even by a trial lawyer as skilled as Leach. In fact, as Bear had said last month, it could have raised the specter of murder in the mind of an imaginative prosecutor.

But that, I figured, was the least of it. Dad might have wanted to shield my mother from the details of his recent love affair. But I was sure the person he most wanted to protect was himself. Having gone on with his life, the last thing Dad needed was to see Gita Lodz. It would have made for a moment of unequaled bitterness, sitting there, knowing he was on the express for Leavenworth, while he looked across the courtroom at the woman who'd used every trick to abet Martin's countless escapes, including, as it turned out, dancing on my father's heart.

I was aware that Bear was watching me closely, but I was in the full grip of the illusion that I finally had some insight into my father, and had suddenly harked back to Dad's advice when I was eighteen. In telling me to base my college choice on something besides the bulge that arose in my trousers at the firs
t t
hought of Nona, Dad, I saw, was speaking from experience, rather than his native caution. He wanted to keep me from taking my own helping of a dish that had been served cold to him decades ago by Gita Lodz.

Chapter
26.

CAPTURED

Ou
t s
ide the former French Army garrison building which had been used as a civilian hospital in Saint-Vith, Biddy and I awaite
d t
he organization of a posse of MPs, while I smoked in the cold. The fighting had taken an enormous toll on this town, too. Almost nothing remained standing. The hospital had survived only because of the huge red crosses painted on its roof.

The Provost Marshal Lieutenant who had surrendered Martin to the nice-looking little nurse was abject when he learned that the Major was a wanted man, but he insisted they could not have gotten far. The explosion in December that had leveled the lodge had also blown off Martin's left hand and a piece of his thigh, as well as layers of hair and fles
h o
n the side of his head. A month later, he still had open burn wounds and had departed from the hospital in a wheelchair.

"If we don't find them," I told Biddy, "Teedle will court-martial me. Mark my words. Showing my orders to the known consort of a spy--what was I thinking?"

Biddy cocked a brow at the word 'consort.'

"Cap," he said finally, "let's just get 'em."

My grief over my professional failures seemed trivial, however, compared to the personal devastation. I had assumed Gita would disappoint me, but I'd never imagined she would play me entirely false. One question seemed to peck at my mind like an angry crow. Was she really the new Bernhardt? Had everything she'd exhibited toward me been part of a role? Even while my heart struggled for some other solution, I could not reason my way to any answer but yes. Martin and she were the worst kind of people, I concluded, manipulators willing to prey on the softest emotions. If I saw either, I might reach for my pistol.