Ordinary Heroes (7 page)

"Stewart, where is it written that a parent is required to become your journalistic subject? Is giving life to a child, Stewart, like running for public office, where every piece of dirty linen is open to inspection? Is it not a parent's right to be understood on his own terms? Do you pretend that your daughters know every seamy detail of your youth?"

That was a low blow, but effective. I took a second.

"Mom, don't you want to know the story?"

"Stewart, I know the only story that matters, and I knew it from the moment I fell in love with your father in the concentration camp. David Dubin was kind. He was intelligent, educated. Jewish. I could tell at once he was a loyal person, a person of values.

What more could matter to me, or to you? Then. Or now?"

Naturally, I phoned my sister. Mom could dress this up however she liked, I said, claiming she was bound by Dad's wishes, but it was really about her. And being in control.

"God, Stewie, why do you always make her the bad guy? So what if it's about her? She lived with the man for fifty-eight years. Now you come along to tell her that her husband was a convict? Of course she doesn't care to hear the details. Leave her alone. If you have to do this, do it when she's gone.

I reminded Sarah that Leach was ninety-six. "Look," I offered, "I swear I won't tell her anything I find out."

"Oh, Stew," my sister said, tart as always, "when was the last time you kept a secret? Haven't you figured out yet what you liked about being a reporter? I'll sign whatever you like after she's gone. But I don't want to hear another word about this now. Maybe you should spend some time asking yourself why you're hyperventilating to learn all this."

I already had. Every day and every night. But the simplest answer to Sarah was probably the best: he was my father. We can all dream up the hero we want to be when we're adolescents and spend our adult years trying to live out the ideal, but sooner o
r l
ater we each realize that our options are limited b
y t
he raw materials, that dose of DNA we get and the imprinting of early childhood. As a young man, I did not see myself in Dad. Now when I go through the many photos I have assembled from his youth, there are moments when I cannot tell whether the fellow standing there is he or I. That body, which years ago stopped belonging to either of us, was fundamentally one: the same corrupted posture, sagging somehow from a point between the shoulder blades, the same dark-complected look like a warm tan, the same uncertain approach to the camera, unsure how much to surrender. I have his nose, they say, and at moments, his haunted eyes. From Dad I got my taste for salty things, and my acceptance of the Trappers' losses as a piece of fate.

In my research, I discovered many unacknowledged debts I owed my father. Scouring his letters, and later, what he had written for Leach, I was struck that my old man could turn a phrase. My father spent two hours every night reading any novel he could get his hands on, a habit so unvarying that he actually wore two rawhide stripes into the leather ottoman where he perched his feet. Yet it had never clicked that Dad was probably the source of my own interest in writing, even though I'd always been heartened by his quiet pride in my bylines. Now, looking back, I realized that he must have intervened to get my mother to quit her pestering about law school.

Yet it was not the things I liked about myself that fed my hunger to find out what he'd done wrong. In the end, I fear it was probably more of the affliction that had made me a happy observer in criminal courtrooms for decades: I wanted to know Dad's failings, so I'd feel better about my own.

And given what happened next, you might say that self-acceptance is not all that it's cracked up to be. But I have always been a slave to impulse, and slow to face the fact. When I look in the mirror, I see a trim guy, inconveniently burdened with a few dozen pounds that belong to someone else. That's because the thinner fellow, with his good intentions, generally holds the rudder on my soul. On a perpetual diet, I'm the guy at the restaurant who orders the little salad that comes topped with a tiny pellet of poached salmon--before I eat the French fries off everybody else's plates. My eternal undoing arrives in these instants when my appetites are more than I can handle. My saddest turn as a courthouse reporter came in the early '90s as I was walking past the jury room and, with no planning whatsoever, pressed my ear to the door, hoping for a scoop on an important verdict. When a bailiff caught me, I was suspended from the paper for thirty days and, far worse, showered doubt on every honest success before and after. It's a lifetime pattern. I resist. I struggle. But I also succumb.

Which in this case means that when I wrote back to Barrington Leach, I not only set a date to visit, but formally released him from any legal responsibility for what he might reveal. How? I simply stated that my mother had died a few years ago and that I was an only child. Just like the crooks I covered for twenty years, I told myself that nobody would ever know.

DAVID: MAJOR ROBERT MARTIN

October 22, 1944

With the Third Army in France

Dearest Grace
,
I have been sent to the front (where all remains quiet, so please don't worry) to do a little investigation, involving Army politics among the brass. Since I have been able to borrow a typewriter, I wanted to say hello and tell you I think of you always.

Yesterday was really a banner day, as I received four airmails and a V-mail from you. I've brought all of them with me to read a second (and third!) time. In your V-mail, dearest, you tell me of your cold--please tak
e c
are of yourself. If you don't feel well, stay home from school. I don't want anything happening to you--you mean too much to me, and we have too much living together in the near future for you to take any chances.

Tonight, my bed will be a cot in a tent, a reminder of how embarrassingly good life is in Nancy. Eisley and I have found new quarters with Madame Vaillot, whose husband has been carted off by the Germans to God knows where. She greets us each morning at 6:30 a
. M
. with strong coffee and our laundry, for which she refuses to take any money. She says in cultivated French, "We are repaid enough by your keeping the Germans out and protecting us." So what can we say? Our room is nice, but cold with the constant rains, and fuel is in short enough supply that we start a fire only if we are going to be awake in the room for a while, which we seldom are.

I've been thinking about the nest egg I'll have when the day comes that I get back. With allowances, I should be making around $350 per month when my promotion comes through (November 1, they swear). I'm going to send $300 a month to Mom, by way of a Class E allotment, to put into my savings account. (Please tell my dad to make sure Mom uses a few bucks to buy a new frock or something as a birthday gift from me.

They won't do it unless you insist on my behalf.) There will be $300 mustering-out pay plus the insurance policy of $250 I have, and fifteen or twenty war bonds. All in all, I'm thinking you're right and that I should open my own law office. There may even be enough left over to buy a jalopy. I wouldn't mind getting a little joy out of this money. Other boys have done more to earn it, but it's not a picnic being away from all of you. I still keep my house key in my wallet. Call it loony if you like, but several times a day, I'll reach to my back pocket and feel its impression against the leather, and know that I have a place to return to.

Well, I'm getting maudlin, so I'll stop. Love forever
,
David

Lieutenant Colonel Brunson, General Teedle's personnel officer, had said that Martin and the remainder of his Operational Group wer
e q
uartered at the country estate of the Comtesse de Lemolland, west and south of Bezange-la-Petite, near the skirmishing edge of the front. Brunson couldn't explain how Martin had arranged such a scenic billet, but it was clear that many of Teedle's officers, camped in tents on wet ground, had taken notice.

It was nearly noon the next day before the i8th Division's motor pool surrendered a jeep to us, and
I thought for a second that Bidwell was going to get into a fistfight with the private filling the tank, who might as well have been using an eyedropper.

"That ain't but a third of the gas we come with," Biddy told him.

"Sarge," the boy said, "this here's my orders. And you'd do better to look close at that map than keep your eye on me. Krauts are two miles from where you're headed. One wrong turn, Sarge, and your war might end early."

As we drove north into the hills, the sun arrived like a blast of horns, lighting up the isolated groves of trees in full fall color. This was rolling country, principally open fields, resembling southern Wisconsin, where my parents sometimes took us for long Sunday drives in my Uncle Manny's borrowed Model A when I was a boy. After a day together, Bidwell had become more approachable and we laughed about the private who'd parceled out gasoline as if he expected us not to come back. Half an hour later, when we heard the echo of mortars and the pecking of rifle fire from the east, we grew a trifle more serious.

I asked Biddy if this was the closest he'd been to the front. A sardonic snort escaped him.

"D-Day," he said. "That count, Lieutenant? D plus one, actually. Landed my whole MP company on Omaha. Needed us to take custody of the POWs, bu
t w
e had to scrap our way up that beach like everybody else.

"D-Day! My God, I bet this duty seems boring after that.

He found the idea amusing.

"Hell no, Lieutenant. That was the like of some-thin I don't never wanna see again. Truth to tell, I didn't care much for it when they made me an MP. Basic, I put in for an engineering company, truck mechanic. I been fixing cars at home a couple years since I left high school, figured it'd only make sense. But this here is the Army. My orders come through sayin 'Provost Marshal Section,' I had to ask what all that was, and cussed when they told me. I don't hold nothin 'gainst po-licemen,
-
Lieutenant, but it ain't what I ever had a mind to do. Turns out, though, it got its good side. Generally speaking, MPs don't get there till the shooting's over and Mama's little boy here, he promised her he's gonna do his best not to get hisself killed. You can keep combat, Lieutenant. All I care for is take a few pictures and go home."

Like half the soldiers I knew, who remained part tourist, Bidwell always had a camera in his hand. Given his size, he looked almost dainty when he put it to his eye. Most troops took photos of the wreckage of war and of their buddies, but Biddy seemed more studious about it and, typical of his solitary ways, would go off at moments and fix on particula
r o
bjects and scenes that didn't appear to hold much. interest. Driving yesterday, we fell in with the convoy from the 134th and came to a halt when they did, so we could empty our bladders in a roadside ditch. The drivers were Negro troops, as was often the case, and six or seven of them had gathered for a little society, since the white boys as a rule would have nothing to do with them. From behind one of the trucks, Biddy snapped several photos of the colored men carrying on with one another over their cigarettes. It had disturbed me that he hadn't bothered to get their permission.

Recollected, the incident brought Biddy's Georgia roots to mind and I asked when his people had left there and where they'd ended up. He seemed to have no interest in answering. That was this man's army. From boot camp on there were guys who showed you photos of their ma and pa and sweethearts and told you every imaginable detail about them, right down to dress size, and others who wanted to keep home as far from this mess as possible. I was in the latter group anyway, but I prodded a bit now, because I wanted to be sure before criticizing Bidwell's manner with the coloreds that he'd actually had the chance to learn the difference between North and South.

"Daddy, he was a tenant farmer down there. His people been workin that patch, only God Hisself knows how long, hundred years, two hundred years
,
but it just didn't make no sense to him, when times got so bad. In 1935 he picked us all up and moved us North. He was thinkin to find somethin in a factory, I guess."

"Yes, but where did you settle, Bidwell?"

He smiled for a second while he looked over the road.

"Ever hear of Kindle County?"

I actually cried out. "Dear God, Biddy! You must have heard me talk to Eisley a dozen times about home. Why didn't you say anything? I'm half a world away and it turns out I'm touring around with a neighbor."

"'Cause of just that, Lieutenant. Wasn't much way you and me was neighbors."

"Don't be so sure, Biddy. I don't come from the high and mighty. My father's a shoemaker." I rarely shared this detail, fearing it might undermine me, both among fellow officers and the troops, and as I'd anticipated, I could see I'd caught Bidwell by surprise. "Pop's been at that trade since he was a boy, right after he landed in the U
. S
. An uncle took him in and taught him. I grew up in a three-flat on Deering Road. The folks are still there. What about you?"

Biddy shook his head as if he didn't know.

"We was all over," he said. "You know how that goes when a man's scratchin for work. Come the end of the month, sometimes Dad and the landlor
d w
udn't seein eye to eye. I must have been near to eighteen 'fore I stopped in askin why we didn't move in daytime like other folks." He smiled at the memory, but his green eyes drifted over to see what I made of that. As the son of a cobbler, though, I knew a lot about hard times. In the Depression, Pa had plenty of work because people wanted to make their shoes last. But many of them couldn't come up with the six bits once their footwear was mended. Some pairs left on credit, if Pa knew who he was talking to, even when it was all but certain he'd never get paid. But he'd let a man walk out barefoot rather than get cheated.