The Liar's Wife (26 page)

It's a word people use much too easily, much too carelessly, but you must believe me when I say that Thomas Mann's speech was electrifying. Because I felt in all the nerves of my body a heat, a luminosity, as if they were the first time real to me, palpable, almost visible. I felt a thrumming up and down my back, and then a sense of a match having been lit under my ribs. It was almost as if I were being given shock treatments, the old consciousness emptied out, but instead of torment being replaced by nullity, the nullity of my own life would from then on be replaced by a torment. A torment that was the knowledge of the world, of the implication of what it meant to be human in a world that was full of evil and greatness, of terms and conditions larger than I had ever imagined.

Now I'm opening my Thomas Mann notebook, a black-and-white cardboard composition book, the most common kind, the pattern aspiring perhaps to an impression of marble. The journal I kept of my thoughts about meeting him, and after meeting him. Pasted on the cover, the paper so brittle I'm afraid to hold it in my hand, yellow and fragile and somewhat pathetic, is the speech itself, which was reprinted in the Gary newspaper the next day. I look at the title and I can hear his voice.

“The title of my speech,” he began, “is ‘The Problem of Freedom or the Crisis of Democracy.' ”

He began talking about the conflict between socialism and individualism, between the common good and the good of the individual. I'd forgotten that he spoke about Western civilization, or Occidental civilization as he called it, as Christian and that he saw Nazism as an attack on Christianity. I find that odd now; I know he wasn't a religious man. But perhaps he knew his audience. Perhaps he knew that he had to convince Americans that they were fighting not just people who wanted to kill Jews but people who wanted to do away with Christianity. I can see what he was trying to do, he was trying to refute the argument that Fascism, particularly Nazism, was a bulwark against Communism. He was trying to convince them that Nazism wouldn't protect their property, or anything that they held dear. Oh, how Germanic so much of it is, turgid, dense; he invokes Goethe and Heine and tries to distinguish between the claims of the individual and the larger society.

But finally he gets to his point and he's as passionate as any Neapolitan. He says that, unlike any other revolutionaries, Nazis are devoid of any humanity, any ideal, that they are devoted only to extermination and to force. He calls for a forceful response to their love for force; he insists that, like the church of old, the church militant, there must be a democracy militant. He says that no moral person can be outside the fight.

It was thrilling to be in the presence of someone not afraid to use words like “evil” and “force” and “revolution” and “humanity.” It was shocking to hear someone insist that, at the very moment that we were drawing our safe breaths in safe, middle America, blood was being
shed in the defense of democracy and liberty and the individual. That there were clear choices to be made: between freedom and tyranny, between liberty and annihilation. And that we must not hide our faces from it.

But most electrifying were his final words, when he spoke as himself, a man, an artist. Seventy-three years have passed and I still feel the same heat, the same illumination of my nerves, the same match-lit blow to my ribs when I read those last paragraphs.

“Before you stands an individual who never expected in former years that he should be called upon to make statements and efforts such as these.

“I have spoken to you of truth, justice, civilization, democracy. In my purely aesthetically determined youth, it would never have occurred to me to deal in such terms. Today I pronounce them with a wholly unexpected note of joyousness. For the position of the spirit has changed upon Earth in a peculiar way. Civilization is in retreat. A period of lawlessness and anarchy reigns over the outward life of the people. Yes, we know once more what is good and what is evil. Evil has been revealed to us in such crassness and meanness that our eyes have been opened to the dignity and the simple beauty of the good. That is, if you like, a rejuvenation of the spirit, and I often have thought that this period of spiritual rejuvenation and simplification, this moral epoch, into which we have entered, might well be the great hour for America. May America stand forth in an abandoned and ethically leaderless world as the strong and unswerving protector of the good and the godly in mankind. I salute you as a country that is conscious of its own human inadequacy but knows what is good and what is evil; that despises force and untruth, a country that perseveres in a faith which is sound and utterly necessary to life—faith in goodness, in freedom and truth, in justice and in peace.”

Are you surprised that I stand here, holding the old notebook, the old pages in my hand, and weeping? I suppose I am above all weeping for myself, weeping for the young man who was shocked, electrified by these words, who felt the force of clarity: we knew what was good, what was evil, and we would die for it. I would have followed him anywhere,
felt humbled that I could follow him off the stage, into the room with its ugly green walls, to offer my hand and say, Thank you, thank you, you have changed my life.

“And do you think, Mr. Bill, Mr. American, that America will do as I have said? Will save us, will save Europe? Or will you hide from it, protected by the miles of ocean; will you leave us to our perhaps just deserts? Our just destruction. Will American boys be willing to give their lives for us? For what we call civilization?”

“I'm sure we will,” I said. “I'm sure the best of us will want to.”

He shook my hand and sat down heavily on the inadequate chair. “I'm afraid that the best might not be enough.”

He'd insisted that he be showed directly to the car: he said it took too much out of him, this speech, and he didn't want to talk to the press or anyone in the audience. Mr. Hauptmann gave me the signal to bring the car around. I was hoping Thomas Mann would sit beside me in the front seat, but he walked towards the back door, and Mr. Hauptmann opened it for him and got in beside him.

I didn't know what I could possibly say to him after those words that shone and burnt and pierced me like hot arrows. Now I had to drive him to Chicago. Because that was another reason Mr. Hauptmann had chosen me. He didn't like to drive. He was afraid of driving in Chicago. And I was known to be an excellent, supremely responsible driver.

I think he fell asleep in the backseat. I drove him to the Palmer House, and Mr. Hauptmann got out with him; he was going to spend the night in Chicago. “Thanks for everything, Bill. You did us proud.” I got out of the car to shake the great man's hand. “Thank you, sir, I'll never forget this day.”

“You very well may, my son,” he said. “You have your whole life ahead of you. I hope it is a beautiful life.” And he made his way into the formal doorway, Mr. Hauptmann walking a few paces behind him, as if he walked behind a king.

And then I just drove home. I wondered what my mother thought of it, or my father, who thought that Communism was the greatest evil under the sun, who was even against labor unions as something getting in the way of his ability to do his job. But they weren't there to see Thomas Mann. They were there to see me, their son, sitting transfixed,
electrified, ready to change his life. Perhaps they were relieved that my shoes were shined, that my tie was straight, that I'd got a haircut. That I hadn't stumbled over any of my lines or mispronounced any words. In fact, we never talked about it. We never said a thing about what Thomas Mann said. They told me they were very proud of me. But that was all they said.

I don't want the relief of too easy tears, because I am, in a way, crying for a young boy, a whole way of life that took its tone from a kind of deafness. Deafness and blindness. Thomas Mann told us that good and evil were clear, but I hadn't even noticed the evil of living in a restricted town, going to a segregated school … and my parents died without grasping it. Does that mean they were good Germans? That we all were? That we can love ourselves only because of the accident of not being put to the test?

And I wonder what he would think of his idealistic words about America now? He left America in disgust during the McCarthy years. What would he have thought of Vietnam, when the world and we ourselves no longer thought us worthy of the faith and hope that we'd believed in? What, I wonder, would my children, my grandchildren make of Thomas Mann's speech? Or of an old man, in an attic, wiping the dust off on his trousers, weeping.

I'd like to say that my life was changed from that day forward, that I thought about Fascism and Nazism and evil and good and that force must be used against force all day, every day. But I was just seventeen years old, and although Thomas Mann's voice was never far, it wasn't always at the center of what I heard. I was still the self-absorbed moonstruck boy in love with Laurel Jansen. And I was still the midwestern boy who hoped that war could be avoided, hoped for that above all.

Nevertheless, I had the image of Thomas Mann, the sound of his words as a lodestar. When I remembered to—it wasn't always, but it wasn't rarely—I measured things against him. I wrote letters to him, which I of course never sent. I have no idea what happened to them, and I'm not sure whether or not I'm sorry that they don't exist anymore. Let me be honest: I am sorry. Any trace of the boy I was, whom I loved
for some of the very reasons that he hated himself, is precious to me, and any loss of the trail, a sadness.

I know for certain that I wrote to him about the real tragedy that struck all of us in the Dunes, the terrible death of Betsy Laird. The death of a young girl, right in Ogden Dunes, on a night in June: a full moon, and a sky full of bright stars.

I suppose the night began with my lying on my bed, sulking. I knew I was sulking, knew that what I was doing wasn't admirable, not manly, but the obvious deep wrongness of it granted it a kind of grimy voluptuous allure, as if I were putting my nose to something filthy, but the filth was my own. The way I sometimes liked the smell of my own dirty shirts. Is it something that everyone does, sniffing their own clothes to see if they're good for another day's wearing? Or telling yourself that's what you're doing. But is it really that, secretly, everyone is a little in love with his own stink?

So there I was, lying on my bed while everyone I knew was outside on this glorious June evening. A perfect night, everyone said, for the hayride we'd all been planning for weeks.

I'd had some part in planning it, but it was my brother, Sam, who ran the show. He'd arranged with one of the local farmers to rent his tractor, arranged that the farmer would both drive the tractor and provide the hay. He would load it onto a flat-bottom cart that the tractor would be attached to, that the tractor would pull. We were expecting ten people, five couples: Sam and his fiancée, Mabel, two other couples that were friends of Sam's from Purdue, Betsy Laird and her boyfriend from Northwestern, and the youngest among them, Laurel and myself.

I'd dreamed of it for weeks. I'd lie on my bed as the nights grew steadily warmer, the days steadily longer, breathing the heavy air, the breeze just lively enough to move the white muslin curtains, occasionally. I thought about lying on the hay in the wagon next to Laurel, how the smell of the hay would mix with the smell of her hair, the light lovely smell of her skin that in my mind had its source on the insides of her arms, particularly the bends of the elbows. I had smelt that wonderful
smell when my face came close to her arm when I turned her as we danced a jitterbug. I knew just how the stars would be, flat as saucers, and the moon, which we knew would be three quarters full. I knew there would be singing and I'd practiced the song I'd sing to her, though I'd pretend I was singing it for the whole group. I'd spent a lot of time choosing the song, studying the songs on the hit parade as carefully as I later studied for organic chemistry finals. I narrowed it down to three. I was tempted by “Change Partners,” because it was such a clear expression of my fervent wish that she free herself of the beastly Dolph Johnson. But I rejected that: too obvious. I was drawn to the high drama of “All or Nothing at All,” but I was afraid it might scare her off. So I settled on “Moonlight Serenade.” It was romantic, but gentle; it spoke of the touch of a hand and roses and the stars and the moon, but it hinted of something larger, “break of day … love's valley of dreams … you and I … summer sky … heavenly breeze, kissing the trees.”

I stood in front of the mirror, practicing, closing my eyes at particular moments, opening them, moving my head closer to and farther away from the phantom Laurel. I'd been told I had a good voice: after all, I'd had the lead in
The Mikado.
But I had to use my voice now to suggest to Laurel that she'd be happier with me, a gentle but no less passionate lover, the kind of man who didn't rely on muscle power, but would listen to her dreams, than with Dolph.

And then the morning of the hayride, she had telephoned and said she couldn't make it: a cousin was visiting from out of town. But I knew it wasn't a cousin, it was Dolph, home from Purdue for the weekend.

All I wanted to do was sleep, sleep so I could forget the humiliation, but maybe it was because the moon was too bright, I couldn't get to sleep. I decided to read. I decided I would read
Tonio Kröger
, and the thought allowed me to salvage some vestige of pride in myself. Laurel Jansen had stood me up, but I was reading
Tonio Kröger
, and I had been praised by Thomas Mann. I was sure Dolph didn't even know who Thomas Mann was.

I read the beginning quickly, the encounter between Tonio and the boy Hans, stupid ordinary Hans, who doesn't want to read a great book; he only likes books with pictures of horses. And then like a detective
finding the right clue—the footprint, the piece of string, the crushed grass, the discarded envelope—I came to the place I had been looking for, and it filled me with a rush of excitement. This is me, I thought, reading by the light of the three quarter moon, so bright was it that I didn't need to switch on my bedside lamp. These words, I thought, will tell me who I am.